 Since its 1970s origins, identity politics as a mode of organizing and set of political philosophical positions has undergone numerous attacks by those motivated to point to its flaws, whether by its pragmatic exclusions or more programmatically. For many leftist commentators, in particular, identity politics is something of a bête noire, representing the capitulation to cultural criticism in place of analysis of the material roots of oppression. Marxists, both orthodox and revisionist, and socialists—especially those who came of age during the rise of the New Left in western countries—have often interpreted the perceived ascendancy of identity politics as representing the end of radical materialist critique (see discussions in McNay 2008: 126–161, and Kumar et al. 2018). Identity politics, for these critics, is both factionalizing and depoliticizing, drawing attention away from the ravages of late capitalism toward superstructural cultural accommodations that leave economic structures unchanged. For example, while allowing that both recognition and redistribution have a place in contemporary politics, Nancy Fraser laments the supremacy of perspectives that take injustice to inhere in “cultural” constructions of identity that the people to whom they are attributed want to reject. Such recognition models, she argues, require remedies that “valorize the group’s ‘groupness’ by recognizing its specificity,” thus reifying identities that themselves are products of oppressive structures. By contrast, injustices of distribution require redistributive remedies that aim “to put the group out of business as a group” (Fraser 1997: 19). If Fraser’s argument traces its intellectual roots to Marx through critical theory, similar arguments come via Foucauldian genealogy. In her 2008 book Against Recognition, for example, Lois McNay argues that identity claims that are at the heart of many contemporary social movements are represented as demands for recognition in the context of an over-simplified account of power. Although theorists of recognition typically start from a Hegelian model of the subject as dialogically formed and necessarily situated, they too quickly abandon the radical consequences of such a view for subject formation, McNay argues. The subject of recognition becomes both personalized and hypostatized—divorced from the larger social systems of power that create conditions of possibility for particular “identities” (2008: esp. 1–23). In this way, the debates around subject-formation that are at the heart of philosophical discussions of identity politics parallel conversations between Habermasians and Foucauldians about the possibility of a transcendental subject that can ground practices of critique (see Allen 2008). This varied debate has a long half-life (see Fraser 2010; 2013) and contemporary manifestations. For example, Glen Coulthard (2014) argues that the shift in colonial state-Indigenous relations in present-day Canada from unabashed assimilationism to demands for mutual recognition (especially of cultural distinctiveness) cannot be an adequate decolonization strategy. Reading the intellectual history of the politics of recognition through Hegel to Sartre to Fanon to Benhabib, Coulthard argues that this discourse is a reiteration (and sometimes a cover-up) of the patriarchal, racist, and colonial relations between Indigenous people and the Canadian state that it purports to ameliorate. Instead, he defends a paradigm of critical Indigenous resurgence that draws on cultural history and economic practices that are neither essentialized nor romanticized, but that also do not rest on concession-oriented relation-building with the existing Canadian state. Audra Simpson makes a similar argument, suggesting that the politics of recognition in the context of settler dispossession denies its own history, assuming that recognition for Indigenous people can occur within the context of such “largely state-driven performance art” as reconciliation, which casts the injustices of settler colonialism as having occurred “in the past” and requiring apology, rather than acknowledging the wide-ranging material political consequences of land theft and Indigenous sovereignty (2017, 6–7).