Page 162 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

IDENTITY BLUES

approach. On the one hand, he highlights the inadequacy of conventional
conceptions of ‘identity’, but on the other, he simultaneously affirms its irreducible
political and cultural significance. We do not have to repeat here the well-known
chorus of anti-essentialist, deconstructive and postmodern critiques which have
stripped ‘identity’, as a concept, from its elevated status as the fundamental inner
core of ‘me’ or ‘us’, representing the true, inalienable self of the subject, individual
or collective. However, no matter how convinced we are, theoretically, that
identities are constructed, not ‘natural’, invented not given, always in process and
not fixed, at the level of experience and common sense identities are generally
expressed, and mobilized politically, precisely because they feel natural and essential.
Indeed, as Craig Calhoun (1994) has remarked, the constant emphasis on identity
as construction in contemporary theoretical discourse (and, by implication, as
somehow not ‘real’ and therefore not worth fighting for) ‘fails to grapple with
the real, present-day political and other reasons why essentialist identities continue
to be invoked and often deeply felt’ (ibid.: 14). ‘For better and worse’, James
Clifford (1998: 369) has recently observed, ‘claims to identity – articulations of
ethnic, cultural, gender, and sexual distinction – have emerged as things people,
across the globe and the social spectrum, care about.’ The persistent gap between
the imaginaries of everyday experience and the orthodoxies of contemporary theory
points to the irreducibility of identity as an operative concept; in Hall’s words, it
is ‘an idea which cannot be thought in the old way, but without which certain key
questions cannot be thought at all’ (1996g: 2). To put it differently, while we may
have discarded ‘identity’ in theory, we cannot do away with cultural identities as
real, social and symbolic forces in history and politics. In this context, according
to Hall (ibid.: 16), we have fully and unambiguously to acknowledge ‘both the
necessity and the “impossibility” of identities’.
It is in the face of this double bind between necessity and impossibility that the
idealistic move to highlight the possibility of future-oriented, open-ended identities
acquires its understandable urgency. If we cannot do without identities, so the
reasoning seems to go, then we’d better make sure that they are vehicles for
progressive change! Indeed, the so-called new social movements that have emerged
since the 1960s – feminism, gay and lesbian movements, anti-racist, ethnic and
multicultural movements, various environmentalist, youth and counter-cultural
movements, and so on – are often cited as forms of identity politics that have
contributed to democratization and progressive change in many arenas of social life,
especially in the rich Western world. However, Calhoun observes rightly that this
idea of new social movements is problematic because

[it] groups together what seem to the researchers relatively ‘attractive’
movements, vaguely on the left, but leaves out such other contemporary
movements such as the new religious right and fundamentalism, the
resistance of white ethnic communities against people of color, various
versions of nationalism, and so forth.
(1994: 22)

151