How central a part identity places in Western thinking! I am now in a position to clarify something I had intuitively registered before. At least in terms of my generation and its perspectives, identity was a political category but not a real category, in post-colonial Zimbabwe. This was obviously different for my parent's generation, where society was more static.
My generation could not learn the truth about anybody on the basis of an external identity. There were now wealthier black people and there had always been whites who weren't as well off as others. All that the category of identity could indicate was somebody's capacity to move around, and where those parameters lay. It could tell you the permissions that somebody most likely had to do x or y. It couldn't tell you how they thought, or what they had been through, or what their attitudes were certain to be. You had to find those things out for yourself.
Much is made of identity in the West, for over the centuries of industrialisation, identity has become an epistemological category here -- and not merely a political one.
So much nervous energy is wrapped up in the frenzied issue of identity in contemporary Western culture. Political heads continue to roll around after the ecstasy of their execution. Sado-masochistic excitement about "identities" keeps us in its thrall.
My situation is different in that I so easily revert to benign indifference concerning matters of group identity.
My generation could not learn the truth about anybody on the basis of an external identity. There were now wealthier black people and there had always been whites who weren't as well off as others. All that the category of identity could indicate was somebody's capacity to move around, and where those parameters lay. It could tell you the permissions that somebody most likely had to do x or y. It couldn't tell you how they thought, or what they had been through, or what their attitudes were certain to be. You had to find those things out for yourself.
Much is made of identity in the West, for over the centuries of industrialisation, identity has become an epistemological category here -- and not merely a political one.
So much nervous energy is wrapped up in the frenzied issue of identity in contemporary Western culture. Political heads continue to roll around after the ecstasy of their execution. Sado-masochistic excitement about "identities" keeps us in its thrall.
My situation is different in that I so easily revert to benign indifference concerning matters of group identity.
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