THE WEALTH OF SELVES BY EDWINA BARVOSA

Book Review “The Wealth of Selves” by Edwina Barvosa



Book Review “The Wealth of Selves” by Edwina Barvosa

All of us have multiple identities. Yet, as Edwina Barvosa argues, we are not always aware of the influence of our multiplicity on our selves or on political life. Wealth of Selves explores the everyday character and political consequences of multiple identities, blending insights from various disciplines to forge an overarching theoretical framework for understanding multiple identities in political context. Through this original framework, Barvosa analyzes the shape and politics of multiple identities in terms of identity contradictions, the intersections among identities, and the political potential that lies within practices she refers to as self craft (Barvosa, 2008).

This reconsideration of the self promises to reshape our thinking on issues such as immigrant incorporation, national identity, political participation, the socially constructed sources of the will and political critique, and the longevity of racial and gender conflicts. With its accessible style and rich cross-pollination among disciplines, Wealth of Selves will reward readers in political science, philosophy, race, ethnic, and American studies, as well as in borderlands, sexuality, and gender studies (Barvosa, 2008).

The book is reviewed by Dr. Norma E. Cantú, in the following words:

“A serious unpacking of what has established unified identities as normative and what a decentred multiple identity theory contributes to current thinking and political life" (Dr. Cantú, 2008: 164).

Within Western thought the subject that is the self as a thinking, feeling, and psycho-physiological entity—has been traditionally defined as a cantered consciousness, characterized and unified by one self-defining identity. Within this tradition, a cantered subjectivity was long thought to exist and function independently of the social contexts surrounding it, without significant influence from those contexts. Later, the cantered subject came to be regarded as socially constructed in and through social contexts, yet still rendered whole by a single self-defining identity or identity-grounding element that would centre the subject in any and all circumstances (Benjamin, 1994).

Multiple identity, on the other hand, is one specific conceptualization of the more general idea that the subject is not cantered, but instead debentured and multiple. Such a debentured subjectivity can encompass many different, perhaps even contradictory, identities, and is not necessarily cantered by one self-defining or "true" identity. Rather, since identities are socially constructed and constructing, their specific number and character are a function of the various forms of socialization that forge the subject over time, as well as of the life worlds in which he or she participates. Consequently, the multiple identities of a subject (both social and personal) are relevant to and engaged in specific social milieux and are manifest in a context-dependent manner. Since subjects engage different and multiple identities in response to the social contexts in which they find themselves at a given moment, no one identity is a priori or necessarily more central, self-defining, or true than any other.

The breadth of scholarship utilizing some formulation of multiple identity has firmly established its place in contemporary Western thought (Butler, ...