New Books In Critical Theory

In conversations about polarised political issues, phrases like ‘it’s not about race, it’s about class’ have become the perfect way to induce a stalemate. It seems as though the traditional, materialist critique of inequality has been supplanted by a fast-evolving set of reflections on group identity. Mainstream politics makes fast and loose assumptions about the relationship between class and identity, and economic conditions and culture. These assumptions are fodder for the culture wars. In The Identity Myth: Why We Need to Embrace Our Differences to Beat Inequality (Constable & Robinson, 2022), David Swift covers the four different kinds of identity most susceptible to rhetorical and cultural manipulation – class, race, sex, and age. He considers how the boundaries of identities are policed and how diverse versions of the same identity can be deployed to different ends. Ultimately, it is not that identities are simply more ‘complex’ than they appear. Rather, there are commonalities more important to the cr