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“Inasmuch as the desire to identify ourselves and others remains complicit with positivist assumptions about a fully knowable world--a world that can be described, hierarchized, named, and mastered--identity as a concept will serve oppressive and reductive ideological functions. Under this view, to speak of identities as 'real' is to naturalize them and to disguise the structures of power involved in their production and maintenance.” [15]

Moya’s claim suggests that any attempt in searching for an objective or “authentic” identity will necessarily face problems of reducing individual differences of experiences, itself relative to the social and power structures of the society, to simplistic claims, and thus, any national identity in the postmodern viewpoint cannot truly represent the people.

Any national identity, as understood by postmodernists, will thus be unable to help one construct any knowledge of the self as a citizen of the nation at all, since the notion of self is driven by social forces and constantly changing. There is in fact, no real national identity, and thus no knowledge can be gained from national identity.

5.0 Conclusions

5.1 Reconciling Differences: Synthesis

Both essentialist and postmodern perspectives posit different problems on the epistemic value of national identity. The essentialist claim that national identity is defined by a few objective values limits what one knows about oneself as a citizen of a nation. On the other hand, the postmodern perspective asserts that there is no national identity, and no self to speak of. One can thus never know about himself or construct epistemically valuable knowledge about himself as a citizen, since identity and self are constantly affected by social forces, ideologies and power structures.

I however wish to reclaim the notion of identity as epistemically valuable, albeit not of the objective nature, by evaluating the two perspectives of national identity to propose an alternative to understanding national identity.

While an essentialist claim limits the construction of knowledge of national identity to certain key values, these values are not totally unrepresentative, but are rather inadequate in explaining one’s existence as a citizen of Singapore. There is thus some sense of unattainable “authenticity” in such a national identity. What implications does this have? It suggests that there is some sense of “authentic” national identity out there, something one can consistently work towards. Postmodern claims of ideologies and power structures can then provide one with the framework through which one can understand and work towards a more “authentic” const本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。