Some evocative commentary from Plums about Hanif Kureishi and migrant identity crisis. “Suddenly there was this book about people like me.” Funny you should say this, Plums, because last night on the train I noticed that practically all the kids in my carriage were asian, and it got me thinking of my own childhood (which was in the immediate wake of the White Australia Policy), and how isolating, marginal, wimpy and uncool it was to be a middle class asian kid in the 1970s.
Since the various shifts in Australian culture that have happened since the 1980s, the problems around race, culture and power that most non-Anglo kids in Australia have now are neither better nor worse, I imagine, but they’re definitely modulated in very different ways. One thing I envy is their relative untroubledness with simply walking down the street. And it’s got very little to do with white people being more “tolerant” (feh). Just seeing that really evokes so many emotions for me, and I challenge anybody with a literalist opposition to “identity politics” to explain how feeling like a powerless freak is not linked to a need for identification with other people like me. That need is not reducible to microfascism or the tyranny of homogeneity. (And yes, we probably need new terminology for it. Because it is a sharing of crisis as well as familiarity.) Often, I find that critiques of “identity politics” are nothing of the sort, and are instead a capitulation to atomisation, or an excuse to destroy our sensitivity to difference so that unacknowledged racism can happily replicate, unhindered.
Anyway, I was working up to mentioning Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan’s DEMO #6, “What You Wish For”, which really touched a nerve:
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Oh, and what self-obsessed post by me wouldn’t be complete without a starfucker story about Hanif Kureishi? But wait, I’ve already told that one…
Glad you found in interesting, hon.
“Often, I find that critiques of “identity politics” are nothing of the sort, and are instead a capitulation to atomisation, or an excuse to destroy our sensitivity to difference so that unacknowledged racism can happily replicate, unhindered”
Gawd yes. I often find myself kicking against what seems to be an automated critique of ‘identity politics’ in the circles where I have these conversations…
I am aware of the problems of the more rigid forms of identity politics, but I think there’s a tendency to use these ‘straw men’ to throw the whole I.P project out the window…
Politics of identity are still relevant to me, and will be as long as long as societies struggle/fail with multiculturalism and liberalism’s response is to claim that racism is being dealt with by erasing difference.
have you seen this? gets interesting at times….
“One thing I envy is their relative untroubledness with simply walking down the street. And it’s got very little to do with white people being more “tolerant” (feh). “
again, yep. More and more I look at 1st/2nd/3rd generation immigrants and feel that the gaps in years between generations are getting smaller… people 10 years younger than me seem much less troubled by this stuff….