The politics of identity

Place, space and discourse

Christine Agius, Dean Keep, Christine Agius

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781526110244
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526110275
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política comparada

In what ways can we think through the complexities of identity? Identity is a contested concept, but it is more than a thing possessed by agents. Identity is contingent and dynamic, constituting and reconstituting subjects with political effects. In this edited book, identity is explored through a range of unique interdisciplinary case studies from around the world. Questions of citizenship, belonging, migration, conflict, security, peace and subjectivity are examined through social construction, post-colonialism, and gendered lenses from an interdisciplinary perspective. This combination showcases in particular the political implications of identity, how it is constituted, and the effects it produces.

This edited collection will be of particular interest to students of international relations theory, migration studies, gender and sexuality, post-colonialism and policy-making at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

1

The politics of identity: making and
disrupting identity

Christine Agius and Dean Keep

The power of identity to manifest as a unifying and divisive force pervades social, cultural, economic and political relations. Economic crises, war and conflict, struggles over resources and equality, and questions of exclusion and belonging are premised both overtly and subtly in claims about identity. This finds expression at and between the individual and collective level. In the wake of the January 2015 terrorist attacks at the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris, people around the world readily identified with France and values such as freedom of speech with the hashtag #jesuischarlie (‘I am Charlie’), and #jesuisparis after the November attacks in the same year. The anti-establishment push-back against globalisation and mainstream politics from both the left and right of the political spectrum invokes questions of identity, to differing degrees. The Eurozone crisis has provoked discussions about the failure of the European political and economic project and identity. The push for independence in Scotland in 2014, and the rise of Syriza in Greece, and Podemos in Spain, also reflected efforts to rethink national and sub-national representation and identity against wider societal and economic crises. In the UK, the June 2016 referendum on EU membership was deeply tied to questions of identity in both the Leave and Remain campaigns. For those supporting ‘Brexit’, the referendum was an opportunity to ‘reclaim’ national identity and ‘control’ over economic and immigration policy and borders. The Leave campaign’s saturation of images and rhetoric imagined a restored national sovereignty and identity that proved to be a powerful, if contentious and divisive, discourse. For many who supported staying in the EU, the loss of the referendum was experienced as an ‘existential’ – or ‘Brexistential’ – crisis (Spicer 2016), an undoing of an identity that was attached not only to the nation-state (which now appeared different) but also to Europe.

Questions of ‘who we are’ shape our subjectivities and the world we inhabit, but the relationship is more intricate than locating identity as a causal factor in human behaviour and relationships. For some time, questions of identity have been fixated on ‘identity politics’, which has pitched class against gender, race, sexuality and other status-based social movements which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in response to post-industrial change. Neo-Marxists upheld class as the main social movement through which to address structural inequality and promote social change (Bernstein 2005, 66). As such, identity politics based on other social status is regarded as a distraction to achieving wider social justice and is thus non-political (despite the intersection of gender, race, sexuality and other categories with class). Some account for the rise in identity politics as an outcome of capitalism’s homogenising tendencies, where identity politics emerges as the working class is weakened by processes of globalisation (Fox Piven 1995) or the left’s inability to address gender, race and sexual inequality (Bernstein and Taylor 2013). Post-election analyses of the 2016 US presidential election have been dominated by ‘identity politics’, particularly the rise of ‘white identity politics’ as an explanatory force for Trump’s success (Knowles and Tropp 2016; Taranto 2016), and the source of Hillary Clinton’s loss. Moreover, the ‘rising American electorate’ of minorities, millennials and women that Clinton relied on failed to translate into votes (Judis 2016; Slater 2016). According to Jodi Dean, the reason pollsters ‘got it so wrong’ has in part been due to assumptions about fixed demographic categories to determine views and preferences. Dean’s critique of the fixation on identity politics emerging from the US presidential election identifies several problems that mainstream analyses have yet to address: ‘the appeal of identity, attachments to it and investments in it’. Hashtag-ready statements of identity, such as Clinton’s ‘I’m with Her’ slogan, utilise what Dean refers to as ‘affective networks of communicative capitalism’, whereby mass personalised media is used by individuals to circulate feelings and opinions, and identify enemies. This form of ‘weaponized identity politics’ does little to understand or challenge the underlying foundations that block solidarities and real capacity for change (Dean 2016).

In the same vein, the need to be attentive to the ‘politics of identity’ remains important, lest we restrict the parameters of debate and fail to thoroughly analyse identity. The politics of identity can be a wider lens through which to examine seismic and everyday phenomena, because a politics of identity is concerned with how identity works, and the effects (and affects) it produces. When we speak of ‘identity’ we are not simply classifying but, rather, engaging in a complex series of meanings, intersections and possibilities of being, and relating that construct to the fabric of social, political, cultural and economic life. Identity underscores how collectives and individuals interact, their subjectivities, and how they manage complex problems and challenges. Naming and categorising is a vital part of identity work and is political. But understanding and analysing how a politics of identity works requires further questions. Writing before Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, psychologists Stephen Reicher and S. Alexander Haslam maintained that Trump’s success was attributable not only to his political rallies, which were carefully orchestrated performances (‘identity festivals’), but also to his ability to be a successful ‘identity entrepreneur’ – ‘in essence, his ability to represent himself and his platform in ways that resonate with his wouldbe followers’ experience of their world’ (Reicher and Haslam 2016). When elites enunciate their vision of nation and community, what sort of politics of identity underscores such discourses, and how does it structure and produce specific debates about ourselves (and others)? How is identity performed and performative? How do language, discourse and narrative shape meaning and identities, and what ‘work’ do emotional and affective cues and appeals do? How do we use technology, media, images and other forms of communication to express ideas about identity? How is power deployed in claims about identity? In our ‘post-factual’ age, where untruths and inaccuracies are consumed and circulated as ‘truth’, and established understandings of politics and society are fraying, questions about how we form our identities and see others hold great importance, because identity plays a role in how we are constituted and how we regard others, and has meaning for our future choices.

Problems of identity, approaches to identity

Although identity pervades the human experience and constitutes the subjectivities of individuals, nations, groups, ethnicities, religions and other collective formations, it remains a ‘slippery’ concept (Buckingham 2008, 1; Connolly 1991, 64; Lawler 2014, 1). Analyses often begin by invoking the Latin derivative – idem (‘same’) – which establishes identity as referring to ‘identical’, or the notion that we are identical with ourselves but also others (Buckingham 2008, 1; Jenkins 2008, 16–17; Lawler 2014, 9). Dictionary definitions, however, impart an older, ‘bureaucratic’ or ‘jurisprudential’ usage of the term, which is concerned with legally naming or associating ‘things’, such as the legal name for an entity or individual (Descombes 2016, 4; Fearon 1999, 8). The political usage of ‘identity’ in English-speaking nations is only a recent development, traced to Erik Erikson’s coinage of the term ‘identity crisis’. Erikson’s psychosocial work of the 1950s and 1960s examined the loss or weakening of identity in adolescent subjects and soldiers returning from the Pacific in the Second World War. ‘Identity crisis’ came to signify an inability to maintain a consistent self (Descombes 2016, 17–18; Fearon 1999, 9; Stokes 1997, 2). Changes or challenges to established identities invoke notions of crisis and uncertainty. In this vein, political psychologists have elaborated Erikson’s concept of identity crises further through ontological insecurity, which refers to the idea of certainty of self, or the ‘subjective sense of who one is, which enables and motivates action and choice’ (Mitzen 2006, 344). In the context of globalisation – the opening of borders, rapid communication, proliferation of technologies, movement of peoples, trade, markets and the spread of ideas – core understandings of identity are seen to be breaking down and developing in different ways. Social theorists have drawn attention to the critical implications for human subjectivity that are part of these processes, particularly in the ‘posthuman age’ where processes of globalisation, information- and bio-technologies impact subjectivity (Elliott 2016, 2). Dislocation, job losses, economic and social changes and cultural shifts affect not only routines but understandings of self and one’s place in the world. Despite many arguing that such changes promote new opportunities, there is also a withdrawal into a defence of the self, and a desire to reaffirm self-identity (Kinnvall 2004, 742; Parekh 2008) or appeals to ‘authentic’ identities. Globalisation brings about a desire to return to an imagined homogeneity in the face of such changes, evidenced in the rise of right-wing populism across Europe, North America and elsewhere. The more porous nature of identity is also reflected in how citizens see themselves. A BBC World Service poll conducted in 2016 found more people from emerging economies identifying themselves as global rather than national citizens. This was particularly the case in Nigeria, China and Peru, where over 70 per cent of respondents saw themselves as global citizens. The same poll showed the trend in industrialised nations, such as Germany (30 per cent, the lowest since polling began in 2001), to be lower, explained by economic pressures and immigration (Grimley 2016).

Knowing ‘who we are’ is a foundational claim about identity, which Jenkins defines as the ‘human capacity – rooted in language – to know “who’s who”’. This basic form of categorisation contributes to social reality; furthermore, our own self-perceptions are ‘intimately related to who we think others are, and vice versa’ (Jenkins 2008, 5 and 12, italics in original). Efforts to analyse identity involve categorisation, such as identifying personal, societal, corporate and collective levels. These divisions are predicated on national, cultural, religious, economic and ideological grounds. Among scholars, there is agreement that identity is a process (‘identification’), but they differ to various degrees on the question of whether it is a thing that individuals or groups ‘possess’ or whether identity determines behaviour or actions (Buckingham 2008, 1; Jenkins 2008, 5 and 13). Various approaches focus on explaining identity or using identity as an explanatory tool to establish causality (Fearon 1999). Traditional theories of international relations, for instance, have a limited view of identity, assuming that the identities of states are pregiven. Rationalist theories, such as realism, argue that states are ‘like units’ and behave according to their capabilities and interests. For liberals, it is a mosaic of individual and group interests that are contained within the ‘state’ (Guillaume 2010, 13). Yet, individual and collective identities cannot form without exposure to and engagement with the outside world and others; it is through interaction that identity forms, and the relationship is co-constitutive, a point taken up by social constructivism in international relations. Here, identity explains the behaviour of actors and is central to how interests are defined through social interaction and intersubjective meanings rather than given (Adler 1997; Fierke and Jørgensen 2001; Hopf 1998; Wendt 1994).

The tendency to regard cultural, national or religious groups as a singular identity is likewise problematic, because ‘solidarist’ approaches deny the multiple possibilities of identity, obscuring how we engage, refer to or prioritise our different identities and associations, depending on context (Sen 2006, xii). Actors experience a hierarchy of multiple, and at times competing, identities. Singular conceptualisations of identity also fail to consider intersectionality, where other axes of difference such as ethnicity, religion, caste, ability, gender and sexuality alter the meaning of an identity category or intersect with additional forms of domination or subjugation (Crenshaw 1991). Sociologists have long understood identity as a process undertaken in interaction with others, in social and cultural contexts. From Mead’s symbolic interactionism (1934) to Goffman’s dramaturgy (1956), sociologists draw on varying metaphors for the way that identity is ‘done’. Fenstermaker and West’s (2002) conceptualisation of ‘doing difference’ and Butler’s ‘performativity’ belie that there is any true self underneath the doing; this has ontological implications for identity as a concept, implying that identity itself is an ‘empty’ category, ‘real’ only in so far as it is ‘performatively constituted’ through citational practices (Butler 2011, 1999).

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 The politics of identity: making and disrupting identity: Christine Agius and Dean Keep
• Part I Establishing and consolidating identity
• Part II Identity rupture
• Part III Contesting identity
• Index