Cultural IdentityENGE 5850

Semester 2, 2016-2017

Dr. Emily CHOW

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Recap

1. Postcolonial Identity

2. Significance

3. Inevitability

4. identity in the moment of decolonisation

5. get beyond it eventually

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Discussion What is the function(s) of identity?

Who needs identity and why?

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Identity

• “Social”• “Official”• Who you are to others• Public Sphere

• “Personal”• “Unofficial”• Who you are to yourself • Private Sphere

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Discussion How do you define identity?

What are the natures of identity?

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Fluidity

Stuart Hall in “Ethnicity: Identity andDifference” (1991)

• “Identity emerges as a kind of unsettledspace, or an unresolved question in thatspace, between a number of interestingdiscourses […] Identity is a process, identityis split. Identity is not a fixed point but anambivalent point. Identity is also therelationship of the Other to oneself.”

• An epistemological knowledge resultingfrom continuous ontological enquiries

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Sameness

• “idem” = “sameness”• in relation to a collective group

(share commonalities)• A certain degree of assimilation • Problematic? (Confinement or

emancipation?)

• Racial Identity • Ethnic Identity• National Identity

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Cultural Identity

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• Stuart Hall in “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (1990)•2 ways of thinking about

cultural identity: “oneness” and “becoming”

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“Oneness”“There are at least two different ways ofthinking about ‘cultural identity’. The firstposition defines ‘cultural identity’ in terms ofone, shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one trueself’, hiding inside the many other, moresuperficial or artificially imposed ‘selves’, whichpeople with a shared history and ancestry holdin common. Within the terms of this definition,our cultural identities reflect the commonhistorical experiences and shared cultural codeswhich provide us, as ‘one people’, with stable,unchanging and continuous frames of referenceand meaning, beneath the shifting divisions andvicissitudes of our actual history.”

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“Oneness”

“Such a conception of culturalidentity played a critical role in allthe post-colonial struggles whichhave so profoundly reshaped ourworld.”

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“Becoming”

“This second position recognises that, aswell as the many points of similarity,there are also critical points of deep andsignificant difference which constitute‘what we really are’; or rather - sincehistory has intervened – ‘what we havebecome’.”

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“Becoming”“Cultural identity, in this second sense, is a matter of‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’. It belongs to thefuture as much as to the past. It is not somethingwhich already exists, transcending place, time,history and culture. Cultural identities come fromsomewhere, have histories. But, like everythingwhich is historical, they undergo constanttransformation. Far from being eternally fixed insome essentialised past, they are subject to thecontinuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power. Farfrom being grounded in a mere ‘recovery’ of thepast, which is waiting to be found, and which, whenfound, will secure our sense of ourselves intoeternity, identities are the names we give to thedifferent ways we are positioned by, and positionourselves within, the narratives of the past.”

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Racial Identity

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Discussion To what extent do you agree with what the theorists claim about the nature of identity?

What is the significance / function of racial identity?

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Négritude

• Paul Nursey-Bray and PalAhluwalia in “Frantz Fanon andEdward Saïd: Decolonisation andthe Search for Identity” (1997)

• “to reverse the racialvilification’s of the coloniserand to declare unequivocallyfrom the outset that ‘black isbeautiful’”

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Négritude

• Léopold Sédar Senghor claims in the SecondCongress of African writers and Artists in 1959:

• “The problem we blacks now face is todiscover how we are going to integrateAfrican Negro values into the world of 1959. Itis not a question of resuscitating the past, ofliving in an African Negro museum; it is aquestion of animating the world, here andnow, with the values of the past.”

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Négritude

• Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, WhiteMask (1952)

• “Have I heard it correctly? Igive it an even closer reading.On the other side of the whiteworld there lies a magicalblack culture. Negro sculpture!I began to blush with pride.Was this our salvation?”

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Négritude

• Abiola Irele in The African Imagination:Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora(2001)

• “The ideologies or race promoted by thetheories of Africanism associated withthese figures, which go in hand in handwith movements of racial solidarity,sustains in the literature a form ofRomanticism that seeks to legitimise andunderwrite a myth of universal blackIdentity.”

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Négritude

• Melissa Levin and Laurice Taitz in “Fictional Autobiographiesor Autobiographical Fictions?” (1999)• “African literature, as a discipline, was institutionalised

through its confrontation with colonialism and colonialhistory. Here fiction writes back to history and in so doingcompetes for historical status. The African writerconstantly confronts colonialism as one writes form aposition of marginality and constructs him/herself as acenter.”

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Négritude• Fanon in “The Fact of Blackness” (1952)

• “For not only the black man must be black;he must be black in relation to the whiteman.”

• “I subjected myself to an objectiveexamination, I discovered my blackness, myethnic characteristics; and I was battereddown by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectualdeficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships.”

• “All I wanted was to be a man among othermen […] I wanted to be a man, nothing but aman.” 21

Négritude

• Kwame Anthony Appiah’s in “The Illusion ofRace” (1992)

• “The truth is that there are no races: thereis nothing in the world that can do all weask race to do for us […] it works as ametonym for culture, and it does so only atthe price of biologizing what is culture,ideology.”

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National Identity

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Discussion To what extent do you agree with what the theorists claim about racial identity?

What is the significance / function of national identity?

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On Nation

• Benedict Anderson in ImaginedCommunities: Reflections on the Originand Spread of Nationalism (1983)

• the nation is “an imagined politicalcommunity – and imagined as bothinherently limited and sovereign.”

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On Nation

• the nation is not “limited” because ithas “finite” and “elastic” boundaries;

• it is not “sovereign” because it dodgesaway from “pluralism;” and

• it is not a “community,” because overthe centuries millions of people arekilled and die under such comradeship.

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Nation Building and Utopianism

• Lyman Tower Sargent in “Utopianism and National Identity” (2001)

• “These myths are part of the creation of national identity andfrequently have a distinctly utopian tinge to them if they are notexplicitly utopian themselves. These myths are part of a collectivenational memory or subgroup memories that include manyeutopian and dystopian stories and experiences. Utopian literaturefrequently use these memories to build either the justification ofovercoming the past or support for the future eutopia.”

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Nationalism

• Tom Nairn in Faces of Nationalism: JanusRevisited (1997)

• “the genuine point of national identity isnot possession of one’s own folk-danceacademy but the government – or anyway,the attempted government – of one’s ownaffairs.”

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Nationalism

• Bill Ashcroft in “Introduction: Spaces ofUtopia” (2012)• “The concept of the nation, or at least

the nation state, has been robustlycritiqued in the field because thepostcolonial nation is marked bydisappointment, instituted on theboundaries of the colonial state anddoomed to continue its oppressivefunctions. Postcolonial utopian visiontakes various forms but it is alwayshope that transcends thedisappointment and entrapment ofthe nation-state.”

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Ethnic Identity

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Discussion To what extent do you agree with what the theorists claim about ethnic identity?

What is the significance / function of ethnic identity?

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Ethnic Identity

• Fredrick Barth in Ethnic Groups andBoundaries: The Social Organization ofCulture Difference (1969)• only defines “the group” but not

“the cultural stuff that it encloses”•rather than conceptualising

ethnicity “in terms of differentpeople, with different histories andcultures, coming together andaccommodating themselves to eachother,” we should “ask ourselveswhat is needed to make ethnicdistinctions emerge in an area.”

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Ethnic Identity

• Fredrick Barth in Ethnic Groups andBoundaries: The Social Organization ofCulture Difference (1969)

• “when one traces the history of anethnic group through time, one is notsimultaneously, in the same sense,tracing the history of ‘a culture’ […] thegroup has a continual organisationalexistence with boundaries (criteria ofmembership) that despitesmodification have marked off acontinuing unit.” 33

Discussion Is there any other dimensions of identity other than racial, national, and ethnic identity?

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Stuart Hall in “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (1990)

• “cultural identity is not a fixed essence at all, lyingunchanged outside history and culture. It is not someuniversal and transcendental spirit inside us on whichhistory has made no fundamental mark. […] It has itshistories - and histories have their real, material andsymbolic effects. The past continues to speak to us. But itno longer addresses us as a simple, factual 'past', since ourrelation to it, like the child's relation to the mother, isalways-already 'after the break'. It is always constructedthrough memory, fantasy, narrative and myth. Culturalidentities are the points of identification, the unstablepoints of identification or suture, which are made, withinthe discourses of history and culture. Not an essence but apositioning.”

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Stuart Hall in “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (1990)

•A “dialogic relationship” • “similarity and continuity” &

“difference and rupture”

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Conclusion

Identity as a concept that …• Resist definitions• Entangled with both the

past & the future

Identity as• a variance• a narrative

Slippery and Contested !!

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Works Cited

Ahluwalia, Pal, and Paul Nursey-Bray. “Frantz Fanon and Edward Saïd: Decolonisation and the Search for Identity.” In Post-Colonialism: Culture and Identity in Africa, edited by Pal Ahluwalia and Paul Nursey-Bray, 27-48. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 1997.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London; New York: Verso, 1983; London; New York: Verso, 2006.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Ashcroft, Bill. “Introduction: Spaces of Utopia.” Spaces of Utopia: An Electronic Journal (Special Issue: Postcolonial Utopianism) 1 (2012): 1-17.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967; London: Pluto Press, 1986.

Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, 222-237. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990.

---. “Ethnicity: Identity and Difference.” Radical America 23, no. 4 (1991): 9-20.

Irele, F. Abiola. The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Levin, Melissa, and Laurice Taitz. “Fictional Autobiographies of Autobiographical Fictions.” In Emerging Perspectives on DambudzoMarechera, edited by Anthony Chennells and Flora Veit-Wild, 163-176. Asmara; Trenton: African World Press, 1999.

Nairn, Tom. Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited. New York; London: Verso, 1997.

Senghor, Léopold. “On African Homelands and Nation-States, Negritude, Assimilation, and African Socialism.” In African Philosophy: A Classical Approach, edited by Parker English and Kibujjo M. Kalumba, 40-56. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1996.

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