Competitive Words: Identity Counts in Large Amounts

Abstract

This essay argues that central assumptions underlying identity politics in literary writing—inclusion, visibility, diversity—are progressive in character. Yet in conditions of social precarity, literary writing and especially literary discussions that derive progressive potential from identity claims involuntarily and inevitably act under the aegis of neoliberal progressivism (as critiqued by Nancy Fraser and many others). Caution about identity politics (rather than its outright rejection) is a necessary minimum in response to the corruption inherent in the systemic placement of literature. When literary discussions, and this does not just mean scholarly research but also literary critique, book presentations and discussions in different reading groups and book clubs, fall short of this critical minimum, they risk missing that common and universal feature of the general intellect upon which revolutionary ideas of emancipation and solidarity once rested. Following Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen's study of the imperial mode of living, this essay examines the phenomenon of what I call 'literary identity politics'—namely the implementation of identity politics in and through literary writing—in terms of the interval between literature's efforts to right the wrongs of exclusion and its simultaneous entanglement in the system of global injustice.

Keywords

• literary identity politics
• reduction fallacy
• progressive neoliberalism
• commercial fiction
• the imperial mode of living