The Postcolonial Alien in Us All: Identity in the Global Division of Intellectual Labor

Identity politics has accented the primacy of subjectivity of all kinds. I deflate the importance of identity in the short term here, as a preamble for arguing that our identities have always been fictions that are shaped by underlying institutional forces; that is, contrary to what we think, these identities can change and are stratified less by the ethnocentrism in our concepts than our institutional situatedness.