Expanding the ‘social’ in ‘social identity’

Not enough consideration has been given by some texts in the field of ‘social identity’ to the task of defining society, which is, after all, the notion behind the first half of the field's name. For these particular texts, one very basic definition – ‘society is human interaction’ – is left to stand alone. This paper does not challenge the importance of any of the attempts by these texts (or by any other texts in the field) to describe and analyze the plethora of identities being promoted, invented, or rejected around the world. Rather, it focuses on only the ‘social’ component in ‘social identity’, arguing that the field as a whole would be stronger if all its contributors, or at least the great majority of them, granted this component a more important role. In particular, the paper offers the field three definitional possibilities it might usefully add to the ‘society is human interaction’ definition.     

Gypsy students in the UK: the impact of ‘mobility’ on education

This paper argues that Gypsy students in primary and secondary education in the UK are marginalised because of ambiguous understandings of their ‘mobility’. Drawing on research conducted on the south coast of England, it examines Gypsy families’ experiences of education. Despite often describing their identity in relation to travelling or mobility, few families’ lifestyles were characterised by actual movement or nomadism. Teachers and educationalists meanwhile cite the need to deliver a ‘mobile’ rather than a ‘sedentary’ education for Gypsy students. The Department for Communities and Local Government recently defined Gypsy ethnicity in direct relation to a nomadic lifestyle. This is problematic as the association between Gypsy ethnicity and nomadism is itself questionable and may be better understood in more nuanced terms reflecting the relationship between identity and ‘mobility’. This paper argues that ‘mobility’ is understood to define Gypsy difference in a way that excludes students.     

A ‘master status’ or the ‘final straw’? Assessing the role of immigration status in Latino undocumented youths’ pathways out of school

Previous research on undocumented youth and young adults in the United States asserts that immigration status is a ‘master status’, wherein undocumented status overshadows the impact of other social locations. Drawing primarily on interviews with 45 Latina/o undocumented immigrant youth who stopped out of school, I assess whether the ‘master status’ explanation accurately characterises how immigration status shapes undocumented youths’ pathways out of school. Using an intersectional lens, I argue that multiple social locations disrupt educational pathways and set the stage for immigration status to emerge as the ‘final straw’ that pushes undocumented youth to leave school. Specifically, I show how race, class, gender, and first-generation college student status heavily shape undocumented youths’ educational journeys. I find that their resistance to these other forms of marginalisation is weakened by the emerging salience of undocumented status as a severe, relatively insurmountable legal barrier. I highlight the process through which these multiple social locations work together to lead undocumented youth to stop out of school. I contend that using an intersectional lens enhances understandings of how multiple social locations intersect and interact over time to marginalise immigrants.     

‘And ever give us cause’: Understanding the investments of the ‘Ur-anthem’, ‘God Save the King/Queen’

This paper engages a close analytical reading of the lyrics of ‘God Save the King/Queen’ in order to understand what the functional survival of this song tells us about the rhetorical/affective investments of national devotion in the British sense. This study asks also how the lyrics of ‘God Save the King/Queen’ figure in the general definition of anthem and in the generic classification of anthems worldwide? Because of the song's international spread, and status as ‘Ur-anthem’, much may be gleaned from it as to both the nature of the speech act entailed in the prayer-type of anthem and the nature of ‘anthem quality’ more generally. ‘Anthem quality’, for the purposes of this paper, is defined as that soul stirring effect which certain combinations of music and lyrics achieve, most typically in the service of national affiliation. Theories of nation and nationalism are drawn on to frame affective relations between nation, state and citizenry as implied by, fostered by and utilized in anthems. Parodies and other derivative texts are considered in order to reach a better understanding of the sources and the pragmatic uses of anthem quality in the world today.     

On ‘outsourcing’ the political in political science

ABSTRACT

Through a critical analysis of some of the most popular theoretical approaches in mainstream political studies, the paper draws attention to the dichotomist interpretations of the political made by political scientists in the context of social movements, either celebrating their ‘truly’ political and radical nature, or deeming them conformist and post-political. It suggests that both discourses, but especially the insistent discourse of de-politicisation by political scientists must be viewed critically as it contributes to what might be called as ‘outsourcing’ the political merely to social movements while reserving themselves the possibility of remaining politically non-engaged. In encouraging discussion on engaged scholarship in political science, the paper proposes that instead of expecting others to ‘reoccupy’ the political, political scientists should politicise themselves – and do so in a close relationship with social movements through the practices of unlearning privileges and solidarity based on the ‘ethics of sharing’, which can help to transcend the binary between political theory and political practice.     

‘At last the family is together’: reproductive futurism in March of the Penguins

This paper offers a resistant reading of the nature documentary March of the Penguins, interrogating its humanist and anthropocentric assumptions. It focuses on the film's reiteration of a politics of reproductive futurism, the belief that children are the future. The figurative association March of the Penguins creates between penguin chick and human child demonstrates the politics of reproductive futurism in manifold ways, but also creates some remarkable ambiguities that can suggest the limitations of such a politics.     

Nuclear fetishism,the fear of the ‘Islamic’ bomb and national identity in Iran

The paper's focus is the concurrence in the Islamic Republic of Iran between the state's enrichment of uranium, internationally feared as a potential Islamic atomic bomb, and the identification of the radio-active material by many Iranians as a national cultural object. In contrast to the Islamic virtues imposed by the state that had created an autarkic image of Iranians in the global context, nuclear technology offered them the opportunity to become cosmopolitan consumers of nuclear energy, a global product that also represented the ‘excellence’ of Iranian scientists’ and engineers’ competence. Instrumental in this re-invention of national identity outside the political space was a reified (fetishised) conception of the nuclear object as a utility – nuclear energy. The enhanced utilitarian use of nuclear material mystified (metamorphosed) both the oppressive relation of Iranian people with their Muslim rulers and their incongruous relation with the rest of the world. The mystifying impact of nuclear production on their national and international relations served Iranians to draw on their role as internationally recognised bourgeois agents (burghers) by subsuming (neutralising) their brutalised relation with the Muslim rulers within the instrumental relation of producers/consumers of the nuclear product. Thus, in their exclusive demand for the right to emulate the non-Iranian producers/consumers of nuclear energy as a global product, Iranians acted in their capacity as burghers. A burgher is defined here, following Hegel, as the agent of civil society whose primary concern is to pursue his/her own interest by using the needs of others as the means to satisfy his/her own. The rationality that governs the action by burghers is ‘the suitability of means to their ends’. By adopting the rationality of a burgher, Iranians abandoned their quest for citizenship. The rights of citizen, in contrast with the cosmopolitan right of burgher to emulate producers/consumers, were geared to the exercise of individual autonomy within the political space, as a domain of contested representations. The paper examines the inadequate mediation of modern institutions that has historically postponed the nationalisation of Iranian society and has delayed the emergence of the Iranian nation as a political community. Looked at from this standpoint, nuclear production offered to Iranians the opportunity to avoid a hazardous route of taking part in a political construction of Iranian identity by acting as citizens and instead draw on their fragmented bourgeois identity to define the nuclear product as ‘national’. This identification matched their Muslim rulers’ interest to represent the enriched uranium internationally as a national, as opposed to Islamic, achievement without having to face the Iranian nation as a political community. The consequence was the Iranians’ failure to deal with nuclear technology and the question of public safety both as a national and international issue which could only be addressed if Iranians had acted in their capacity as citizens.     

Italian Americans in the ‘Bocce Belt’: ‘Old World’ memories and ‘New World’ identities

This essay examines the development of an ethnically and racially segregated resort landscape in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York in the twentieth century. Focusing on the history of Italian American resorts clustered primarily in Greene County, New York, it demonstrates that ethnicity continued to shape the social and cultural lives of many European immigrant New Yorkers and their families well after World War II. Ethnic resorts provided vacationers with an insulated recreational environment in which group identity and transatlantic ties – both real and imagined – could be fostered and sustained. However, the flexibility of these ethnic identities and the pervasive discrimination against African Americans at ethnic resorts in the 1940s and 1950s reveals the extent to which European Americans had largely internalized a sense of white ethnic identity by the postwar decades. The history of ethnic resorts in the Catskills sheds light on the process by which generations of European Americans in New York City negotiated these multiple ethnic, national, and racial identities.     

International migration and the rise of the ‘civil’ nation

Scholars largely agree that immigration policies in Western Europe have switched to a liberal, civic model. Labelled as ‘civic turn’, ‘civic integration’ or ‘liberal convergence’, this model is not identically applied across countries, since national institutions, traditions and identifications still matter. Even so, the main focus is on processes which allow or prevent migrants to be incorporated into nations usually taken for granted in their meanings. Moving from policies to discourses, this article aims to interrogate what kind of nation is behind these policies as a way to further scrutinise the ‘civic turn’. Exploring how the term ‘civility’ and its adjectivisations are discursively deployed in Italian parliamentary debates on immigration and integration issues, the article points to two opposite narratives of nation. While one mobilises civility in order to rewrite the nation in terms of a common, inclusive, civic ‘we’, the other uses civility to reaffirm the conflation between national identity and the identity of the ethno-cultural majority. These findings suggest the importance of exploring the ‘civic turn’ not only across countries, but also across political parties within the same country to capture the ways in which a liberal, civic convergence in political discourses might hide divergent national boundary mechanisms.     

Perceptions of diversity and attitudes of tolerance in the ‘fragmented’ U.K.

ABSTRACT

Relying on a quantitative survey (n = 1497) and semi-structured interviews (n = 30) conducted in the U.K., we explore British nationals’, Romanian and Turkish migrants’ attitudes of tolerance and the factors influencing them in the current socio-political context in the U.K. The quantitative data reveal the role of younger age, diverse networks, higher education, attachment to city/region and supranational identifications in more open attitudes towards diversity. The qualitative findings illustrate how diverse these three groups’ attitudes of tolerance can be and how they are affected by their position and status in the U.K. The British’ attitudes show their tolerance can reflect diverse forms of acceptance of ethnic and cultural differences but can also draw lines in terms of civic values opposing ‘those who contribute to society’ versus those who ‘live as parasites’. The Turks are in favour of diversity with the expectation of receiving more civic rights and facing less prejudice. The Romanians tend to have a more ambiguous relation to diversity given their position of stigmatised migrants in the U.K. Our analysis reveal how inclusive or exclusive people’s (sub- and supra-)national identities can be and how these frame their attitudes of tolerance.     

‘Settling’ the multicultural nation-state: Little Mosque on the Prairie,and the figure of the ‘moderate Muslim’

This paper analyzes Little Mosque on the Prairie, its characters and themes within the context of post-9/11 discourses of nationalism and citizenship. Against the backdrop of the Canadian national narrative, I argue that the sitcom foregrounds a ‘moderate Muslim’ that demarcates the boundaries of the multicultural nation-state, especially when juxtaposed against the racially and sexually coded Muslim ‘other’ on the global landscape. The moderate Muslim is represented as ‘liberal’ and ‘modern’, one who seeks to integrate her faith into the multicultural fabric of society. Such a figure, represented both as a ‘good’ Muslim/immigrant and a ‘good’ Canadian citizen-subject, illuminates the boundaries of ‘acceptability’ within the Canadian national imaginary. The figure of the moderate Muslim reinforces the racial coding embedded in this imaginary, while enabling the state to proclaim its ‘multicultural tolerance’ and benevolence. Building on previous scholarship on race, citizenship, and nation-building, I argue that the moderate Muslim – as exemplified in Little Mosque on the Prairie – serves important ideological functions in (re)defining the internal (and racially coded) borders of the nation. While Little Mosque on the Prairie makes an important contribution to the representation of Muslims, challenging some stereotypes, I argue that it does not deliver on its considerable potential to articulate nuanced representations of Muslims. Through its foregrounding of the figure of the moderate Muslim, the sitcom reaffirms key norms, engages in a politics of authenticity, and reinforces hegemonic messages, both within Muslim communities and in Canadian society. Thus, the moderate Muslim becomes a key player in enabling the state to render invisible its exclusion of the ‘Muslim Other,' while maintaining its non-racist credentials.     

Explorations in ‘Event Ecology’: The Case of the International Gay Games

Mega-events increasingly shape and reinforce the identities and economies of cities and nations. Major sporting events such as the Olympic Games attract enormous interest, consume vast resources and generate substantial material and cultural capital. In what has become a competition of place and identity, an ecology of events can be discerned which highlights the considerable differences that exist between events in terms of their nature and internal objectives and their intersections with the discourses and politics of host cities. Through a study of selected gay and mainstream media coverage of the International Gay Games held in Sydney in 2002, this paper explores the consequences of, and deep contradictions inherent in, an agenda of cosmopolitan advocacy that requires the endorsement of different publics with competing interests. The paper argues that the emphasis on urban sophistication and anticipated economic benefits at the heart of the promotion of the Games to mainstream Sydney were at odds with the identity building and sexual political advocacy agenda of the gay and lesbian community. Through this analysis, the paper contributes to academic understanding of the contemporary event ecology and its wider significance for social identities, cultural formations and political interventions.     

‘Strange faces’ in the academy: experiences of racialized and Indigenous faculty in Canadian universities

This paper is based on a larger qualitative study of exclusion and belonging as experienced by members of marginalized groups in the professions. The current analysis draws on a subsample of 13 racialized and Indigenous academics at Canadian universities to examine their experiences of both everyday racism – subtle, almost intangible micro-level interactions that convey messages of not fully belonging – and overt racism and colonialism. Overt experiences were less common, though intensely painful. Though in some ways they are more straightforward to address, as they are more obvious, they also consume considerable time and energy. Instances of everyday racism and colonialism were more common, often intricately interwoven with the very fabric of the institutional culture. Their cumulative nature is exhausting. Diversity initiatives, while popular in contemporary universities, are failing to approach equity, in that they deny the need for change in institutional cultures.     

The construction of ‘illiterate’ and ‘literate’ youth: the effects of high-stakes standardized literacy testing

High-stakes standardized literacy testing is not neutral and continues to build upon the legacy of dominant power relations in the state in its ability to sort, select and rank students and ultimately produce and name some youth as illiterate in contrast to an ideal white, male, literate citizen. I trace the effects of high-stakes standardized testing by using the voices of 16 youth who failed the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) to illustrate how the ‘illiterate youth’ revealed to students, schools, and communities by this test is culturally and socially constructed. In an age where multiple literacies are more and more valued, standardized literacy testing acts as a form of social control projected upon the ‘adolescent’ body that has historically been deemed ‘other’ or ‘deficient.’ Just as colonized subjects needed to be ‘civilized,’ so youth now need to acquire a state defined literacy in a competitive and fast paced learning environment. This article helps to demonstrate how power operates on marginalized youth through standardized literacy testing that is being used transnationally.     

Whitewashing the nation: racist jokes and the construction of the African ‘other’ in Greek popular cinema

This article explores representations of race in three Greek popular films of the 1970s and 1980s. The portrayal of African characters in these films is antagonistically positioned in relation to the dominant, ‘whitewashed’ Greek national narrative which relies on the nineteenth century idea that Greece is the progenitor of European civilization. Often masquerading itself as ‘just a joke’, the discourse of these films narrates the African Other as lacking in terms of culture, intelligence and beauty – the three central categories upon which the idea of the ‘white supremacy’, according to Cornell West, is historically constructed in modernity. Tightly woven with this idea (largely introduced in Greece by the leading European powers), these films enunciate explicitly colonial viewpoints in a country that was neither a colonial power nor at the geopolitical center of the European project. The article argues that the racialized representations of these films are an effect of appropriating the Eurocentric idea of historicism, where the ‘progress’ and ‘backwardness’ of groups and nations are measured according to how effectively they perform the values of modernity.     

Popular Culture and Politics: Whispers and the ‘Dramaturgy of Power’ in Kenya

Popular culture has become one of the most visible sites of critical social and political interpretation in post-colonial Africa. It is a site where an alternative public space is created and where various discourses; social, economic and political are invariably debated and negotiated. In many ways its various forms reflect, other times allegorize, fundamental transformation in society. In Kenya, a weekly newspaper column, Whispers, written by one of the country's most prolific fiction writers Wahome Mutahi, became arguably the most visible site of social, cultural and political expression for the last two decades, at a time when freedom to such expression was highly constrained by the state. The column echoed life in Kenya in all its banality but also in its distinctiveness. It interrogated a range of issues but most profoundly, the ‘performance of power’ in the country. Drawing from a pool of cultural resources and various forms of social and political culture, Whispers made legible the ambiguous interactions of ‘political performance’ in Kenya, how the subject population and the polity are all actors in a contradictory carnival of ‘mutual zombification’ which is at once empowering and disempowering. This paper engages with how fiction lays bare the intricacies of ‘political performance’ in the African postcolony using Kenya as a case study.     

An ‘undeliberate determinacy’? The changing migration strategies of Polish migrants in the UK in times of Brexit

This paper reformulates classical questions regarding the plans and strategies of Polish migrants in the UK – such as decisions to leave or remain in the host country, or be ‘deliberately indeterminate’ about future plans – from a sociologically situated ‘rights-based’ perspective. This approach considers migrants’ attitudes towards specific ‘civic integration’ measures in a medium-term time frame, as well as in the new context created by the UK’s vote to leave the EU. Based on the quantitative analysis of original survey data, we investigate the factors behind Polish migrants’ migration strategies, and we argue that basic socio-economic and demographic factors are inadequate, on their own terms, to explain future migration and civic integration plans. Instead, we find that aspects such as interest in and awareness of one’s rights, as well as anxieties about the ability to maintain one’s rights in the future are stronger determinants.     

The ‘new Chinatown’: the racialization of newly arrived Chinese migrants in Singapore

Studies of racism tend to rely on a presumed dichotomy between whites and ‘Others,’ whether Black or Asian. Even as many scholars have established that whiteness is manufactured, ethnographic studies of racism still have not escaped the color paradigm, basing their studies on the enactment of racism by white people on Others. Using the case study of Singapore, this article challenges the color paradigm by exploring racism between co-ethnic Chinese. I show that Singapore’s modernity is highly tied to place and that the ‘new Chinatown’ is used to ‘place’ and racialize newly arrived Chinese migrants. The racialization discourse, in this case, is subtle, and renders it a form of new racism - one that is reinforced by the media as well as state structures inherited from the nation’s colonial past. The aims of the article are two-fold: first, the paper aims to show parallels between the racialization of Chinese migrants in Singapore and colonial racism. However, this is not to say that locals are merely emulating colonial discourse which leads to the second aim of the paper: to locate this particular racialization process as a product of the intersection of global capital with Singapore’s local modernity. I conclude that although Singaporean-Chinese may enact racism against Chinese migrants, they do not hold unimpeded power. Rather, Singaporean-Chinese' construction of a ‘new Chinatown’ ironically acts to displace them.