Identity, Discourse and US Foreign Policy: The Writing of a Puritan National Identity in The War on Terror (original) (raw)

Introduction: Dynamic Perspectives of Identity Politics

Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore, 2012

Identity is a concept that concentrates cultural researchers' thinking and discussions around a search for an explanation to human behaviour and ideas behind it. Identity appears to us as a contradictory idea that can be perceived in diachronic and synchronic perspectives simultaneously as fixed and vague, a core of one's self-understanding and an endless play of meanings, existential and stereotypical. Identity is related to a certain substantial sense of constancy but is seen in the course of an analytical effort as a fluid complex of discourses.

Identity and Culture. Cultural identities in a globalized world.

Third International Cross-Cultural Communication Conference (“Cultural Identity and Diversity as Assets to Global Understanding”), 2019

There is a painting by the Renaissance master Pieter Bruegel (who became known as “The Old Man”) whose original name is “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”, which Homi Bhabha (Rato, 2015) observes that should make us think. In the picture a small detail shows us Icarus, son of Daedalus, fallen from the sky to drown solitarily in the sea, after he tried to fly too high and burned the wings for having been near the sun, and no one noticing his drama. The picture is supposed to be from the dreadful perspective of Daedalus, watching impotently from above the misfortune of his own son. This leads to a question by Bhabha: “After all, who is the moral witness of human suffering, today?” According to the scholar, this is one of the questions that Culture can make the world. A self-reflexive question, as the role of witness is one of the places of Culture. Another question is to think if Culture is not the peripheral and secondary detail that makes us reconsider the whole system, just like the legs of Icarus, when we finally look at them, at Pieter Bruegel’s picture. The concept of “Culture” has several meanings, continuing to be problematized and reformulated constantly, making the word complex and impossible to be fixed in an unique way. The same happens with ‘identity’, that is a concept that must be declined in the plural. In the current paradigm crisis, the identity plan integrates a broader process of change that has shaken the frames of reference that previously seemed to give individuals some stability. Stuart Hall notes that identity theories have shattered, and identities are in the process of disintegration as a result of cultural homogenization and ‘postmodern-global’ logic stemming from the globalization process. Thus, to talk about the existence of an eventual centrality of culture, it is necessary to leave behind the idea of absolute truth (Hall, 1997). Identity and difference are thus faces of the same coin (Martins, 2007), and memory must be preserved in a balanced way, in order to avoid amnesia and indifference from becoming dangerous ingredients of any barbarism, and so that resentment does not occupy the place of humanity. As Claude Dubar (2011) points out, the crisis is not only due to the passage from one economic cycle to another, but it has to do with the new ways of living together in the world, which highlight preconceived ideas about another, about himself and about the world itself. It is the acceptance of the ‘other’ which, moreover, there is, to determine the beginning of an ethical dimension, as stated Umberto Eco (1998). Or it shall be understood by an ‘other’ ubiquitous, in the design of Dominique Wolton (2003), who is no longer abstract or distant, but does not mean that it is more familiar or understandable. It is therefore an ‘other’ that will be understood as a sociological reality, integrating all elements resulting from cultural diversity, but also those that establish links, at the societies scale. With this communication, we propose a reflection on the relationship between identity and culture, observing how cultural identities are located in a globalized world.

Syllabus - Identity in International Relations (2020-21)

This advanced module explores how an identity perspective can be useful for understanding world politics. It unpacks the concept of identity and its sources – parameters forming conceptions of Self and Other – and discusses how they shape the ontology of various actors, their behaviour and relationships. Building on the tradition of constructivist scholarship in International Relations (IR), this course has two main aims: First, to conceptually explore the different ways identities form and how this process affects socio-political life, drawing on insights from philosophy, social theory and psychology. This will introduce students to various parameters and processes of identity politics like bordering, bonding, discrimination and socialisation. Second, to discuss how these processes play out in phenomena of conflict/violence and cooperation/integration in various sites of international relations, foreign policy and nationalism. Throughout, students will be asked to also consider the ethical dimension of identity politics.

Identity Problematics in National, Ethnic and Regional Constructs

2005

The search for identity is itself problematic. It is a pervasive theme in our society. Social scientists, cultural studies scholars, dramatists and the like, use the term identity in a variety of ways to explain an assortment of phenomena. Some familiar words like identity crisis, finding oneself, self-esteem, self-actualization, are used in the search for identity. At various levels, identity and culture are either pole apart, closely knit, can stand for one another or are interrelated. Whichever way however, we form our identity by carefully and deliberately selecting values, beliefs, and concepts that better define our sense of self. This is why identity cannot invariably be wholly separated from the culture(s) which build, structure and sustain it.

Identity as identification in a situation of threat to cultural security

2018

Contemporary reflections on identity mostly focus on its changeability and volatility. We are also witnessing threats to cultural security and the so-called cultural trauma today, which do not inhibit the process of cultural homogenization and the resulting crossing of cultures, however. The intensifying processes of migration also raise a number of concerns. Perhaps this situation, generating new areas of conflict, has contributed to a revitalization of the notion of identification with a group, society, nation, as it provides a sense of security by emphasizing shared interests and common good.

On the Geopolitics of Identity

Anthropological Theory, 2009

The trope of identity has served in recent decades as a powerful construct in literary criticism, cultural studies, history, race and gender studies, invoking in turn identity politics of various genres. Despite its seemingly interdisciplinary usages and broad theoretical ramifications, the concept of identity has been conditioned by semantically flawed usages and provincial disciplinary assumptions, which have not only reified myopic fields and positions but also influenced the way we understand its presumed relevance to social relations and concrete institutional practices. I argue first of all that ethnicity, culture and identity are analytically distinct notions whose meaning and usage have been muddled in disciplinary practice. Identity's relationship to ethnicity in particular is tied less to the putative existence of groups (or an assumed sameness) than to a notion of subjectivity that must be seen in the context of evolving social and political forces. These forces are more complexly nuanced than the way they have been used by theories of social construction or Bourdieuan practice prevalent in the literature. In sum, the pragmatics of identity is less a political contestation per se over ethnicity and culture than abstract struggles within these geopolitical processes.

Ethnic Identities and Transnational Subjectivities

Rastas, Anna (2013) Ethnic identities and transnational subjectivities. Published in Spickard, Paul (ed.) Multiple Identities. Migrants, Ethnicity, and Membership. Indiana University Press. 41- 60. The number of new ethnic minority communities, and the numbers of people belonging to these minorities have grown in many western societies due to migration. Because of the rapid increases in the diversity of the population there are also more people, especially children and young people, who are often categorized as immigrants and as members of ethnic or racial minorities, but who themselves are not comfortable with these categorizations. This essay discusses problems related to the ethnicity paradigm and identity talk in studies of young people and their positionings in multiethnic societies.