A CAUTION ABOUT IDENTITY POLITICS

George Hutchinson, Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018): 

One striking connection between now distinct fields of inquiry is the way black, queer, and Jewish authors in particular resisted minoritizing discourse infer of universalizing one, to borrow terms form Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet. They did this because they came to believe, in an era shadowed by fascism, that all forms of minoritization and oppression interconnect and that the battle for liberation must always be fought on broader grounds than identity politics alone provides, even though oppression operates by way of particularizing identity--marking the Jew, the Negro, the homosexual for subordination or worse. The universal exists not in the abstract human being, the classical liberal subject, but as a potential emerging at the shifting crossroads of social identities--never a fixed point--and a guard against limiting chauvinism, separate idealizations, or calcifying and monumentalizing traditions that curb the reach and power of creative imagination and that support inhumanity, to use a common term. The heroes of identity politics were Hitler, Hirohito, Mussolini, and the Ku Klux Klan. They have their much-diminished avatars today.

Id. at 4. From the book jacket:

Mythological as the era of the 'good war' and the "Greatest Generation,' the 1940s are frequently misunderstood as a heroic, uncomplicated time in American history. Yet just below the surface, a sense of real, alienation, and the specter of radical evil permeated American art and literature. Writers returned home from World War II and gave form to their disorienting experiences of violence and cruelty. They confronted bigotry, existential guilt, ecological concerns, and fear about the nature and survival of the human race.