Co-opting and being co-opted: on critiques of identity politics

In this paper, I analyze three categories of narratives that seek to understand identity politics' role on the American left through the lens of co-optation. The first, represented primarily by Fredric Jameson, Adolph Reed, Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels, sees identity as having always been foreign and harmful to the left. The second, represented by Asad Haider, acknowledges its original radical role in the 1970s, but sees contemporary identity politics as only a co-opting force. Despite their differences, both of these approaches consider identity politics to be the cause of the left's decay and define anticapitalism as devoid of it. Audre Lorde, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, and Alex Charnley and Michael Richmond, representing the last category, turn the question around. They refuse a simple dichotomy between a pure political idea or movement and a co-opted one and ask not what identity politics is doing to the left, but how it works within and against capitalist co-optation. Drawing on a larger body of literature, I argue that such an understanding of co-optation as the starting point of any political theory or practice offers a more generative understanding of the possibilities of radical (identity) politics today.