Identity Politics in America: A Review-Essay (original) (raw)
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An Introduction to Identity Politics
Historical Materialism, 2018
This special issue responds to ongoing debates around what has been termed ‘identity politics’. We aim to intervene in what are make-or-break questions for the Left today. Specifically, we wish to provoke further interrogative but comradely conversation that works towards breaking-down the wedge between vulgar economism and vulgar culturalism. Critically, we maintain that just as all identity categories are spatially and temporally contingent – socially constructed, yet naturalised – so too is this current bifurcation between ‘class politics’ and ‘identity politics’. Ultimately, we call for an intellectual and organisational embracing of the complexity of identity as it figures in contemporary conditions; being a core organising-principle of capitalism as it functions today, a paradigm that Leftist struggle can be organised through and around – and yet all with a recognition of the necessity of historicising, and ultimately abolishing, these categories along with capitalism itself.
This document is a critical overlook of an arising issue regarding identity in contemporary societies. The document focuses on Identity politics as process that actuates many identities in our society. The understanding of the subject for this document comes from understanding of issues through critical analysis of opinions of critics and our own opinion regarding the issue.
Even before the term identity-politics came into use, there were those who engaged in a political thought process based in identity. These individuals critiqued not only mainstream culture and society, but the ways in which they believed the left had overlooked the significance of race, gender and sexuality in favor of perspectives it deemed more foundational, such as class, economic structure and later philosophical questions of meaning in form. Frantz Fanon, Ralph Ellison and Simone de Beauvoir were but a few writers who directly criticized the left, pointing out perspectives overlooked in the discourse of social equality and fair distribution of resources. Those who took up the cause of critique from the standpoint of identity had a major task. They were charged with informing the world of leftist thoughtboth in the academy and in the arts-of the urgency to address race, gender and sexuality. Moreover, they had to exhibit the ways in which these critical perspectives could illuminate omissions within the accepted discourses of social and political justice and their cultural manifestations.
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.
From Identity Politics to Identification Studies
International Journal of Communication, 2011
Today, identity politics seems almost quaint. Faded into memory are NEA funding battles and culture wars over representations of identities, dismantling of identity-based social programs such as college admissions and affirmative action, and the spawning of an all-purpose, anti-progressive code phrase, "politically incorrect." Moreover, scholars, particularly those working in critical/cultural areas, have theorized identity away in a multitude of ways: combining categories into hybrids and cyborgs, challenging its liberal humanist assumptions, critiquing its biases, tracing its processes of discursive constitution, queering its dualisms, and envisioning its aftermath in a post-identity world. Identity-at least insofar as
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...