Course: Advanced Topic 2Dated August 12, 2014Sushant KishoreLiterature Review: Theorizing Identity Part 1Topic: Theorizing Identity in the context of time (History), space (location) and religion.Objective of the review: The purpose of the Literature Review is to establish current knowledge in the discourse of Identity. The review aims to identify the problems in the discourse, the attempts to overcome these problems and their consequent success or failure thereby.IntroductionThe problem of identity carries the weight of generations history, culture, religion, location, ethnicity, race, class, gender and sexuality. In different times, different contexts and different perspectives, Identity bears different meanings and often the confluence of these meanings invokes an inherent crisis. There has been a need to solve these conflicts, at least on a national level, in order to establish a homogenized identity for the country, avoid civil unrest or discord and create a sense of naturalized harmony. Theorists have tried to explain identity in their own preferences. While some have assumed identity to be fixed and innate, inherited from their common ancestry other faction claim identity to be strictly individual based upon and shaped by personal political and ideological choices. Some theorists describe identity crisis as a crisis of overproduction and consequent devaluation of meaning and suggest doing away with the term completely with all its ambiguities and reifying connotations and to replace them with newer terms with fixed meanings. (Brubaker, Cooper 1)In the context of India, various social and political actors have tried to persuade the people that they are all identical, have common ancestry, history and cultural heritage and therefore share a common identity. The discourse around religion and religious scriptures has played a significant role in the identity politics of India. The Europeans denunciation of Indian History in 18th century has been seen as attempts to dissociate the national identity from its historicity and associate to the alternative provided by European conquest and colonization. In response to this the Indian intelligentsia has tried to reclaim Indias history through the texts available the Vedas and Upanishads. The politics of literary writing in pre-independence and post-independence India is largely aimed at recreate a national identity in the larger narrative of cultural and religious history.A narrative of identity is a necessary condition for the existence of any notion of agency and subjectivity.(Spivak 79) Since my research topic explores the role of the discourse around religious scriptures in the construction of social, cultural, political and national identities it is important to understand the processes and the influence of identity formation for individuals as well as group of individuals.BodyStuart Hall, in his essay Cultural Identity and Diaspora, proposes that instead of considering identity as an established, pre-formulated social fact we should consider it as a work in progress, a continuing process, as a production which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation (392). This approach is problematic because it challenges the established authoritative claims of cultural and historical identity as we know it. But it is relevant because in the face of globalization and cross-continental interactions societies have evolved, cultures have hybridized and as a result identities have morphed too. If identity does not proceed, in a straight unbroken line, from some fixed origin, how are we to understand its formation? (395). Hall responds with a model of Caribbean identity that are framed by two axes or vectors, simultaneously operative: the vector of similarity or continuity [the first model of identity]; and the vector of difference and rupture (395). Halls suggests that these two axes exist in a dialogic relationship (395): the coerced migration from their native lands to the plantations unified these people in spite of their differences and simultaneously created a rift between their past and present. India and Africa are not homogenous entities and have an inherent history of differences. Even in their relationship with the colonizing metropolitan there is a huge difference but they had an identical shared history of colonization. Hall concludes that, Difference, therefore, persists--in and alongside continuity (396). Hall takes up the task to describe this play of difference within identity (396).Identities cannot be analyzed as monolithic, homogenized and static. To impose an ancestral identity that goes back into millennia is inappropriate. Identity therefore should be as constantly evolving.

ConclusionWorks CitedBrubaker, Rogers, and Frederick Cooper. "Beyond 'Identity'".Theory and Society. New York: Springer, 2000. Print.Hall, Stuart. Cultural Identity and Diaspora. Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory. Ed. Williams, Patrick & Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Print.Spivak, Gayatri Chakraborti. Can the Subaltern Speak. Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory. Ed. Williams, Patrick & Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Print.

Notes

A selective listing of major social theorists and social scientists whose main work lies outside the traditional homelands of identity theorizing yet who have nonetheless written explicitly on identity in recent years includes Zygmnunt Bauman, Pierre Bourdieu, Fernand Braudel, Craig Calhoun, S.N. Einstadt, Anthony Giddens, Bernard Giesen, Jurgen Habermas, David Laitin, Claude Levi-Strauss, Paul Ricoeur, Amrtya Sen, Margaret Somers, Charles Taylor, Charles Tilly and Harrison White.