Identity-politics labels freeze fluid selves into false shapes for political gain

Evidence

Kureishi’s main objection to the identity politics that he sees taking over from class orientation is that it freezes identity in false shapes for political convenience. Against this, The Black Album, like its predecessor, records a young man in the process of wrestling with the challenges to identity that youth and new experience raise. True identity is seen as fluid, and the search for an authentic self is more fruitful than the possibility of finding it. The narrator tells us of Shahid: “He believed everything; he believed nothing. His own self increasingly confounded him. One day he could passionately feel one thing, the next the opposite.… Which was his real, natural self? Was there such a thing? How would he know it when he saw it? Would it have a guarantee attached to it?” (147). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 172

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the Kureishian critique of identity politics that Morey contrasts against Islamist and Islamophobic framings — a usable vocabulary term for the reader’s own hinge argument.
• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s project: Shahid’s fluid, self-undoing identity anticipates Changez in The Reluctant Fundamentalist wrestling with Pakistan and America rather than committing to either. — connects to: People preferentially form false memories consistent with their political allegiances — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 82; the MOC “The Wound of the Label: When Knowing Someone Becomes a Way of Erasing Them”
• SEED: The ‘identity as brandished tag’ line gives an angle: How do Hamid and Naqvi depict protagonists who refuse or fail the identity tag, versus novelists who hand their characters finished identities?