Identity for a ‘Tomorrow’: A Postcolonial Critique of Identity Politics

Abstract

This article offers a postcolonial perspective to investigate the limitations of the so-called essentialist identity politics. It reveals that at the outset, the discourses on identities were created and represented by the West in order to serve colonial practices during the European colonial era. However, these Western-constructed images were thence adopted by the anti-colonial struggles regardless to their unreal origins. Therefore, by ways of proclaiming on their inbornessentialist collective identities, the struggles carelessly subjugated vary individual subjects into mere group categories. In this way, the subalterns within identity groups were double-victimized. Furthermore, this article also explores the practices of the discourses of essentialist identities in racist societies that eventually enchained individual ‘selfs’ into the ‘in-betweenness’ of unreal past and unachieved future. It suggests that we should understand individual ‘selfs’ as uncertain and hybrid ones since in reality, the ‘selfs’ were constructed in accordance to the relationship of power and the social structure in their own contexts. Nonetheless, the dialectic between ‘self’ identities and ‘collective identity’ resulted in collective schizophrenia among the inferior groups. Henceforth, so as to overcome the problems of essentialist identity politics in which the nostalgia for the past was constantly repeated whilst the possibility for a better future was recklessly neglected, there is a need to bring back the ‘self-realized’ subjects into identity movements. With a will to communicate and cooperate with the others, this article argues that the identity groups can go beyond their own identities only by ways of calling for social justice, as well as reforming an unequal structure of power so as to create a better society for all.