The Crisis of Culture:Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms

by: Olivier Roy (Author)

Publisher: C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd

Publication Date: 21 Mar. 2024

Language: English

Print Length: 232 pages

ISBN-10: 1911723057

ISBN-13: 9781911723059

Book Description

Are we confronting a new culture―global, online, individualistic? Or is our existing concept of culture in crisis, as explicit, normative systems replace implicit, social values?Olivier Roy’s new book explains today’s fractures via the extension of individual political and sexual freedoms from the 1960s. For Roy, twentieth-century youth culture disconnected traditional political protest from class, region or ethnicity, fashioning an identity premised on repudiation rather than inheritance of shared history or values. Having spread across generations under neoliberalism and the inteet, youth culture is now individualised, ersatz.Without a shared culture, everything becomes an explicit code of how to speak and act, often online. Identities are now defined by socially fragmenting personal traits, creating affinity-based sub-cultures seeking safe spaces:universities for the left, gated communities and hard borders for the right.Increased left- and right-wing references to ‘identity’ fail to confront this deeper crisis of culture and community. Our only option, Roy argues, is to restore social bonds at the grassroots or citizenship level.