An Introduction to Identity Politics (original) (raw)
Related papers
Introduction to Identity Trumps Socialism: The Class and Identity Debate after Neoliberalism
Essays by Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Slavoj Zizek, Bruno Bosteels, Vivek Chibber, Barbara Foley, Nancy Fraser, Adolph Reed Jr, Cedric Johnson, Walter Benn Michaels, David Harvey, Jodi Dean and Marc James Léger
Getting to a Baseline on Identity Politics: the Marxist Debate
The Routledge Companion to African American Art History, 2019
There has been much debate in art, and other fields, about the efficacy of identity politics for advancing social justice and change. My contribution considers anti-racism, as a type of social analysis and political strategy, in the context of Leftist debates that also reoccur in relation to sex and gender politics. Pointing to how ideas articulated in art relate to politics, this essay identifies what makes a particular phenomenon a model, when specificities can be generalized, or from which concrete situations we can extrapolate abstractions. If we articulate the universal potential of identity politics, we can base solidarity on the intersection of class with other forms of identity-based, or ascriptive, politics.
2019
https://kapital-noviny.sk/what-went-right-is-also-what-went-wrong-identity-politics-between-collectivity-and-individualisation/ "What went right is also what went wrong". Taking a stock of the past fifty years, Bulgarian political theorist Ivan Krastev sums up lucidly what the problem of identity politics is today. The cultural and social revolutions of 1968 and 1970s, he argues, "put the individual at the centre of politics. It was the human rights moment. Basically this was also a major outbreak, a culture of dissent, a culture of basically non-conformism, which was not known before." But, he continues, this has paved the way to negative processes too, namely that this cultural and social revolution "in a certain way destroyed the idea of a collective purpose". Social movements in the West addressed issues such as racism, sexism, and homophobia, which were largely ignored by the Left at the time. They addressed the lived oppressions of marginalised social groups, arming themselves with a new (and long-overdue) conceptual vocabulary with which to voice their demands. They also, quite rightly, highlighted the relevance of privilege, positionality and intersecting oppression. That was identity politics back then, based on collective experiences, naming hitherto unrecognised power structures. These movements have however substantially transformed over the years. Unwittingly, these movements did not (could not) resist co-optations and market-conforming reformulations-aligning with the needs of current forms of capitalism. We would be wrong to equate the identity politics of the Combahee River Collective (1977) with what we witness today in the political practice of social justice activism.
Edges of Identity: The Production of Neoliberal Subjectivities
Edges of Identity: The Production of Neoliberal Subjectivities, 2017
The chapter explores how competing forms of self and society are repressed or exploit opportunities within the liminal space at the edges of neoliberalism. In each case how agency is expressed or is repressed is the point of fascination. Both space and place, in this sense, are multidimensional and sustained by discursive practices. This speaks to how we might understand the enormity of international relations and social structures through to the everyday intimacy of relations in the private sphere. The normalisation and the reproduction of particular social practices are linked to the expansion and penetration of a neoliberal hegemony that rationalises, atomises and homogenises the world around us. This volume critically explores how a range of subjectivities is formed, constrained, reshaped or resisted when confronted by the expansionary logic of neoliberalism. Many critics (see Harvey, 2006) have argued that neoliberalism has failed to achieve the growth rates of the golden age of Keynesianism in the 1960s. This failure to succeed on its own merits raises serious questions about how neoliberalism has maintained legitimacy in the face of its own failed raison d’être – which is to ensure wealth for all through market efficiency. In light of sustained criticism of the neoliberal project it seems only reasonable to seek both tools and ‘how-to’ guides in order to untangle a limiting and reductive ideology from our lives and our social structures. We hope that the critical analysis and theoretical reflection embodied in this book goes some way to providing both tools and guides for readers.
Theses on Class Struggle and Identity Politics
Racism, sexism and other forms of oppression and discrimination predate capitalism. These forms of oppression have been incorporated, in various ways, into capitalist social relations and ideology. Racism and sexism, however, are not constitutive of capitalism. Despite the real subsumption of labour and alienation of social life in post-Fordist global capitalism, there is no racial capitalism and no patriarchal capitalism. Likewise, there is no black Marxism or socialist feminism. There is capitalism and there is opposition to capitalism. 2. Contemporary neoliberal capitalism makes use of anti-racism, anti-patriarchy and other forms of anti-oppression. Just as capitalism and racism can be two sides of the same coin, so can capitalism and anti-racism. Actually existing patriarchy and racism is used by the ruling capitalist elite to divide and control the masses. In contrast to theories of anti-racism and antipatriarchy, class analysis does not view class differences as the root of capitalist exploitation. Class society is the product of capitalist social relations and the capitalist mode of production. Class is therefore central to class analysis but not exclusive. The contemporary emphasis on identity, like culture, is a measure of the extent to which it is both useful and irrelevant to the circulation of capital. People who are serious about ending oppression are serious about ending class exploitation.
Unstable Identity Narratives in the Age of Neoliberalism
pre-print
The concept of identity as unitary, stable, and context-independent is being replaced by a view of identity as multiple and context-dependent. In light of this shift, I critically examine how to conceptualize and investigate identities in the age of neoliberalism, in which free-market capitalism accelerates in tandem with numerous social changes, such as increasing privatization, soaring consumerism, outsourcing of jobs, unemployment, escalation of the precariat, as well as the educated underclass. These changes, I argue, have had profound implications for how individuals make sense of their surroundings and themselves. The paper asks how far a nationstate's economic framework can reshape personal subjectivities. I argue that these questions cannot be adequately answered without recognizing that identities and narratives exist within social, political, and economic contexts and without examining 'the victims' of neoliberalism.
The Killing Fields of Identity Politics
The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations
The obsession with securing recognition through identity pervades organizational, institutional, political, and everyday life. As academics, our culpability in promulgating this fascination, or idée fixe is indisputable, for as a collective body we are responsible for a proliferation of articles, books, and conference streams on identity. However, apart from a few exceptions, the majority of texts fail to interrogate the concept to uncover its dangers, but instead reproduce the everyday common-sense fascination, indeed addictive, preoccupation with seeking order, stability, and security through identity. In this chapter, the authors expose this neglect within the organization studies literature and argue that it contributes to, rather than challenges, some of the major social ills surrounding identity—discrimination and prejudice, aggressive masculine competition, conquest and control, and the growing identity politics of nationalist, if not xenophobic and racist, constructions of b...