The Politics of Identity

Hortense Spillers, "All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freudís Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race"

"Double consciousnessÖthe sensation of looking at oneself and of imagining being seen through the eyes of another is precisely performative in what it demands of a participant at the other end of the gazeÖIn working with the Du Boisian double, we recover the sociopolitical dimensions that classical psychoanalysis and its aftermath sutured in a homogenity of class interest, just as Du Bois'í scheme must be pressured toward a reopened closure: The subject in the borrowed mirror is essentially mute.  Du Bois is speaking for him.  But it is time now, if it were not in 1903, for him to speak for himself, if he dares.  That this will not be simple is all the more reason why it must be done."

Edward Said, "The Politics of Knowledge"

"In any case the politics of knowledge that is based principally on the affirmation of identity is very similar, is indeed directly related to, the unreconstructed nationalism that has guided so many postcolonial states today.  It asserts a sort of separatism that wishes only to draw attention to itself; consequently it neglects the integration of that earned and achieved consciousness of self within ëthe rendez-vous of victory.í"

Ann Ducille, "The Occult of True Black Womanhood"

"Why are black women always already Other?  I wonder.  To myself, of course, I am not Other; to me it is the white women and men so intent on theorizing my difference who are the OtherÖ.African American studies courses and black women writers such as Hurston are once again exotic subjects.  They are exotic this time out, however, not because they are rarely taught or seldom read, but because in the midst of the present, multicultural moment, they have become politically correct, intellectually popular, and commercially precious sites of literary and historical inquiry, [but] ÖWhat does it mean for the future of black feminist studies that a large portion of the growing body of scholarship on black women is now being written by white feminists and by men whose work frequently achieves greater critical and commercial success than that of the black female scholars who carved out a field in which few ëothersí were then interested?"

Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, "Speaking in Tongues," in Gates, ed., Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology

"What distinguishes black womenís writing, then, is the privileging (rather than repressing) of ëthe other in ourselvesíÖ.If black women speak from multiple and complex social, historical, and cultural positionality which, in effect, constitutes black female subjectivity, [Barbara] Christianís term ëcreative dialogueí then refers to the expression of a multiple dialogic  of difference based on this complex subjectivity.  At the same time, however, black women enter into a dialectic  of identity with those aspects of self shared with others."