Contesting

1
Contesting Race, Culture, and Identity

• Is Race an Essential Category?
• Race, Culture and Identity as Social
  Constructs
• - the origins of race theory
• - cultural performance
• - representing the Other the social
• imaginary

2
Toni Morrison

• I have never lived, nor has any of us lived in a
  world in which race did not matter. Such a
  world, one free of racial hierarchy, is usually
  imagined or described as dreamscape (Home 3).

3
Frantz Fanon

• My body was given back to me sprawled out,
  distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that
  white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the
  Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is
  ugly look a nigger, its cold, the nigger is
  shivering . . . . The handsome little boy is
  trembling becausehe thinks the nigger is
  quivering with rage, the little boy throws
  himself into his mothers arms Mama, the
  niggers going to eat me up (Black Skin, White
  Masks 114).

4
Frantz Fanon

• From the opposite end of the white world a
• Magical Negro culture was hailing me. Negro
• sculpture! I began to flush with pride. Was this
• our salvation?
• . . . . So here we have the Negro rehabilitated,
• standing before the bar, ruling the world with
• his intuition, the Negro recognized, set on his
• feet again, sought after, taken up . . . .
  (Black
• Skin, White Masks 127).

5
Carolus Linnaeus (1735)

• Americanus reddish, choleric, and erect hair
  black, straight, thick wide nostrils, scanty
  beard obstinate, merry, free paints himself
  with fine red lines regulated by customs.
• Asiaticus sallow, melancholy, stiff hair black
  dark eyes severe, haughty, avaricious covered
  with loose garments ruled by opinions.
• Africanus black, phlegmatic, relaxed hair
  black, frizzled skin silky nose flat lips
  tumid women without shame, they lactate
  profusely crafty, indolent, negligent anoints
  himself with grease governed by caprice.
• Europeaeus white, sanguine, muscular hair long,
  flowing eyes blue gentle, acute, inventive
  covers himself with close vestments governed by
  laws (Smedley 164).

6
Johann Blumenbach

1. Caucasian/Caucasoid white race, European
2. Mongolian/Mongoloid yellow race, Oriental
3. Ethiopian black race, African
4. American red race, American Indian
5. Malay brown race, Asiatic

7
Manning Marable

• Race is first and foremost an unequal
• relationship between social aggregates,
• characterized by dominant and
• subordinate forms of social interaction,
• and reinforced by the intricate patterns
• of public discourse, power, ownership
• and privilege within the economic,
• social and political institutions of
• society (Beyond Black and White186).

8
Hershini Bhana Young

• To be black is to have accrued a
• subjectivity haunted by the spectral traces
• of a social, political and ideological history.
• Blackness is a historically and culturally
• specific embodied discourse constituted in
• and through a discursive tradition
• mobilized by the reconstituted figure of
• Africa and brutal systems of oppression
• such as slavery and imperialism (Haunted
• Capital 25)

9
Stuart Hall

• Identity is the narrative, the stories
• which cultures tell themselves
• about who they are and where they
• came from (Negotiating
• Caribbean Identity).

10
Stuart Hall

• identity is not only a story, a narrative which
  we tell ourselves about ourselves, it is stories
  which change with historical circumstances. And
  identity shifts with the way in which we think
  and hear them and experience them. Far from only
  coming from the still small point of truth inside
  us, identities actually come from outside, they
  are the way in which we are recognized and then
  come to step into the place of the recognitions
  which others give us. Without the others there
  is no self, there is no self-recognition
  (Negotiating Caribbean Identity 8).

11
Michel Foucault (1977)

• the normalizing gaze is a
• surveillance that makes it possible to
• qualify, to classify and to punish. It
• Establishes over individuals a visibility
• Through which one differentiates and
• Judges them (Discipline and Punish
• 25).

12
Defining the Social Imaginary

•  The social imaginary is a discursive space in
  which communities are already constructed,
  imagined, positioned and created by hegemonic
  discourses and dominant groups.

13
Frantz Fanon

• . . . The white man . . . had woven me out of a
  thousand details, anecdotes, stories. I thought
  that what I had in hand was to construct a
  physiological self, to balance space, to localize
  sensations, and here I was called on for more.
  Look, a Negro!(Black Skin 111)
• And so it is not I who make a meaning for
• myself, but it is the meaning that was already
• there, pre-existing, waiting for me (Black
• Skin 134).

14
Renuka Sooknanan

• The end result of a sedimentary knowing of Black
  
• community is a homogenous, transparent identity
• category, which offers entrenched and inflexible
  
• boundaries. Black community becomes a finished
• product in that it is thought in advance, and to
  call on
• something called the Black community is to
  perform a
• set of erasures. Among the disappearing actsis
  the
• Multiplicity and plurality of ethnic
  representations
• (Politics of Essentialism 148).

15
Stuart Hall

• Far from being eternally fixed in some
  essentialised past, they are subject to the
  continuous play of history, culture and power.
  Far from being grounded in a mere recovery of
  the past, which is waiting to be found, and
  which, when found, will secure our sense of
  ourselves into eternity, identities are the names
  we give to the different ways we are positioned
  by, and position ourselves within, the narratives
  of the past (Cultural Identity and Diaspora
  225).

16
Visible Minority Groups 2001 Counts, for Canada

• Canada
• Total Population
• 29,639,030
• Visible Minorities
• 3,983,845 (13 of population)
• Chinese
• 1,029,395 (25 of minorities)
• South Asians
• 917,070 (23 of minorities)
• Blacks
• 662,215 (17 of minorities)

• Toronto
• Total Population
• 4,647,960
• Visible Minorities
• 1,712,530 (37 of population)
• Chinese
• 409,530 (24 of minorities)
• South Asian
• 473,805 (28 of minorities)
• Blacks
• 310,495 (18 of minorities)

17
Manning Marable

• Our ability to transcend racial chauvinism
• and inter-ethnic hatred and the old definitions
• of race, to recognize the class
• commonalities and joint social-justice
• interests of all groups in the restructuring of
• this nations economy and social order, will
• be key to constructing a nonracist
• democracy, transcending ancient walls of
• white violence, corporate power and class
• (Beyond Black and White 201).