About the Book:In an important new book, Laura Gillman argues that in this post-identity politics era, identities can still yield reliable knowledge. Focusing on womanist and mestiza theoretical writings, literary texts, and popular cultural representations, Gillman advances a comparative theoretical model of identity and consciousness that foregrounds a naturalist-realist account. She demonstrates that reason and knowledge originate from diverse human practices enacted in the social and natural world and can be explained and justified entirely in terms of them.