Flexible ethnic identity,adaptation, survival,resistance: The Garifuna in the world-system

In this paper we examine flexible ethnic identity formation as a mechanism of accommodation and resistance deployed by a particular social group with origins in the periphery as they respond to changing political and economic forces in the world-system. This paper addresses criticisms that world-system analyses are ‘too macro’ or ‘structurally deterministic’ by examining on the ground action and responses by a local oppositional movement within its broad political and economic context. Its focus is an historical case study of a particular group of people whose origins lie in European colonial expansion into the Caribbean in the seventeenth century. The paper begins by recounting ethnographic reports of Garifuna origin myths, then sketches this group's forced incorporation in a colonial world-system (and their responses), discusses their assignment to ‘minority group’ status within newly independent Belize at about the same time they are establishing transnational communities via migration to the United States, and concludes with some thoughts on the emerging ‘virtual communities’ of Garifuna and indigenous peoples around the world that are emerging on the worldwide web today. We explore what the notion of ethnic identity means in this particular case, and how and why it changes over time. We also try to understand if this flexible identity, and the social movements that arise as it is redefined, can be understood as a form of ‘resistance’. Finally, we ask if diasporic identity movements of indigenous people, like the Garifuna, actually or potentially can contribute to rising challenges against the forces of contemporary ‘globalization’.     

Un/Free mobility: Roma migrants in the European Union

ABSTRACT

This special issue showcases work that theorises and critiques the political, economic, legal, and socio-historical (‘ethnic’ or ‘cultural’) subordination of the European Roma (so-called ‘Gypsies’), from the specific critical vantage point of Roma migrants living and working within and across the space of the European Union (EU). Enabled primarily through ethnographic research with diverse Roma communities across the heterogeneous geography of ‘Europe’, the contributions to this collection are likewise concerned with the larger politics of mobility as a constitutive feature of the sociopolitical formation of the EU. Foregrounding the experiences and perspectives of Roma living and working outside of their nation-states of ‘origin’ or ostensible citizenship, we seek to elucidate wider inequalities and hierarchies at stake in the ongoing (re-)racialisation of Roma migrants, in particular, and imposed upon migrants, generally. Thus, this special issue situates Roma mobility as a critical vantage point for migration studies in Europe. Furthermore, this volume shifts the focus conventionally directed at the academic objectification of ‘the Roma’ as such, and instead seeks to foreground and underscore questions about ‘Europe’, ‘European’-ness, and EU-ropean citizenship that come into sharper focus through the critical lens of Roma racialisation, marginalisation, securitisation, and criminalisation, and the dynamics of Roma mobility within and across the space of ‘Europe’. In this way, this collection contributes new research and expands critical interdisciplinary dialogue at the intersections of Romani studies, ethnic and racial studies, migration studies, political and urban geography, social anthropology, development studies, postcolonial studies, and European studies.     

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.     

Multiple belongings: transnational mobility,social class,and gendered identities among Polish migrants in Norway

ABSTRACT

Using ethnographic research in Norway and in Poland, this article focuses on the dynamics of multiple belongings of Polish migrants. It explores their experiences of belonging in relation to social class, gendered identities, and their different strategies of transnational mobility between Poland and Norway. By approaching belonging ‘from below’, we posit that it is a dynamic, processual, and socially and culturally constructed attachment to places, times, and communities, which includes experiential, practical, and affective dimensions. Considering the importance of questions of belonging and home-making in migrants’ lives, always contextually produced and read through performative reiterations, we focus on migrants’ daily routines and migratory practices, and argue that belonging is a multifaceted process, which takes on diverse forms and meanings of ‘who’ belongs to ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘when’. Following intersectional perspective, the article aims at problematizing dependencies between mobility, gender, class, and migrants’ multiple belongings, and thereby, enhancing the understanding of the notion of belonging and its embeddedness in the inter-related social, cultural, economic, and political realms.     

Colonial laboratories,irreparable subjects: the experiment of ‘(b)ordering’ San Juan's public housing residents

This article provides a genealogy of the discourses that shaped the public housing policies of the mid-twentieth century in the US island colony of Puerto Rico. In the 1950s and 1960s, a conversation arose between government officials, social science experts, and the local press about how to fix social inequalities by ‘ordering’ mostly black and mulato, economically dispossessed families residing in shantytowns and barrios. This led to the establishment of caseríos (housing projects) as places where the government would attempt to ‘modernize’ residents through architectural design, planning, and social betterment programs. Because the caseríos did not address the structural causes of inequalities of power and wealth in the island, they failed in lifting residents out of poverty. From the mid-1960s onwards, a host of writings blamed caserío dwellers for the failure of the projects, attributing it to their purportedly dysfunctional – and nearly incorrigible – ‘culture of poverty’. This perpetuated a particular characterization of Puerto Rican economically dispossessed people as incapable of political or social agency without the guidance of elite Puerto Ricans and the ‘benevolent’ American colonial metropolis. It also led to the subsequent ‘bordering’ of caseríos spaces with walls and checkpoints, which in turn reproduced the branding of public housing residents as irreparably dysfunctional and ‘criminal’.     

Marketing an imagined Muslim woman: Muslim Girl magazine and the politics of race,gender and representation

This article examines the magazine Muslim Girl (started publication 2007) and explores how the representations on the magazine's pages construct a particular type of identity for Muslim women: an ‘idealized’ Muslim woman who is both North American/Western and Muslim. Such a woman is portrayed as liberal, educated, fashionable, a ‘can-do’ woman, who is also committed to her faith. This ‘ideal’ woman is situated squarely as a neo-liberal subject in an increasingly consumerist world: she is ‘marketable’ (and marketed) as the ‘good Muslim’ (Mamdani, 2004) and is positioned as the ‘familiar stranger’ (Ahmed, 2000) in North America. This so-called ‘modern’ Muslim (read: ‘good Muslim’) is juxtaposed both against the ‘fundamentalist’ Muslim (read: ‘bad Muslim’) and the ‘normalized’ white North American subject. Against the discourse of post 9/11 nationalism and within the context of (gendered) Orientalism, this article argues that such idealized representations present easily recognizable tropes, which serve important political, ideological and cultural purposes within North American society. An analysis of these representations – and the purposes which they serve – provides an important window into the nuances of the structured discourses that seek to control and discipline the gendered Muslim body. On the one hand, the representations in Muslim Girl focus on the so-called ‘integrated North American Muslim’ – a ‘modern’ or ‘good’ Muslim – within the context of the multicultural, neo-liberal and post 9/11 nation-state. On the other hand, these representations also highlight examples of Muslim women, who seemingly remain committed to their faith and community. Such representations of hybridized North American Muslims speak powerfully to the forces – ideological, cultural, political and social – that are at play in the post 9/11 world. In analyzing the representations found in Muslim Girl, this paper provides an insight into some of these forces and their implications.     

‘A brutal blow against the democratic normality’: unlearning the epistemology of the political

ABSTRACT

The objective of this paper is to rethink our understanding of ‘the political’ through an examination of two novels by José Saramago, Blindness and Seeing. Both novels tackle directly a central, if not the central, signature metaphor of Western political thought, namely that of ‘seeing the light’. This metaphor takes many forms and recurs throughout the tradition of Western political philosophy as a source, legitimiser, and validator of knowing, and perhaps even a guarantor of knowledge. In particular, this metaphor has served to make knowable whatever it is that is signified by ‘the political’. By extension, it also means that whatever might be outside of this epistemological frame is rendered unknowable, if not unthinkable. Both of Saramago’s novels provide a fruitful means to recalibrate how we might know ‘the political’. The novels call into question the epistemic signatures that frame our commonly accepted understandings of ‘the political’ and in so doing provoke us further to question how we might move towards unlearning the epistemology of the political.     

Multi-ethnic public sphere and accessible ethnic media: mapping online English-language ethnic media

The multi-ethnic public sphere requires a functioning media system that facilitates intercultural dialogue across communities. As producers of multi-ethnic voices, the role of ethnic media is important in this debate. However, studies so far have focused on ethnic media’s role within their respective communities rather than their role within broader society. Equally, theoretical debates on ethnic media as independent spheres focus on speaking by and listening to minority voices without consideration of the necessary conditions that need to be in place in order to enable these voices to be heard. This study advances Charles Husband’s notion of the ‘multi-ethnic public sphere’ by using a notion of an ‘intercultural media system’ that considers both availability and accessibility of ethnic media for a broader audience as a necessary condition to enable listening. Drawn from New America Media’s NAM National Ethnic Media Directory, the study provides a case study on the ethnic media sector in the U.S. by mapping accessible ethnic media, that is, ethnic media that produce content in English or bilingually online. The findings suggest the existence of a substantial base of accessible ethnic media with a growing interest in serving audiences beyond their respective communities.     

Jewish Geopolitics: Nationalism and the Ties between the State and the Land

Professor Yosseph Shilhav's article in this issue of National Identities entitled ‘Jewish Territoriality between Land and State’ is an important addition to the literature on territoriality and national sovereignty. His carefully researched and insightful study of the religious affinity between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel is especially timely because of the urgency that the present intifada has given to the debate within Israel over the political future of the West Bank and Gaza. What is most provocative, as well as innovative, is Dr Shilhav's thesis that the clash of opinion within Israel over the solution to the Occupied Territories is not, as commonly understood, a political debate between ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’, but is rooted in differences of religious interpretation concerning the ‘sanctity of the Land’. It is with this thesis that I take issue.     

What's anger got to do with it? Towards a post-indignation pedagogy for communities in conflict

We argue that anger tends to be naturalized and normalized in social and educational theory and our goal is to problematize the too easy justification of indignation as an emotional resource in political and pedagogical work. Instead we wish to propose the broad contours of a post-indignation pedagogy as a frame for rethinking racism and redefining antiracist and dialogic pedagogy. In the first part of the paper, we offer a genealogy of anger in conflict communities; in particular, our analysis explores the emotionally saturated discourses of anger in our home countries (Australia and Cyprus). In our second move, we draw on figures such as Seneca, Buddhism and Judith Butler for reframings of anger. The reframe we are proposing interrogates two extremes – resignation to anger and resignation from anger – and proposes a ‘middle way’ between these two. Thirdly, in rejecting these two extremes, the paper speculates on possibility of pedagogies of ‘conviviality’, borrowing from Gilroy.     

Adulteration of pure native blood by aliens? mixed race kapya in colonial and post-Colonial Myanmar

ABSTRACT

Colonization may be viewed not only as loss of sovereignty and territory but also of ‘purity’ of a native race to an alien power. After the British colonized Burma in the late nineteenth century, they brought in Chinese and Indians to the sparsely populated colony as labour for new administrative and economic activities. Intermarriage, mainly between native Burmese women and men of alien races – British, European, Chinese and Indian – was thus inevitable. Mixed-race peoples – kapya in Burmese – were then born out of these relationships, and their identities became a key political issue in colonial Burma. Importantly, all natives, foreigners, and kapya were British subjects at that time. Independent Burma from 1948 through 1962 was not expressly anti-foreigner/kapya; working to naturalize those who had overstayed or remained. However, the Ne Win government from 1962 through 1988 was openly against ex-foreigner and kapya citizens, passing a new citizenship act in 1982 to downgrade their citizenship to a second class tier. The Myanmar Citizenship Law (1982), which remains in force, has downgraded the legal, political and social stature of ex-foreigner and kapya citizens. A more problematic and racist term thway-nhaw or ‘adulterated’ race has come to the fore, being used in official law-like language in recent years and highlighting the racist roots of the Myanmar Citizenship Law.     

Review article

Social processes in the world today are characterized by the growing importance of relations between actors located in different national spaces (transnational relations). Based on case studies, this article illustrates how nowadays transnational relations between local and transnational actors affect in different ways the social production of representations that are sociopolitically significant – insofar as they articulate meanings in the constitution and practices of social organizations and movements of diverse political orientations. Through the analysis of cases related to the social production of representations of ideas of pan-ethnic indigenous identities, ‘culture and development’, ‘civil society’, and ‘free trade’, this text seeks to contribute to the theoretical debate about culture, communication, and social change in the contemporary world. The cases discussed in this article are based on field and documentary research undertaken in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, the United States, and Venezuela.     

Decolonising Eurocentric disability studies: why colonialism matters in the disability and global South debate

The words ‘colonised’ and ‘colonising’ have recently been adopted in global North fields such as disability studies, highlighting notions of colonised bodies by colonising practices, with the implication that some or other ‘decolonisation’ is required. But these words remain little more than abstract and dehistoricised metaphors in these Eurocentric academic projects. This paper critically maps out some arguments as to why the colonial encounter is not simply a metaphor and cannot be bypassed in any global disability analysis. The paper argues how this historical event transcends the discursive, a violent materiality framing disability as a historical narrative and human condition, while (re)positioning disability as a useful optic through which to examine the dynamics of imperialism. The colonial provides the landscape for understanding contemporary Southern spaces within which disability is constructed and lived – neocolonised spaces hosting what I call neocolonised bodies. The paper concludes that decolonisation, just like colonialism, is not a metaphor. Instead, it is a continuous violent and political process owned by the global South but open to collaboration, drawing on forms of resistance that have long colonial lineages.     

Renovating ethnic identity on Restaurant Makeover

Food can be a novel way of understanding and explaining some of the pointed paradoxes of multiculturalism and the ‘management’ of ethnicity. Many studies of culinary culture are attentive to the exoticization of ethnicity in and through food media, which now includes a vertiginous array of cookbooks, travel literature, magazines and, most important for our purposes here, television series. Among various programs is Restaurant Makeover, a popular Canadian reality series broadcast on Home and Garden Television (HGTV) as well as the Food Network Canada. In each episode, dining experts are hired by struggling restaurateurs (often ethnic) to ‘spice up’ the existing menu, ‘modernize’ the décor and, by extension, ensure the welfare of the (immigrant's) family. While the series is not explicitly directed at ethnic restaurants, it seems to be increasingly interested in ‘non-white’ establishments (i.e., Mexican, Chinese, Thai, etc.). This participation in culinary multiculturalism may be symptomatic of wider political changes in immigration and ‘diversity’ in Canada. Based on the authors analyses of specific episodes this paper argues, firstly, the growing interest in ethnic cuisine on Restaurant Makeover can be read as a (neo)liberal response to an emerging conservative ‘multicultural’ agenda that recognizes migrants predominantly as laborers (as opposed to citizens) and, secondly, that behind its rehearsal of liberal benevolence is a skewed set of power relations that authorize the experts’ (re)construction, cultivation and containment of ethnicity.     

The Power of Ethnic Nationalism: Foucault's Bio-power and the Development of Ethnic Nationalism in Eastern Europe

Although the ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ brands of nationalism are frequently contrasted, the origins of the civic/ethnic dichotomy remain under-theorised. By building upon Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, this article argues that, during the eighteenth century, the articulation of power shifted across the board from a pre-modern control over the ending of life, to a modern expression of power as control over the production of life (dubbed ‘bio-power’ by Foucault). Given the Foucauldian claim that power is built upwards from ‘its most infinitesimal mechanisms’, it is suggested that expressions of bio-power were first enacted in that social structure most amenable to biological manipulation—the family—and then expanded upwards towards the widest understanding of a kin collective—the ethnic group. As the shift to bio-power took hold, so too did visions of the political nation-state begin to take shape in Eastern Europe. A fusion of doctrines of self-determinism with the expression of power as ‘control over the production of life’, then saw the ethnic nation-state gain credence as a social and political construct in Central and Eastern Europe. This article takes Romania as a case study through which the mechanisms of this exploratory argument can be illustrated.     

Muslimness as a political formation: an inquiry into Muslim presence

ABSTRACT

In this article, I undertake an investigation into the political significance of Islam and Muslimness. By doing so, I aim to underscore the primacy of Islam’s ontological (constitutive) nature and its irreducibility to any of its ontic (empirical) articulations. This project necessitates the recovery of the political as the moment of the formation of a collective order and community, irreducible to any of its material expressions (e.g. territorial or institutional unity). Thus, the article renounces the objectivity of the secular grammar which fixes, essentializes, and reduces Muslimness to being merely ‘religious’ as opposed to ‘political’. By contrast, it attempts to retrieve Islam’s basic condition of existence and hence emancipate it from the confines of the Western epistemic structure. Toward that end, the article presents a deconstructive analysis of Islam as an autonomous universe of meaning inaugurated by the event of the Divine Revelation to Prophet Muhammad as its originary moment. By doing so, I also emphasize the primacy of Muslimness as a political subjectivity, whose unity and autonomy is contingent upon the drawing of its most universal boundaries and the exclusion of an outside – a function, I argue, which had historically been fulfilled by the mechanism of the caliphate. Finally, the article discusses an alternative conceptualization of diaspora in order to come to grips with the political implications of Muslimness in the post-caliphate world order.     

The Modern Colonial Politics of Citizenship and Whiteness in France

While there is no blatantly racist discourse among the French political class per se, the modern politics of citizenship in France is rooted in France's racialized colonial legacy. Upon critical examination, contemporary French political discourse and policy implementations indeed speak to France's colonial past. The concept of ‘otherness’ is situated at the centre of French political discourse, and is manifested in constructions of whiteness. ‘Otherness’ has created a double standard for legal non-European immigrants compared with French and European citizens. The politics of integration and assimilation are founded on the ideological backdrop of universality, which falsely represents French society in colour-blind terms. This is evident in both moderate and extremist political party rhetoric in regards to new policies of immigration, citizenship and nationality. We contend that the contemporary political discourses in France closely resemble the colonial period in spite of (and precisely because of) France's historical amnesia. In this article, we explore the redefinition of French citizenship as an expansion of whiteness as rooted in the concept of ‘otherness’. In so doing, we contextualize the contemporary discourse of inclusion, exclusion, citizenship, and whiteness on the backdrop of France's colonial legacy.     

Bifurcated homeland and diaspora politics in China and Taiwan towards the Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia

ABSTRACT

The conventional literature on diaspora politics tends to focus on one ‘homeland’ state and its relations with ‘sojourning’ diaspora around the world. This paper examines an instance of ‘bifurcated homeland:’ the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan) since 1949. The paper investigates the changing dynamics of China's and Taiwan's diaspora policies towards Overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia throughout the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. They were affected by their ideological competition, the rise of Chinese nationalism, and the ‘indigenisation’ of Taiwanese identity. Illustrating such changes through the case of the KMT Yunnanese communities in Northern Thailand, this paper makes two interrelated arguments. First, we should understand relations through the lens of interactive dynamics between international system-level changes and domestic political transformations. Depending on different normative underpinnings of the international system, the foundations of regime legitimacy have changed. Subsequently, the nature of relations between the diaspora and the homeland(s) transformed from one that emphasises ideological differences during the Cold War, to one infused with nationalist authenticity in the post-Cold War period. Second, the bifurcated nature of the two homelands also created mutual influences on their diaspora policies during periods of intense competition.