Culture, Location, and the Problem of Transitive Identity

Abstract

“Identity politics” misunderstands the nature and, therefore, the importance of its subject matter. Far from being something fixed and exclusive, identity is the transitive or motive element that negotiates meaning between settled understandings and the fluidity of cultural development. A self, in this mode, is a being who can articulate a sense of identity—in other words, one who can narrate self-consciousness—within a set of ideas, moral and ethical, that locate that self in the larger human endeavor of community or culture. Making clear-cut definitions of identity is complicated by the experience of diaspora. Diaspora, initially, is an identity detour, a movement or shift away from the traditional understanding of the linear journey of the self from beginning to end of life within established structures, which allows us to make meaning along the way. Diaspora takes us out of those structures, creating dead ends that stop movement and establish new borders, new spaces of contact and interactions that lead either to reinforcement, maintenance of the “old” self, or the mixing, creolization, or hybridity, a remaking/remixing of identity and self in the new place in relation to new “others.” This remixing is further complicated by factors of race and ethnicity. In this chapter, we will look at manifestations of this remixing and the complications that arise in the context of diaspora, particularly confronting issues of race, identity, and culture, using, primarily, the work of Homi K. Bhabha in The Location of Culture and Caryl Phillips’s travelogue/memoir The Atlantic Sound.¹