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Kwame Anthony Appiah - The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity

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From the best-selling author of Cosmopolitanism comes this revealing exploration of how the collective identities that shape our polarized world are riddled with contradiction.Who do you think you are? Thats a question bound up in another: What do you think you are? Gender. Religion. Race. Nationality. Class. Culture. Such affiliations give contours to our sense of self, and shape our polarized world. Yet the collective identities they spawn are riddled with contradictions, and cratered with falsehoods.Kwame Anthony Appiahs The Lies That Bind is an incandescent exploration of the nature and history of the identities that define us. It challenges our assumptions about how identities work. We all know there are conflicts between identities, but Appiah shows how identities are created by conflict. Religion, he demonstrates, gains power because it isnt primarily about belief. Our everyday notions of race are the detritus of discarded nineteenth-century science. Our cherished concept of the sovereign nationof self-ruleis incoherent and unstable. Class systems can become entrenched by efforts to reform them. Even the very idea of Western culture is a shimmering mirage.From Anton Wilhelm Amo, the eighteenth-century African child who miraculously became an eminent European philosopher before retiring back to Africa, to Italo Svevo, the literary marvel who changed citizenship without leaving home, to Appiahs own father, Joseph, an anticolonial firebrand who was ready to give his life for a nation that did not yet exist, Appiah interweaves keen-edged argument with vibrant narratives to expose the myths behind our collective identities.These mistaken identities, Appiah explains, can fuel some of our worst atrocitiesfrom chattel slavery to genocide. And yet, he argues that social identities arent something we can simply do away with. They can usher in moral progress and bring significance to our lives by connecting the small scale of our daily existence with larger movements, causes, and concerns.Elaborating a bold and clarifying new theory of identity, The Lies That Bind is a ringing philosophical statement for the anxious, conflict-ridden twenty-first century. This book will transform the way we think about whoand whatwe are.

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OTHER BOOKS BY KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH As If Idealization and Ideals Lines of - photo 1

OTHER BOOKS BY KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH

As If: Idealization and Ideals

Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity

The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen

Experiments in Ethics

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers

The Ethics of Identity

Thinking It Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy

In My Fathers House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture

THE LIES THAT BIND

The Lies That Bind Rethinking Identity - image 2

Rethinking Identity

CREED, COUNTRY, COLOR, CLASS, CULTURE

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH

The Lies That Bind Rethinking Identity - image 3

LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

A Division of W. W. Norton & Company

Independent Publishers Since 1923

New York London

Copyright 2018 by Kwame Anthony Appiah

The book is based on the BBC Reith Lectures 2016, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

All rights reserved

First Edition

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W. W. Norton Special Sales at specialsales@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830

Book design by Kristen Bearse

Production manager: Beth Steidle

JACKET DESIGN BY JASON HEUER

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Appiah, Anthony, author.

Title: The lies that bind : rethinking identity, creed, country, color, class, culture / Kwame Anthony Appiah.

Description: First edition. | New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018023080 | ISBN 9781631493836 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Identity (Philosophical concept) |

Group identity. | Identity (Psychology)

Classification: LCC BD236 .A58 2018 | DDC 302.5dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018023080

ISBN 9781631493843 (eBook)

Liveright Publishing Corporation, 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS

For my sisters grandchildren, as they enter the world.

Spes mihi quisque.

Wer bin ich? Der oder jener?

Bin ich denn heute dieser und morgen ein andrer?

Who am I? This one or that one?

Am I then this one today and tomorrow another?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Wer bin ich?

(1945)

Contents

Picture 4

Picture 5

O ver the years and around the world, taxi drivers, putting their expertise to the test, have sized me up. In So Paulo, Ive been taken for a Brazilian and addressed in Portuguese; in Cape Town, Ive been taken for a Colored person; in Rome, for an Ethiopian; and one London cabbie refused to believe I didnt speak Hindi. The Parisian who thought I was from Belgium perhaps took me for a Maghrebi; and, wearing a caftan, Ive faded into a crowd in Tangiers. Puzzled by the combination of my accent and my appearance, once our ride is under way, taxi drivers in the United States and the United Kingdom regularly ask me where I was born. In London, I tell them, but thats not what they really want to know. What they mean to ask is where my family came from originally. Or, more bluntly: what are you?

The answer to the question of originsthe where question if not the what questionis that I come from two families in two places pretty far apart. By the time I was born, my mother had lived in London off and on since her childhood, but her real home was far awayin atmosphere, if not in distanceon the edge of the Cotswold Hills, where she had grown up on a farm in a tiny village on the border of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. Her grandfather had a genealogist trace his ancestry back through eighteen generations of his forefathers to a Norman knight in the early thirteenth century who lived less than twenty miles from the place where my mother was born some seven hundred years later.

As a result, while my mother was, in a sense, a Londoner when I was born, she was at heart a countrywoman who just happened to work in London... though she had spent a fair amount of time living abroad during and after the Second World War, in Russia, Iran, and Switzerland. Not surprisingly, perhaps, given her international experiences, she found a job at an organization in London that was working for racial harmony in Britain and its empire, largely by supporting colonial students. It was called Racial Unity. That was how she met my father, a law student from the Gold Coast. He was an anticolonial activist, the president of the West African Students Union, and a representative in Britain of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, who was to lead Ghana to independence in 1957, just a few years after I was born. You might say she practiced what she preached.

The other side of my family, then, came from Ghana: more precisely from Asante, a region in the heart of the modern Republic of Ghana. My fathers lineage, as he taught us, could be traced back to Akroma-Ampim, an eighteenth-century general whose successes in battle had won him the right to a great tract of land on the kingdoms edge. He was a member of the military aristocracy that created the Asante Empire, which dominated the region for two centuries; and his name is one of the names my parents gave me. My father raised us with stories of his family. In a sense, though, it wasnt really our family. Just as my mothers people, being patrilineal, thought you belonged to your fathers family, my fathers, being matrilineal, thought you belonged to your mothers. I could have told those taxi drivers I had no family at all.

This book is full of family stories because I want to explore the ways in which narratives like these shape our sense of who we are. Each persons sense of self is bound to be shaped by his or her own background, beginning with family but spreading out in many directionsto nationality, which binds us to places; to gender, which connects each of us with roughly half the species; and to such categories as class, sexuality, race, and religion, which all transcend our local affiliations.

Ive set myself the task in this book of discussing some of the ideas that have shaped the modern rise of identity and trying to see some of the mistakes we regularly make about identities more clearly. Philosophers contribute to public discussions of moral and political life, I believe, not by telling you what to think but by providing an assortment of concepts and theories you can use to decide what to think for yourself. I will make lots of claims; but however forceful my language, remember always that they are offered up for your consideration, in the light of your own knowledge and experience. Im hoping to start conversations, not to end them.

What I wont offer is an explanation of why identity talk has exploded through my lifetimea fascinating question, but one for intellectual and social historians. Instead, Im going to take the modern prevalence of ideas about identities as a given but challenge some of our assumptions about them. I aim to persuade you that much of our contemporary thinking about identity is shaped by pictures that are in various ways unhelpful or just plain wrong. Getting to pictures that are more helpful and closer to the truth wont

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