Cultural Politics of Identity in Latin America

The phrase “identity politics” has come to encapsulate a wide diversity of oppositional movements in contemporary Latin America, marking a transition away from the previous moment of unified, “national-popular” projects. This review takes a dual approach to the literature emerging from that transition, focusing on changes in both the objects of study and the analysts' lens. Four questions drive this inquiry: When did the moment of identity politics arise? What accounts for the shift? How to characterize its contents? What consequences follow for the people involved? Past answers to such questions often have tended to fall into polarized materialist and discursive theoretical camps. In contrast, this review emphasizes emergent scholarship that takes insights from both while refusing the dichotomy, and assigning renewed importance to empirically grounded and politically engaged research.