If you were hoping to read some version of “The Politics of Identity” in the latest issue of the Harvard Political Review, you may be at first sorely disappointed, yet ultimately compelled by what you find instead. “I Am,” our Fall 2021 Magazine, is a labor of love from across the Harvard collegiate community. At the start of this summer, we called for our peers to submit essays, features, photo journals, and any other pieces that center identity in its many forms — be it disability, sexuality, religion, race, neurodiversity, or national identity. In return, we received more submissions than ever before in our institutional memory. In the following articles, you will hear from more than a dozen authors who attest to how complex, contradictory, and confounding one’s identity can be.
For as long as I’ve been on this magazine, its staff has flirted with the idea of devoting an issue to identity and its political implications, but “Identity” as such was always deemed too slippery, too difficult to execute in good conscience. I believe much of that hesitance arose because it’s next to impossible to bundle a set of political issues and label them as “identity-based.” What really is identity? Is there anything that isn’t identity-based, in one way or another? Is it reductive to group together various identities, or is it nearsighted not to acknowledge identity’s full range? Left without clear answers, the HPR’s masthead and staff — myself included — routinely sidestepped the issue. Still, I would leave these discussions with the sinking certainty that we had an obligation, as Harvard’s flagship political publication, to dedicate space to the discussion of identity, but that we were in no position to dictate its boundaries.
“I am,” first proposed by HPR veteran editors Ruhi Nayak, Sophia Weng, Ryan Tierney, and Swathi Kella, is an inspired approach to illustrating identity. Instead of drawing pithy conclusions of our own about what identity means — in America, in 2021, etc. — we opened up the floor to our writers to tell us what identity means to them. The very phrase “I am ___” invites the writer, or reader as it may be, to fill in the blank. Departing from the usual, removed analysis found in many of the HPR’s most iconic pieces, this issue includes first-person essays, replete with “I” statements that are as illuminating and educative as the highest calibre writing we’ve ever produced.
I invite you to navigate through the many stories which make up “I Am,” made possible by the tireless, creative efforts of our Tech and Design teams. After retiring the print version of the magazine early last year, we are excited to display our Covers content in a dynamic, fully digital format. As always, our hope is to give our writers the platform their writing deserves, and I can only underscore my gratitude for everyone who contributed to making this magazine possible.
I am grateful, too, that the HPR continues to grow as a space in which people of all identities are respected and valued as community members — where assertions of “I am” are welcomed and heard, loudly and clearly.
