Subaltern Appeal to Experience: Self-Identity, Late Modernity, and the Politics of Immediacy

Combining historical findings with discourse analyses and diagnostic readings of recent subaltern and aesthetic inquiry, Ireland reveals that the term experience has been incorrectly understood. Since the 1970s, persistent appeals to experience in identity politics and cultural inquiry testify not only to the influence of a particular modern concept but, more importantly, to the historical status of modern self-identity.