Identity Politics: Where Did It All Go Wrong?
Book Details
- Publisher : Karnac Books
- Published : 2022
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 246
- Category :
Psychoanalysis - Category 2 :
Psychotherapy and Politics - Catalogue No : 96239
- ISBN 13 : 9781800131002
- ISBN 10 : 9781800131
Reviews and Endorsements
‘This important book offers a searing analysis of the state of identity politics today and its degeneration into dogmatism at both ends of the political spectrum, right and left. Working from a range of disciplines, the author skilfully demonstrates how we have gone from mobilising on the basis of identity politics as a starting point in the struggle for social justice to regarding identity as an end in itself: an end that serves only to police dissent and to reinforce neoliberalism and hierarchical and patriarchal power structures. The warning at the heart of this book could not be starker: the chilling logic of identity politics is that it breeds authoritarianism from below and not just above. This book serves as an urgent rallying cry to re-imagine a progressive, democratic politics of solidarity based on equality and our shared common humanity in place of a politics of identity characterised by a fetish of diversity and a descent into intolerance, censorship and moral absolutism.’
Pragna Patel, activist and consultant, founder and former director of Southall Black Sisters