French philosophy since World War II has been preoccupied with the issue of difference. Specifically, it has wanted to promote or to leave room for ways of living and of being that differ from those usually seen in contemporary Western society. Given the experience of the Holocaust, the motivation for such a preoccupation is not difficult to see. For some thinkers, especially Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gilles Deleuze, this preoccupation has led to a mode of philosophizing that privileges difference as a philosophical category. Nancy privileges difference as a mode of conceiving community, Derrida as a mode of conceiving linguistic meaning, Levinas as a mode of conceiving ethics, and Deleuze as a mode of conceiving ontology. Reconsidering Difference has a twofold task, the primary one critical and the secondary one reconstructive. The critical task is to show that these various privilegings are philosophical failures. They wind up, for reasons unique to each position, endorsing positions that are either incoherent or implausible. Todd May considers the incoherencies of each position and offers an alternative approach. His reconstructive task, which he calls &"contingent holism,&" takes the phenomena under investigation&—community, language, ethics, and ontology&—and sketches a way of reconceiving them that preserves the motivations of the rejected positions without falling into the problems that beset them.

This major essay collection takes a fresh look at how differences among people matter for music and musical thought.

In studies of gender and sexuality in popular music, the concept of difference is often a crucial analytic used to detect social agency; however, the alternative analytic of ambiguity has never been systematically examined. While difference from heterosexual norms is taken to be the multivalent sign of resistance, oppression, and self-invention, it can lead to inflated claims of the degree and power of difference. This book offers critically-oriented case studies that examine the theory and politics of ambiguity. Ambiguity means that there are both positive and negative implications in any gender and sexuality practices, both sameness and difference from heteronormativity, and unfixed possibility in the diverse nature of discourse and practice (rather than just "difference" among fixed multiplicities). Contributors present a diverse array of approaches through music, sound, psyche, body, dance, performance, race, ethnicity, power, discourse, and history. A wide variety of popular music genres are broached, including gay circuit remixes, punk rock, Goth music, cross-dress performance, billboard 100 songs, global pop, and nineteenth-century minstrelsy. The authors examine the ambiguities of performance and reception, and address the vexed question of whether it is possible for genuinely new forms of gender and sexuality to emerge musically. This book makes a distinctive contribution to studies of gender and sexuality in popular music, and will be of interest to fields including Popular Music Studies, Musicology/Ethnomusicology, Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, and Media Studies.

Through the analytic of racialization, the chapters in this book argue that social difference in India is reproduced and buttressed through casteist, racist, colonial, and Hindu nationalist projects that generate tacit or explicit consent for continued violence against racialized others. At the same time, the chapters look transnationally, examining how regional forms of difference marked by caste and tribe, for instance, have long articulated with historical forms of global racial capitalism. Ultimately, this book attends to the narratives and experiences of those living at the margins, who strategically deploy racial and antiracist concepts to build international solidarity movements beyond the narrow confines of the Indian nation-state. In so doing, it hopes to derive insights on the necessity of transnational translations, even as it directs renewed attention to the specificity of regional hierarchies that shape everyday life and death in India. This book is a significant new contribution to addressing fundamental questions of caste, race, and religious politics in India and will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of Sociology, Politics, Geography, History and Anthropology. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.