Marriage, kids, and career also ascribe versions of our identity.
“He’s a cool guy!” “You went Greek?” “He’s one of the popular ones!” “You’re not in a fraternity?” (translation: loser) “You’re not on scholarship?” ( spoiled) “ That’s your car?” ( poor) “You live in a dorm?” ( lame) you must be a mama’s boy.” “He’s that rich kid.” “He’s super smart but man, he is not fun to be around!” “You’re a geek.” “He’s that homeschool kid.” “You don’t play football. “You’re a good little athlete.” “You’ve been picked as Most Talented.” Then there was the other ones. “You can’t do anything right!” (translation: incompetent) “You don’t measure up”( failure) “I think there’s something wrong with you!” ( abnormal) “Good boys don’t do that kind of thing.” (Well I just did that ‘thing,’ so I must be bad!)Īs we got older, our identity was ascribed by outsiders: teachers, schoolmates, coaches, friends.
Or maybe you heard words ascribing different identities. “You’re going to be a good big brother.” “See how smart he is? “Watch how fast he can run!” Those who had great dads heard, “You are my son!” What’s my race? My nationality of origin?īecause we don’t know who we are and we want someone with credibility to tell us.īeginning in early, early childhood, our parents started to ascribe our identity. Millions are ordering DNA profiles on themselves. It is painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present.” (63)talking about the history of colonialism.Who am I? Identity was ’s 2015 Word of the Year. “Remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. “the doubling of identity: the difference between personal identity as an intimidation of reality, or an intuition of being, and the psychoanalytic problem of identification” (51)Ībove: what/who you think you are compared to what outsiders think of you when the see you without any context. The desire for the other is doubled by the desire in language, which between Self and Other so that both positions are partial neither is sufficient unto itself.” (50) “to fix cultural difference in a containable object. “This image of human identity and, indeed, human identity as – both familiar frames or mirrors of selfhood that speak from deep within Western culture – are inscribed in the sign of resemblance.” (49) “Barthe’s description of the sign-as-symbol is conveniently analogous to the language we use to designate identity.” (49) This is what we see and what we assume from it. “the linguistic sign in its function” (48). Mentions semiotics (Barthes) and how it affects the visual. “Shifting the frame of identity from the field of vision to the space of writing interrogates the third dimension that gives profundity to the representations of Self and Other – that depth of perspective that cineastes call the forth wall” (48) Through the process of this poem ‘you’ are continually positioned in the space between a range of contradictory places that coexist.” (47-48)
“What is interrogated is not simply the image of a person, but the discursive and disciplinary place from which questions of identity are strategically and institutionally posed. “What is so graphically enacted in the moment of colonial identification is the splitting of the subject in its historical place of utterance” (46) “the discourse of identity: the philosophical tradition of identity as the process of self-reflection in the mirror of (human) nature and the anthropological view of the difference of human identity as located in the division of Nature/culture.” (46) “colonial governance: the visibility of cultural mummification in the colonizer’s avowed ambitionto civilise or modernisethe native that results in ‘archaic inert institutions under the oppressor’s supervision like a caricature of formerly fertile institutions.” (43)
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