Identity

Identity is the ongoing process by which a person or group comes to understand itself as itself — as continuous across time, as distinct from others, as bearing certain commitments and characteristics. The concept is indispensable and treacherous. Indispensable because people do experience themselves as having identities, and political life is organized around identity claims. Treacherous because the concept tends to reify — to treat a fluid, contested, relational process as if it were a fixed thing a person or group possesses.

Stuart Hall (1996) proposed understanding identity not as what someone is but as what someone is becoming — a process of identification rather than a state. Identity is constituted through narrative: the stories a person or group tells about where they came from, what they’ve been through, and where they’re going. These narratives are always partial, always contested, always in transformation. There is no moment at which identity is complete.

Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper (2000) argue that “identity” has become analytically useless precisely because it means everything. They propose replacing it with more specific concepts: identification (the act of classifying oneself or others), self-understanding (one’s sense of who one is), social location (one’s position in social structure), commonality (sharing attributes with others), and connectedness (relational ties). These concepts do the analytic work “identity” gestures at without the metaphysical baggage.

The genring framework depends on this analysis. Genring works by freezing identity — converting a fluid process of identification into a fixed type. The genre figure is the frozen identity: the Mountain Kurd, the Noble Indian, the Hearty Bavarian. Once frozen, the identity becomes a standard against which living people are measured. Those who match the frozen image are recognized as authentic. Those who don’t are classified as having lost, betrayed, or never possessed the identity. The temporal middle — the position of someone whose identity is in process, who is inheriting and transforming — has no place in this scheme. Identity-as-process is invisible to identity-as-type.