Identity politics and the need for a “tomorrow”

Recent years have witnessed a general backlash against identity politics, both in the academy and the public sphere. This paper recognises the problems in identity politics as arising from an apparent difficulty in conceptualising identity separately from notions of fixity and exclusion. It argues that politicised identities could, instead, be premised upon an explicit affirmation of the provisionality of political identity that is oriented to a "tomorrow " in which the identity will no longer be required