Feminism/Postmodernism edited and introduced by Linda Nicholson
Intro
From
the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, feminist theory reflected the viewpoint of
white middle-class women of N America and western Europe. The voices of many
social groups were silenced. Feminists replicated the problematic
universalizing practice of the particular groups of thought to which their works
was most closely allied. Academic scholarship failed to see the embeddedness of
their own assumptions in a specific historical context. They sought basic
ordering principles-like God’s in the past.
Because
feminist scholarship had so much opposition, the scholars challenged the
universalizing notion itself, claiming that all scholarship reflected the
perspectives and ideas of its creators. (=No neutrality.)
Postmodernism
argues that “a God’s eye view” must be situated within the context of
modernity. It criticizes diverse elements such as the modern sense of self and
subjectivity, the idea of history as linear and evolutionary, and the
separation of art and mass culture.
p.3
Beyond historicist claims about “situatedness” of human thought within culture
they go to the very criteria by which claims for knowledge are legitimized. Not
only the questions are effected but also the answers.
Postmodern critique has come to focus on philosophy and the very idea of
a possible theory of knowledge, justice, or beauty. The pursuit itself of such
theories rests upon the modernist conception of a transcendent reason able to
separate itself from the body and the historical time and place.
It exposes political agenda, Western supremacy, the legitimacy of science to tell us
how to use and view our bodies, and separation art/mass culture.These ideas are overlapping with previous feminist positions.
Jane
Flask: Feminist theory dealing with the notions of the self, knowledge and truth
belongs more with postmodernism than with the enlightenment. It shouldn’t use
one aspect of women experience (giving birth etc) as an underlying factor in
human oppression. It’s not inclusive
enough-so it’s against the political objective. (This idea is related to intersectionality.)
Politics of Location
Sandra
hardig and…Are worried that eliminating cross-cultural notions will take the
basis from under the concept of gender.
Susan
Bordo: theorizing needs stopping points and gender is one of them. (Post
modernism is too relativist without it).
Postmodernism may affect the same kind of the historical erasure of the body, and thus erases the (beneficial) positioning in space and time that was present in modernism.
In the Cartesian world there is no place for the body, since the body, by situating a perspective, prevents an all-encompssing perspective.
Postmodernism may affect the same kind of the historical erasure of the body, and thus erases the (beneficial) positioning in space and time that was present in modernism.
In the Cartesian world there is no place for the body, since the body, by situating a perspective, prevents an all-encompssing perspective.
The
dance in postmodern writing, description of the body as fragmented and changing
and invites confusion of boundaries.
Linda Nicholson:
Metaphor-the body has boundaries-just like theories.
The
question:
Are
coherent theory and politics possible within a postmodern position?
Yes-if
the theory is well-constructed.
Probyn:
We always negotiate our
locales-working to make sense and articulate both place and event. Women are
never fixed within locale. (Localization, unlike locale, is physical.)
We may live in patriarchy but the struggle to rearticulate locale continues at different levels and in different ways.
We may live in patriarchy but the struggle to rearticulate locale continues at different levels and in different ways.
10 Probyn and Bordo:
Mere abstract invocation of
difference is a political act that can be conservative.
Locale is a process, negotiable, and it has its
specific characteristics.
Political implications of postmodernism
11 Donna Haraway-Cyborg-a phenomenon that violates certain previously
established distinctions, particularly between humans and animals, humans and
machines, minds and bodies, materialism and idealism. It rejects prior hopes of
unity and wholeness as expressed ideas such as unalienated labor, pre-Oedipal
symbiosis, community as family and female as goddess.
It reveals a heightened consciousness
of boundaries, whose dark side is individualism.
Prior means of control and representation give way to
new forms. Dark aspects but a freeing aspect too. Liberatory-from certain
definitions. Women of color-identity constructed out of recognition of
otherness and difference. 12.
Domination is not based on normalization and
medialization, but through networking, communication, redesign of stress
management. WE need politics that embrace the multiple and contradictory
aspects of our identities.
Iris Young
Community-individualism: not as opposed as people used
to think: both may negate difference. Liberal individualism: self-sufficient,
not defined by anything or anyone other than itself. Community denies
difference by positing fusion rather than separation as the social ideal.
Discourages respect for those with whom they don’t identify.
Gender – the concept helps to understand human thought
and behavior, which is a feminist accomplishment. It represents a refining of
“humanity.”
15 Judith Butler-Gender trouble, feminist
theory and psychoanalytic discourse
A central basis of the essay is that
gender identity is a regulative ideal which fundamentally assists the norm of
heterosexuality. Notions of gender identity are not the point of our liberation
but the grounding of our continued oppression.
(More later.)
(More later.)
INTERSECTIONALITY
Intersectionality as buzzwords/ Kathy
Davis
The concept:
The interaction of multiple
identities and experiences of exclusion and subordination.
It’s an important contribution for
feminist scholarship.
It has generated uncertainties, confusion and debate.
It has generated uncertainties, confusion and debate.
Davis claims based on Murray Davis
that the concept's ambiguity and open-endedness are the secrets for its success,
and it makes it good feminist theory.
68 Intersectionality refers to he
interaction between gender, race, class and other categories of difference in
individual lives, social practices, institutional arrangements and cultural
ideologies, and the outcomes of these interactions in terms of power.
The term was coined by Kimberlé
Crenshaw in 1989 to address the exclusion of experiences and struggles of women of
color both from feminist and anti-racist discourse.
A theory succeeds when it appeals to a concern
regarded as fundamental by many scholars in a way that’s not only unexpected
but inherently mystifying and open-ended.
70 This concept addresses the question of
difference among women.
Matsuda 1991 :1189: suggested a
method of asking “the other question”-when something looks sexist asks where’s
the patriarchy in it/the heterosexism/class etc. (Already a cliché according to
Davis.)
Intersectionality is related to black feminism and to
postmodern feminist theory, and also to queer theory and diaspora studies.
History of it-p.73
What’s the TWIST?
It offered a novel link between
critical feminist theory on the effect of sexism, class and racism and a
critical methodology, inspired by postmodern feminist theory, bringing them
together in new ways. It solved the
problems each group saw in the theory of the other, overcoming these
incompatibilities, thus offering a new platform of collaboration.
Basic doubts:
Which and how many categories should
be included?
Won’t the endless proliferation of
difference be after all the weak spot?
Do we need to think across categories
or focus on sites where multiple identities are performed?
What’s the scope of the analysis?
Identity or detriment of social structure? Connection? Mobilization? Uncovering
vulnerabilities?
It bridges between theorists and
generalists.
77 Butler and Joan Scott- feminist
theory needs to reach out to political objectives beyond these to which it was
constrained.
Important notes-p. 79 with
references.
81-Butler: categories: gender, race, ethnicity,
class, sexuality, able-bodiedness.
Luz Helma 2002: Categories: gender, sexuality,
race or skin color, ethnicity, national belonging, class, culture, religion,
able-bodiedness, age, sedentariness, property ownership, location (geographical),
status in term of tradition and development.
The Politics of
Postmodernism/ Linda Hutcheon 1990
Any attempt to define postmodernism
would aim to say what it is and what it is not.
A phenomenon whose mode is
contradictory and political. It takes the form of self-conscious,
self-contradictory and self-undermining statement. A commitment to duplicity.
It installs and reinforces while also subverting conventions.
Doxa=force of nature
Barthes: Doxa is public opinion or
the voice of nature.
Foucault-power is not something unitary that
exists outside us. It is spread across all fields of force.
Derrida-textuality and defferal
Layotard-intellectual mastery and its limits.
24-no unitary narrative but multiple ones.
Jameson 24-2.
Jameson 24-2.
Luiz Althusser-Marxist-notion of
ideology both as a system representation and a necessary part of every
social totality. 1969:231-2
By using and abusing general
conventions and forms of representation postmodern art de-naturalizes them.
Postmodern critics acknowledge that the criticism is from their perspective.
Facts are events to which we have
given meanings. (57)
We cannot avoid the past and escape
it but need to access it through traces, come to terms and confront. (58) The
history of representation.
About Narrative-p. 66
Postmodern theory doesn’t have an
agency to cause change but it does question and does a de-naturalizing
critique. It works to de-doxify.
In Hutcheon’s book the analysis focuses mainly on the ideological values and interests that inform any representation.
(Intersection): Nigel Wlliams’s 1985’s Star
Turn (fiction) does not stop at the analysis of class difference: race is shown to enter
into complicity with class on both formal and thematic levels of the novel. 5.
Postmodern theory and practice
suggests that everything has always been culturally- mediated by
representations.
No realism
transparency.
No modern reflexive response
(Modernism-rationality, history as
linear development, art vs mass culture centered subjectivity.)
p. 141 Postmodernism and feminisms
Feminisms-awkward and accurate. A
multiplicity of POV’s that possess at least some common denomination when it
comes to the notion of the politics of representation.
Politicizing desire-fear of disease,
fetishization of fitness led to recessionary erotic economy. Problematizing the
body and its sexuality-and the erotic is a part of it.
The body cannot escape
representation-here: the feminist challenge to a patriarchal underpinning of
cultural practices.
Gendered art. (142-3)
Postmodernism is politically
ambivalent for its doubly coded-complicitous with and contesting of the
cultural dominants by which it operates. Feminisms have distinct,
unambiguous political agenda of resistance. Feminisms radicalize the postmodern sense
of difference and de-naturalized the traditional separation of private and
public, personal and political. Both theories are interested in
representations.
Sexual difference is continually
reproduced.
Feminisms focus on politics of
representation of knowledge, therefore power.
They made postmodernism think about the
female body and its desires, and how its socially constructed through
representation.
Visual or linguistic-it’s always
systems of meanings operating with socially produced and historically
conditioned codes.
144 Both theories de-doxify the
notion of desire as individual fulfillment.
Desire is a value of
poststructuralist theory. It is also a norm of consumer society. (Marxists deconstruct it.)
145 Angela Carter’s Black Venus-Jeanne
Duval denied Bauldaire his advances and wasn’t treated kindly by biographers
though he had syphilis. Also he might have wanted more desire than
consummation while she wanted sex. (paradox?) Her not understanding his poetry-occured simply due to language + he forced it on her. Manet painted her without sympathy. The woman is just a mediating
sign for the male. Carter codes and re-codes the colonized territory of the
female body. Erotic masculine fantasy Vs female experience…For the West Indian
woman the island paradise he imagines is “glaring yellow shore and harsh blue
skies.” (Very interesting.) Carter allows her to have back her history.
Feminist theory and postmodernism
influence one another in regard to change. Parody is postmodern strategy.
Problematizing gendered
representations.
##
POSTMODERN THESAUROUS
Discourse, deconstruction,
fragmentation, representation, subversion, questioning the
center/universality/nature/truth, context, corporeality, language, system of
meaning, resignification, power relations, counter-discourse, marginal, resistance, subversion,
access to knowledge and power, the investigation of social, cultural and
historical production of meaning, ambivalence.
The Empire Writes Back
Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature is a 1989 Bill Ashcroft, eds. Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin
Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature is a 1989 Bill Ashcroft, eds. Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin
Bill Ashcroft: Re-placing
Theory: post-colonial writing and literary theory (chapter 5)
Post-colonial literature and
postmodernism
Post-colonial writing and literary
theory intersect with the movement of poststructuralism, and Marxist and
feminist criticism among others. There is an undeniable interaction. However,
the appropriation of these recent European theories introduces the danger of going
back to internationalist paradigms.
Literature in the 20th century is closely determined by its relation to imperialism. The best theory to analyse it is the post-colonial.
Literature in the 20th century is closely determined by its relation to imperialism. The best theory to analyse it is the post-colonial.
Modernism/colonial experience
Through modernism Europeans realized
that their culture was one amongst the plurality of ways of conceiving reality
and organizing its representation in art and social practice. (156)
African art, artefacts that
arrived in Europe during the oppression generated interest and appeared in
literature (D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow).
19th century: “primitive”
“savage”
20th: re-discovery
This art called into question the
European basic assumptions of aesthetics.
Slavic culture sought its roots and
with this it questioned basic ideas of culture.
158 The African was unique, on the
margin, positive and negative force in the European conception of itself. It was considered
a prior stage, the dark side of the European (Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.)
Yeats: "After us the savage God." (The
true face of the savage, a threat.)
World War I dismantled the belief in
civilization. A tendency toward postmodernism to deconstruct the culture and
discover the “Other” in the form of non-European culture in order to produce
and reproduce European art. There is an effect on BOTH cultures.
Indian and Chinese cultures were more
respected than African.
Hegel: defines the African continent as being
“outside history”. It could serve as a mirror, as a negative of the positive,
the black Other to the white norm, demonic opposite.
Two main views: either horror or a liberating form from “civilization.”
Two main views: either horror or a liberating form from “civilization.”
(Rimbaud—Nicholson-his relations to
Africa)
“Discovery” of Africa by Europe heads to
rediscovery and self-doubt.
New criticism and post-colonial
theory
Influential modern movement called
the New Criticism: a product of the post-colonial USA: their intent to
establish a literary canon against the English traditional supremacy.
They begin again with each work.
It emphasizes the individual work.
It gave validity to work previously denied, including African.
It emphasizes the individual work.
It gave validity to work previously denied, including African.
The negative aspect: assimilation of
post-colonial writers, assumption of objectivity, unseen in their context,
unseen as innovative and subversive of European values.
Thanks to it, post-colonial criticism
began to investigate theoretical problems in a different model of literature.
Comparative study reveals postcolonial characteristics beyond national ones.
Postmodernism and post-colonial
Exposing formations as
culture-specific.
Foucault: casts doubts on objective
historical consciousness: the fictive nature of historical reconstructions.
Despite the recognition of “otherness” structuralism and poststructuralism
sometimes operate like Western historicizing consciousness to appropriate and
control the Other.
Rather than seeing poststructuralism and
postmodern as decentering forces, they reaffirm certain lit as subversive thus
allowing USA to recapture their own culture through Eurocentric assumptions.
USA is postcolonial too, which means both appropriation and subversion.
USA is postcolonial too, which means both appropriation and subversion.
164 Intellectuals want to define themselves
against their colonial past and against international postmodernism. In general, however, USA tends more toward postmodernism than toward post-colonial.
Post coloniality and contemporary
European theory
Jen Francois Layotard 1979: narrative is
an alternative mode of knowledge to science.
(Less text and more context.)
In oral societies narrative dominates
and it’s an integral part of society, not a category above
Science classifies narrative as
savage. This is the beginning of imperialism.
For him postmodernism will articulate
a weave of practices grounded in the particular and local.
Post coloniality and discourse theory
167 A discourse in the Foucauldian
sense is best understood as a system of possibility for knowledge.
Edward Said proposes “orientalism” as
the discourse which constituted the Orient in the consciousness of the West.
“such locales, regions, geographical sectors as “Orient” and “Occident” are
man-made.” (1978:5)
To him, identity is constructed based
on the difference (King or Stewart Hall won’t agree?) distancing from the
center and self-assertion.
Foucault: The post-colonial discourse is
grounded in a struggle for power over truth, the power focused in the control
of metropolitan language. What rules allows the construction of maps.
Homi Bhabha: this struggle may mimic
the struggle for colonial dominance. Solution-only in a theory that embraces
difference and absence as material signs of power and not of negation, of
freedom and not subjugation, creativity and not limitation.
Post-colonial theory can appropriate
what it wants from the European system discoursive formations overlap and
intersperse.
Counter Discourse-Richard Terdiman
1986-recognizes in language the
material site of text’s social production.
Against the view of Saussure that
language systems can be split into system of meanings and nonsystematic.
Agrees with Foucault that culture is
a field of struggle.
169 Discourse comes into practice in
a structure of counter-discursive practices. The conflict is not a
contamination of the language but a defining function in power relations.
Post coloniality and theories of
ideology
The works of Marxist
critics-Althusser, Michel Pecheux, and Frederic Jameson is relevant to the
problematic relation between language and literary practice addressed by
post-colonial critics. (Bhabha 1984, 257) and to the problem of building an
identity within the self-Other imposed by imperialism.
=creation of subjects through
ideological language and practices. (Foucault).
Pecheux: 1.The good
subject-identification, consent
2.The bad subject-counter
identification-refuses the image offered and turns it back on the offerrer. “What you call the oil crisis.”
3. "Dis-indification”-recognizes that ideologies are transformable-working
of the subject form and not just its abolition.
The meaning of words change according
to who utters them.
Jameson-literature is informed by the
political unconscious. Reading=unmasking.
Led to - Postcolonial narrative as
reconstruction.
172 Jameson: The text transforms the
historical subtext which it draws up into itself=a symbolic act, relationships
between authors and their societies,
A book is more influential than the experience itself. (Jameson or Bhabha?)
A book is more influential than the experience itself. (Jameson or Bhabha?)
Reciprocity between Other and self.
The identity of the other doesn’t emerge only from ideology or resistance to
ideology.
In post-colonial society there’s a hierarchy and set relationships.
In post-colonial society there’s a hierarchy and set relationships.
European postmodernism labels the
world-again constructing peripheral and central areas.
…
174 Feminism and post colonialism
In many societies women have regulated
the position of the “Other”.
The same concepts: language, voice,
silence, mimicry, other, difference. (subaltern-Gayatri Spivak 1981)
Feminist critics reject the
patriarchal bases of literary theory and criticism, subvert them and show their
relativity.
Feminist and post-colonial discourses
both seek to reinstate the marginalized in the face of the dominant.
They question, unmask. No
inversion. Rereading. Subversion of
patriarchal literary forms.
Binarism-if we lose sight of it we
may lose the problem of racism among others.
The projects of both discourses are
directed toward the future. Intersections between the two.
177 The Politics of
Theory-Decolonizing colonialist discourse
Through appropriation of
poststructuralist theory critics offer ways to dismantle colonialism’s
signifying system and exposing the silencing and oppression
Gayatri Spivak: Colonized women-a double
subjection. There’s no space from where the subaltern (sexed) subject can
speak.” (1985:122) -extended to the whole colonial world. There’s an absent of
text that can answer epistemic violence.
Homi Bhabha disagrees: the colonized
is indeed constructed within a disabling master discourse. Colonial discourse of
‘reform, regulation and discipline’ appropriates bad mimicry and the Other. But
the subaltern has in fact spoken and thus, properly symptomatic readings can
recover the native voice.
“Parry invokes Fanon as classic and
alternative model whose position she characterizes as constructing a
politically conscious unified Self…” She rejects both Spivak and Bhabha’s work
as still connected to the same signifying systems, but her main complaint
is their political ineffectiveness. (Total independence from the past
despite Fanon’s int. Ascroft: she doesn’t speak about more complex colonialism-less
military…180)
Ashcroft: Critical and creative
post-colonial texts are hybrid. There are multiple forms of
post-colonial difference-so hybridity will continue.
181 Post-colonial reconstructions:
literature
Different styles: for instance: inherited
from traditional, oral literature. Not linear, goes in swoops, reiterates,
digresses off a new sudden idea etc. (Rushdie uses such narrative structure in
Midnight Children.)
Cross-cultural literature.
Combination of English styles with oral etc.
Reading without essentialism.
Return to traditional pre-colonial
(indigenous) forms – brings a renewed sense of identity and self-value.
Meaning-how to read: three pillars: author,
reader, text.
The text is the event. The participants
may be absent.
Value-like meaning is “not an intrinsic
quality but a relation between the object and certain criteria brought to bear
upon it.” 187
Post-colonial as reading strategy
(189)
“A canon is not a body of texts per
se, but rather a set of reading practices (the enactment of innumerable
individual and community assumptions, for example, about genre, about
literature, and even about writing.”
A range of ways of engaging with
texts from the canon have emerged…
Reading strategies, reconstruction,
uncovering silences, showing the repression of the economic basis to civilized
practices. Seeing the context, seeing its effects, revisioning in the light of
post-colonial discursive practices. Subversive accounts.
Post-coloniality seen as a reading strategy
and not as texts.
STUART HALL
From the Net-Signification is the
meaning a culture gives.
Representation-comes through the
language that gives meaning and signifies. The production of meaning is not
fixed.
The media is one of the most powerful
circulators on meaning.
Ideology is an attempt to fix
meaning.
Stereotypes-an attempt to fix
meanings as well.
What you see/don’t see/expect or
don’t expect to see in images. The absence of information subverts out expectations.
Making meaning-interpreting
(contextually what is represented.
Stuart Hall: 1932-2014
(Thinking Allowed, 12/2/14) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g70bqF_1xAo
Born in Jamaica in 1932. His words: He was the
blackest of the brothers. In Jamaica, your shade of color is the most important
question. His mother never wanted to be Jamaican but “properly English.” Got to
Oxford and realized he could not be “a part of it.” You can’t learn
“Englishness”each learned text is a part of life. Became interested in contemporary
cultural studies.
There is no authentic culture-culture
is mixed and blended. Mass culture
coming from the US was also a significant place of culture-a lot of
information. (Worked with Richard Hoggart.)
Looking at struggle and contestation.
Class politics can’t be accepted.
Came with coding and encoding, decoding images on TV-the hegemonic power transmits messages to people about race and class.
Decoded in order to look at things differently.
In the end young people are going to be delivered into society as productive members but they can question.
Class politics can’t be accepted.
Came with coding and encoding, decoding images on TV-the hegemonic power transmits messages to people about race and class.
Decoded in order to look at things differently.
In the end young people are going to be delivered into society as productive members but they can question.
Black politics-he wasn’t engaged in
black community activity in the regular sense.
The community found very little space especially in the academy. He focused on issues of identity and representation-realized there’s an opening (Caspar-resistance) resisting what the mainstream tried to impose upon people.
The community found very little space especially in the academy. He focused on issues of identity and representation-realized there’s an opening (Caspar-resistance) resisting what the mainstream tried to impose upon people.
His disillusionment-a lot of rubbish
mascaraed as culture. Didn’t want to interpret for others-they sought a new
paternal role. He’s only interested in what can change the world. He is involved with cultural studies only in order to act socially, resistance -and not caricature,
a generic study.
Lola Young: He kept negotiating different
spaces and ideas regarding black people. Always in a dialogue with ideas and terms
such as multi-culturalism (he rejected it because it became “harmony” fiction).
He asked what kind of differences matter and how they are made to matter or to seem to matter in relation to race and ethnicity.
He asked what kind of differences matter and how they are made to matter or to seem to matter in relation to race and ethnicity.
In the left people weren’t discussing
race, gender et-as if asserting the classes everything else will fall into
place, but he questioned everything.
Stuart Hall (Free
Thinking, 13/12/04)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSCjcyqIL50
His family orientation was toward
England-critical of the Caribbean. A generation that decided they had to do
something and get out-in order to go back. Didn’t have a moment of decision not
to go back. He’s a part of the diaspora. It’s how life turn out. Discovered his
Careabeanism only in London. Discovered who he was in West Indian. His mother
said-I hope they don’t think you’re an immigrant-but that’s what he was. She
said-black-and he realized he was black indeed. (It appears in his lecture). Identity
doesn’t grow inside you-it’s a response from something of the outside and something
of the inside.
Was interested in Henry James: very
in-between: not American or European, wanting to go back but never would.
Multiculturalism (In Our
Time, 13/5/99)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzarDosXIHM
Hall’s books (then) concentrated on
cultural identity, race and ethnicity.
"The divisions between people
provoked and exploited because of differences in religion, culture, nationality
and race seem to beset the planet the more information technology promises globalization.
A recent estimate put the figure of people living in a country other than the
one of their birth at 80 million. Does this mean that, amongst these eighty
million people, their country of origin, their sense of self, and their cultural
history are no longer as significant as they were? And how are those eighty
million people and their descendants accommodated in the country to which they
have moved - do their lives exemplify the success of multicultural policies or
are they subject to racism? Is it possible to define how attitudes to race and
identity have changed this century, given its vast shifts of population,
cultures and peoples?”
Stuart Hall: Immigration. Problems of both England
and the immigrants. Questions of co-existing. The English expected them to go
home-Hall just chose not to. Questions: “Who are you? Where do you belong?
Knows welll both cultures.
The dream of both sides that full
assimilation will happen-that after a generation or two the immigrants will
totally mingle clearly fell. No side actually wanted it.
Multi-cultural: make a common life together. Multi-cultural drift-many ethnic backgrounds-it just happened.
Multi-cultural: make a common life together. Multi-cultural drift-many ethnic backgrounds-it just happened.
Dr Avtar Brah (passed through many immigrations
Uganda-Pakistan -US-England (?))
Assimilation into what? The dominant culture talks about it, but when outsiders enter, the insiders change too.
Many kinds of Orientalisms have been directed at her, but in England she was soon called “Paki”. Subjected to discrimination in direct and indirect forms.
The British never conceived themselves as a group of ethnicities. USA yes.
Colonial relations in Britain make it different. Self-conception of themselves-USA make "Americans" out of many ethnicities.
Both England and USA were slave societies but the British colonial is different. It constructs relationships in a different way.
In the US there’s an intimacy between blacks and whites. England constructed it as if the relations started in 1954-as if they didn’t know where the colored people came for. Reconstructed as if there isn’t a history-but the history comes back.
Assimilation into what? The dominant culture talks about it, but when outsiders enter, the insiders change too.
Many kinds of Orientalisms have been directed at her, but in England she was soon called “Paki”. Subjected to discrimination in direct and indirect forms.
The British never conceived themselves as a group of ethnicities. USA yes.
Colonial relations in Britain make it different. Self-conception of themselves-USA make "Americans" out of many ethnicities.
Both England and USA were slave societies but the British colonial is different. It constructs relationships in a different way.
In the US there’s an intimacy between blacks and whites. England constructed it as if the relations started in 1954-as if they didn’t know where the colored people came for. Reconstructed as if there isn’t a history-but the history comes back.
Ethnicity-constructing a sense
of belonging for a group, where the boundaries are shifting. -The question is always there: how a group
construct itself differently.
20 minute Melvyn Bragg (interviewer)-Jews
feel obliged both to England and Israel and contribute to both.
Hall-the Jews are almost
assimilated-or appear to be so, unlike African-American. This is because of the
crisis of what is the British identity. We need public value that valorizes difference.
Brah: not only ethnicity but also
class. Jewishness-which group? Black Jews? Then it’s not Jewish per-se. We
cannot forget the color. There’s a European Jew-a different debate.
Hall: race – we think about genetic
differences but need to be thinking about negotiating it socially.
Brah: Communality of experience-like
football team unite a group: it creates belonging. But also there’s the
construction of race-where you are talked about as different and outsider.
Stigmatism and pragmatism. In a
global world maybe we should start with small local groups.
Hall: There are attachments, but culture is moving, changing, influencing and is influenced, and locality has a response to the globe and
immigration. A multicultural being comes out of this context.
Thomas King
Thomas King was born in Sacramento,
California in 1943. His father is Cherokee and his mother is of Greek descent.
The Truth About Stories - Thomas King
- Lecture 1
NEW PERSPECTIVES ON GLORIA
E. ANZALDÚA
Shifting Worlds, una entrada /
AnaLouise Keating
Nepantla means in Nahuatl “in between
space”, indicating temporal, spatial, psychic, and/or intellectual point(s) of
liminality and potential transformation. “During nepantla individual and
collective self-conceptions and worldviews are shattered.”
Apparently fixed categories based on gender/ethnicity/race/sexuality/economic status/health/religion/different combinations of these and others become more permeable and begin to break down.
Apparently fixed categories based on gender/ethnicity/race/sexuality/economic status/health/religion/different combinations of these and others become more permeable and begin to break down.
Nepantleras: mediators,
in-betweeners, those who facilitate passage between worlds (“(Un)natural
bridges” 1)
2-her life as nepntlera
It shapes her work and life. She challenges
and deepens through words.
A great citation p.2-“I am a
wind-swayed bridge…” (205)
Multiple allegiances and worlds. She rejects the need for unitary identities and exclusive alliances. All is based
on affinities-“new tribalism”.
She moves between ad among worlds, like her writing.
She moves between ad among worlds, like her writing.
(Good for characters’ analysis.)
She says that Borderland is a part of a much larger project.
Autohistoria=autofiction,
self-awareness employed in the service of social-justice work.
Nepantla…pathway to change-citation
p.6
Intersecting selves p.7-we are the
other, the other is us…alliance between us and others.
Expanding the vision p.8 knowledge
shares sense of affinity…
Potentially transformative elements of the theories of mestiza consciousness and others.
Potentially transformative elements of the theories of mestiza consciousness and others.
New tribalism-the queer group- “the
people that don’t belong anywhere, not in the dominant world nor completely
within our respective cultures.”
