Concluding Remarks

Abstract

Although the recognition of cultural difference is usually seen as a source of self-liberation and collective emancipation there is a darker side to identity politics which has received far less attention. Instead of a ‘celebration of difference’, many identity projects, couched as they are in discourses that reify and essentialise, and often institutionalised by powerful structures of the modern state, tend either to reinforce group centric views of social reality or reproduce blinkered and discriminatory forms of domination. The rhetoric of identity often becomes a potent device for the ideological justification of political inequality, and in the most extreme cases, for mass murder. However, regardless of how unintentional such an undesirable outcome is, identity is very far from being an innocent, technical term. Instead its nearly universal and all embracing popularity, apparent normality, and general acceptance are the very ingredients that constitute its ideological power.