Strategic Essentialism, Indigenous Agency and Difference

Abstract

Leonie Pihama is clear that when the era after colonialism arrives, Māori identities will still survive. This is a position that Bhabha’s performative hybridity cannot account for, so in this chapter I turn to the other central identity concept of postcolonial identity politics, strategic essentialism. Like performative hybridity, strategic essentialism aims to describe identity practices of resistance to dominant groups’ impositions, but unlike performative identity, it is a concept that brings us more firmly back to the ‘substance’ or ‘essence’ of identity claims.