Identity: Quest and Questions

Book excerpt: This academic edited volume analyses and interprets the constantly altering meaning(s) and expression(s) of identity in the context of rising tensions and conflicts caused by society's dominant power structures on vulnerable and victimised groups. The question of identity that arises in a person gets into conflict with the social structures that complicate the notion at every instant of developing newer definitions of existence in the multifaceted world. These social constructs, either directly or indirectly, employing persuasion or coercion, and through manoeuvre or manipulation, develop to deviate from the expected normative identity possessed to knowingly or unknowingly embrace the ‘other’ identity. The freedom to continue in one's own identity or freely transit between identities without the stains of society’s constructs is critical, thus resulting in the debates and questions raised by/on/for identity. It is equally important to understand the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of the notion of identity that influence and get influenced by the connected spheres of gender dysphoria, patriarchal ascendance, cultural diversity and construction, uncertainties and conflicts of diaspora, alterity and entrapment, migration and displacement, caste oppression, vulnerability and victimisation, state apparatuses, and subalternity. Through multifarious themes and topics of discussion related to exploring the notion of identity, this book converges the diverse perspectives on various situational existences of people. Thus, an elaborate and wider angle on the transitions and formation of identity is captured to decipher the relevance and significance of identity.