About Post-modern Identities with reflections on the Implications of a Multicultural World

The essay “Structuring of Modern an Post-modern Identities with reflections on the Pedagogical Implications Multicultural World” by Mariam John Meynert, University of Lund, is a starting point to assess the theories of the construction of the identity, that is going to be used to address the personal development of the character of the narrative.

The essay is “a theoretical attempt to de-constructt the notion of essentialized, stable, static and coherent modernist subjectivity/identity and tries to explore the construction of amulti-layeredd, nonUnitariann, fragmented, pluralpost-modernn subjectivity/identity...It tries to construct the representation of identities within a world-system paradigm..Post-modernity is seen as a condition of fragmentation due to capital flight, resulting in discontinuities between different forms of collective and individual life."

This deconstruction of modernist identity does not write of “the other”. "Writing the "other" is seen as violence, as it silence and disallow the other from representing themselves...This has resulted in a focus on research on self-definition, self-identification, autobiographical and local narratives and a replacements of flawed grand narratives". It involves the notion of “difference” as ideal.

"Post-modernism discourses challenge the fiction of the self-determining subject of modern discourses and the inflated conception of human reason and will. The notion of subjectivity is de-constructed and is considered non-Unitarian and multi-layered."

"The identity of a person is produced simultaneously in many different locales of activities by different agents for many different purposes. Identities are continually displaced and replaced. The subject is neither unified nor fixed."

Identity is also constructed through narratives – stories, sagas, histories and world views internalised into cognitive make-up of identity of a person. Narratives are crucial (Said, 1993), because they are the method through which people assert their own identity and an existence of their own history.

Eriksen (1993) describes three main strategies used by nation-states in dealing with minorities:
- The first one is Assimilation, a modernist strategy, where minorities loose their language and market and gradually come to identify themselves as the dominant people. - The second strategy is the domination, where segregation on ethic ground is implied, the creating of ghettos and slung.
- The third strategy is multiculturalism, a strategy close to post-modern perspective. “Here the members of all cultures and ethnicity enjoy full rights as citizens, without implying high degree of local autonomy. Multiculturalism may take two forms: that of melting strategy, where instead of the traditions of the immigrants being dissolved in favour of those dominant among the pre-existing population, traditions of all cultural groups blend to form a new, evolving cultural pattern. And cultural pluralism where it is foster the development of a genuinely plural society, in which the equal validity of numerous different subcultures are recognized.