Shifting Identities: Research Presentation

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Shifting Identities Research Presentation

• Teresa Chen
• teresa.chen_at_gmx.net
• www.teresachen.ch
• Z-Node
• Mexico City, August 2006

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Shifting Identities Research Presentation

• Part I Overview of Assimilation and
  Acculturation Theories
• Part II Stuart Hall on Race and Ethnicity

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Shifting Identities Research Presentation

• Part I Overview of Assimilation and
  Acculturation Theories
• Part II Stuart Hall on Race and Ethnicity

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Definitions of Assimilation

• increasing similarity or likeness (M. Marger)
• a process of boundary reduction that can occur
  when members of two or more societies or of
  smaller cultural groups meet (J. Milton Yinger)
• the processes that lead to greater homogeneity
  in society (Harold Abramson)
• the disappearance of an ethnic and racial
  distinction and the cultural and social
  differences that express it (Alba and Nee)

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Sociologist Robert E. Park (1939) Cycle of Race
Relations

• apparently progressive and irreversible
• Contact (migration and exploration)
• Competition (economic and new social
  organization)
• Accommodation
• Assimilation

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Milton M. Gordon (1964) Seven Stages of
Assimilation

• 1. Cultural or acculturation (language, religion,
  food, values, beliefs etc.)
• 2. Structural (Large scale social interactions
  among groups in institutions)
• 3. Marital (Large scale intermarriage)
• 4. Identificational (Development of sense of
  peoplehood based exclusively on host society)
• 5. Attitude receptional (absence of prejudice)
• 6. Behavioral receptional (absence of
  discrimination)
• 7. Civic assimilation (absence of power conflict)

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M. Gordon Possible Outcomes of Assimilation

• 1. Anglo-Conformity (ABCA)
• 2. Melting Pot (ABCD)
• 3. Cultural Pluralism (Salad Bowl, Cultural
  Mosiac) (ABCABC)

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Criticism of Gordon

• Static and linear
• Ethnocentrism Direction is middle-class
  Protestant Anglo-American
• No room for positive role for ethnic group

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Old vs. New Immigration

• Before 1965 (USA and other classical immigration
  countries)
• European ancestry
• Small groups, single families
• Economic growth
• Assimilative orientations
• Friendly acceptance

• After 1965 (USA) western Europe (after WWII)
• Third world, Asians
• Large groups, complete networks
• Hourglass Economy
• Ethnic orientations
• Cultural and social distances

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Contemporary Assimilation Theories

• Segmented Assimilation
• Return of Assimilation
• Transnationalism

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Segmented Assimilation Min Zhou, Alejandro
Portes (1993)

• Three possible directions (not just one)
• 1. "Classical" upward mobility
• 2. Downward mobility (integration in
  underclass)
• 3. Structural integration with preservation of
  ethnic orientations

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Return of AssimilationRichard Alba, Victor
Nee (1999)

• Evidence of acculturation with all new immigrant
  groups
• Mainstream itself becomes more diverse
• Tempo is gradual and not necessarily linear
• Despite changing conditions, long term
  perspective remains assimilation

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Transnationalism Schiller, Basch, and
Blanc-Szanton (1992)

• the process by which immigrants build social
  fields that link together their country of origin
  and their country of settlement
• Elements of Transnationalism
• Circular Migration
• Network
• Ethnic Identity
• Cultural Spaces

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Reasons for not continuing this research direction

• Each theorist committed to his/her own theory
  offering empirical evidence to support own model
  and definition of assimilation
• Attempt to categorize everything into one system
• Ethnicity and identity viewed on a purely
  sociological level
• Discussions obviously very political (e.g. what
  kinds of national policies should be put into
  place)?
• Nothing about representation
• Not inspiring for me

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Shifting Identities Research Presentation

• Part I Overview of Assimilation and
  Acculturation Theories
• Part II Stuart Hall on Race and Ethnicity

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Stuart Hall (1932 -)

• Influential Jamaican-born British cultural and
  media theorist
• A founder of Cultural Studies
• Following Gramsci, issues of hegemony and culture
• Following Althusser, argues that media appear to
  reflect reality but in fact construct it
• Proponent of reception theory with models of
  encoding and decoding of media discourses

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What is Cultural Studies?

• Studies cultural practices and relations to power
• Focus on representation and cultural differences
  based on race, class, gender

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Representation and Meaning

• It is the participants in a culture who give
  meaning to people, objects, and events. . . . It
  is by our use of things and what we say, think,
  and feel about them -- how we represent them --
  that we give them meaning.
• Stuart Hall (1997)

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"Gramscis relevance for the study of race and
ethnicity" (1986)

• Seminal essay by Stuart Hall
• Uses Gramsci's theories for a non-essentialist
  analysis of class for a similar non-essentialist
  examination of race and ethnicity

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Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)

• Italian writer, activist, Marxist political
  theorist
• Founding member and leader of Communist Party of
  Italy
• 11 years imprisoned by Mussolini regime
• Most known for his concept of hegemony

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Hegemony

• Preponderant influence or domination of haves
  over have nots
• Not total
• Not based on force
• Not a plot or conspiracy
• Based on widespread acceptance of dominant
  ideology or common sense

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Other important Gramsci concepts

• Non-reductive and non-essentialist
• Historical perspective
• Civil society (Churches, schools, cultural
  associations, clubs, the family etc.) as site of
  negotiation for cultural politics
• Role of popular culture

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"New ethnicities" (1988)

• Conference Black Film, British Cinema
• How to address black and British
• End of innocent notion of essential black
  subject
• Re-theorize the concept of difference to develop
  a non-coercive and more diverse concept of
  ethnicity

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Essential black subject

• You can no longer conduct black politics through
  the strategy of a simple set of reversals,
  putting in the place of the bad old essential
  white subject, the new essentially good black
  subject. ("New ethnicities", 1988, p. 444)
• Black is beautiful uses same essentialist
  logic all blacks are the same

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"Black" identity

• What these communities have in common, which
  they represent through taking on the 'black'
  identity, is not that they are culturally,
  ethnically, linguistically or even physically the
  same, but that they are seen and treated as 'the
  same' (ie non-white, 'other') by the dominant
  culture. (Stuart Hall, 1992, p. 308)

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Strategic essentialism

• Where would we be, as bell hooks once remarked,
  without a touch of essentialism? Or, what Gayatri
  Spivak calls strategic essentialism? The question
  is whether we are any longer in that moment,
  whether that is still a sufficient basis for the
  strategies of new interventions. ("What is this
  'black' in black popular culture?", 1992, p. 472)

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Diversity of experiences

• Diversity of black experiences and
  subject-positions
• The question of the black subject cannot be
  represented without reference to the dimensions
  of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity.
  ("New ethnicities", 1988, p. 444)

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New ethnicities

• Must re-appropriate ethnicity and separate it
  from essentialist ideas of race and nation
• We are all ethnically located
• The term ethnicity acknowledges the place of
  history, language and culture in the construction
  of subjectivity and identity, as well as the fact
  that all discourse is placed, positioned,
  situated, and all knowledge is contextual. ("New
  ethnicities", 1988, p. 446)
• Representation should engage rather than suppress
  difference

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New ethnicities (cont.)

• The desire to correct omissions of the past
  ... has led to a one-sided fixation with
  ethnicity as something that belongs to the
  Other alone...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. ("Introduction
  to Stuart Hall", 1988, p. 9)

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"Race, the Floating Signifier"

• lecture that Stuart Hall delivered at Goldsmith's
  College in London
• video clip Race the Floating Signifier

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"Race, the Floating Signifier"

• Classification and power work together,
  classification maintains order
• Race is a signifier which can be linked to other
  signifiers in representation
• Meaning is relational and subject to redefinition
  in different cultures and moments
• How we organize those differences into systems of
  meaning to make world intelligible

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Discourse of race

• Problematic term because of focus on the physical
  body
• Utilises symbolic markers to make a socially
  constructed difference into a natural one
• Organizing discursive category around which a
  system of power has been built
• Emerged in a particular social and historical
  context
• Not a scientific category, but a political and
  social construct
• Idea that genetic differences can be read off
  from visible physical signifiers of the body

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Role of science in racial discourse

• Science is invoked as sanction, as the guarantee
  of truth
• Historically religion, then anthropology, now
  science
• Race makes nature and culture correspond to one
  another
• Search for guarantee which addicts us to the
  preservation of the biological trace

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Struggle over meanings of ethnicity current
discussions

• Dynamic state of diversity and hybridity
  
• Acknowledges past, but transformed to present
• Blurring and mixing of cultures
• Experiential differences based on gender, class,
  sexuality

• Possible essentialist re-appropriation in
  defining cultural purity
• Can be used as term of exclusion
• Who has power to define boundaries
• Used as marginalizing tactic "ethnic minorities"

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Linda Leung's Virtual Ethnicity (2005)

• Leung bases much of her discussion on race and
  ethnicity as well as her analysis of media and
  representation on Stuart Hall

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Next Research Direction

• Exploring Postcolonial Discussions about
  Representations of the Other and Cultural
  Hybridity