Relational identity replaces legitimacy with pure contingency

Evidence

Creole tongues, mother tongues vary too much within them to “be conjoined,” to be prized as an essence or to be valorized as a symbol of either the mother or the father. Their threatened violence is, admittedly, a synthesis but one spread throughout the expanse. … Just as early discoverers/ discovered are equal in Relation, the legitimate and its opposite appeal to each other. That is, legitimacy is totally replaced by contingency. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 350

Categorization

• DEFINE: Glissant’s maxim that in Relation legitimacy gives way entirely to contingency is central to his critique of essentialist identity.
• XREF: Directly relevant to whether strategic essentialism can be sustained: legitimacy’s replacement by contingency is the condition that would prevent ironic identity from collapsing into residence. — connects to: Status is relational comparison, not a fixed resource, and affects behavior through identity — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2736; Every identity is constituted relationally through what it excludes — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 371; Communities form identity relationally only through encounter with an other — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2678 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Every identity is constituted relationally through what it excludes #corroborates (0.85) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 371
• Identity is constituted through relation to what is other and different from itself #corroborates (0.85) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 378
• Status is relational comparison, not a fixed resource, and affects behavior through identity #corroborates (0.80) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2736
• Communities form identity relationally only through encounter with an other #corroborates (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2678
• Identity is constructed through opposition to a continuously reinterpreted other #corroborates (0.80)
• Identity is internally mediated by the non-identical #corroborates (0.75) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1223