Jana Evans Braziel, Assistant Professor
229B Mc Micken Hall
Department of English and Comparative Literature
University of Cincinnati
ML 210069
Cincinnati, OH 45221-0069
Office # (513) 556-0834
Fax # (513) 556-5960
jana.braziel@uc.edu
evans_braziel@hotmail.com

Root Identity

• is founded in the distant past in a vision, a myth of the creation of the world;
• is sanctified by the hidden violence of a filiation that strictly follows from this founding episode;
• is ratified by a claim to legitimacy that allows a community to proclaim its entitlement to the possession of a land, which thus becomes a territory;
• is preserved by being projected onto other territories, making their conquest legitimateóand through the project of a discursive knowledge.

Root identity therefore rooted the thought of self and of territory and set in motion the thought of the other and of voyage.

Relation Identity

• is linked not to a creation of the world but to conscious and contradictory experience of contacts among cultures;
• is produced in the chaotic network of Relation and not in the hidden violence of filiation;
• does not devise any legitimacy as its guarantee of entitlement, but circulates, newly extended;
• does not think of a land as a territory from which to project toward other territories but as a place where one gives-on-and-with rather than grasps.

Relation identity exults the thought of errantry and of totality.