We live in an age in which it is practically impossible to speak of politics without speaking also of identity. Identity provides us with a sense of who we are, where we have come from, and, more importantly, where we are going. It mediates our personal memory in terms of collective inheritance and provides the platform from which we launch ourselves on an unsuspecting world. Understood in these terms, identity offers itself, almost uniquely, as a means of ordering the chaos of our experience. It can assimilate the unlikely event, the crisis-wracked history, the piece of outrageous good fortune and find in this material not merely a story but an explanation. Perhaps more importantly, within this function identity is forgiving; it justifies the visceral response, smoothes over the contradictions of our prejudices and constitutes the final refuge from which we can argue our case and vindicate our position.

At the same time, however, identity has its limits, not least in the fact that it never quite seems to coincide with the incoherences, the ambivalences and the gaps out of which we make ourselves. Indeed, Spivak's awareness of the ‘distancing’ involved in asserting any statement of identity is salutary in that it suggests something of the fundamental contradiction implicit in such utterances. As she notes, identity assumes this monolinear position because it is based not on the question ‘who should speak?’ but rather on the more pressing issue of ‘who will listen?’. In its ideal form identity is a point of contact, a mediation between competing material forces and interests and, as such, is necessarily rooted in antagonism.