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Introduction
Two decades ago Zygmunt Bauman described identity as ‘today’s talk of the town and the most commonly played game in town’ (Bauman, 2001a, p. 15) and ‘a prism through which … topical aspects of contemporary life are spotted, grasped and examined’ (Bauman, 2001b, p. 140). In making these statements he was capturing a general mood, or even zeitgeist, that had been gathering force in the social sciences and humanities from the 1980s onwards, and by now, there is little doubt that many scholars in the humanities and the social sciences consider identity to be a useful, if not essential, construct in their work. This can be seen in the fairly continuous flow of publications on the topic, written from a multitude of disciplinary perspectives over the past 30 years. Nowhere has the turn to identity been more pronounced than in pre-millennial applied linguistics, where the interest in identity may be said to have begun with Bonny Norton’s critique of second-language acquisition researchers for their failure to develop a theory of social identity and power as integral to understanding second-language learning processes (Norton-Pierce, 1995).
Though she referred explicitly to second-language acquisition, Norton’s appeal for greater attention to identity was certainly relevant across applied linguistics, where the construct was, at the time, all but absent in research. As a result of Norton’s call, developed in more detail in a book appearing a few years later (Norton, 2000), identity began to gain traction in applied linguistics. Thus, over the past two and a half decades, there has been a considerable number of conference papers on some aspect of language and identity, to say nothing of the many articles published in refereed journals. Further to this, there have been numerous influential edited volumes (e.g. Omoniyi & White, 2006; Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004; Preece, 2016) as well as key monographs (e.g. Benwell & Stokoe, 2006; Block, 2007; Coulmas, 2019; Joseph, 2004; McNamara, 2019; McEntee-Atalianis, 2019; Norton, 2013; Riley, 2007). All of this means, in effect, that identity is now a well-established key construct in applied linguistics, as researchers with a wide range of interests often include in-depth treatment of it in their work. This applies to research on bi/multilingualism, second-language learning and teaching, language and migration and many other areas of inquiry united by their focus on real-world problems in which language is a key issue. And while there are no doubt differences in how the previously cited scholars incorporate identity in their work, by now most would agree that identity is neither primordial nor essentialist in nature. This means that it does not owe its existence exclusively to well-defined, enduring biological, psychological, economic, political, social, cultural or geographical relationships that precede it in a stable and structured manner; rather, it is an emergent, contingent and multilayered phenomenon.
But how did so many scholars in the humanities and social sciences – and, of course, applied linguistics – come to hold this view of identity? More precisely, what are some of the sources of ideas that converged to constitute this view? And further to this, what are some of these key ideas? In this chapter I attempt to provide answers to these questions by providing a historical view of how identity came to be conceptualised as it is at present in applied linguistics. I think it important to provide such background because it will help us understand the broadly poststructuralist/social constructivist understanding of identity that I present and discuss in Chapter 2, and then critique thereafter in Chapters 3 and 4.
Before beginning my historical review of key authors and key concepts that are foundational to current thinking about identity, I begin with a section in which I clarify three preliminary matters, one related to the temporal point of departure for my discussion, and the other two related to terminology – self and subjectivity as terms used in conjunction with identity. I then begin my historical review by focusing on influences from postcolonial (and decolonial) literature in the period 1950s–1980s, which, as we shall see, emerged as part and parcel of a general questioning of modernist views of politics and society in the post-World War II era. I then examine the abundant amount of scholarship that came out of the social sciences, particularly from Europe, from the 1970s onwards. Space does not allow an encyclopedic coverage of all of the main currents of thinking leading to the current state of play in identity research, and so I will provide what I consider to be a plausible narrative of how identity came be an important construct.
Preliminary matters
In this chapter. I will not, as some identity scholars have done (e.g. McEntee-Atalianis, 2019), construct a history of identity that goes back to the ancients (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, etc.). Instead, I will align myself, for the most part, with those who have fixed the starting point of their discussions in the post-World War II period. For example, for Philip Gleason (1983), ‘identity is a new term … [that] came into use as a popular social-science term only in the 1950s’ (p. 910). Elsewhere, Marie Moran (2015) suggests that:
Gleason’s and Moran’s arguments notwithstanding, I believe it is worth inserting a caveat at this point. To say that identity was not a key construct in word before the 1950s is obviously not to say that there was nothing resembling in it in deed prior to this period. In fact, in most discussions of identity, there is the near-obligatory mention of two founders of modern psychology, William James and Sigmund Freud, as precursors to the current interest in the topic. This mention is due to their respective framing of human beings, not as tradition-bound pawns in a pre-ordained life-play, but as flesh-and-blood individuals with their individual life trajectories. Particularly innovative and transformative was James’s (1890) focus on the self, which as Shanyang Zhang (2014) notes, is based on the assumption that human beings may simultaneously act as ‘thinking subject’ and as ‘the object of their thinking’. While the former situates us in the realm of individual self-consciousness and awareness, the latter has to do with what James termed the ‘empirical Self’, which amounts to the self as an object of scientific inquiry. Thinking and writing within the androcentric mental frame so dominant in the late nineteenth century, he explains that
Meanwhile, Freud’s thinking was equally innovative. Freud revolutionised understandings of the self by situating its development at the crossroads of the id (the unconscious inner world of emotions and instinct), the ego (derived from the id, but the socially shaped organiser and repressor of it) and the super-ego (the internalisation of cultural rules and parental guidance) (Freud, 1923), and, on the whole, his influence has been far greater than James’s over the years. Thus, not only has his ‘conception of unconscious desire, and motivation entered sociology, political science, feminism, and philosophy in important ways’ (Elliot, 2020, p. 10) in recent decades, but Freudian thinking has also made great inroads into society at large. There, public discourses have become imbued with psychoanalytic language which previously had not been used and one often hears references to a person being ‘anal’, or ‘repressed’, or as ‘projecting’, or as ‘needing therapy’. It should be noted, however, that such terms are used with little knowledge of their grounding in Freudian psychoanalysis.
Still, notwithstanding the relatively greater presence of Freudian influence a century after he and James were active, it is probably fairest to say that both scholars’ work may be seen as essential and foundational to three important developments taking place during the twentieth century: the rise of individualisation and individualism; the eventual – and by now pervasive – infatuation with ‘me and who I am’; and finally, the rise of a particular way of seeing identity. Above all, their work is key to any understanding of the self as one’s inner being, which stands in contrast to ‘social identity’, and how ‘the fabrication of the self, psychologically and emotionally … involve[s] something more subjective, particularly the complex ways desire, emotion and feeling influence both conscious and unconscious experience and sexuality, gender, race and ethnicity’ (Elliot, 2020, p. 14). This is certainly how many people understand the notion of self today, and it is based on ideas that both James and Freud were writing about over a century ago.
I have mentioned the term ‘self’, sometimes used as synonym of ‘identity’ and other times distinguished as the individual’s inner being in contrast with social being. Another term that is often used in free variation with ‘identity’ is ‘subjectivity’, along with derived forms such as ‘subject position’. This practice occurs despite some scholars’ suggestion that there is space for differentiating between the two. For example, Stuart Hall (1996) writes that ‘identities are … points of temporary attachments to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us’ (p. 6). Meanwhile, Chris Weedon (1997) adopts a similar position. If subjectivity refers to ‘the conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions of the individual, her sense of herself and her ways of understanding her relation in the world’ (p. 32), identities are ‘perhaps best understood as a limited and temporary fixing for the individual of … particular mode[s] of subjectivity as apparently what one is’ (Weedon, 2004, p. 19). Elsewhere, Claire Kramsch (2009) writes that ‘[i]dentity refers to the identification with a social or cultural group, while subjectivity focuses on the ways in which the self is formed through the use of language and other symbolic systems, both intrapersonally and interpersonally’ (p. 20). Kramsch also uses ‘subject position’ in her work to indicate ‘the way in which the subject presents and represents itself discursively, psychologically, socially, and culturally through the use of symbolic systems’ (ibid.). In one form or another, Hall, Weedon and Kramsch subscribe to the notion that identities have a certain permanence or fixedness, even if this might be temporary and unenduring, while subjectivities are emergent in activity and the ongoing discursive processes constituting activity. In this chapter, and the book as a whole, I will primarily use ‘identity’, although ‘subjectivity’ and ‘subject position’ will at times be used. When this occurs, it will be in the spirit of what the aforementioned authors have written, namely, that identity signifies a fixing of who someone is, be this temporary or longer lasting, while subjectivity refers more to the making of identity in interaction.
Frantz Fanon and postcoloniality/decoloniality
My first stop in this narrative of scholars and ideas foundational to the rise of identity in the post-World War II era is the considerable body of scholarship that began to appear in the 1950s under the general rubric of postcolonial studies. While not explicitly about identity as we understand it today, this work has nevertheless provided identity researchers with a great deal of conceptual background, independently of whether this influence is actually acknowledged. Drawing on history, political economy, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies and human geography, postcolonial scholars denounced enduring imperialism in the world, and importantly, they demanded that voices from the periphery (as positioned by Eurocentrism in global academia) not only be understood (as some anthropologists might claim they had been doing all along), but actually be heard. This body of scholarship was heavily influenced by two key texts by Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks (1967), and The Wretched of the Earth (2001). In these books, Fanon analysed the impact of European imperialism and colonialism on colonised and racialised subjects, in the latter book drawing on his direct experience of Algeria’s war of independence against France, which took place from 1954 to 1962 and ended just 2 months after Fanon’s death. Heavily influenced by the still earlier work of Aimé Césaire (1972), and working in parallel with Albert Memmi (1991), Fanon focused on key elements of colonial oppression, in particular the psychologically damaging effects of racism, while also writing about resistance to oppression, advocating violence where and when appropriate.
Fanon’s thinking was prescient in many ways. First, it can be seen as an early precursor of what today are known as ‘southern epistemologies’, defined by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2018) as ‘the production and validation of knowledges anchored in the experiences of resistance of all those social groups that have systematically suffered injustice, oppression, and destructiveness caused by capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy’ (p. 19). Here, the notion of ‘southern’ (and indeed, the often-used ‘global south’) may be understood to ‘re...
