Interesting article. Apart from the small part you have quoted does anything else stand out for you?
yes, what he described of the development of Amiri Baraka's (who I've not heard of before) politics, and also the limits or inherent problems of what he calls cultural nationalism. I thought his efforts to draw the history of the politics he's criticising are also quite important too. There's a tendency sometimes I feel for critics of identity politics to behave as though it is some sort of alien development cooked up by students when it's actually drawing on fairly deep roots and with concrete reasons of how and why it has developed the way it has. So I think that's very worthwhile.
I have to say I did like his short dismissal of the debate about trigger warnings which I too think are treated out of all proportion a lot of the time. There are much bigger problems as Haider points out with education around austerity etc but for right wing critics at least they seem not to matter nearly so much, strangely.
The piece also links in with things I have read by people like Adolph Reed jr & Walter Benn Michaels on identity and class etc. I've seen them referred to a number of times on here and Reed in particular I really rate highly. I recently read a very thoughtful little book by Kenneth W. Warren called What Was African American Literature and it treads some similar ground but also demonstrates again that these kinds of debates have been going on a long time. He talks about the Harlem Renaissance and Jim Crow and so on, and how African American writers of that time dealt with questions of identity shaped by these circumstances, but also how this could obscure class. I'll just quote a little bit:
But as was the case at the dawn of the Jim Crow era, the impulse to call upon men and women of letters to step into the vanguard of social justice movements is symptomatic of larger inequalities.
And I think this has significance in relation to Haider's piece.
I suppose the article has some resonance for me too because of my own experiences of intersectionality/identity. I'm not university educated and tend to mainly steer clear of it on the internet so I've not come into contact with it too much but where I have it has generally been pretty alienating for me. Even where I could be classed as part of this or that identity group it has seemed like it is a politics designed to reinforce middle class dominance of these movements and to conceal differences of interests and experiences under the umbrella of identity and thereby facilitates more particular interests. If that makes sense. Anyway, I won't go in to that too much as I have the feeling I'm already rambling on a bit...
One weakness of it was maybe that it was too student focused. Haider is I think some sort of professor or teacher so I suppose its what he knows and perhaps where the form of politics he's discussing is most common, but I did wonder how much it really is obstructing action. In as much as my impression is that back when student politics was more 'universalist' or at least more heavily influenced by the labour movement and socialist/communist politics generally, they probably wasted a smiliar amount of time wrangling over obscure terminology and processes and all that. Part of that at least is likely to be in the nature of student politics.
So anyway, although he's talking in a context I'm pretty unfamiliar with, these are questions that have got to be grappled with and I thought his was a good contribution to the debate. I'm feeling a bit fuzzy in the head today and I seem to have written an awful lot which usually doesn't bode well but hopefully it's not all nonsense
