https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i3.025
Identity: Some Recent Conceptual Reflexions
DR. JASWINDER SINGH
Assistant Professor in Sikh Studies
GGS Department of Religious Studies &
Incharge, Bhai Vir Singh Chair
Punjabi University, Patiala
E-Mail: jaswinder@pbi.ac.in
Abstract: After postmodern interventions, identity, once a complex, multilayered concept, has become an important point for rethinking across geographical boundaries. The paper outlines key theoretical perspectives that reconceptualise identity through the lenses of difference, incommensurability, power, and hybridity. Through Jonathan Rutherford, it examines how the cultural politics of difference and the notion of “home” destabilise fixed hierarchies and highlight relational understandings of the self and the other. Jeffrey Weeks’s argument on the “value of difference” foregrounds the tensions between individualism, community, and democratic plurality, while Kobena Mercer’s analysis of postmodern politics situates identity within new social movements and fragmented structures of feeling. Gary Taylor and Steve Spencer’s understanding of identity, power, and subjectivity emphasises the role of language and cultural codes.
Homi K. Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity and the “third space” challenge cultural essentialism and open up new sites of negotiation. Stuart Hall’s notion of identity as an ongoing “production,” especially in the context of diaspora, further underscores the unfinished, positional character of cultural identities. Finally, the paper considers experiential and political articulations of identity in the works of Frances Angela and Pratibha Parmar, highlighting confinement, black feminism, and postcolonial diaspora as critical locations for new subjectivities. Together, these perspectives illuminate identity not as a stable essence, but as a dynamic, contested process shaped by difference, history, and power.
Keywords: Identity, Difference, Diversity, Culture, Postmodernism, Black Feminism
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