ABSTRACT
Wherever I go I come across people meeting together to hear, read and discuss questions about identity: personal identity, social identity, national identity, ethnic identity, feminist identity…In Raymond Williams’s Keywords 1 there is idealism, ideology, image, but no reference to identity. Now it has become a key word; there are conferences, lectures, books and articles on every aspect of identity that one can think of. There are talks and discussions on the meanings of home and place, displacement, migrations and diasporas. Distinctions are made between immigrants, economic migrants, refugees and exiles. There is also a great deal of interest in the self, subjectivity, and in recent developments in the theory of the subject. How does one represent oneself? There is talk about different positionalities. Identity can be displaced; it can be hybrid or multiple. It can be constituted through community: family, region, the nation state. One crosses frontiers and boundaries. I am not complaining about all this interest in identity. I am fascinated by it.
