i liked the post, especially the bit on '30 seconds of clear definition'... reminds me of the 30 seconds of presumed unity within many groups i have been part of.
> I read in your response to Charles Brown that you thought that
> while there might be ten groups today each representing a
> specific identity within "black," a decade ago there might have been
> only three. It hasn't ever been the case that there were only a
> few and now there are many, although it is possible easy to think so
> given what circulates most visibly in the larger public fora. What
> looks like proliferation is simply the most recent manifestations
> that are very visibly represented by virtue of faster means of
> circulation (mass media, commodity culture, etc.).
no doubt, the very massiveness of the mass media is important to the presentation of (for want of a better word) variety; but i was thinking more along the lines of: when i started out as an tertiary student, there was one women's (feminist) group on my campus, when i graduated, there were 4. this would have been welcomed by me as a step forward if, for instance, the delineations were expressed as political ones - which they were in any case.
(this would have made contestation and conflict less bitter, less prone to vicious moralising, and more open to debates over strategy and aims)
but, they were expressed as differences of identity, with regular bun fights over who was either best placed to 'represent' women (even that particular 'category') or who was more oppressed. no doubt there was something about the conduct and politics of the 'first' group that prompted the establishment of the others, and i myself was in the thick of this in various ways, since those who dominated the first group seemed to resist any elaboration through the claim to unity and universalism (i.e., to only work on those issues which affected all women) - and you can guess how that one works. my response was to shift from this kind of organising to one in which the politics was more explicitly discussed rather than obscured or defended by a claim to identity; and, i guess i'm arguing to some extent that it is easier to raise the range of perspectives and 'identities' within this terrain than - paradoxically - in one in which identity is regarded as key. (similar things occured within the fields of gay and lesbian and anti-racist politics, not to mention class politics, though divisions there are expressed more as a kind of fideism to the canon than identity, but no less hostile for all that - they both after all make claims about the essence of x, y or z, and fidelity to that essence as the condition of sincere action and enunciation)
i find myself asking the question of which 'self' and which 'identity' i'm attached to, or at least this is the question that is asked of me, and for which i have no answer, especially when that is always regarded as a singularity. which raise the question of whether this 'singular identity' applies to anyone.
angela