Summary of Chapter 8: Ethnicity, race, nation
Barker, Chris and Emma A. Jane. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. 5th Edition. Los Angeles: Sage, 2016
● Racialization:
- The idea of ‘racialization’ or ‘race formation’ is founded on the argument that race is a
social construction and not a universal or essential category of biology.
- Race does not exist outside of representation.
- Races are formed in and by symbolization in a process of social and political power
struggle.
- Racialization: those instances where social relations between people have been
structured by the signification of human biological characteristics in such a way as to
define and construct differentiated social collectives.
- Race formation/Racialization has been inherently racist for it involves forms of social,
economic, and political subordination that are lived through the categories and
discourse of race.
● Different racisms:
- The presumption of a single monolithic racism is being displaced by a mapping of the
multifarious historical formulations of racisms.
● The concept of ethnicity:
- Ethnicity is formed by the way we speak about group identities and identify with the
signs and symbols that constitute ethnicity.
- Ethnicity is a relational concept that is concerned with categories of self-identification
and social ascription. Thus, what we think of as our identity is dependent on what we
think we are not.
- Ethnicity is best understood as a process of boundary formation that has been
constructed and maintained under specific socio-historical conditions.
● Ethnicity and power:
- The problem with the cultural concept of ethnicity is that some questions of power
and racism may be sidelined. It has also bee suggested that it diverts attention away
from racism and towards the cultural characteristics of racialized minorities.
- Ethnicity is constituted through power relations between groups. It signals relations of
marginality, of the center and the periphery(edge). The west is the center and outside
of that is the edge.
- Race and ethnicity have been closely allied to forms of nationalism that conceive of
the ‘nation’ as a shared culture requiring that ethnic boundaries should not cut across
political ones (though of course, they do).
● The nation-state:
- Nation-state: a political concept that refers to an administrative apparatus deemed to
have sovereignty over a specific space or territory within the nation-state system.
- National identity: a form of imaginative identification with the symbols and discourses
of the nation-state.
- Nations are not simply political formations but systems of cultural representation by
which national identity is continually reproduced through discursive action.
- The nation-state as a political apparatus and a symbolic form also has a temporal
dimension since political structures endure and change.
, ● Narratives of unity:
- Cultures are not static entities but are constituted by changing practices and
meanings that operate at different social levels. Thus, any given national culture is
understood and acted upon differently by diverse social groups.
- National identity is a form of identification with representations of shared experiences
and history.
- National unity is constructed through the narrative of the nation by which stories,
images, symbols, and rituals represent ‘shared’ meanings of nationhood.
- The unity both assumes and produces the linkage between national identity and a
pure, original people or ‘folk’ tradition.
● The imagines community: Anderson
- National identities are intrinsically connected to and constituted by, forms of
communication.
- Anderson: the nation is an ‘imagined community’
- 1. Because the members of a nation will never know most of their fellow members.
- 2. It is imagined as limited
- 3. It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which
enlightenment and revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the ordered realm.
- Print capitalism > standardized (vernacular) languages > conditions for nationalism
● Criticisms of Anderson:
- He does not deal with the various ways in which divergent social groups use media
products and decode them in different ways.
- He covers over differences of class, gender, ethnicity.
● Diaspora and hybrid identities:
- Patterns of population movement and settlement established during colonialism and
its aftermath, combined with the more recent acceleration of globalization, particularly
of electronic communications, have enabled increased cultural juxtaposing, meeting,
and mixing.
● The idea of diaspora:
- Diaspora: a dispersed network of ethnically and culturally related peoples.
- Diasporic identities are networks of transnational identifications encompassing
‘imagined’ and ‘encountered’ communities.
- The concept of diaspora space… includes the entanglement, the intertwining of the
genealogies of dispersion with those ‘staying put’.
- Gilroy: Diaspora identity is focused less on the equalizing, pro-democratic force of
common territory and more on the social dynamics of remembrance and
commemoration defined by a strong sense of the dangers involved in forgetting the
location of origin and the process of dispersal.
● The black Atlantic: Gilroy
- We think of identities as being in motion rather than existing as absolutes of nature or
culture.
- Black identity cannot be understood in terms of ethnic absolutism. > instead black
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