identity is not only a story, a narrative which we tell ourselves about ourselves, it is stories which change with historical circumstances. And identity shifts with the way in which we think and hear them and experience them. Far from only coming from the still small point of truth inside us, identities actually come from outside, they are the way in which we recognized and then come to step into the place of the recognitions which others give us. Without the others there is no self, there is no self-recognition. (1995, p. 8)
identity is not in the past to be found, but in the future to be constructed. (1995, p. 13)
identity is always in part a narrative...always within representation. (1997, p. 49)
...culture is not just a voyage o rediscovery, a return journey. It is not an "archaeology." Culture is a production. It has its raw materials, its resources, its "work of production." It depends on a knowledge of tradition as "the changing same" and an effective set of genealogies. But what this "detour through its pasts" does is not enable us. through culture, to produce ourselves anew, as new kinds of subjects. It is therefore not a question of what our traditions make of us so much as what we make of our traditions. Paradoxically, our cultural identities, in any finished form, lie ahead of us. We are always in the process of cultural formation. Culture is not a matter of ontology, of being, but of becoming. (2005, p. 556)
"Negotiating Caribbean Identities," New Left Review, Vol. 1, Jan. 1995, pp. 3-14.
"Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities," in A. D. King (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World System (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 41-68.
"Thinking Diaspora: Home Thoughts from Abroad," in G. Desai & S. Nair (eds.),Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), pp. 543-60.
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