Agency should not be equated with history-making or self-empowerment

Evidence

I agree with Grossberg that agency and subjectivity must be analytically separated, but I disagree that agency must be identified with “history-making” and “self-empowerment,” as this chapter makes clear. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 327

Categorization

• SEED: An angle here: the Western equation of agency with efficacy (making history) smuggles a specifically modern, secular ideal of self-empowerment into how we read religious actors — the seed of an essay on why scholars see ‘resistance’ everywhere they see labor.
• XREF: connects to: Identity claims need not yield agency, which is a blank word — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 2328; Ethical reading must choose between qualified agency and historical excess — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1599; Political agency requires historical location and stable commitments, not hybrid flux. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 921 (+1 more)