Domination, Subordination and the Dialogical Self: Identity Development and the Politics of ‘Ideological Becoming’

In this paper I present an approach to understanding the dialogical self that considers the role that social, cultural and institutional dynamics of domination and subordination, and structures of power of privilege, play in the development of identity. To accomplish this I expand Penuel and Wertsch’s (1995) ‘mediated action’ approach to identity development to include a dialogical process of what Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) calls ‘ideological becoming’. Using the Autobiography of Malcolm X as an illustrative example, I argue that the development of Malcolm’s identity, via the process of ideological becoming, is influenced in profound ways by his experience of subordination and oppression, and his lack of power and privilege, growing up as a black man in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. Thus the ‘politics of ideological becoming’ refers to the degree to which the process of identity formation is necessarily different for persons from different social locations, who stand in different relationship to structures and systems of power, privilege and authority.