15 June 2006 Southlands College, Roehampton University, London CRONEM Conference on Multicultural Britain: From Anti-Racism to Identity Politics to

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15 June 2006 Southlands College, Roehampton
University, London CRONEM Conference on
Multicultural BritainFrom Anti-Racism to
Identity Politics to ? Multiculturalism
without EssentialismStuart Hall, Homi Bhabha
and Amartya Sen

• Toru Yamamori
• University of Cambridge

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• Purpose
• To demonstrate the unique combination of
  theoretical standpoints within Sens theory of
  multiculturalism
• Ethical level Liberalism
• Ontological level Non-essentialism

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• Outline
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Sen on Identity
• ethics and ontology
• 3. Liberalism on Identity
• ethics
• 4. Cultural / Post-Colonial Theories on Identity
• ontology
• 5.Concluding Remarks

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2. Sen on Identity

• 1970s and 1980s Introduced the epistemic use
  of identity in the field of economics
• 1990s - present Critical of the ethical use
  of identity in political philosophy and the real
  world
• (beyond
  identity)
• Clarifying the ontology of
  identity
• (plurality and choice
  of identity)

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• plural identity
• being an Indian and being an economist
• being an Indian and being a Caribbean
• versus communitarians (C.Taylor and M.Sandel)
  and S. Huntington

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• identity choice
• constraints on choice
• internal and external identity
• there remains substantial choice at the level of
  internal identity
• Versus communitarians (C.Taylor and M.Sandel)

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• beyond identity
• an epistemic use of identity trying to know
  what others feel and what they see by placing
  oneself in the position of others (impartial
  spectators)
•  
• an ethical use of identity counting them as
  if they were the same as oneself
  (identity-based reasoning/morality)

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• Justice beyond national identity
• plurality, choice and transcendence

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3. Liberalism on identity

• Kymlicka justifies privileging national identity
  on three grounds
• (1) The first reason is normative
•  
• The freedom which liberals demand for
  individuals is not primarily the freedom to go
  beyond ones language and history, but rather the
  freedom to move around within ones societal
  culture, to distance oneself from particular
  cultural roles, to choose which features of the
  culture are most worth developing, and which are
  without value. (p.91-92)
•  

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• (2) The second reason comes from the intellectual
  history of liberalism. Kymlicka argues that
  almost all of liberalist thought from J.S. Mill
  to J. Rawls presupposes, implicitly or
  explicitly, a nation as a unit where individual
  freedom is considered and guaranteed (ch. 4).

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• (3) The third reason is an empirical fact which
  Kymlicka alleges.
•  
• The liberal ideal is a society of free
  and equal individuals. But what is the relevant
  society? For most people it seems to be their
  nation. The sort of freedom and equality they
  most value, and can make most use of, is freedom
  and equality within their own societal culture.
  And they are willing to forgo a wider freedom and
  equality to ensure the continued existence of
  their nation. (p.93)

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Figure 1 ethics and ontology on
identity in liberalism and
communitarianism
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4. Cultural / post-colonial theories on identity

• essentialism
• the assumption that groups, categories or
  classes of objects have one or several defining
  features exclusive to all members of that
  category (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin (eds.)
  2000, p.77)
• Edward Saids Orientalism

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4.1. Three claims of non- (or anti-) essentialism

• non-essentialism of nation and ethnicity
• non-essentialism of identity
• (social constructionism 1)
• non-essentialism of any notion
• (social constructionism 2)

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• non-essentialism of identity
• (S. Hall and H. Bhabha)
• The subject assumes different identities at
  different times, identities which are not unified
  around a coherent self. Within us are
  contradictory identities, pulling in different
  directions so that our identifications are
  continuously being shifted about. The fully
  unified, completed, secure and coherent identity
  is a fantasy. We are confronted by a
  bewildering, fleeting multiplicity of possible
  identities, any one of which we could identify
  with at least temporarily. (Hall 1992, p.277)

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• (1) non-essentialism of nation and ethnicity
• (2) non-essentialism
• of identity
• (including (1))
• (3) non-essentialism
• of any notion
• (including (1) (2))

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4.2. Commonalities and differences between Sen
and Hall / Bhabha

• plurality
• historical or ahistorical?
• choice
• collective and individual
• repetitive process

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• Identity is not as transparent or
  unproblematic as we think. Perhaps instead of
  thinking of identity as an already accomplished
  fact, which the new cultural practices then
  represent, we should think, instead, of identity
  as a production, which is never complete,
  always in process, and always constituted within,
  not outside, representation. (Hall, 1990, p.51)

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• this is the moment when the term black was
  coined as a way of referencing the common
  experience of racism and marginalization in
  Britain and came to provide the organizing
  category of a new politics of resistance, among
  groups and communities with, in fact, very
  different histories, traditions and ethnic
  identities. In this moment, politically speaking,
  the black experience, as a singular and
  unifying framework based on the building up of
  identity across ethnic and cultural difference
  between the different communities, became
  hegemonic over other ethnic / racial identities
  though the latter did not, of course,
  disappear. (Hall 1987b, p.163-164)

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5. Concluding remarks
nothing new added here

• Ethical level Liberalism
• Ontological level Non-essentialism
  (Constructionism) of identity

This is the purpose and a new insight of this
paper
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• Cultural / post-colonial studies FOR Sen
• Identity and agency
• Identity claims are political manipulations of
  people who seem to share one characteristic and
  therefore it is a sort of roll-call concept. Now
  it seems to me that agency relates to accountable
  reason. The idea of agency comes from the
  principle of accountable reason, that one acts
  with responsibility, that one has to assume the
  possibility of intention, one has to assume even
  the freedom of subjectivity in order to be
  responsible. That's where agency is located.
  (Spivak 1993, p.294)

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• Sen FOR cultural / post-colonial studies
• a new universality /
• constructive universalism
• Universality means taking a risk in order to
  go beyond the easy certainties provided us by our
  background, language, nationality, which so often
  shield us from the reality of others. It also
  means looking for and trying to uphold a single
  standard for human behavior when it comes to such
  matters as foreign and social policy. (Said 1994,
  p.xii)

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• Thank you very much!
• Comments are welcome to ty232_at_cam.ac.uk

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• Introducing the epistemic use of identity into
  economics
• Criticising the ethical use of identity among
  political philosophy and the real world
• (beyond
  identity)
• Clarifying the ontology of identity
• (plurality and choice of
  identity)

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• But I wont heed the battle call
• It puts my back up
• Puts my back up against the wall
• (Sunday Bloody Sunday, U2)
•  
• Marcos is gay in San Francisco, a black in South
  Africa, Asian in Europe, . an artist without a
  gallery or portfolio, a housewife in any
  neighborhood in any city in any part of Mexico on
  a Saturday night, a guerrilla in Mexico at the
  end of the twentieth century, . (a communiqué
  by Zapatista)