Settler colonialism, multiculturalism and the politics of postcolonial identity

The twentieth century saw the development of nationalism and the construction of postcolonial identities in many newly independent nations. Formerly colonised peoples have struggled to restore and adapt their customs and to construct postcolonial national identities. Settler colonial nations face a distinctive challenge in the construction of postcolonial national identities. These nations are founded on the dispossession and assimilation of indigenous peoples and the impulse to build an autonomous settler nation. They are, therefore, caught in a limbo between an ambivalent relationship to the ‘mother-country’ and an unwillingness to acknowledge brutal and colonial aspects of their nation’s foundations. The Australian situation is a powerful example of the difficulty of constructing postcolonial national identities in settler colonial nations. In Australia, multicultural discourses have sought to distance Australian identity from its settler colonial foundations. These discourses have the potential to contribute to a more postcolonial form of national identity. Many Australians, however, have seemed indifferent to multicultural descriptions of Australian identity. Multiculturalism’s failure to capture the Australian imagination can be attributed to the difficulty of overcoming settler colonial forms of identity. The settler colonial ambivalence regarding Australia’s British and colonial heritage has resulted in the adoption of liberal democratic ‘universalist’ values as a form of surrogate cultural and national identity. The culture of Australians of British heritage is normalised and these Australians frequently regard themselves to be without a true cultural heritage. This has serious implications for multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is interpreted as applicable only to Australians of ‘ethnic’ background, irrelevant to Australians with British heritage and unable to provide a sense of belonging to all Australians. Settler colonial discourses of Australian identity continue to be influential. However, multicultural discourses have broadened Australian public debate to include a search for innovative identities in a postcolonial world

Identities in search of identity

AbstractThe time is ripe to start a science of identities for their own sake, without paying lip-service to high-brow mathematics. Although putting combinatorial, (abstract-)algebraic or analytic flesh and blood on identities did lead and will lead to considerable insight as well as new identities, there is also much to be gained in forgetting advanced mathematics, and starting a new sub-discipline of high-school mathematics called the theory of identities.Preamble. I would like to add to Xavier Viennot's charming after-dinner speech, in which he listed a large set of properties that conferences may have, and which were all enjoyed by the present one, in addition to ”something special that comes from the heart“, the following. There are many conferences in which a Bourbaki is an invited speaker, and many conferences in which a software developer is an invited speaker, but this one is the first one, that I know of, that has both (Pierre Cartier and Gaston Gonnet, respectively.) So we are nearing the blissful days of the mathematical messiah in which Concrete shall dwell with Abstract

Playground of gender : cross-dressing and self-mutilation as negation of gender identity in Tanja Duckers’s Spielzone (1999)

Although it is an outstanding example of writing life as negotiation of gender roles as well as exploration of the body as site of identity constructs, Tanja Dückers’s novel Spielzone, published in 1999, has not yet received the critical attention it deserves. The novel displays an interesting aesthetic technique of representing the milieu of two Berlin districts and their inhabitants, whose identity conflicts can be shown to reflect the state of construction of the urban space before its homogenization through gentrification. Especially with regard to gender identities, Dückers portrays the search for a different lifestyle, which is expressed through a striking focus on aesthetic differentiation and cross-dressing. The protagonists stage masculinity and femininity through a theatrical masquerade, which reveals the construct of gender identities and advocates a postmodern transgender existence. The negotiation of a new identity without binary gender attributions ranges from the negation of traditional role assignments to self-mutilation. In the following paper, Dückers’s text will be analysed as uncanny playground of gender between masquerade and brutal gender embodiment, which nevertheless, with all its negations of conventional values, eventually moves near to a return to traditional patterns.peer-reviewe

Ethical Considerations of Online Identities

In the United States, the personal information of private citizens can end up online many times without permission. This personal information can become publicly available via the internet, where algorithmic driven internet search engines serve as a type of aggregation and retrieval system. Personal information from internet search engines can be compiled and used by frontline practitioners within organizations to form a profile i.e. an online identity about private citizens; where the online identity can be used for making decisions which may cause undue harm. It is not clear if organizations and private citizens are aware of the implications of this phenomenon. This paper discusses emerging concerns regarding the use of internet search engines to form online identities for decision-making and provides an ethical framework in the form of a series of questions to help guide the use of internet search engines and online identities in the day-to-day decision-making processes of frontline practitioners within organizations