Cultural Misrepresentation Research Articles

The Disguised Mask of Race, Gender, and Class

The Disguised Mask of Race, Gender, and Class By Genesis Diaz I | Introduction acism has occurred throughout American history from when the founding fathers decided that slaves were three fifths of a person to when African-Americans were segregated and categorized as ‘colored.’ Gender roles are often demonstrated to show which sex a female or a male belongs in. Nella Larsen writes about the issue of Af- rican-Americans “passing” in 1929 and the consequences of living that life in the story of Irene and Clare. In Larsen’s novel, Passing, the reader becomes familiar with the term, exploring what it is for an African-American being able to ‘pass’ as white. The color of someone’s skin was the prominent focus in the 1920s. This was a factor that often advanced those with white skin or limited the opportunities of black individuals. Throughout Amer- ican society, there has been a general struggle of identity in issues of gender and race. Both Irene and Clare struggle with those same issues in the novel, further trying to fit into a mold and have their true intentions. Passing takes place in 1929 during the Roaring Twenties and the Harlem Renais- sance. The protagonists in the novel are Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield. They both have hidden secrets about who they really are. Clare is a mulatto who is able to pass from her race and conceal her true black background. Irene is a black middle class female who is proud of where she is from but nonetheless desires and has feelings for Clare. Irene struggles with her personal identity. Once Clare and Irene have their second encounter Clare is intrigued by Harlem—where Irene lives—and decides she is tired of living a lie. Clare spends most of her time in Harlem where the epitome of culture and art are emerging. Irene suspects that Clare may be having an affair with her husband Brian. Irene becomes jealous of Clare to the point where, when at a party, Clare’s husband finds out about Clare’s race. Clare later dies, but her death is unclear. Larsen leaves the reader to wonder if Irene pushed her or if Clare committed sui- cide. Larsen demonstrates the limitations that an individual can have regarding the race, which factors on social status. Larsen also depicts the image of a woman and the gender roles that women needed to display in the 1920s. R II | Historical Context The economy had been thriving due to the overproduction of goods. The prosperous use of credit and surplus of revenue was known to be the Roaring Twenties. Money and power became a huge factor for industry. The booming economy became the aftermath of the Progressive Era. The Harlem Renaissance was a time period that brought in much art prestige to the black community. There had been a fluctuation of art, literature, poetry, and painting. There had been a negative cultural misrepresentation of black culture up to that point but art do- nors wanted to sponsor the authentic black image.

A Playmaking Research Journey Into Canada's North: Kangiqsujuaq

In 2009, two white women from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (a playwright and a director/dramaturg), went to the community of Kangiqsujuaq in Nunavik, Northern Quebec, to conduct play development research for a theatre for young audiences piece called Beneath the Ice. The women were aware that the project raised complicated ethical issues, including appropriating voice and story, potential cultural and community misrepresentation, reinscribing Canadian identity myths concerning the North and Inuit people, essentializing and stereotyping identities, and possible neocolonial relationships. This is a discussion of how the artists tried to approach the project with care, respect, and artistic integrity; how the research journey augmented their perceptions of the North and Northern people; and how the playwright exposed her Southern position through the script's narrative and characters.

The Politics of Representation and Audience Reception: Alternative Visions of Africa

Western media has consistently misrepresented or underrepresented African people and cultures. This article focuses on Florence Ayisi’s documentary film practice, which engages with alternative realities and images that portray the lived experiences of African people and how these are manifested in audio-visual representations, including narrative structure and point of view. Her multiple positions as African woman, film lecturer, and filmmaker mean that these documentaries provide a space to challenge the myriad of simplistic representations of African life and societies. The ideas explored in this article will be illustrated through a cross-disciplinary analysis of Zanzibar Soccer Queens (2007, 87 mins.) and Art of This Place: Women Artists in Cameroon (2011, 40 mins.). The academic discourse of this article is situated within several academic disciplines: audience reception studies, cognitive film theory, phenomenology, representation, and African film practice, where the experience of filmmaking is politicized and emerges from postcolonial struggles to redefine and counter cultural misrepresentations.

Not Reading Brick Lane

Abstract When someone becomes or does not become a reader - and how we make a chim to or refuse these kinds of identity - clearly matters within globalued cultures, where the challenges of literary representation quickly become problems of cultural misrepresentation. Yet precisely because not reading would appear to amount to nothing, its significance remains unexplored. In order to trace the conjunctural and multiple meanings of not reading, this essay explores the embattled reception surrounding Monica AW s novel Brick Lane (2003) and its adaptation into film (2007), and locates not reading within a longer history of book controversies that L· overshadowed by the Rushdie Affair. Our paper argues that, far from mere negation, not reading is an intensely productive site of cross-cultural negotiation and conflict without which the contemporary significance of global readerships and reading acts makes only partial sense. Keywords Not reading, book controversies, Monica Ali, Brick Lane, Rushdie Affair, hierarchies of reading I look at the bewildered faces of male children, the fanatic faces of the igniters, the dull faces of the media men and ask: Do they read? In the name of that most philosophical religion whose opening injunction is 'read'? (Gayatri Spivak responding to images of the burning of The Satanic Verses in Bradford, 1989)1 Half of them haven't even read the bloody book! (anonymous 'Bengali media executive from East London' responding to protesters against the filming of Brick Lane, 2006)2 Common sense tells us there are many ways to read a book, but cultural critics have proved themselves poorly equipped to make sense of the different practices of reading that emerge when books become controversies. During times of trouble, undeclared hierarchies of reading and readers surface that leave recent advances in the study of cultural production and consumption at an impasse. Conjectures on world literature, wandering audiences and nomadic critics, the rapid extension and increased efficiency of print and digital technologies, the much touted decline of the book, the rise of the global literary marketplace: all pose important new questions around reading. But within these debates, discourses and acts of 'not reading' and the accompanying concern about 'non-readers' have yet to be adequately explained. Recent book controversies oblige us to answer questions about the meaning of not reading because it is through this category that their significance is frequendy produced, explained or dismissed. When someone becomes or does not become a reader, making a claim to this kind of identity (and indeed the refusal to recognise it) clearly matters within globalised cultures, where the challenges of literary representation quickly become problems of cultural misrepresentation. Yet precisely because not reading would appear to amount to nothing, its significance remains unexplored. Contrary to this logic, we argue below that, far from mere negation, not reading is an intensely productive site of cross-cultural negotiation and conflict without which the contemporary significance of global readerships and reading acts makes only partial sense. In order to trace the conjunctural and multiple meanings of not reading, this essay explores the embattled reception surrounding Monica Ali's novel, and its adaptation into film, between the years 2003 and 2006. To make sense of the controversy that emerged around this text and to understand the circumstances under which it arose, we look first at the recently emerging meanings of 'not reading', and then, following Igor Kopytoff 's wish for 'the cultural biography of things',3 we consider the social life of Ali's Brick Lane, and its prefigurement in the Rushdie Affair. We move from here to pursue more precisely the conflicted articulations of 'not reading Brick Lane' within the national and international print and electronic media. Finally, we locate not reading within a longer history of book controversies that is overshadowed by the Rushdie Affair. …

The Politics of Mirrored Metaphors: Flor Contemplacion and The Maid

The article investigates the disjunctive mirroring of images and representations through films that evoke the larger socioeconomic and political relations between Singapore and the Philippines. The two films analyzed are about related plights of Filipina domestic workers in Singapore, whose body, labor, and travel provide the nexus for illumination of the cultural politics of representation of the self and other. The sense of self and identity in film alludes to the larger polity in which Philippine and Singaporean self-representations quote and implicate the other. What then becomes interestingly poised is that the representations do not necessarily dialogue, more so ending in a failure of engagement. Partly coded in myth making, the representation of the self in films and binational polity is distinguished from the authority of the other, initially foregrounding then later abjecting the conditions in which the other can render visible the self. The article calls for an abandoning of essentialism, vulgarities, and cultural misrepresentation for a genuine dialogue to ensue.

Teaching Indigenous American Culture and History: Perpetuating Knowledge or Furthering Intellectual Colonization?

Problem statement: This study addresses a number of ongoing and important issues related to teaching the history and culture of Native Americans in the public setting. As part of the social science curriculum, the study and academic interpretations of American Indian culture and history regularly attracts educators and students alike, but remains problematic for reasons of cultural property and identity. Of particular concern are matters related to the accuracy and purposes of such instructional content and problems of cultural representation, cultural boundaries and cultural and/ or intellectual property. A related question concerns problems associated with limiting access to cultural knowledge versus increased demands for open access to information. Approach: By examining the historiography related to this subject and exploring other mainstream and indigenous academic and traditional indigenous perspectives on this topic, the scope of the problem of American Indian cultural misrepresentation can be ascertained, while the complexities of these issues may also be recognized. A key aspect of this study is its emphasis on indigenous perspectives, which often stand in contrast with those of mainstream academic thought on this and related topics. Though legal questions arise from such an examination, the issues addressed here are largely ethical in nature. Results: From traditional indigenous and indigenous academic perspectives, the unauthorized use of ceremonies, sacred songs and stories, or ritual and other material culture objects constitutes a theft of cultural and/ or intellectual property. The fact that this problem persists despite many decades of indigenous criticism indicates the continuation of an overall non-indigenous disregard for American Indian authority. Thus, the perpetuation of cultural misrepresentation and the continued theft of cultural and/ or indigenous intellectual property serves to further the historic process of non-indigenous colonization of Native American cultures. Conclusions/Recommendations: In most cases, solutions to the problems of cultural property and misrepresentation are obvious but difficult to carry out due to the general use of and emphasis on authorities not recognized by traditional indigenous peoples. This study addresses that fact and concludes that everyone involved (teachers, students and indigenous peoples) are best served when traditional American Indian authorities are regularly consulted, with regard to matters involving public presentations and interpretations of indigenous cultures. The single greatest remedy to the problems described involves open communication and the unbiased recognition of indigenous authority. Due to the complexities of these and related issues, further contributions by indigenous peoples, expanded study and analysis by academics are recommended.

Cultural Misrepresentation through Translation

The space of intercultural communication is bound to make translation the par excellence site for the negotiation, understanding and/or contestation of the relationships of power and knowledge across cultures. In these intercultural encounters, translation has played a decisive role in the formation and/or deformation of cultural realities through systems, the master discourses, of representing the foreign (other) for the local (self). In the process of translation, a master discourse, the product of a specific cultural context where translation takes place, is used as the medium for the exchange of cultural goods, most importantly literary ones. Drawing on a number of translation instances, this article examines the lack of innocence of translation as the medium of intercultural communication.

Orientalism as Cultural Practices and the Production of Sociological Knowledge

AbstractSince the 1990s, sociologists and others have increasingly used the term orientalism to refer commonly to ethnocentrism, Eurocentrism, prejudicial stereotyping, and cultural misrepresentations of non‐‘western’ societies, particularly those influenced by Islamic knowledge and practices. I chart how theorist Edward Said has helped initiate the sociology of orientalism by emphasizing the relationship of orientalism as a set of cultural practice and discourse to modern empires and global imperialism. I discuss the prominent clusters of studies published in English in the sociology of orientalism: (i) cultural representations and (ii) cultural regulation and social‐identity formation. I argue that these studies have examined the ways orientalisms have deployed signifying practices of abstraction, difference, and desire in constructing problematic images and social relations. Furthermore, I contend that sociology as an intellectual endeavor still needs to confront seriously the issues raised by critics of orientalisms.

IDENTITY POLITICS AND ITS DISCONTENTS

This essay examines an ironic situation in the use of postcolonial identity politics in contemporary Hong Kong cultural studies, in which the postcolonial cultural politics that criticizes the marginalization of Hong Kong people by Eurocentrism and Sinocentrism has also allowed newly empowered Hong Kong constituencies to use the same cultural politics as a strategy to assert dominance in ethnocentric and racist terms. Postcolonialism has so far focused on the poststructuralist critique of cultural misrepresentations while neglecting most of the structural inequalities beyond the cultural realm. What we need from postcolonialism is not just a differential identity politics useful in subverting cultural hegemonies ad infinitum. We also need an effective engagement with the quotidian effects of colonial legacies affecting people in and beyond the cultural realm. As one such attempt, this essay evaluates the critical potency of four prominent and contesting analytical frames in Hong Kong cultural studies by contextualizing their operations in a translocal context. I discuss Rey Chow's postulation of Hong Kong as the marginalized entity in between two colonizers, Britain and China. Posed against this discourse is what I call a petit-grandiose Hong Kongism, a kind of inferiority-superiority response to Hong Kong's multiple colonial experiences, both British and Chinese. The notion of Hong Kong's relation to China in terms of Hong Kong's ‘Northbound Cultural Imaginary’ is then examined. This refers to Hong Kong's mainstream cultural imaginary that posits its claim to cosmopolitanism as a justification for an implied economic and cultural expansion towards China. This cultural imaginary is justified by another Hong Kong mainstream cultural imaginary, one which sees China as a national, economic and cultural threat expanding towards Hong Kong to the south. I call this Hong Kong's imagined China ‘Southbound Cultural Imaginary’.

Using Case Studies to Examine the Decision-Making Process for Cleaning Ethnographic Objects

The traditional distinction between museum dirt and ethnographic dirt, and the corollary that museum dirt can and should be removed while ethnographic dirt must be left in place, is no longer valid. In reality it is not always possible to tell the difference; even if it is possible it may not matter; and it may be desirable to remove both or neither. The possible removal of information and the desire to represent the object and its makers accurately must also be taken into account. In addition to the interests of curators and educators, Native consultants often play a role in decision-making. Examples are given of objects in several categories: (1) post-collection deposits which can be removed; (2) deposits of uncertain origin, where curatorial knowledge is of special importance and the issue of cultural misrepresentation may arise; (3) pre-collection deposits of cultural significance which should be left in place; and (4) problems of inherent vice, caused by a combination of ethnographic residue and post-collection environment, requiring removal of material deliberately applied or reflecting use. The discussions leading to the decision to clean or not to clean are described. This decision often involves compromise between preservation of information, prevention of further deterioration, potential for damage during treatment, and the possibility of cultural misrepresentation. A minimalist approach is usually safest; simple rules are not adequate. The ability to balance the needs of the objects with the wishes of curators and consultants is one of the hallmarks of a professional conservator, and requires training and experience. All conservators of ethnographic objects need an understanding of anthropology, especially as it was practiced during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when most collections were assembled. The ability of conservators to communicate what they do has become an essential professional skill.

Land use research and the duty to consult: a misrepresentation of the aboriginal landscape

This paper addresses the means by which the government of Canada is fulfilling its fiduciary obligation to consult with Aboriginal communities whose traditionally used lands are subject to industrial development. Specifically, the use of Aboriginal land use studies, as a means of consultation, is called into question on the basis of methodological limitations and cultural misrepresentation. In closing, it is suggested that until the Canadian government is prepared to take a proactive stance in mitigating land use conflicts through an effective and equitable consultative framework one should expect an escalation of litigation and continued Aboriginal discord.