Identity politics of recognition displaced wealth redistribution in 1980s Britain

Evidence

These identity politics were an important feature of the new landscape that emerged in the 1980s in response to the resurgent racialized nationalism of the Thatcher government. The demand for “recognition” of hitherto oppressed minority groups began to supplant the more traditional claims for a redistribution of wealth in society. Charles Taylor delineated the political effect of this model in his influential essay “The Politics of Recognition,” where he claimed that “our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves.” The demand for recognition of minority identities is a central defining feature of political multiculturalism. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 153

Categorization

• XREF: Taylor’s recognition model — misrecognition as real damage — is the theoretical hinge the reader could deploy to argue that Hamid’s and Naqvi’s novels contest, rather than reinforce, the demeaning mirror held up to Pakistani-British characters. — connects to: De-industrialisation fragmented labour and replaced class struggle with identity politics — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 672
• SEED: Angle: use the recognition-vs-redistribution shift as the political backdrop for reading Changez’s demand that America recognize him, in The Reluctant Fundamentalist.