Politics of Identity and Difference in Cultural Studies

Abstract

How do modern Western concepts of identity, subjectivity, and difference enable and constrain how Cultural Studies scholars engage in the work of social justice and political transformation? Despite a sophisticated understanding and theoretical establishment of identities as intersectional, students and faculty continue to make strategically essentialist claims as they navigate the contradictory dynamics of power and privilege in the university. In this chapter, I examine some of the strategies and expectations of performing diversity that coincide with ongoing dilemmas of the “burden of representation” (Mercer, Welcome to the jungle: new positions in black cultural studies. Routledge, London, 1994). Cultural Studies’ continued reliance on liberal humanist frameworks limits how it can imagine and enact practices of anti-capitalist decolonization. I use an example of local grassroots organizing to protect water to suggest that by engaging with Indigenous feminist theories of relationality, Cultural Studies can more purposefully resist and challenge colonial and corporate powers within and beyond the institution.