Identity

Florian Coulmas is Professor of Japanese Society and Sociolinguistics at the IN-EAST Institute of East Asian Studies at Duisburg-Essen University. Prior to this, he has held research and teaching positions at Georgetown University, the National Institute of Japanese Language and Linguistics, and Chuo University. He has published numerous books, including An Introduction to Multilingualism (OUP, 2017) and Writing and Society: A Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2013). For the past three decades he has served as Associate Editor of the International Journal of the Sociology of Languages, during which time he has observed the steadily increasing use of the concept of identity in both general and scholarly publications.

• Introduction: an identity wave1: "Who am I?" Identity in philosophy2: Identity in logic and the classical law of thought3: Given or constructed? Identity in cultural anthropology4: Adam and Eve, Hijra, LGBTQs and the shake-up of gender identities5: Identity politics: promises and dangers6: "Your station in life." Social identities in our time7: Citizenship, legal status, and proof of identity - identity as a legal concept8: Selfhood, character, and personality - the psychology of identity9: "They don't speak our language." Identity in linguistics10: Who is behind the mask? Identity in literature and literary criticismConclusionsFurther readingIndex

By setting the concept of identity in its correct historical, philosophical, cultural, political, and sociological context, Florian Coulmas brilliantly rescues one of the most overused and abused words of recent decades and demonstrates why it has such relevance for contemporary debates