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  • "Pacific" Ethno-National IdentitiesVictims, Persecutors, and the Quest for Identity
  • David García-Ramos Gallego (bio) and David Atienza de Frutos (bio)

IDENTITIES AND VICTIMS IN THE GLOBAL AGE

The processes of globalization, embraced with such eagerness in the 1990s, started being reviewed a decade later, having revealed a vicious underside. Behind the diverse masks of globalization hide murderous identities that promise different types of violence. During Brexit, the referendum in June 2016 that was to decide whether the United Kingdom left the European Union (EU) or stayed in it, Britain rejected what the EU represents—a common identity—to pursue a road on its own—a separate identity.1 Significantly, one of the elements that analysts regarded as central to Brexit was immigration. According to a recent book by Nidesh Lawtoo, immigration is one of the main rhetorical tropes of the new political movements, especially Trump's (2019: xxiii; 188). A succession of such narratives has been cast like bait and assimilated by the people, who, we are told, have "decided." The success of nationalist parties and movements and their expansion across the globe—in Italy, the Lega; in Spain, Vox; in the United States, Trump; and the list could be longer: Hungary, Poland, and so on—seems undeniable. Shortly after the [End Page 171] Brexit referendum came the terrible attack in Nice, in which a man drove a truck through a crowded promenade on Bastille Day, killing more than 80 people.2 The auctor of this incident and the incident itself were framed within the radical Islamist terrorism espoused by most fundamentalist factions. Finally, the actual unprecedented coronavirus crisis will further curtail the movement of people and the dynamics of globalization, and will further demonize "foreigners" and encourage what we could call identity nationalist narratives.3

From the perspective of the mimetic theory, the connection between these events, Brexit on the one hand and Islamist terrorism on the other, seems clear. In both cases, the sacred, an exclusionary mechanism that creates solidarity of the group at the expense of the expelled and excluded victims, is achieved through the bloody sacrifice—political in one case, literal in the other—of a victim who is always the "other" who does not belong to the "new" separated identity that those who carry out the sacrifice are hoping to generate or secure with their act. In Arjun Appadurai's words,

It has also been observed by some of our great political theorists, notably Hannah Arendt, that the idea of a national peoplehood is the Achilles' heel of modern liberal societies. … The road from national genius to a totalized cosmology of the sacred nation, and further to ethnic purity and cleansing, is relatively direct.4

Within the so called national–historical identities, the historical element has been allowed, for the national identities, to be open or common, as we stated earlier. They have been also submitted to continual negotiation and, finally, transformed into ethno-national identities. This last step of the ethno-national identities is, by its very nature, closed: a separated and exclusive identity, rooted in an ethno-mythical past. But what is identity, and how is it understood in the contemporary world? Why have identity problems assumed such an unprecedented and extraordinary importance, which they lacked only fifty years ago?5 Furthermore, how does the postcolonial in general, and the postcolonial approach to identity in particular, deal with this new concept?

In order to answer these questions, this article does not embark upon a historical analysis of the concept of identity, for the proliferation of such works would make the umpteenth analysis of the concept practically superfluous, especially when others have done it so well (i.e., Charles Taylor, or Zygmunt Bauman).6 Instead, we want to comprehend the contemporary vision of the concept of identity, which seems to be founded on a double bind that continually feeds on itself, fueling a runaway and possibly terminal paroxysm—the sacrificial solution, to use mimetic terminology. At this point, we can experience [End Page 172] that language's capacity for re-presenting, and, at the same time, covering its sacrificial origin; for saying who is "us" and who is "they"; for performing...

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