Identity Poltics is a central aspect of postmodern politics and communities in which the legitimacy of a unitary public identity or an overarching sense of self has diminished and in its place the previously private identities of citizens, like their race or ethnicity, or sexual orientation, compete for public recognition and legitimation. Identity politics sets people against each other, insisting on the impossibility of sharing and communication. When minority groups feel excluded by "mainstream" society, it's not surprising that identity politics result in a reaction. Identity Politics is both a-historic and a-political. The demands of identity politics can be met by elevating citizenship, full enfranchisement and equal rights.
Identity politics is not opposed to an encompassing national vision. Criticisms of identity politics span the mundane to the practical. In his latest book, “Identity,” Stanford University political scientist Francis Fukuyama calls identity politics one of the “chief threats” facing liberal democracies, diverting energy and thinking away from bigger problems, such as increasing economic inequality.
Theorists fear that Identity Poltics will lead to private values and identities coming to take precedence over public involvement as citizens. Identity Politics means the use of characteristics that people can't or don't want to change as a way of seperating different groups from each other. Identity politics divides people into mutually suspicious and hostile, if not warring camps, constantly insisting on denigration of the other. Identity politics developed in the home of identity politics, that is, United States, during the 1980s, as a direct response to the militant imposition of mainstream" values during the Reagan years.
Gender and the perils of identity politics in India - ZOYA HASAN. Hindu women's activism in the service of the political goals of the Hindu Nationalist parties and the debates around the legal rights of Muslim women illustrate the perils of identity politics in matters of gender equality.
Gentrification and the White Left - This article has sparked controversy on the nyc indymedia site, for its scathing indictment of the hypocrisy of the white left with regard to anti-poverty and anti-racist struggle wiht regard to the phenomenon of urban gentrification. The piece has been roundly lauded by many for its frankness, soundly criticized as "identity politics" and deemed subtly homophobic by others.
Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Poltics During Decolonization of Algeria. Le Sueur. Tracing the intellectual history of one of the most violent and pivotal wars of European decolonization, author James D. Le Sueur illustrates how key figures such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Tillion, Jacques Soustelle, Raymond Aron, Claude Levi-Strauss, Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon, Mouloud Feraoun, Jean Amrouche, and Pierre Bourdieu agonized over the "Algerian question. As Le Sueur argues, these individuals and others forged new notions of the nation and nationalism, giving rise to a identity politics that continues to influence debate around the world.
Identity Politics and Social Exclusion in India's North-East: The Case for Re-distributive Justice - N.K.Das. Abstract: This paper examines how various brands of identity politics since the colonial days have served to create the basis of exclusion of groups, resulting in various forms of rifts, often envisaged in binary terms: majority-minority; sons of the soil - immigrants; local-outsiders; tribal-non-tribal; hills-plains; inter-tribal; and intra-tribal.
Identity Politics and
Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in International Perspective edited by
Valentine Moghadam is a collection of essays on identity politics in various parts of the
world and also identity politics in India.
Jana Everett, "All the Women Were Hindu and All the Muslims Were Men":
State, Identity Politics and Gender, 1917-1951, Economic and Political Weekly
36(23), 2001, 2071-2080.