Introduction: an ‘identity’ wave
An obsession is gripping the world—the obsession with identity. In 2015, the
Australian National Dictionary Centre selected ‘identity’ as the Word of the Year.
The word is, of course, much older; what the Australians recognized is that it has
continued to gain currency for decades. In the 1950s, ‘identity’ spread around the
world, arguably as a by-product of the cultural Americanization then in progress.
Today, ‘identity’ is a household word.
The identity of—the attacker, England, NATO, God’s people, neo-tribes, our
nation, the group, your cells, plant glutamate receptors, the suspicious substance,
statistics, indiscernibles, an endpoint, Kaliningrad, our beloved language, pan-
Arabic culture, Leonardo da Vinci’s mother, Mr Hyde, legal systems, the
Socialist Party, roots, the town centre, the landscape, Ukrainian citizens, twins,
women in art, Zhiqing, Jesus Christ, a survivor, Molière, Western civilization—
and on and on.
The list of things that are said to have an identity can be extended almost at will.
And it can be supplemented by a list of predicates that tell you what kind of
identity is at issue: additive, basic, collective, dissociative, cultural, fictitious,
linguistic, multiplicative, neuronal, moral, online, political, gender role, stylistic,
social, racial, professional, territorial, generational, inherited, genetic, lost,
stolen, assumed, fractured, stigmatized, legal, mistaken, true—and on and on.
Talk about identity has become ubiquitous. The number of newly published
English-language books that have ‘identity’ in the title reflects this. The 1950s
saw the publication of thirty-seven such books; in the current decade, since
2010, more than 10,000 have appeared (Figure 1).