by
Grant Farred[i]
Identity
politics was founded as a critique of the grand narrative, charged
with inaugurating a different mode of struggle. Instead of the Great
White Man theory of history and politics, identity politics demanded
thinking the political in its specificity; it undertook, in the wake
of the post-War anti-colonial struggles and the anti-Establishment
turmoil that rocked Western societies in the 1960s, the thinking of
the Other. Identity politics sought to rearticulate the extant
political categories by, inter alia, complicating the workings of
class with race; attending to gender and sexual orientation in the
campaign for national liberation; foregrounding the constitutive
importance of ethnicity in political struggles. However, from its
inception identity politics has been haunted by the question of how
to think the specific against the grand political narrative.
