Concept: Identity

Definition: (noun) the fact of being who or what a person or thing is.

Related Terms: Identity politics, intersectionality, elite capture

Description: The term identity has been one of the most contested and misunderstood in recent years. Both in scholarly and in popular understandings of the term, identity is a political category that can be polarizing and empowering at the same time. Many social movements, particularly in the United States, began as ways of reclaiming identities (such as that of African-Americans and women) that had been marginalized or silenced altogether. Waves of immigrants, from the Chinese to Eastern European Jews, came to inhabit spaces—physical and psychological—based on their ethnic identities. Yet in reality, identity is hardly immutable.

In Stuart Hall’s memoir, Familiar Stranger: A Life between Two Islands (2017), the Jamaican-born British cultural theorist asserts that “no identities survive the diasporic process intact and unchanged, or maintain their connections with their past undisturbed.”¹ Here, the experience of migration is inflected by Hall’s encounter with postcolonial Britain, where diasporic identity serves as a space of anti-colonial resistance. In thinking of identity in relation to processes of migration, we may find alignment with Hall’s observation that rather than “a set of fixed attributes […] a singular, complete, finished state of being,” identity is instead a “constantly shifting process of positioning […] a never-completed process of becoming.”²

Contemporary intersectional understandings of identity as racialized, gendered, sexed, and classed, for instance, are profound overlapping elements of migrant identity. Such ideas are often found categorized under the contested label of “identity politics.” While derided by right-wing politicians in the same manner as the term “political correctness,” contemporary uses of “identity politics” by the left (and often on social media) diverge significantly from its origins with the Combahee River Collective. As a queer Black feminist collective, their 1977 manifesto outlined identity politics as an approach favoring diverse coalitional organizing.³ The mediated identity of the migrant, then, is necessarily viewed through this prism of intersectional, inter-causal relations.

Some of the most provocative immigrant novels and films probe questions of identity in specific communities. British writer Hanif Kureishi has critiqued and satirized the inter-generational gap between “purist” and “flexible” notions of identity in My Son the Fanatic (1994), and explored cross-cultural dynamics during most of his long and prolific literary career. 

S.C. & J.Y. 2024

Notes

¹ Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger: A Life between Two Islands (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 144.

² Hall, Familiar Stranger, 16

³ Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else) (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books), 11–12.

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