Strategies of Authenticity

In her thoughtful examination of the complexities of identity, Lauren Bialystok provides a full and incisive vocabulary for thinking through the tensions among authentic, political, and social recognition-requiring aspects of identity. This is a welcome article, adeptly bridging the concerns of those who find identity claims hopelessly contradictory and the concerns of those whose lives are circumscribed by misrecognitions. I will address what I see as strategic and complex forms of authenticity. These are only meant to continue the conversation, not contest Bialystok’s excellent points. First, my guess is that the problem of authenticity is well understood by anyone making a claim to identity, considering whether they have common cause with an already-existing community or one that is newly emergent. This complicated authenticity acknowledges some necessary connections with others like oneself but also sees one’s subject position as more complicated than that single identification. How does one belong and how does one find community likely to provide community? Having found some sense of belonging, not surprisingly, the first response one may have is: why do I not agree with all these people? In other words, groups bound together by some common history of experience (Feinberg, 1999) or by a shared positioning by the law (Spade, 2011) may be quite diverse and not share all aspects of their experiences or subjectivity. But such groups do form communities and may even engage in interest group or identity politics because they are living in a context in which they are not yet recognized. Identity politics intends to repair omissions. To use the U. S.-based formulation: “we, the people” did not involve an expansive enough “we.” Assertions against the crypto-inclusion of democracy, then, have sometimes been fairly specific in their demands. That sense of shared exclusion may help bring a sense of identity for people who otherwise would have been different from one another in a different context. White people who enslaved people stolen from the African continent separated language groups from one another to try to destroy Black solidarities. Communities of enslaved people created common cultures, practices, and shared understandings based on experience under slavery and freedom. Those commonalities endure as conditions of racism endure and, simultaneously, as those creative and resilient communities grow. Like the other examples Bialystok analyzes, time and place shapes the identity- (or subjectivity-) based claims. Because “identity politics” has used the word identity, sometimes it appears that political groups are making psychological or sociological claims to ground a particular epistemology or politics. Better, I think, to consider the use of identity in “identity politics” as a calling together of the recognition of how histories and current conditions have shaped subjectivity in that two-fold sense Foucault uses: both subject to the law and becoming a subject through self-knowledge and resistance (Foucault, 1982). Rather than seeing those identity formations as metaphysical, it may be better to see them as a form of resistant strategic authenticity, likely not terribly different from strategic essentialism (Spivak, 1987). That is, as Patricia Hill Collins (2000) describes black women’s epistemology, shared traditions of experience and shared understanding of histories and positionalities generate shared epistemological resources for resistance and organizing. Among those strategies may also be strategies for maintaining a sense of cohesion in the face of dispute. So what looks like claims to authenticity may be strategies for asserting a claim about one’s “people” and their needs, even if those claims might not map onto one’s individual particular feelings. As Arendt (1994) put it, “when one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew” (p. 12). It may be that strategic …