In Search of Our Other Selves

What does essentialism, any kind of essentialism, look like? Why do we want to resist it, make it our life’s business to resist it through our fiction, our poetry and lays, our criticism and the way we teach and read? All of us have known the temptation to stereotype tradition as the bogeyman and contemporary interpretations as resistances. This is why it is important to remember that those who retell “contemporary” versions of small and big traditions, individual and collective histories include those who distort the past or our joint legacies for their own political purposes. On the one hand, we have those who use tradition, history, culture only to perpetuate old stereotypes and create new ones; reinforce old exclusions and strengthen new ones. On the other hand, we have the heterogeneous collective of readers and writers we hope we belong to: those who expand the map of inclusions. Because this is a heterogeneous group, it becomes necessary also to initiate a challenge to resistances that are either incomplete or in danger of turning essentialist themselves

Aesthetics · Art · Criticism · Epistemology · Essentialism · Literature · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Stereotype (UML · Temptation · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Social Psychology