Can Lit 182 Text EDIT
Winfried Siemerling “May I See Some Identification?” Race, Borders, and Identities in Any Known Blood Race isn’t about skin colour. It’s about social categorization. — . every identity is actually an identification come to light. — 1 Our most post-identitarian moments and movements notwithstanding, identities are hardly a matter of the past. New constructions of identities and post-identities are continually wrought by historical subjects, the agents who invent or choose them, and who modify, resist, or discard them. “Unused” identities continue to exist as possible scripts, as virtual and often virulent realities until human actors put them into play, and through iden- tification use them in practice and performance. One of the important ways of crossing borders of identity is travel, a movement I explore here with respect to “Crossing Cultures,” “Frontiers of North American Identity,”1 and identities ascribed or self-ascribed through “race.” Identification, a transformative displacement or transposition and a form of cognitive travel, signals the crossing of borders of who we think we are, or who others think or say we are. Under the sign of “race,” however, identity, identifica- tion, and travel have worked in particularly “arresting” constellations. Through race, identity and identification were tied to pseudo-scientific laws of biology, abetting the enforced displacements and the end of free personal movement in the middle passage and in slavery, and the impeded mobility across social and economic lines ever after. Lawrence Hill continues to devise, from a Canadian vantage point, intriguing laboratories for the study of the intricate relations between iden- tification, identity, and race.
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