Leonard's essay leads us to the second important theme of this collection, namely, the relationship between constructions of "locality" and "community," on the one hand, and identity, on the other. One of the reasons for the multidisciplinary explosion of writing on the subject of "identity" in the last few years (Schiller 1994) is that very different kinds of political and analytic projects can be advanced under this rubric. Although the interest in identity is often assumed to emanate from a poststructuralist emphasis on the multiple, crosscutting, and shifting basis of self-representation, the idea of identity itself is perfectly compatible with theoretical projects that move in a quite different direction. Indeed, discussions of identity, it seems to us, all too easily fall into the model of possession and ownership embodied in discourses about the sovereign subject: an identity is something that one "has" and can manipulate, that one can "choose"; or, inversely, it is something that acts as a source of "constraint" on the individual, as an ascribed rather than a chosen feature of life. In both cases, the individual subject is taken as a pregiven entity, identities as so many masks or cages it may inhabit. Such positions are perfectly compatible with the observation that identities (like the contents of "cultures" themselves) are historically contingent. But what is missing from such a conception is the crucial insight that the subject is not simply affected by changing schemes of categorization and discourses of difference but is actually constituted or interpellated by them. As Stuart Hall has suggested (cited in Watts 1992), rather than posit an essential temporal stability and continuity of the subject, we might better conceive of identity as a "meeting point" — a point of suture or temporary identification — that constitutes and re-forms the subject so as to enable that subject to act (see also Diprose and Ferrell 1991). It is in this way that we bring together identity and subject formation with the question of agency.