one thing that's interesting about obama's selection of sotomayor is that while bo presents himself as coming after the politics of identity, sotomayor defines herself squarely within them. i don't think we're done with identity, and no child of sixties politics could simply abandon the stance. on the other hand, the whole thing does have the flavor of something...past, superseded by other ways of conceptualizing the terrain. even within the academic discourse in which it is most at home, identity politics sort of deconstructed around the complexity and plurality and ambiguity and contradiction inherent in identities. we might say that liberation movements need the moment of essentialism, wherein we codify an identity, include and exclude, define and revalue. but then there is the next moment, where you can do more than fend off and unify, or at which you can regain complexity or even individuality.

amazingly, i think this has to do in part with the ages of obama and sotomayor. they're what, eight years apart? but those are different generations of the american left: sotomayor is late-blooming sixties but obama's cohort deals with, for one thing, the failures of the previous generation, at the same time availing itself of its insights and accomplishments.