Week 10: Cultures In/between: Identity, Multiplicity, and Hybridity
Media Example: “Asian” character in Gen V
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhSrnKMiaoc
Jordan Li is played by Logan Thor
https://www.reddit.com/r/GenV/comments/173yk03/question_about_the_actor_playing_jordan/
Hall, S. (2011). Introduction: who needs ‘identity’?. In Questions of Cultural Identity (pp. 1-17). SAGE Publications Ltd, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446221907
Main argument (p.16): “…identity is a matter of considerable political significance, and is only likely to be advanced when both the necessity and the ‘impossibility’ of identities, and the suturing of the psychic and the discursive in their constitution, are fully and unambiguously acknowledged. “
The “necessity” to re-evaluate the concepts of identity (p.2).
- The first reason arises along with the deconstructive critique, which erased the no longer useful concepts but ironically allowed them to continue to be read because there existed not entirely different ones to replace. Instead, Hall contended that the concept of identity should be investigated “in the interval between reversal and emergence”.
- The second reason is the importance of "rearticulating the relationship between subjects and discursive practices that the question of identity recurs", which leads to the question of identification.
Identification (p. 3-6):
- The discursive approach draws meaning from both psychoanalytic and discursive analysis and understands identification as an always incomplete process, and “also an articulation, a suturing, and an over-determination” operates across differences.
- “identities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions.
- It is always in the process of transformation, subject to radical historization. “Identities are about questions of using the resources of history, language and culture in the process of becoming rather than being” and constructed through differences, and “destabilized by what has been left out. ”
The matter of subject and identity in previous scholarships:
- Suturing (Stephen Heath)：“identity as suturing point” attaches to the subject positions. Thus, suturing refers to a way of articulation (p.6).
- Interpellation (Louis Althusser- Michel Pecheux -Stephen Heath – Pearl Hirst): “showing that all the mechanisms which constituted the subject in discourse as an interpellation… were in danger of presupposing an already constituted subject. (Hirst, p.8)”
- The Mirror Stage, the formation of subjectivity (Jacques Lacan) : “not the beginning … but the interruption, which initiates the process that finds the sexually differentiated subject (and the consciousness) and this depends not alone on the instantaneous formation of some internal cognitive capacity, but on the dislocating rupture of the look from the place of the other. (p.9)”
- Subject, individual, and body (Mitchel Foucault): “centering of power”, “subject is discursively constructed” and individual’s self-production and recognition of its subjectivity (p.12-13).
- “All identities operate through exclusions” (Judith Butler): “...the discussion of gender and sexuality, framed by feminism, and so is directly recurrent both to the questions of identity and identity politics (p.15)”.
- The articulation (Stuart Hall): mechanism that “relates subject to the discursive formations. (p. 14)”
Q: How to understand “misrecognition” in terms of positioning individuals’ subjectivity? (p.8, p.9, p.10)
Lowe, L. (1991). Heterogeneity, hybridity, multiplicity: marking Asian American differences. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 1(1), 24-44.
Main Ideas: “In this sense, I argue for the Asian American necessity—politically, intellectually, and personally—to organize, resist, and theorize as Asian Americans, but at the same time I inscribe this necessity within a discussion of the risks of a cultural politics that relies upon the construction of sameness and the exclusion of differences. (p. 28)”
Two objectives:
- Disrupting the 'dominant discursive construction' is a crucial step in challenging the homogeneity of social groups and emphasizing the complexity of Asian American social ethnicity.
- The necessity to negotiate the heterogenous argumentation within Asian American politics “based on ethnicity”.
Three Sections
- Section I：A discussion of "cultural hegemony," which is negotiated between the ethnic groups and the existing ones to determine the intersection that constructs the "majority" – the "hegemony creation." Deconstruct the existing perception of the binary composition of social class as majority and minority, but rather acknowledge the multicity of various, heterogenous groups. Such heterogeneous quality disclosed the meaning of Asian American identities, thus providing room to align with other groups in the "challenge to specific forms of domination" as they shared common interests.
- Section II: Questioning the political unity of Asian American discourses. Lowe rejects the binary construction of differences, which prioritizes one over the other (white, non-white, majority, minority). Based on the nation-based model of analysis, Fanon criticized bourgeoisie's nationalism in caution of nativism and assimilation, a legacy of colonialism --- which privileges one tribe or ethnic group over the other. Instead, Fanon advocates establishing a new order to break the existing structure of society. Therefore, Lowes contends that Asian American subjects are never only about ethnicity but situated in specific social discourses, in addition to the dichotomy of nativism and assimilation.
- Section III: Tensions between nationalist and specific social discourses in representations. First, debates surrounding the novels between feminist and nationalist how fixed masculinist identity (e.g. the classic models of topo regarding the conflict between nativism and assimilation, the generational conflict in masculinist terms) should be challenged by the heterogeneity of the culture. Joy Luck diversifies the representations of discourses by demystifying several mother-daughter relationships to consider horizontal differences under the shared ethnic identity. A Great Wall, however, even further explores the distinction to portray the complex contrasts between the diaspora and the indigenous culture and values.
Conclusion: “...the grouping "Asian American" is not a natural or static category; it is a socially constructed unity, a situationally specific position that we assume for political reasons (p.39)”. Lowes refers to Spivak’s strategic essentialism to illustrate the possibility to unify under the ethnic identity in order to disrupt the exclusion based on race without obscuring the intricate social discourses that could be associated with other discursively formed social groups.
Languages Notes:
Nisei (Japanese): Second Generation
Sensei (Japanese): Third Generation
Isei (Japanese): First Generation
Lo Ban (Cantonese): Boss
Doi m-dju (Cantonese): Sorry
Keywords:
• Hegemony (Gramsci): “describes both the social processes through which a particular dominance is maintained and those through which that dominance is challenged, and new forces are articulated.”
• Subaltern Class (Gramsci): “The subaltern classes are, in Gramsci's definition, pre-hegemonic, not unified groups, whose histories are fragmented, episodic and identifiable only from a point of historical hindsight.”
• New historical bloc (Gramsci): “a new set of relationships that together embody a different hegemony and a different balance of power.”
• New Order (Fanon): “a new order, neither an assimilationist nor a nativist inversion, which breaks with the structures and practices of cultural domination, and which continually and collectively criticizes the institutions of rule.”
• Nation (Fanon): an essentialized bourgeois construction of "nation" is a classification that excludes other subaltern groups that could bring about substantive change in the social and economic relations, particularly those whose social marginalizations are due to class: peasants, workers, transient populations.
• Strategic essentialism (Gayatri Spivak): it is possible to utilize specific signifiers of ethnic identity, such as Asian American, for the purpose of contesting and disrupting the discourses that exclude Asian Americans, while simultaneously revealing the internal contradictions and slippages of Asian American so as to ensure that such essentialisms will not be reproduced and proliferated by the very apparatuses we seek to disempower.
Q： How should we resist in today’s media landscape to address the complexity of discursive differences when others still view Asian Americans as a unified social group in media representation ?
The Global, the Local, and the Return of Ethnicity (Hall, 1996)
Key words: national culture, cultural hybrid, ethnicity, unity
Central argument: National identity/culture is constructed by persistent connections being made between the past and the present. A nation is not inherently unified. Globalization has contributed aspects of plurality in national cultures, however it has also caused the erosion or disappearance of others.“A national culture is a discourse—a way of constructing meanings which influences and organizes both our actions and our conceptions of ourselves.” (626)
“The nation” is constructed in “the mind’s eye,” like a narrative, by:
the production and telling of stories
memories that connect the past with the present
images that are constructed of it
The narrative of the national culture is told through:
Narrative of the nation: consistently retold in national histories, literature, the media, and popular culture
Contains stories, images, landscapes, scenarios, historical events, national symbols, and rituals which represent shared experiences
Contributes a sense of importance to “our humdrum existence,” connects the personal/finite with the nation/longevity
Origins, continuity, tradition, and timelessness: national identity as “primordial” or natural
Critical principles of the national character remain unchanged throughout other developments
The invention of tradition: traditions can be old or invented, invented traditions serve to instill principles or norms that connect the present with cherished stories or symbols or the past
Provide ways for communities to cope with disaster or conflict and to “convert” struggles into shared “triumph”
The foundational myth: “a story which locates the origin of the nation, the people, and their national character so early that they are lost in the mists or, not ‘real,’ but ‘mythic’ time.” (627)
Helps disenfranchised peoples to comprehend and express sentiments as well as experiences
Provides an alternative history or counter-narrative of origin predating events such as colonization
The pure, original people or “folk”: the symbolic image of a national identity
National culture directs the construction of identities as well as goals or expectations for the nation itself in relation to modernity. However, since national culture itself is fraught with influence from the present and the past, certain identities with social authority utilize this struggle to conceal their efforts to reinforce their status. Hall explains how efforts to recapture a certain “lost time” in the nation’s past often has the underlying motive to expel “others” that are perceived to threaten aspects of the existing social hierarchy. The desire for national culture is the pursuit of entry into the universal (national identity) while simultaneously reinventing differences (between different nations) that further characterize the nation.
Deconstructing the “National Culture”: Identity and Difference
Ernest Renan’s three factors that constitute national unity, shared memories, desire to live together, and the will to perpetuate one’s heritage, are also the factors that designate a national culture as an “imagined community” (628). The national culture seeks to unify citizens with a single cultural identity regardless of differences in class, gender, or race.
Many modern nations were unified by the suppression of cultural differences. This occurs through the imposition of a cultural hegemony that aims to be destructive to existing cultures, customs, languages, and traditions.
Nations are made up of different social classes, genders, and ethnic groups. One’s agency/authority is determined by one’s identity within the national culture in terms of class, gender, and ethnicity.
Some historians argue that national identity is developed in part by processes of comparison with other nations and their virtues.
It is more accurate to think of national cultures as part of a discursive device which represents difference as unity or as a single identity. National cultures are understood across divisions in class, ethnicity, and gender by means of different forms of cultural power.
Globalization
Globalization requires that rather than considering “society” as contained in the classical sense, we must consider how the term more broadly applies to the order of social life across time and space. Hall states that both the “trend towards national autonomy and the trend towards globalization are deeply rooted in modernity,” (630). While this means that globalization is not a recent phenomenon, the late 20th century saw an increase in both scope and pace of the process.
There are three potential consequences of this increase:
National identities being eroded due to the “growth of cultural homogenization and ‘the global post-modern.”
National and local identities being strengthened due to resistance to globalization.
Some national identities decline but new, hybrid identities take their place.
“The Rest” in “the West” section speaks on the development of hybrid national identities through the process of migration. After WWII ended and colonizing powers pulled out of those entanglements, formerly colonized spaces suffered from poverty, economic difficulty, governmental destabilization, along with many other problems that ultimately led to global migration on a massive scale. This has caused many national cultures and identity to undergo the process of pluralization.
“The Dialectic of Identities” concludes the piece by further explaining the three possibilities of globalization through real world events. Hall demonstrates how globalization can strengthen local identities, weaken existing national identities, and create new identities. Therefore demonstrating how globalization has “a pluralizing impact on identities, producing a variety of possibilities and new positions of identification, and making identities more positional, more political, more plural and diverse; less fixed, unified or trans-historical. However, its general impact remains contradictory” (633).
Chapter 22 De Margin and De Centre (Julien and Mercer, 1988) — previously titled “The Last ‘Special Issue’ on Race?” as an introduction to Screen
Key words: ethnicity, representation, naturalization,
Central Argument: Ethnic identities are culturally constructed and the implications of this process are important to the practices or representation in film. There needs to be an ongoing discussion of how ethnicities are constructed and a recognition of hegemonic structures that might obscure or attempt to suppress marginalized identities.Film in the 1980s underwent many changes in terms of racial relations within the industry and representation. This includes the emergence of black British film that sought to push back against the “remythification of the colonial past.” This process can also be indicative of the “articulation of ethnicity as ideology,” which speaks to ways that narrative, memory, and history construct varying as well as conflicting identities within a nation.
“The competing versions of narrative, memory and history in this conjuncture might be read symptomatically as a state of affairs that speaks of—articulates— conflicting identities within the ‘imagined community’ of the nation” ( 452)
The changes to film and perspectives on representation have shifted boundaries that differentiated developed and under-developed nations, as well as between what is regarded as culturally central and culturally marginal. With the example of black British film, this practice is becoming demarginalized and at the same moment, questions from within the culturally central practice of film actively destabilize conceptions of the canon. This contrast demonstrates the problem of ethnocentricism as well as reductionist views of ethnicity that do not address the complex process of cultural construction in the development of ethnic identity.
The authors explain the original title choice of “The Last ‘Special Issue’ on Race?” as a response to critical discourse that regards the subjects of race and ethnicity as conceptually marginal. The choice to address these subjects within the context of “special issues” reinforces the marginality or perceived otherness of the subject. Therefore, it is critical to the researchers to deconstruct and undermine the binary relation that presents the marginal as a consequence of the center.
In the context of black British film, access to resources has been identified as an obstacle for individuals who have migrated or are “minorities.” June Givannni notes how black British film can be viewed as a “minor” cinema with considerable cultural achievement considering the structural inequalities that resulted in lacking resources and opportunity. In the 1980s, social and political efforts to secure black rights to representation opened up the conversation for what black representation really meant in media, leading to the “re-articulation of the category ‘black’ as a political term of identification among diverse communities of Asian, African, and Caribbean origin” (254). Paul Gilroy has questioned whether this representation works to depict or delegate black identities.
Due to the limited number of films produced with black representation, there arises the expectation for each piece to “represent” and”speak” for black communities. Similar to the framework of “special issues,” the limitations on resources for black film production and the expectation of these works to be representative of an entire community reinforces “the perceived secondariness of that community” (455). This problem can be identified within other marginalized group’s efforts for representation, and not only does the process “typify” the community being represented, it denies subjectivity to the marginalized subject. Since the marginalized subject speaks in the majority discourse that is carried out by monologic terms, the social/cultural affect of the film as the subject can be ideologically returned to the stereotyped structure of the discourse.
Mercer and Julien bring in Hall’s theories on the “politics of representation” to consider the implications of “black” as a politically and culturally constructed category. “Once you enter the politics of the end of the essential black subject you are plunged headlong into the maelstrom of a continuously contingent, unguaranteed, political argument and debate.” Hall notes that rather than a reversal of the representation of black and white subjects, deconstructing binary relations between the center and the margin includes a rearticulation of ethnicity as cultural and political constructions.
Films made by black artists have not been fully embraced into critical discourse due to political pressures of “correctness” and because ideological moralism has been conflated with aesthetic judgment. These trends have the potential to frame black British film as the cultural avant-garde rather than destabilizing binaries, and furthermore, some have argued that the integration of black British film into the mainstream have rendered Asian experiences secondary. The trend to celebrate black cinema reduces the perceived diversity within the community. This desire to celebrate stems from efforts to correct the past, which has led to the consideration of ethnicity as belonging to the “cultural other,” therefore discourse has not addressed questions of the white ethnicity and it retains the “central” cultural position. “The burden of representation thus falls on the Other, because as Fusco argues, ‘to ignore white ethnicity is to redouble its hegemony by naturalising it” (457).
The debate, however, has shifted from multiculturalism or anti-racism to questions within the concept of ethnicity itself. Ethnicity is important because, as Hall notes, it “acknowledges the place of history, language and culture in the construction of subjectivity and identity, as well as the fact that all discourse is place, positioned, situated, and all knowledge is contextual” (458). Hall argues that representation is possible only due to contextual knowledge expressed through codes which correspond to certain periods.
The white ethnicity has secured itself within the hegemonic structure of norms or expectations, thus masking the force of the ethnicity by the elusivity of its defining features. Whiteness becomes visible in moments where its hegemony is destabilized or is under contestation. This idea is connected to the burden of representation, where black filmmakers are expected to make films about black communities and issues, whereas white filmmakers are not held to such types of expectations.
Implications of greater attention to ethnicity and representation in relation to hegemonic structures of meaning:
The complexity of ethnicity must be taken into consideration when analyzing the portrayal and recirculation of stereotypes on film. As ethnicity is constructed through historical events, language, and symbols, dominant ideologies naturalize their hegemony through representation and recodification into narratives. Generally these productions take on frameworks of the dominant ideology that portray racial or ethnic relations to be one of antagonism, accommodation, or subordination.
Scholars must be cognizant of their approach to analysis of projects on race and ethnicity to avoid the reproduction of binarisms in theory. Reaching out of set structures of analysis, research should “take account of the intersections of differences” (sexuality as a site where race and gender intersect). Furthermore, efforts to analyze class or gender issues must also consider how the different categorizations interact with each other.
“What does the black spectator identify with when his/her mirror image is structurally ascent or present only as Other?” (461). In discussing the ways that Hollywood narratives often perform a type of mythic “castration” and “visual punishment” on black males, the researchers pose this question to further evaluate the pleasure found in the “mirror phase” of spectatorship for black spectators. Examples such as The Cosby Show and Eddie Murphy’s comedy demonstrate a type of representation that portrays the minority subject within the dominant ideological discourse.
Ethnic determination takes place in discourse between the author, text, and reader. Black has meaning in avant-garde and auteurist contexts as well as in modernist differentiation in Euro-American canons. It has so many meanings and associations within different contexts that influence and are influenced by the discourse on race and ethnicity.
The conversation surrounding race and ethnicity in concerns to representation must be continued in order to confront blind spots and insufficiencies in the fields of film and cultural studies.
Questions: How do the processes of globalization and representation in media interact?
How should academics address/avoid the danger of reproducing binaries in theory and criticism?
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