Structuring of Modern and Postmodern Identities with Reflections on the Pedagogical Implications in a Multicultural World

Abstract: This essay explores the different discourses that intersect to define and explain the concept of "identity" and consists of two distinct parts. The former being an attempt to eclecticize the discourses around identity and the structuring of identity under modern and post-modern conditions. The latter consisting of reflections on the methodological and pedagogical implications in a fragmenting postmodern and multicultural condition. This essay is a theoretical attempt to deconstruct the notion of the essentialized, stable, static and coherent modernist subjectivity/identity and tries to explore the construction of a multilayered, non-unitary, fragmented, plural postmodern subjectivity/identity. The essay aims to discusses the current politics of `identity´, `difference´, `recognition´ and `multiculturalism´ and explores the intricate enmeshing of concepts such as identity, ethnicity, minorities and nationalism. It further tries to construct the representation of identities within a world-systems paradigm. Modernity is seen as being convergent and a result of capital accumulation resulting in globalisation. Post-modernity is seen as a condition of fragmentation due to capital flight, resulting in discontinuities between different forms of collective and individual life. The deconstruction of modernist identity has methodological and pedagogical implications. This fragmentation and disintegration of stable hegemony has emancipatory potential within research. It has led to the decline of writing the "Other". Writing the "Other" is seen as a violence, as it silences and disallows the other from representing themselves. Mere ethnographic observation needs to give way to a dialogic methodology. This has resulted in a focus in research on self-definition, self-identification, autobiographical and local narratives and a replacement of flawed grand narratives. It has also led to a new awareness of pluralism and diversity and articulation of a cultural politics in which culture is bound up with power and resistance. Feminist identity perspectives have strengthened research methodologies by creating empowering and self-reflexive research designs - concerned with producing emancipatory knowledge and empowering the researched. Pedagogically, from the perspective of postmodernism, modernist authority privileges western patriarchal culture and represses and marginalizes the voices of the subordinated. Hence the essay suggests the need for practicing "critical pedagogy" that views education as a political, social and cultural enterprise, and "border pedagogy" that incorporates the notion of difference as an ideal. In practice the culturally divergent fragmented postmodern condition calls for advocating policies of multiculturalism and multiligualism in education.