Difference, Bordered Identities, and (Dis)Identifications With Belonging

• In Event: The Interventional Possibilities of Difference: Thinking Through Communication, Difference, and Identity

Abstract

The very real vestiges of colonial projects and their many afterlives, continue to create and complicate the borders, possibilities, and realities of difference - all differentially experienced within and among bordered territories. Such bordering of territories not only includes nationally and globally demarcated spatial relationships but also the very borders around identities and difference available to us for articulation. While strategically essential delimitations and policing around identity allow for interventions at particular historical conjectures they also limit the possibility of articulating and mobilizing competing (dis)identifications with belonging. I think of difference and its interventional possibilities by considering the current political protests in Ethiopia in relation to the very real/murky residues of colonialism and Ethiopia’s nation making projects. How can difference, diaspora, and globality be used to (de)territorialize and demystify the politics surrounding identity - questioning and weakening the constructed temporal and spatial relationships often used to maintain power.

Author

• Azeb Madebo, U of Southern California - Annenberg School for Communication