Identity and Multiculturalism
Sardar has written extensively on identity. He shares with the psychologist and philosopher from India, Ashis Nandy, the idea that humans do not have one but multiple identities. Identity, he argues, is not monolithic and static; but multiple and ever-changing.
He has said: "Many categories of identity that we have conventionally projected on others – such as the ‘evil Orientals’, the ‘inferior races of the colonies’, the immigrants, the Blacks, the refugees, the gypsies, the homosexuals - are now an integral part of ourselves. It is not just that they are our neighbours but their ideas, concepts, lifestyles, food, clothes now play a central part in shaping ‘us’ and ‘our society’. We thus have no yardstick to measure our difference and define ourselves."
In his book Orientalism and in Why Do People Hate America and American Dream, Global Nightmare, co-written with Merryl Wyn Davies, he explores how Muslims are perceived in books, films, television series and advertisements. He argues that the image of Muslims as "the darker side of Europe" seems to be a fixture of western consciousness and is recycled from generation to generation. In Aliens R Us, he says that Orientalist imagery has become an integral part of science fiction cinema.
Sardar is a strong supporter of multiculturalism. He argues that multiculturalism is concerned about transforming power to non-western cultures and allowing these cultures to speak for themselves.
In the first volume of his memoirs, Desperately Seeking Paradise, he explores different facets of Muslim identity. In Balti Britain, he explores what it means to be British and Asian in contemporary Britain. He has said: 'In Britain, we neglected to learn how we have been shaped by a long history of mutual entanglement and belonging. Without such learning we cannot give young British Asians the respect they deserve or appreciate the comfort so many have in living their compound identity, in being simultaneously British and Asian.
Read more about this topic: Ziauddin Sardar
Famous quotes containing the words identity and and/or identity:
“The adolescent does not develop her identity and individuality by moving outside her family. She is not triggered by some magic unconscious dynamic whereby she rejects her family in favour of her peers or of a larger society.... She continues to develop in relation to her parents. Her mother continues to have more influence over her than either her father or her friends.”
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“Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in London—he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell—turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.”
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