Life Stories, Law's Stories: Subjectivity and Responsibility in the Politicization of the Discourse of "Identity"

In this essay, my focus is on the politicization of "identity" as an aspect of political competition within the U.S. government at critical moments in the modern making (and unmaking) of rights. I draw on a comparison of two textual examples: transcripts of the hearings that yielded the Civil Rights Act of 1990 and a reading of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Their antithetical visions of identity offer a "way in" to a particular moment in the recent U.S. past when race was resignified in public policy debates that clarified the emergent political dominance of the conservative movement—and then partially reclaimed with the assertion of identity as a theoretical object in anthropology and adjacent academic fields.