Situating identities: towards an identities studies without binaries of difference

Abstract

This article queries the pervasiveness of binary thinking in contemporary identity studies. Reviewing the genealogy of binary alterity beginning with the synergies between the European Enlightenment and colonialism, I note the binary logics that remained embedded within the apparently disparate schools of structuralist and poststructuralist theory. Even the social constructionism of post-colonial scholarship became transmuted through a celebration of radical relativism into a legitimation of continued racialised or culturalised inequalities. To counter this position, I build on but also critique efforts to theorisations of relationalities. A reconstituted identity studies requires the theorisation of unequal globe-spanning imperial power and its contestations through domains of mutual practice. If we set aside an assumption of binaries of difference, such domains of relationship can be found as people meet in terms of their commonalities of experience and aspirations for equality, justice and respect.

Keywords:

• identities studies
• binaries of difference
• alterity
• relationalities
• cosmopolitan urbanism
• displacement

Notes

1. Alternative readings of Levi-Strauss, Mauss and Simmel could highlight relationality as well as difference but they are too rarely approached in this way.