Satya P. Mohanty

Reconsidering Identity Politics: An Introduction

Just a few years ago, the great political movements that profoundly trans-formed American society the — movements demanding voting rights, civil rights, and equality for various disenfranchised groups — were generally viewed as the natural extension of liberal ideals. These identity-based liberation movements were viewed by many Americans as confirming rather than challenging democratic institutions, and expanding rather than threatening popular political values. Recently, this positive view of minority social movements has been transformed. Identity-based liberation movements and their politically active constituencies, which include ethnic and racial groups, women’s groups, gay and lesbian groups, and disability groups, have come under sustained attack by people on both the Left and the Right of the political spectrum in the debates over multiculturalism, identity politics, and political correctness. Thinkers as different in their political perspectives as Nathan Glazer and Judith Butler seem to agree at least on this one point—that identity-based social struggles are politically limited and misguided. Identity-based groups are widely portrayed as having an “agenda,” they are called “special interest groups,” and their leadership is often portrayed as opportunists uninterested in, even opposed to, the common public good. For those on the Right, these movements appear to be threatening individual freedom, while for those on the Left, they are seen as threatening the progressive coalition and wallowing in victimization.

Can Our Values Be Objective? On Ethics, Aesthetics, and Progressive Politics

Are evaluations always political? Are our efforts to make objective value judgments always thwarted by our own political interests or our cultural and social perspectives? I am interested in this question because I am interested in progressive politics and would like to believe that my values and commitments are not rigidly determined by my social background or my narrow personal interests. In this paper I would like to defend the view that objectivity is attainable in the realm of values, in such areas as ethics and even aesthetics. For the purposes of the present discussion, I shall pose the question about value in epistemological terms: Can we human beings be objective in our views and judgments about such properties as goodness, justice, or beauty? In order to outline my position and present my argument, however, I need to first explain what I mean by objectivity, for it is clear that we live in a postempiricist intellectual world where the term has undergone substantial redefinition. Whether we work in literary studies or in philosophy, in anthropology or any of the social sciences, we have to acknowledge the deep critique of empiricist and positivist epistemologies which has emerged from related developments in the philosophies of science and language, in ethics and cultural studies. Specifically, what has been shown to be inadequate is a particular conception of observation and objective knowledge. Thus, philosophers like Quine and Putnam, Nietzsche or Heidegger, all argue that everything that science relies on—its methodology, its understanding of what “facts” are, its practices of confirmation and even observation—is always necessarily theory-dependent rather than innocent, filtered through our values, presuppositions, and ideologies, rather than unmediated and self-evident.

Alternative Modernities and Medieval Indian Literature: The Oriya Lakshmi Purana as Radical Pedagogy

Focusing on the sixteenth-century Oriya Lakshmi Purana by Balaram Das, this essay shows how distinctly “modern” values are being explored and elaborated in this religious poem. Das’s narrative develops the notion of a self-critical individuality that is distinct from—rather than merely embedded in—the dominant social structure and its patriarchal and caste-based value system. The LP provides a feminist and anticaste critique of patriarchal behavior and defends the value of the work done by women and others who are socially marginalized. This literary-critical analysis is a contribution to contemporary scholarship on “alternative” or “precolonial” modernities, especially in the Indian context.

Introduction: The Future of Diversity

In the early 1990s, two social psychologists conducted an experiment to see whether our society’s negative racial stereotypes affect the learning experience of students in our educational institutions. They selected a group of black and white Stanford undergraduates and gave them a test made up of items from the advanced Graduate Record Examination in literature. The students had been statistically matched for ability, and since most of them were sophomores the GRE-based test was intentionally chosen so that it would be challenging and difficult for them. The psychologists—Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson—wanted to see whether there were differences in the way students of similar academic backgrounds but from different racial groups experienced a test that is supposed to be scientific and “objective.” In particular, they wanted to see whether simple cues provided in the testing environment would be seen as innocuous or significant, and how these cues would affect the students’ performance. The cues they provided casually were intended to refer indirectly to negative social images; their goal was to see, in short, whether negative social stereotypes were mere words, or if they had the power of sticks and stones. What they found was startling. When the test was given to the students as an abstract test of ability (that was the cue from the examiner), the black students in the group performed far less well than the white students.