Introduction

Transnational Identities 289
sciousness, or in collective action. This usage is found especially in the literature
on social movements; on gender; and on race, ethnicity, and nationalism.
In this usage, the line between “identity” as a category of analysis and
as a category of practice is often blurred.
3. Understood as a core aspect of (individual or collective) “selfhood” or as
a fundamental condition of social being, “identity” is invoked to point to
something allegedly deep, basic, abiding, or foundational. This is distinguished
from more superficial, accidental, fleeting, or contingent aspects or attributes
of the self, and is understood as something to be valued, cultivated,
supported, recognized, and preserved. This usage is characteristic of certain
strands of the psychological (or psychologizing) literature, especially as influenced
by Erikson, 8 though it also appears in the literature on race, ethnicity,
and nationalism. Here too the practical and analytical uses of “identity”
are frequently conflated.
[…]
5. Understood as the evanescent product of multiple and competing discourses,
“identity” is invoked to highlight the unstable, multiple, fluctuating, and
fragmented nature of the contemporary “self.” This usage is found especially
in the literature influenced by Foucault, post-structuralism, and postmodernism.
In somewhat different form, without the post-structuralist
trappings, it is also found in certain strands of the literature on ethnicity –
notably in “situationalist” or “contextualist” accounts of ethnicity.
(Brubaker and Cooper 7-8; emphasis in original) 9
The problem is obvious: all these definitions claim to stand for the term ‘identity’
but they clearly describe very different and even mutually exclusive things. While
the second definition argues that ‘identity’ is something that always stays the same
and never changes this is already negated to some extent in the third, which states
that only some aspects never change. The fifth definition then defines ‘identity’ as
not at all stable but as a constant process so that there appears to be hardly any
sameness at all from one moment to the next, which clearly contradicts the second
definition. It also becomes apparent that the use of identity with regard to
nations is usually one that stresses continuity. It is thus clearly the kind of perception
of identity which leads to the assumption that migration and its accompanying
disruption of said sameness necessarily leads to a crisis of identity as previously
mentioned.
8 Erik Erikson, mentioned in a previous passage as the theorist who “was responsible, among
other things, for coining the term ‘identity crisis’” (Brubaker and Cooper 2).
9 The first and fourth definitions stress the use of ‘identity’ as “the basis of social or political
action” (Brubaker and Cooper 6) and to describe group solidarities that lead to “collective action”
(Brubaker and Cooper 7-8) neither of which I will be concerned with in the following.