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Beyond “identity”

2000; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1023/a

1573-7853

Rogers Brubaker, Frederick Cooper,

The worst thing one can do with words,'' wrote George Orwell a half a century ago, ``is to surrender to them.''If language is to be ``an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought,'' he continued, one must ``let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about.'' 1The argument of this article is that the social sciences and humanities have surrendered to the word ``identity''; that this has both intellectual and political costs; and that we can do better.``Identity,'' we argue, tends to mean too much (when understood in a strong sense), too little (when understood in a weak sense), or nothing at all (because of its sheer ambiguity).We take stock of the conceptual and theoretical work ``identity'' is supposed to do and suggest that this work might be done better by other terms, less ambiguous, and unencumbered by the reifying connotations of ``identity.''We argue that the prevailing constructivist stance on identity ^the attempt to ``soften'' the term, to acquit it of the charge of ``essentialism'' by stipulating that identities are constructed, £uid, and multiple leaves us without a rationale for talking about ``identities'' at all and ill-equipped to examine the ``hard'' dynamics and essentialist claims of contemporary identity politics.``Soft'' constructivism allows putative ``identities'' to proliferate.But as they proliferate, the term loses its analytical purchase.If identity is everywhere, it is nowhere.If it is £uid, how can we understand the ways in which self-understandings may harden, congeal, and crystallize?If it is constructed, how can we understand the sometimes coercive force of external identi¢cations?If it is multiple, how do we understand the terrible singularity that is often striven for ^and sometimes realized ^by politicians seeking to transform mere categories into unitary and exclusive groups?How can we understand the power and pathos of identity politics?