Dialectical Anthropology - Call for Papers: Reconsidering Identity Politics

CfP Reconsidering Identity Politics (this opens in a new tab)

Abstract

Identity politics, both as a concept and as a political approach, has been the focus of heated debates since the term emerged in the seventies. Scholars, activists and policy makers, discussing how best to understand and to implement identity politics, have considered its viability and limitations. Theoretical debates have addressed the meaning of the expression, its conceptual underpinnings whilst those more empirically focused have considered its applicability in specific contexts. Although identity politics tends to be associated with initiatives by oppressed and marginalised groups (understood, for example, to be formed by members of racial, gender or ethnic categories), one could argue that identity politics is also at the core of all nationalist and most fundamentalist movements and political programs. Moreover, critics from a broad political and theoretical spectrum have questioned identity politics’ efficacy for achieving social justice and/or in advancing a redistributive restructuring of political orders aimed at eradicating inequalities.

This Special Collection constitutes an open forum for debates about various aspects of identity politics, including identitarianism and essentialism, about its relationship with struggles for social and transitional justice, and about the relationships of all of those with struggles over material and wellbeing inequalities. It is intended to provide opportunities to examine identity politics both as a concept and as a political practice in activism, state policies and/or international and transnational norms, regulations and initiatives. We seek analyses of identity politics including of its meaning/s, its concrete instantiations, the debates that have surrounded it, and its relationship with social and transitional justice.

Topics

Among many topics deserving consideration and discussion are:

• the relationship between identity politics, identitarianism and essentialism; 
• the role and significance of constructed ‘others’ for identity politics;
• the global and local social forces that have, over time and at different conjunctures, stimulated identity politics and enabled its tenacity; 
• the notions of “justice” lying behind post 1970s investments in identity politics as a means to achieve social justice;
• identity politics in relation to the regulation of labour, labour mobility and access to employment (e.g. discussion of identity based employment equity practices, including the notions of justice behind them and their impact on labour migration);
• how identity politics relates to movements that mobilise identities in support of nationalism; whether, and if so how and to what extent, identity politics is and/or has been mobilised in the cause of white supremacism and/or of other kinds of fundamentalism; 
• in what conjunctural circumstances, and how, identity politics and class analysis might complement and/or conflict with each other;
• whether, and if so how, identity politics relates to contemporary calls for decolonisation and recognition of colonial impositions, for environmentalism, for equity measures, and for other contemporary political demands intended to overcome discrimination and marginality;
• the relationship between identity politics and historically changing forms of capitalism (e.g. discussing the relation between identity politics and such explanatory concepts as “racial capitalism” and “cannibal capitalism”).

This collection has, from its start, been motivated by a need to consider materialist critiques of identity politics. Such consideration includes critiques of those materialist critiques – for example by rejecting them on theoretical or practical political grounds or by identifying the limitations. Consequently we  explicitly encourage contributions that critically consider identity politics from all possible positions, and that engage with its materialist critics as much as with its idealist proponents, and with articles already published as part of the collection. Such contributions should preferably be empirically informed and/or should utilise detailed empirical examples. We welcome submissions from anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, historians and scholars in other disciplines and in diverse parts of the world. Our goal is to bring forth a broad range of positions in relation to the meaning, viability and efficacy of identity politics and its relationship to social justice.Empirical concerns may be approached from an ethnographic, sociological, historical or other social analytical perspective on concrete examples of identity politics at work in one or, comparatively, in more than one part of the world.

Publication process

Prospective contributors should initially send an expression of interest, in the form of a title and abstract (200-500 words), to the guest editors who will collectively decide whether the proposed paper is suitable for the collection. Thereafter,  authors will be requested to submit their full paper via the journal’s normal submission process (please select the Special Collection in the submission form). The papers will then pass through a review process including by the three guest editors and the journal editors. All published papers will appear on the journal’s Special Collection webpage and also in a regular issue of Dialectical Anthropology where their connection to the Special Collection will be made evident.

Guest editors

Jonatan Kurzwelly (jonatan.kurzwelly@gmail.com)

Moira Pérez (mperez@filo.uba.ar)

Andrew Spiegel (mugsy.spiegel@uct.ac.za)