Notes on Cultural Citizenship in the Black Atlantic World (original) (raw)
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Peter Lang, 2014
One defining question links the essays of this collection: How do aesthetic and stylistic choices perform the condition of dislocation of the migrant and, in doing so, also put pressure on the seemingly global promise of cosmopolitanism? Migrant Identities of «Creole Cosmopolitans»: Transcultural Narratives of Contemporary Postcoloniality offers a wide array of narratives that complicate the rhetoric of cosmopolitanism and the related discourses of «hybridity». Many such narratives are under-theorized migrations, such as Dalit narratives from India and inter-island migrations in the Caribbean. Collectively, the essays suggest that there are ways in which the forms of the migrant aesthetics, language, and imaginaries may offer new insights in the interactions between practices and discourses of hybridity and cosmopolitanism by examining their precise points of intersection and divergence. This inquiry is especially timely because it raises questions about the circulation, marketing, and consumption of narratives of migration, dislocation, and «diaspora.» In addition, the collection addresses in at least two significant ways the question about «beyond postcolonialism» and the future of the discipline. First, by questioning and critically examining some foundational theories in postcolonialism, it points to possible new directions in our theoretical vocabulary. Second, it offers an array of reflections around disparate geographies that are, equally importantly, written in different languages. The value that the authors place on languages other than English and their choice to focus on the effect that multiple languages have on the present of postcolonial studies are in line with one of the aims of the collection – to make the case for a multilingual expansion of the postcolonial imaginary as a necessary imperative.
This chapter focuses on the connections between the transformation of citizenship, the diversification of poverty and the development of transnational ways of migrating. As a result of the emergence of new poverties, the methods of impoverishment are characterised by a deep individualisation, so that it is possible to observe different life situations, forms of privation that go beyond ordinary economic deprivation. Furthermore, new methods of migrating and of managing difference within multicultural configurations have led some scholars to speculate on new paths for claiming and granting rights. However, human rights discourses tend to reify the complex and ambivalent social and cultural processes through which rights are negotiated, realised or denied within specific contexts. In some cases there is a noticeable gap between the provision and the realisation of rights, which is often affected by negotiation between individuals and groups. Such negotiation is influenced in many ways by the representation (symbolic as well as political) of social and migrant minorities.
Beyond the bounds of the ethnic: for postmigrant cultural and social research
Journal of Aesthetics & Culture
This article draws on an ongoing self-reflexive debate in German migration research. It is considered that migration research has much contributed to (re)produce subject categories and concepts of the nation-state which it, at the same time, aims to criticize. With its specific focus on diverse figures and formations of the migrant, on ethnic minorities and transnational diasporas, the respective counterparts of a white, national majority and the hierarchical relations between these are being implicitly coconstructed. Especially, the plethora of accounts of migrants' lives and migrants' worlds tend to limit themselves to a more or less exclusive "migrantology"-thus petrifying rather than challenging and transgressing the inner boundaries of the nation-state.
This paper arises from the confluence of three broad yet merging lines contributing to the development of an alternative analysis of essentialism in which identities are characterized in the discourse of modernity; the development of classifications and the establishment of hierarchies, based on ethnic/racial difference. The first is anthropology, historically the space from which the processes of contact and cultural exchange have been debated. The second is semiotics, which assumes divergence and interpretation as constituent parts in the creation of meaning; and the third the decolonial perspective as a way of thinking cultural processes inside the colonial matrix of power.
2015
Transnationalism, a topic important in redefining and understanding geopolitical space and human identity, has recently gained international awareness and recognition as an urgent human condition and issue. This collection of essays focuses the transnational perspective on US Ethnic Studies, especially those communities which have been 'historically aggrieved' (xiii). The editor, Aparajita Nanda, attempts to reconceptualize Ethnic Studies and bring it into a global framework, examining its influence on Transnational Studies, while looking toward a broader discussion across disciplines and nations without 'obscuring the particularism of the many different kinds of ethnic affiliations covered by Ethnic Studies' (1). To this end, Ethnic Literatures and Transnationalism contains multiple perspectives and maintains two levels of analysis through the collection, appealing to both the popular reader as well as the academic. Nanda, a scholar in both Postcolonial Studies and African American Studies, has assembled essays which examine not only the networks that link the US to the rest of the world but also qualities of literature which minimize borders. According to Nanda, these essays look toward a 'symbiotic relationship' between ethnic and transnational literatures (6). In focusing on the spread and influence of subcultures, Nanda argues, Western hegemony will be reconciled with what she calls 'fragmentation', the rise and scattering of 'transnational subcultures' (6). Although the series claims to focus on 'literature', the editor has taken the cultural studies approach and views all products which document culture as literature. Thus, the essays range from analysis of speculative fiction and art objects to personal reflections and theoretical discourse. The book is divided into four clearly-introduced sections, giving a background note to the title and a general overview of what each essay will cover. Section 1, 'Identity Politics', includes a thought-provoking essay by Wlad Godrich, 'Beyond Identity: Bearings', which addresses a range of topics from think tanks to dictionaries to an Italian filmmaker. While discussing these topics, Godrich focuses on the theme of a productive notion of identity based on Heidegger's exploration of orientation, via Charles Taylor as recognition, arguing it is a key concept in the shifting space of identity. Both Keith P. Feldman and Esra Mizre Santesso deal with authors who are within the intersection of a transnational space and the Muslim diaspora. Feldman examines, through a perspective heavily influenced by Postcolonial theorist Edward Said, the racial struggle of Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad, her participation in the Hurricane Katrina aid group movement 'refugees for refugees', and the sense of identity she conveys in her poetry, especially the collection breaking point. Similarly, Santesso argues that Camilla Gibb's Sweetness in the Belly addresses problems of identity for Muslims in post-empire Britain. Nanda gives a brief recap of Lilith's Brood before analyzing the protagonist and another main character in Octavia Butler's trilogy to demonstrate how these characters have qualities that redefine hybridity and embrace what she calls a 'postnational complexity' (65). The last essay in Part 1, by Seulghee Lee, begins with Amiri Baraka's black transnationalism to which Lee contends Baraka's contribution to black discourses on love is a positive, if radical, source for black identity. Part 2, 'Legacy/Trauma/ Healing,' opens with a brief introduction by the editor and then moves into how the past affects understandings of identity. In Pal Ahluwalia's essay of personal reflections of on the genocide in Rwanda, he reflects how tragedies can moves us forward toward healing. Even more than that, he envisions a new discipline devoted to reconciliation studies. Steven
The Politics and Poetics of Ethnic Consciousness
In some of the accounts by Jesuit missionaries on Brazilian soil, the indigenous peoples were described as being “inconstant”. In other words, the efforts of the Jesuits in catechizing the autochthonous population would have very short-lived effects, and the latter would soon go back to its original customs. Representations produced in the colonial encounter played a big part in the process of what can be described as ethnogenesis and helped construct the category of the ‘generic Indian’. Representations that convey an idea of a culture that, though permeable to outside influences, grows back to its natural ways abound in the early accounts in the colonial period, and can also be found in more contemporary readings. Nearly five hundred years later, the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro refers back to the myrtle metaphor used by the Jesuit Antonio Vieira in 1657 to reflect upon what he describes as an “ideological bulimia” which he associates with the indigenous people in Brazil. The same author has suggested that the origin and essence of Amerindian culture is acculturation since cultural contact implies borrowing, either amicably or violently (Viveiros de Castro, 2004). Many anthropologists have written on the shift from class to culture (De la Cadena 2005, Wade 2004) which occurred after the 70s, having the Conference of Stockholm as its landmark, and how it paved the way to renewed processes of ethnogenesis across Latin America (Hill 1996, Norman E.Whitten 1996). I shall argue that this recent trend, alongside major political moves such as the inclusion in the Brazilian Constitution of a chapter named “On the Indians”, has served to rekindle a process of ethnogenesis in Brazil and that such a process is most effective when it can rely on representations that have a long duration. In other words, the constitution of indigeneity as an element of the national culture depends on the effectiveness of the narratives that support it and on the persistence of those narratives through time. Taking those observed facts into consideration this study intends to investigate how a certain configuration of factors, or the dialectical result of a combination of forces, contributed towards a differentiated treatment of the indigenous population in Brazil. By looking at how past representations still echo in people’s imagination, including that of decision makers, this study hopes to critically assess the category ‘Indian’ within the broader context of Indigenism in Brazil, and of ethnicity in general, whilst avoiding ethnic essentialism. This study shall deploy as theoretical references the pioneering work on ethnicity by Max Weber, who sees the formation of an ethnic group as politically oriented, and that of Fredrik Barth, who suggests it is an ongoing phenomenon and that ethnic affiliation happens in the encounter between groups who perceive themselves as different. Finally, it shall address the current phase of ethnogenesis in an attempt to explore possible implications of this contemporary and global trend.