Ethnic Narratives Research Articles

The Texas Historical Markers Program: Racial and Ethnic Narratives

In this article we explore the text of the over 16,000 historical markers erected in the state since 1936, using GIS and corpus linguistics to determine the where, how, what, and when of how Texas memorializes its racial and ethnic groups. Unsurprisingly, our results indicate that the story of Texas is implicitly a narrative of white people. More interestingly, the term “African (Americans)” begins to be commemorated especially after the 1990s, but only in stories of community, religion, school, and children, as Texas historical markers do not to dwell on narratives of slavery, the civil rights movement, and lynchings. “Indians” and “Mexicans” in the 1930s and 1960s exemplify the most egregious case of derogatory semantics we found in the markers. As concerns racial and ethnic groups, in general they tend to be memorialized where they were historically present, whether or not such groups are still there. The analysis also reveals the increasing concentration of the markers in urban areas.

Empathy from the Margins: Observing Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jews) Events in a Reform Jewish Congregation

The socialization of the Ethiopian Jewish community, known as Beta Israel in Israeli society, is marked by performing cultural customs and rituals to establish its unique tradition and collective ethnic narrative. The Sigd is a holiday that is celebrated on the 29th of the Hebrew month of Heshvan, when the community marks its devotion to Zion by renewing the covenant between the Jewish people, God, and the Torah. This narrative of return to the homeland is also expressed and framed in a tragic context by observing a Memorial Day for the members of the Ethiopian Jewish community who perished during their journey to Israel from Sudan. These two commemorative dates support the narrative of Beta Israel and advance its public recognition. This ethnographic study examines why and how these practices were mentioned and performed in an Israeli Reform Jewish congregation, a community that does not include Ethiopians members, and has a religious and cultural character that is different from the traditions of Beta Israel. Both the Reform community and the Ethiopian community deal with stereotypes and institutional and public inequality in Israel. I argue that their solidarity is constructed and based on social perceptions and experiences of social alienation and immigration traumas. This political motivation to mark the narrative of the ‘other’, particularly as an excluded religious group that fights against the Orthodox Jewish monopoly in Israel, marks the Reform community as an egalitarian agent that gives voice to the marginalized. The fact that most Reform congregants are ‘sabras’ (native) Israelis sheds light on how their perception as a majority, and not only as a minority, produces a critical statement about Zionist immigration and acclimatization.

Bharatanatyam and Buddhist diplomacy: inter-Asia significations in Santha Bhaskar’s Anweshana: The Search for Nalanda

ABSTRACT This paper considers a work of the Indian classical dance form Bharatanatyam performed as a vehicle for inter-Asian soft-diplomatic ventures in Singapore. Widely practiced by Singapore’s ethnic Tamil-Hindu minority, Bharatanatyam took a brief “Buddhist turn” in the early 2010s. In stark contrast to Bharatanatyam’s standard recourse to Hindu mythology, several high-profile stage productions including Anweshana (2011), have featured Buddhist themes, iconography and narratives. I put forward a conceptual model of choreographic reassembly that centers on the choreographer’s efforts at negotiating the regulatory regimes that contour Singaporean cultural production. As Buddhist themes in Bharatanatyam render Indianness as fungible within Buddhist and Hindu religious paradigms, dance becomes a vital site to read how Singapore’s racial minority subjects position themselves in relation to shifting narratives of ethnicity, religion and national identity.

Unifying state and nation: modern myths and narratives of Japanese nationalism in times of social change

Kokutai (national polity) was notoriously the ideological organising principle of imperial Japanese society in the early twentieth century, but the end of WWII saw it replaced by a more nation-oriented view of the relationship between the state and the people. This change led to an interpretation of the nation that prioritises ethnic nationalism, although its key text, the Postwar Constitution seems to invite a more civic interpretation. This paper argues that the change and this inconsistency should be analysed in terms of two modern myths – the myth of kokutai and the myth of homogeneous ethnos. The key to the influence of these myths lies in their symbolic representation in the 1889 Meiji and 1947 Postwar Constitutions, and how their historically contingent interpretation formalised relations between the people and the state. These interpretations produced contesting narrative articulations of the myths, among which first statist and later ethnic nationalist narratives emerged dominant, but in both cases remained in tension with other narratives.

‘Land’ as a site of contestation: Empire, identity, and belonging in the Darjeeling Himalayas

As the dominant narratives of ethnicity have been centered on the issues of ethnic identity and nationalism as a form of pre-given category, the invocation of ‘land’ remains marginal to ethnic politics. Many studies on the politics of ethnic homelands in South Asia has further marginalized the notion of ‘land’ in the study of ethnicity and nationalism and overemphasized ethnic identity as a dominant approach to understand the relationship between state and society. However, land is fundamental to ethnic claims for belongingness in a previously colonized society where indigenous land policy has been reconfigured by the intrusion of British colonialism—took away native land for private interest and subsequently remodified land and citizenship criteria. This article examines an ethnic demand for a homeland in the Darjeeling Hills by bringing to the fore the discussion on land contestation, linguistic politics, and regional aspiration for belongingness. The movement for Gorkhaland in Darjeeling Hills has been articulated as a demand for recognition of Gorkha as Indian citizenship and reflects a distinct attachment of Gorkha to land. Although there has been very little discussion on the issue of land in the demand for Gorkhaland and focused solely on ethnic identity and the development of the Nepali language, we argue in this article that the ethnic movement in Darjeeling has its genesis in the contention of ethnic differences in control over land, resources, and identity, and it is land that has historically framed the politics of ethnicity in the region. Therefore, ‘land is identity’ and must be viewed as a fundamental unit of analysis in ethnic politics.

Haunted by Cultural Memory: Analysing Spectral Presence in Select Novels of Amy Tan

This article depicts how Tan, following several writers of contemporary American literature, widely uses recollected cultural memories to construct ethnic ghost narratives in her novels that address the predicaments of Chinese immigrants in the US. In her novels, Tan reconstitutes cultural memories as cultural hauntings representing immigrants’ loss of identity and the repressed trauma of relocating to a new territory. Further, the notion of a matrilineal continuum in Tan’s fiction is intrinsically related to her fictional representation of cultural hauntings. Focusing on Tan’s use of ghost narratives in her novels The Joy Luck Club, The Hundred Secret Senses and The Bonesetter’s Daughter as a supernatural terrain constituted partly through collective cultural history and partly through personal memories of ancestors, this article demonstrates how such memories in being part of the Chinese American cultural unconscious assists Chinese immigrants to find a balance between their heritage and American lifestyles.

Stereotypes and the Ambiguities of Humour in Kenya: The Churchill Show

ABSTRACT The Churchill Show is a weekly live and recorded comedy show, originally staged at the Carnivore Grounds in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, and later hosted in various parts of the country. The live recordings were disseminated on Kenya’s NTV television network and published on YouTube by Laugh Industry Limited and NTV Kenya. The Churchill Show’s theme song includes a reference to bringing Kenyans back together, and the so-called ethnic jokes in the show are presented as a celebration of Kenyan multiculturalism and as a counter to what is popularly known as negative ethnicity. I show in this article that these negative ethnic narratives are situated in colonial and postcolonial archives such as harambee, nyayo philosophy, patriotism and tujenge Kenya ideologies that have been imposed on citizens, as a way of shifting the burden of nation-building onto ordinary Kenyans. I use selected stand-up comedians’ performances that were uploaded on YouTube and TV interviews to explain the prominence of the show in the country, how the humour in the show borrows from historical archives of the country, and how the ethnic-themed humour inadvertently re-constructs negative stereotypes.

КОНЦЕПТУАЛЬНЫЙ ПОТЕНЦИАЛ ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОЙ КУЛЬТУРЫ КАК ФОРМЫ ЭТНИЧЕСКОЙ МАНИФЕСТАЦИИ КОРЕННЫХ СЕВЕРНЫХ НАРОДОВ

The article is aimed at studying the strategies of reproduction and retransmission of the ethnicity of ethno-cultural groups in public representations carried out in the cultural field of the indigenous small-numbered peoples of the North of Russia. Of course, one of the key forms of ethnic manifestation of cultural identity is the national language, holidays, cuisine, traditional economic and commercial activities, etc. However, this article focuses on the importance of artistic culture as a key form of representation of the ethnic narrative, its capabilities in the issue of preserving the traditional culture of the Northern peoples in the era of intensification of globalization processes. The current processes of transformation of global culture have intensified the development of two opposite trends in the issue of ethnic identity — the desire for self-determination, the preservation of traditional economy and the assertion of ethno-cultural characteristics, on the one hand, and for integration, for higher standards of quality of life, on the other. The increasing momentum and expanding spheres of influence on the modern processes of development of the world community affect ethnic self-consciousness by involving in the global monoculture, which leads to changes in ethnicity, which in turn affects the totality of those cultural mechanisms that help ethno-cultural groups to self-represent identity. From the point of view of K. Girts interpretive model of culture, we can say that the artistic culture of a certain ethnic group is a set of meaning-bearing texts representing the social ideals of this ethno-cultural community. The specificity of the works of artistic culture of the northern small indigenous peoples lies in the fact that they record the real experience of human interaction, and therefore the entire ethno-cultural group, the ideals of their community. Thus, ethnic artistic culture acts as a social regulator of the life of an ethno-cultural community and one of the main spheres of ethnic manifestation.

Interracial relations and the post-postcolonial future in Zen Cho’s Spirits Abroad

ABSTRACT Malaysian supernatural and fantasy fiction typically belong to culture-specific mythologies that stay within the limits and boundaries of race and ethnicity. Zen Cho’s collection of fantasy short fiction Spirits Abroad, however, defies these limits and boundaries – and indirectly the ethnocentric politics of Malaysia – through representations of interracial and interspecies relationships. Exploring the emotional connections between human and magical or supernatural beings in selected stories, this article examines Cho’s subversive vision and articulation of an other-Malaysia that is made up of interstitial spaces and hybridized identities, and where the hierarchies and boundaries between native and migrant, self and other are dissolved. Her revisionary narratives not only contribute to the decolonizing of postcolonial Malaysia’s binary discourses and narratives of race and ethnicity, but are also essential to the imagining of a post-postcolonial Malaysian future.

Ethnic Narrative in the Contemporary Arabic Novel: A Cultural Reading of Kurds, Masters without Horses

Ethnic Narrative in the Contemporary Arabic Novel: A Cultural Reading of Kurds, Masters without Horses

Who Speaks for Baltimore: The Invisibility of Whiteness and the Ethics of Oral History Theater

ABSTRACT In 1980, Baltimore Voices, a play written from the transcripts of 200 interviews with elderly working-class Baltimore residents taken as part of the Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project (BNHP), was seen by thousands of people in Baltimore and on public television. Created by left-leaning oral and public historians, the play was intended to center the voices of white and African American Baltimore residents. However, Baltimore Voices fumbled its opportunity to present a nuanced past to the public through a cascading series of decisions revolving around the ethical question of who had the authority to interpret the oral histories for the stage play and how to frame them for public audiences. Specifically, the play ignored the role of whiteness in shaping Baltimore’s neighborhood history. Instead, the creators saw individual prejudice as the key issue shaping race relations in the city. They forced the stories of Black Baltimore residents into a white ethnic immigrant narrative frame, eliding the privileges that allowed white immigrants to rise in social status and distorting Black history. And they imagined the oral histories and play as modular, with the goal of presenting the history most palatable to the audience. While the theater company practiced sharing authority by giving BNHP narrators multiple opportunities to give feedback during script development, the question remains: when certain community members are more vocal than others, who gets to represent the community? Using extensive archival material, this article discusses Baltimore Voices as a case study of an oral and public history project during a formative moment for both fields. I suggest that progressive oral and public historians at times abdicated their ethical responsibility to frame and contextualize oral history to present complicated histories to the public. Examining whiteness requires this interpretive perspective because the power of whiteness is in its invisibility.

A difficult entry into modernity: Tradition as a problem and ethnic narrative

Found among the principal subjects of contemporary discursive practice is the persistent metaconflict between a ‘fossilized' ethnopsychology embodied in tradition, and a universalistic spirit of the informational and electronic era. Tradition's primordial characteristic reduces it to an ethnic-protective mentality, but excessive ethnicization supplants the renewal function of tradition as a spiritual resource. A non-archival meaning of tradition, considered in time and dynamics, suggests, along with household ethnography, the willingness and ability to adapt to modernity. The latter tends to promote breaking with tradition as the best stimulant of reforms. The conflict-inducing nature of the problem results from tradition needing a creative renewal in order to stay as it is, but from the standpoint of modernity it is mainly summed up as falling from temporality, and, consequently, an etymological family, thus turning into an anachronism out of use. The choice of the two canonical as well as the three recently produced works was directed by their focus on the eternal dilemma of ‘tradition vs. novelty.'

Vigilante youths and counterinsurgency in Northeastern Nigeria: the civilian joint task force

ABSTRACT Building on the broader literature on vigilantism, communal war and conflict, this paper examines why and how the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) in northeastern Nigeria mobilized into a pro-government militia with the aim of extirpating Boko Haram insurgents, sponsors and supporters from their communities. It provides a rich and diverse empirical evidence and analysis of why and how local youths joined the CJTF, its modus operandi, and the nature of its relationship to the military and local populations. The participation of people from a variety of religious and ethno-linguistic groups in the CJTF’s counterinsurgent vigilantism point to a collective sense of duty that transcends popular narratives of ethnicity and religion as central to the politics of protection in contemporary Nigeria.

Fluidity and persistance of cultural narratives: Heritage tourism and cultural narratives for insiders and outsiders in Western Mongolia

Framed within contemporary debates about the implications of cultural heritage tourism for rural ethnic minority populations, this paper explores the case study of cultural heritage tourism in Bayan Ulgii Mongolia, juxtaposing arguments about place and identity with those of economic benefits. Preliminary results suggest that growing attention paid to the Kazakhs as aminority ethnic cultural group in Mongolia, and narratives of their lifeway persistence, increase international acknowledgement that mayfoster greater tourism. However, one of the key outcomes of the production of this heritage landscape is the consumption of ethnic cultural identity narratives by ethnic Kazakh out-migrants who desire to reinscribe “traditional cultural lifeways” in their children’s identities. This thus serves to promote a shared sense of identity amongst a rapidly dispersing population but also challenges the notion of production and consumption as competing, rather than complimentary processes, in emerging rural tourism locations of the Global South.

Narratives of integration: Liminality in migrant acculturation through social media

Migrant integration is a long drawn out process requiring synergies with various dimensions of life, rhyming with those of the host country. In this paper, we attempt to deconstruct the digital narratives of migrants to explore how they may lead to a meaningful assessment of their acculturation and consequent integration in their host societies'. Drawing on acculturation theory as a lens, we argue that migrants' use of social media creates a liminality that is synonymous to ambiguity and disorientation that may diminish through a composite adaptation of acculturation and ethnic identity. Our data evidence on social media use among migrants domiciled in major cities in Sweden suggest that social media-based interaction of migrants is not encouraging integration, while their digital proclivities tend to define their narratives of online ethnicity and their physical realities. Implications for migrant integration are presented.

Civic Knowledge, Engagement, and Participation Narratives of Youth of Color in Urban Schools

The issues associated with students’ civic knowledge, engagement, and participation have been heightened in intellectual debates and public discussions. However, these discussions have not focused heavily on urban youths’ civic identities or the locations of these identities within the youths’ personal narratives of ethnicity, race, class, and gender. This article presents the narratives of four urban high school youths of color, selected from a larger study about youths’ experiences in school and society and the ways in which classroom learning encouraged their inquiry, assessment of their social worlds and personal goals, and emerging personal and civic identities. Our purpose was to gain insights regarding the youths’ sociopolitical perspectives on local educational and social issues affecting them and to understand their multiple literacies in the context of their civic engagement, increasing youth advocacy, and larger political tensions. The theoretical framing of this investigation is grounded in democratic education and sociopolitical consciousness and draws upon research that focuses on civic participation and democratic society. Four dominant themes emerged from the analysis: educational inequality, social media, schooling, and race and mass incarceration. This article contributes to an expansive framing for civic education by examining the civic knowledge of urban youths of color and offers implications for research, practice, and policy.

Domesticity and Immigrant Women’s Labor in Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic

Tracing the stories of Japanese picture brides, a generation of Japanese women who arrived in San Francisco in the early 1900’s for arranged marriages, and their American lives, Julie Otsuka’s novel The Buddha in the Attic (2011) combines a literary and historical focus. The experiences of dislocation, otherness, assimilation, and exclusion mark the protagonists’ lives, illustrating the dominant narratives of race, ethnicity, and gender. Otsuka articulates the problems oscillating between national consciousness and ethnic particularity, providing a critique of U.S. structures of domination and oppression that regulate the immigrant labor market. My paper offers a discussion about Japanese American women protagonists who must constantly reinvent themselves in the play of difference. The female lens, which the author employs, allows her to demonstrate how they are subjected to the forces guided by discourse of culture, ethnicity, and gender. The subaltern woman’s perspective on the domestic politics of U.S. is rendered through a collective narrator, and the absence of an identifiable individual voice stresses the characters’ fragmentation. America as home is transvalued, revealing itself as the site of unhomeliness, insecurity, and violence.

Cookbook confidential: global appetites, culinary fantasies, and Thai food

ABSTRACTThai cookbooks offer a productive lens for examining the inequalities at work in contemporary processes of cultural commodification. In the past, these ethnic cookbooks often imagined their non-Thai readers’ encounters with Thai cuisine in sharply hierarchical terms, crafting neo-colonial fantasies that normalized cosmopolitan appetites for cultural difference. Today, English-language Thai cookbooks remain similarly entangled in a global hierarchy of value that privileges a culturally unmarked “West” over its subordinate and culturally marked “others.” Nevertheless, a number of recent Thai cookbooks reveal a greater awareness of the inequalities involved in eating difference and related processes of cultural commodification. Such cookbooks offer invitations to eat otherness that, if not ultimately transformative, suggest both the potential and the limitations for ethnic cookbook narratives to craft models of more equitable, anticolonial ways of eating.

Resourcefulness, advocacy, gratitude: Three ethnic narratives in Master Chef Israel

This article looks at the experience of Mizrahi contestants in Master Chef Israel as exemplifying the limitations certain ethnicities impose on the incorporation of native culinary knowledge into the realm of haute cuisine. It also considers how such ethnicities can serve as obstacles to winning reality television shows. Specifically, I ask how Mizrahi participants can use their ethnicity explicitly within the context of reality TV to negotiate the articulation of their culinary knowledge and food practices into the public discourse on haute cuisine. I argue that Mizrahi contestants are pushed either to use ethnicity as a resource to enrich their cookery, to acknowledge the limitations it imposes on their kitchens or to use it as a stock of knowledge to be enriched so they become better Mizrahi cooks. The three versions of ethnicity, which work simultaneously in the show, point to the dynamic and changing nature of ethnicity and its ability to provide its holders with various modes of participation in the culinary sphere.

Hate Speech in Nigeria: Opportunity in Crisis

This paper reflects on ways hate speech grounded in ethnic and religious narratives precipitate loss of confidence in the Nigerian state. It attempts to characterise how inter cultural dialogue and patriotic fealty could be leveraged to redefine pre-existing relationships and pioneer monumental changes. Methods employed involve desk reviews of the incendiary comments within Biafran separatist and Arewa Youth Coalition quit notice on the Ndigbo rhetoric and their analyses from theoretical prisms of intercultural communications and nationalism. Findings suggest that national coexistence could be progressed through dialogue and accommodation with partisan matters being resolved within the latitudes of constitutionality and governance institutions. They also alluded to the symbolic importance of nationalist consciousness by emphasising need for civic loyalties and political allegiances to the country rather than cultural identity. Consequently, Nigerians are recommended to respect their diversity, embrace compromise and engage in cross cultural dialogue to rebuild the country.