Who’s Afraid of Identity Politics? Stories of (Un)Belonging in World Anglophone Literature

Identity politics has become one of the most contested concepts in contemporary literary and cultural studies. For some, it marks the pathway to allowing the voices of long oppressed communities to be heard, to redressing past and present injustices and to decolonizing knowledge (and possibly the university), while for others, it heralds a return of cultural essentialism, an attack on free speech and the promotion of a “cancel culture”.

Since negotiations of individual and collective cultural identity have been of paramount importance for many anglophone writers, engaging with identity politics arguably constitutes an inevitable task in world anglophone studies. In this seminar, we will take a critical look at the origins of the idea of “identity politics” and at pronounced formulations of identity politics from the political left and right. In the main part of this class, we will engage in close readings of four novels from the contexts of Black and Asian British, American African, Aboriginal Australian and diasporic Sri Lankan literature and contrast them with a contemporary German novel to explore how these texts tell their stories of belonging and unbelonging in the contemporary world and how they negotiate the tensions between open and closed understandings of collective identities.