Life in America: Identity and Everyday Experience

Life in America: Identity and Everyday Experience is a fascinating collection of readings that explores how people negotiate identity in the United States today. While individuals stitch together complex identities based on everything from the hobbies they enjoy to the neighbourhoods in which they live, these identities rarely conform to the quick and routine identification of people by race, gender, and age. By exploring this tension between identity and identification, one can begin to understand how people creatively confront the perks and perils of identity in the United States. Life in America offers a look at a wide range of subjects including: violence and video games, queer pilgrimages to San Francisco, Filipina critiques of ‘sleeping around’, and the significance of ‘lowriders’ in Hispano/Chicano culture.Framed by a lively introduction, this book provides readers with a thoroughly engaging and fascinating look at central issues of identity and what it means to be American.