Why the academic left hates identity politics

Textual Practice

Volumn 16, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 1-11

  Bramen, Carrie Tirado ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33947361251     PISSN: 0950236X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09502360110103676     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. Richard Rorty, 'Back to class politics', Dissent (winter 1997), p. 34.
2. Grant Farred, 'Endgame identity: mapping the New Left roots of identity politics', New Literary History, 31:4 (2000), p. 639.
3. Todd Gitlin, 'The rise of identity politics', Dissent (spring 1993), p. 173.
4. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 101.
5. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
6. For a discussion of how critics have appropriated Nietzsche to represent philosophies that he held in contempt (such as socialism and feminism), see Malcolm Bull, 'Where is the anti-Nietzsche?', New Left Review, 3 (May-June 2000), p. 121.
7. Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage, 2001), p. 21.
8. Audre Lorde, 'The uses of anger', in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984), p. 145.
9. Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 116-17.
10. In her critique of Diana Fuss's book, bell hooks asks: why is it always the minorities who are accused of essentialism? 'Certainly many white male students have brought to my classroom an insistence on the authority of experience, one that enables them to feel that anything they have to say is worth hearing.' bell hooks, 'Essentialism and experience', American Literary History, 3:1 (spring 1991), p. 175.
11. Nancy Fraser, 'From redistribution to recognition? Dilemmas of justice in a "post-socialist" age', in Cynthia Willett (ed.) Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current Debate (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 37.
12. David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995), p. 13.
13. Amanda Anderson, 'Cosmopolitanism, universalism, and the divided legacies of modernity', in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (eds) Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 267.
14. Pnina Werbner, 'Essentialising essentialism, essentialising silence: ambivalence and multiplicity in the constructions of racism and ethnicity', in Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood (eds) Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi- Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism (London: Zed Books, 1997), p. 230.
15. Cornel West, 'The new cultural politics of difference', in Cameron McCarthy and Warren Crichlow (eds) Race, Identity, and Representation in Education (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 22.
16. For a more elaborate discussion of the political dimensions of relative autonomy for rethinking a radical humanism that would link as well as differentiate identitarian categories such as race and class, see my book The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National Distinctiveness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
17. Alan Sinfield, Gay and After (London: Serpent's Tail, 1998), p. 43.
18. Subcomandante Marcos, Our Word Is Our Weapon: Selected Writings, ed. Juana Ponce De Leon (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001), p. 161.