Content area
Full Text
York University, Department of Politics, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto ON, M3J 1P3, email: [email protected] York University, Department of Politics, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto ON, M3J 1P3, email: [email protected]
Identity politics […] is what those “others” do.
Himani Bannerji (1995)
Introduction
Writing twenty-five years ago, Jenson provocatively asserted that “all politics are identity politics” (1991: 50) since all politics are shaped by the subjective positioning of the actors involved. Yet in common circulation, not all politics are labelled as such; the moniker “identity politics” is used to demarcate some politics as situated in particular identities in contrast with more universal conceptions of the political. In the aftermath of the November 2016 election of US president Donald Trump, news media commentators seized on this differentiation between disembodied universal politics and parochial identity politics as an explanation for this jarring turn of events. The New York Times published half a dozen articles on identity politics promoting an opinion piece, “The End of Identity Liberalism,” with a tweet declaring “identity politics never wins elections. But it can lose them.”1 In subsequent weeks, mirroring the tenor of American commentators, the Canadian news media blasted identity politics as a losing strategy for both the federal Liberals and Conservatives.2 In this brief sampling of news media identity politics is imprecisely defined, but strongly associated with divisiveness and undesirable political outcomes.
While questions of identity have long preoccupied Canadian political and social scientists, little academic research has interrogated how the term identity politics is taken up by Canadian academics. Increasingly, scholars have challenged the treatment of race, ethnicity and gender in Canadian political science (for example, Dobrowolsky et al., 2017; Nath, 2011; Thompson, 2008; Vickers, 2002), and some have written critically about the use of the label identity politics (for example, Abu-Laban, 2017; Bannerji, 2000), yet there has been little systemic inquiry into how the discursive use of identity politics is implicated in the treatment of scholarship that foregrounds race, ethnicity and gender. In this article, we aim to interrogate whose politics are being labelled identity politics in Canadian academic discourse, and what work is done by this analytical distinction. This paper does not purport to review all Canadian scholarship on identity but rather seeks to provide insight as to when...