A Quote by Elif Safak
Identity politics divides us. Fiction connects. One is interested in sweeping generalizations. The other, in nuances. One draws boundaries. The other recognizes no frontiers. Identity politics is made of solid bricks. Fiction is flowing water.
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The demand for racial (and sexual) justice gets reduced to politics of identity - and excoriating the so-called perpetrators of the identity politics.
Regardless of the Islamophobia, where we have gone wrong in the Democratic Party and the American left is to play wholeheartedly into identity politics, which divides us just as much as it can unite us. We need to take a long hard look. We can celebrate our identities and our heritage, we can understand, you know, but we don't need to be melting pot. We can be a solid ball with all the different pieces.
When folks say 'identity politics' don't matter, it simply reinforces the norm of a white, middle-class, cis narrative and further marginalizes the rest of us who don't share that identity.
Some of the issues with identity politics are critical moral issues. But we've got to show America that we don't have a plan just on these so-called identity politics issues, but that we have a plan for the economy, that we know how to provide for a strong national defense.
I think the identity politics that have been played, particularly the class-warfare version of identity politics that has been played, has put America into a class-based society - more so than at any point in my lifetime.
What the left ends up missing is that politics have always been at the heart of American culture; it's been a white identity that's been rendered invisible and neutral because it's seen as objective and universal. As a result, we don't pay attention to how whiteness is one among many racial identities, and that identity politics have been here since the get-go.
My being Muslim is only one part of my identity. But particularly in India and the world over, a concerted effort is being made to diminish all other aspects of identity and only take your religious identity as who you are.
Enjoying fiction requires a shift in selfhood. You give up your own identity and try on the identities of other people, adopting their perspectives so as to share their experiences. This allows us to enjoy fictional events that would shock and sadden us in real life.
I write some art criticism, and one thing that's clear to me is that politics is fashionable in the American art world in a way it maybe isn't in American fiction. Your work of art becomes fashionable the moment it has some kind of political commentary. I think this has its dangers - the equation between fashion, politics, and art is problematic for obvious reasons. Nonetheless, the notion of politics as being de rigueur in the world of fiction is almost unthinkable. In fiction in America at the moment, the escape into whimsy is far more prevalent than the political.
I'm not naive. All politics is about identity, right? Neighborhood politics, cultural politics, issue politics. It's not as though I don't get that. It's just - it has to be, I think, tempered in a way that is for our overall advancement and not to our detriment or obliteration. When I say 'our,' I don't mean just communities of color.
Or is anyone's identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction?
All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
When it comes to identity, that was an issue that plagued me for a lot of my life. It's something that I wanted to tap into. Film can really take you to other places, and sometimes that's necessary to understand your own identity or someone else's identity or just the issue of identity, in general. It takes you. It's borderless. It's boundless. It's universal.
I think I passed up a lot of opportunities for love because I was too interested in identity politics.
My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.
The marginalized did not create identity politics: their identities have been forced on them by dominant groups, and politics is the most effective method of revolt.
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