Short Abstract

Beyond the impasse of essentialised identities, compelling narratives are crucial to minorities’ access to cultural, political and legal recognition. This panel analyses entangled cultural scripts of marginality that can empower, even as they limit horizons of actors whose identity is politicised.

Long Abstract

Within the context of secular democracies’ failure to create more equitable worlds, amidst the turn towards authoritarian populism, how do anthropologists analyse the demands on minorities to inhabit and perform identities? Across the polarised settings of indigenous politics, gender justice, identity-based activism, and political discourse online, crafting compelling narratives of marginalised subjectivity remains critical to gaining visibility, traction, and leveraging power. Coherent, relatable, and accessible narratives for emancipation and entitlement are especially influential in a media-tised world where attention itself is highly commoditised.

This panel investigates how minorities narrativise their identity in overdetermined spaces of cultural, political and legal recognition. We welcome accounts of the tensions in identity politics from ethnography, studies of bureaucratic and legal registers of marginality, and anthropologically-informed creative writing. To be marginalised is to necessarily contest a dominant narrative, whether through rejection or conformity. To be marginalised is to have an identity. To inhabit identity categories strategically is thus to participate in a narrative of marginality. But does articulating marginalisation - in order to secure rights - always entrench and further polarise identity categories?

How do anthropologists narrate the ways minorities navigate polarising accounts of their identities? What happens to identities, and to pathways to access rights, when a narrative ossifies, and when the terms through which marginality is made visible become rigid and fixed? How do state framings of identity and marginality reciprocally reproduce and interact with articulations made elsewhere? How do categories of social policies, affirmative action, and protective discrimination fuel politics of resentment and difference? How does the necessity to play into established cultural scripts of marginality empower or limit the horizons of actors whose identity is already politicised? And, how can anthropologists engage constructively with the resurgence of identity politics in the face of growing authoritarianism?

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