A critique of Martín Alcoff's identity politics: On power and universality

Philosophy Today

Volumn 53, Issue SUPPL., 2009, Pages 44-58

  Chanter, Tina ^a  

^a DEPAUL UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77949953959     PISSN: 00318256     EISSN: 00318256     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/philtoday200953supplement26     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (28)

1. While Martín Alcoff acknowledges that "universalist humanism was based on a supposedly innate but unevenly developed capacity to reason" and as such has been implicated in "colonialist arrogance, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 274, she wants to retain the idea of a universalist humanism
2. Yet at the same time she wants to supplement this appeal by pointing to the importance of variables, most fundamentally that of race (see Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (ibid., 278). Henceforth cited as VI
3. The fact that Martín Alcoff sees no contradiction in embracing universal humanism while at the same time espousing the "ineliminable importance of culture and history and the context of power" (Visible Identities, 209) raises the question of what universal humanism could possibly mean - its content appears to have been emptied out to such an extent that it is all but impossible to specify, beyond establishing that there are "connections" (278) between humans, and that race is the most important one
4. Linda Martín Alcoff, Philosophy and Racial Identity," Philosophy Today 41 (Spring 1997): 68. Henceforth cited as PRI
5. Linda Martín Alcoff, "Comparative Race, Comparative Racisms," in Jorge Gracia, ed., Black Ethnicity/Latino Race? (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 4. Henceforth cited as CRCR
6. Combahee River Collective, "A Black Feminist Statement," in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1997), 63-70. Henceforth cited as BF
7. Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), 99. Hencedforth cited as ES
8. Jodi Dean, Solidarity of Strangers: Feminism After Identity Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 5
9. David Ingram Rights, Democracy, and Fulfillment in the Era of Identity Politics: Principled Compromises in a Compromised Word (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 17
10. Linda Martín Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory," Signs 13 (1988): 405-36; see esp. 424. Henceforth cited as CFPS
11. Satya Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of HIstory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 205
12. See, for example, Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980)
13. "Against 'Post-ethnic' Futures," 3
14. "Fraser on Redistribution, Recognition, and Identity," private manuscript, 4. Henceforth cited as FRRI
15. Also see the discussion of ontology in "Philosophy and Racial Identity," 69
16. "Reclaiming Truth," The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture 3:3 (Fall 2001): 26-41
17. Revised and reprinted in José Medina and David Wood, eds., Truth: Engagements Across Philosophical Disciplines (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 336-49. Henceforth cited as RT
18. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color," in Alison Bailey and Chris Cuomo, eds., The Feminist Philosophy Reader (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2008), 279. Henceforth cited as MM
19. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: University: Stanford University Press, 1997), 17. Henceforth cited as PLP
20. Butler says that "agency may well consist in opposing and transforming the social terms by which it is spawned" (Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (ibid., 29)
21. In contrast to Manuel Castells, for example, who distinguishes between the following different senses of identity, "legitimizing identity," "resistance identity" and "project identity," Martín Alcoff makes numerous claims about identity, which she understands in a wide variety of ways at different points in her text, without clarifying how she is using the term. See Castells, The Power of Identity, vol. 2: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 8
22. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 35
23. Elizabeth Spelman, "Gender & Race: The Ampersand Problem in Feminist Thought," in Alison Bailey and Chris Cuomo, eds., The Feminist Philosophy Reader (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2008), 270. Cited as GR
24. Elizabeth Spelman, "Gender & Race: The Ampersand Problem in Feminist Thought," in The Feminist Philosophy Reader (Ibid
25. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2006), 6
26. Judith Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," in The Second Wave, 301
27. Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 23-24
28. Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Ibid., 112