Broadening Identity Through New Knowledge

 This week was an exciting one because we finally got to see our classmate’s work in full fruition! It was fascinating to understand what parts of Kenyon’s history people chose to forefront of their exhibitions. It brought me back to my first blog post, where I talked about the shared collective identity of a Kenyon student, and how our archival work upheld that memory identity and collective narrative. Everyone found a personal connection to their exhibit because they saw themselves in Kenyon’s past– the entire student life display and the letters vowing not to smoke come to mind. In this final week, I found myself wondering about identity in a new way. Based on theories from “Muslims Are The New Blacks,” from Hajar Yazdiha’s The Struggle for the People’s King, I asked and explored the question: What, concretely, enforces a group’s identity? 

Memory can broaden identity more than narrow it. This is the main claim from Yazdiha’s chapter, in which she outlines the progression of Muslim Americans’ expressions of identity. She traces the changes in how they defined themselves culturally and politically, in relation to other oppressed groups, and how the language of the Civil Rights Movement came to change their collective memory narrative of what it means to be a Muslim American. Yazdiha theorizes that groups understand their identities through institutions, cultural and social representations, and how a group feels they’re defined. Muslim American activists, pre 9/11, strove to assimilate with white Americans and differentiate themselves from Black Americans. They defined themselves through a “Not Black” cultural framing (136, 2023). After 9/11, high surveillance led to institutionalized Islamophobia, and a growing number of conspiracy theories inhibited Muslim Americans’ everyday lives. Using the identity of Malcolm X, Muslim leaders and academics “[rooted] Muslim experience in American identity,” connecting their struggle to that of the Civil Rights activists. This strategy created a new perception of identity that came to define the Muslim American past. They became no longer “Not Black,” but now also Black. Through this, they were able to understand the oppression they faced and act in solidarity with the oppressed instead of struggling to assimilate with the oppressor. 

While we didn’t deal intimately with themes of oppression in our exhibits, that theory of how a group defines themselves is very relevant. Using Yazdiha’s framing that groups define themselves through how they’re treated institutionally, culturally, socially, and individually, we can understand how our work in the archives may have broadened our identity and connected us to the past more than we’d thought. In my work, I didn’t experience much of an identity shift through learning more about Kenyon’s past. However, when looking at the Student Life at Kenyon display, I found my identity broadening to connect with larger sects of people, larger sects of Kenyon life, because I found both institutional and social dynamics I related to. For example, I’m not a part of literary magazines on campus, but seeing that tattered, old, out-of-print literary magazine in the display case made me feel an affection for our campus’ love for writing. By connecting my passions to the passions of those in Kenyon’s past, my identity expanded to include, relate to, and be defined by the past. I believe this connects with the journey of the Muslim American identity (though vastly, vastly different in context). That identity shift through learning more about the past of a group you belong to is prevalent in both scenarios. Seeing institutional, social, and cultural examples of movements of past members of your group allows your perspective to widen – more things become tangible; more definition is granted. It felt relevant to end the journey on this reflection. I thought this process would stifle my identity and overwhelm me with how targeted or curated Kenyon’s identity is. Instead, I found relatability at every corner, and thus my identity broadened, and I added more substance to my memory narrative of the group I belong to.