After Babel: Identities in Search of a Name
After Babel: Identities in Search of a Name

Summary/Abstract: Although the concept of identity is a strategic and positional concept, common sense tends to think of national identities as unproblematic categories, pointing to essential qualities in much the same way that natural objects do. Identities, however, are constructed by highly divergent discourses and practices. This situation calls for a contextual approach to identity building that will trace the historical contingency and the plurality of the symbolic processes that are cloaked in such constructions. Identity, maintains Stuart Hall, is constituted by the reiterative power of discourse to produce that which also names and regulates. It is a strategic and a positional category, ‘never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic discourses, practices and positions’. (Hall, 4) At the very core of identity there is always an essential level that we might call ‘narrative identity’ (Randall, 54- 56), consisting of the stories we tell to ourselves about ourselves and the stories we or others tell to others, or stories that are told to others about ourselves – that is, all the stories in which we are included. In the following pages I shall focus on several aspects of identity building, seen as a discursive and an historical instance: the narrative devices that foster a range of both top-down and bottom-up processes of symbolic projection; the basic interaction between stimulus data and stored background knowledge in identity building; the relationships between self-identifications and stereotype representations of the Other; the crisscrossing of inside and outside literary projections, triggered off by identification.

• Details
• Contents