the uselessness of identity
By shag carpet bomb • Jan 6th, 2008 • Category: Class, Not Quite White, Racializationhee. I lied. Well, I got up to go chill in front of the tube for awhile. But then I saw the soup I’d made. yum. I’ve been diggin’ on soup made of yogurt, spices, chicken, and some veggies. Great for cold, wintry days. I love winter! So, I reheated the soup and read the footnotes to Not Quite White. Wray does the typical dissertation turned into a book thing: he puts the academic debates from his methodology section in the footnotes. There I read about various authors who’ve challenged the centrality of the concept of identity. He writes:
For useful critiques of the intellectual and political limits of current analytical idioms of race and ethnicity , see W. Brown, 1995; Stoler 1997; Wacquant 1997; and Gilroy 1991, 1993, 2000. … For a radical call to entirely abandon identity as an analytical concept, see Brubaker and Cooper 2000.
This reminds me of a time when Gary Norris visited Kevin Andre Elliot’s blog, A Slant Truth. I can’t remember what was going on and i tried to find the post but it looks like it’s gone. Still, I think it was in response to something Thinking Girl had written. Gary entered into the fray with, I’m gathering, a rather different perspective on the issues, one fostered by these growing critiques of identity. A perspective that challenges the too easy, unquestioning use of identity — in this case, the identity was something like “blogging while feminist” — which I happened to object to as rude in so far as it compared being a feminist to being black — and this seems to me to typically signal two rather different things.
But anyway, Gary ruffled feathers as he’s wont to do. Kevin smoothed things over and Gary, in the interests of respecting a space where he was unfamiliar with the grooves, stepped down. But I was damn disappointed because, finally, the conversation was going to get out of the usual grooves that have grown deep and, in their depth, comfortable and enveloping everyone like swaddling. It’s perverse, really. Comfortable because, no matter what the insult hurled in those debates, it’s expected, well worn. Grooved and groovy.
What disappointed me about that whole thing was I wanted the conversation to move to a more complex space, and it couldn’t and wouldn’t because, heaven forfend, we might have to eat a juicy burger of sacred cow.
But anyway, the authors in question are:
Wendy Brown, States of Injury
Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Rethinking Colonial Categories: Eurpean Communities and the Boundaries of Rule’ and ‘Racial Histories and their Regimes of Truth’ in Political Power and Social Theory
Loic Wacquant, ‘For an Analytic of Racial Domination” in Political Power and Social Theory
Paul Gilroy, ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack,’ ‘The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness,’ and ‘Against Race: imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line.’
Brubaker and Cooper in ‘Beyond Identity’ in Theory and Society 29.
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Thanks for the references. Found Brubaker and Cooper online. Back
when when I asked whether anyone knew what ‘identity’ was, this
kind of discussion is what I had in mind. Based on the 9 pages I have
read.
Turning to ‘comments.’ In Mozilla, the text does not wrap in the
comment box. The text works fine in Explorer, but, typically, Explorer
seems stuck on Jan. 6., and does not display the Jan. 7 post. Sigh.
i fixed the comment box problem in the other template, but i also saw this template and decided i needed a new dress. amber was here one night for a round of that. ha. i tried on like fifty new dresses, tossed them all in a corner and decided on black cherry. eh.
anyway, i’d meant to write, at the top of that post: “This is for Chuckie”. I want to read those books, even if they irk me. It would certainly be interesting to juxtapose them with _this bridge we call home_ which i’m currently reading. there’s no coherent message in the book — and by intention — but once in awhile i find myself rather irritated against a backdrop of writing that largely reiterates what’s been written over the last 25 years or so. i can’t recall where i read something recently about how, the problem with books is that they don’t say anything especially new. i had to say, “so?” if you used that criteria, why should anyone write at all? and then i read jodi dean talking about how, in her cynicism, she would approach old texts with irony, as if they weren’t of much value to people these days — and yet they are. as a consequence, she hoped that she’d be a better teacher for that, and not marginalize old political texts based on her sense of been there, done that. her students might not have…. hmmmm. what this has to do with the above texts, don’t know. just spewing before i leave for work. i overslept. ugh.
Shag, a question: Why do you say that identity is useless?