IDENTITY

The Importance of Identity: The Analysis of the Two Works

The Importance of Identity: The Analysis of the Two Works

Introduction

The identity is primarily a publishing phenomenon. In recent years, the number of books, articles, journals devoted to issues of identity has been an explosion. Not a day without that seem publications on "identity conflicts", "masculine identity", "identity work", "national identities" or "religious."

Personal identity is a hotly contested topic in both definition and implication, which questions whether, and in what sense, an individual person can be understood as a uniquely definable entity at any one time (synchronic unity) and as that same entity through time (diachronic unity).

However, by generalizing the notion of identity loses its consistency. The word can now be used interchangeably as a synonym for culture (speaking of Breton identity or Corsican), designate a mental pathology (disorders of identity), indicating a sexual preference (gay identity).

Races, Nations, Cultures Collective Identities

It has become common to equate the word identity to communities of belonging: ethnicity, nation, culture. One speaks freely now "Kurdish identity" of "Corsican identity" or "Breton", or "Jewish identity".

In the process of identity negotiation, there is an attempt to hold onto one's identity as a basic definition of who one is. Ronald Jackson's cultural contracts theory (CCT) is a communication-based, contractual agreement between cultural others as they negotiate individual identities and worldview alterations. According to the theory as originally conceived, all human beings have cultural identity contracts that become evident when interactions between in-group and out-group members take place; these contracts are particularly salient in dominant-no dominant communicative acts.

For years, anthropologists have cut companies 'traditional' in separate ethnicities, each with a territory, language, traditions, beliefs, symbols. So Africa was divided into a mosaic of distinct ethnic groups: Fulani, Bushmen, Nuer, Masai, Zulu, Hutu or Tutsi, etc. Each ethnic group or people were therefore assumed to have its culture, its traditions and its own identity specialist and to describe it (Jackson, 2003, pp. 25-41).

Analysis of No Telephone to Heaven

Form and Content

Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven dramatizes a woman's, a generation's, and ultimately a whole culture's struggle toward identity and self-determination in a world that seems too often to conspire against these fundamental human aspirations. The movement is “toward” rather than “to” because the author's grim vision does not allow for a happy ending in which all turns out well. In overview, the novel's structure may appear nearly chaotic, jumping as it does back and forth between past and present and from one country and continent to another. Yet the near-chaos is appropriate to the characterization and theme, reflecting Clare Savage's confused sense of her personal, sexual, and ethnic identity (Hecht, 2003).

As do several, though not all, of the novel's eleven chapters, the first chapter, “Ruinate,” opens with a scene involving a number of young men and women aboard a truck, traveling toward a destination that the reader will not discover until the very end of the novel. Among them is Clare, whose grandmother once owned the estate upon ...