Ethnic Narratives Research Articles

The ethnic and non-ethnic politics of everyday life in Bulgaria's southern borderland

Ethnicity is found in real-world contexts where non-ethnic forms of identification are available. This conclusion is drawn from an empirical study carried out in the multiethnic town of Kurdzhali in Southern Bulgaria, where members of the Bulgarian majority live alongside the Turkish minority. Drawing on the “everyday nationhood” agenda that aims to provide a methodological toolkit for the study of ethnicity/nationhood without overpredicting its importance, the study involved the collection of survey, interview, and ethnographic data. Against the expectations of some experienced scholars of the Central and Eastern Europe region, ethnic identity was found to be more salient for the majority Bulgarians than for the minority Turks. However, the ethnographic data revealed the importance of a rural–urban cleavage that was not predicted by the research design. On the basis of this finding, I argue that the “everyday nationhood” approach could be improved by including a complementary focus on non-ethnic attachments that have been emphasized by scholarship or journalism relevant to the given context. Rather than assuming the centrality of ethnicity, such an “everyday identifications” approach would start from the assumption that ethnic narratives of identity always have to compete with non-ethnic ones.

I Say to You: Ethnic Politics and the Kalenjin in Kenya (review)

Gabrielle Lynch, Say to You: Ethnic Politics and in Kenya. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 283 pp. This account of ongoing importance of ethnic affiliation in contemporary Kenyan political life begins with proposition that ethnic identities are often recent constructs, but nonetheless enjoy a seemingly and natural appeal. Gabrielle Lynch describes how their potential to unite and divide depends on contextually discernable categories of people based on assumed commonalities and differences in histories and cultures. In today's globalized world, ethnic identities enjoy recognition through cultural and peoples' rights and specially designed institutional frameworks. In multi-party electoral politics, ethnic identities can be mobilized by political leaders, educated elites, local elders, and urban and rural residents to promote and defend socioeconomic and political interests. But there is also concern about potential for sense of ethnic difference to activate or endorse violent atrocities against other. Fueled by ethnic-politicking and opportunism, Kenya's post-election violence in 2008 led to death of 1300 people and displaced well over half a million. Say to You offers a meticulously researched, minutely documented history of ethnic group in Kenya. The label Kalenjin, which means I say to you, dates from mid-20th century and refers to linguistic propinquity of peoples subsumed under this designator. In calculus of colonial administration, sub-groups were regarded as separate tribes. A tiny group of politically aware and active members of Nandi and Kipsigis socio-linguistic groups came up with idea of as an inclusive ethnic category as a means to meet needs and interests of their communities. This effort gained some ground and the Kalenjin became a group acknowledged by colonial government, among others, during turbulent decade before independence. Local fears of marginalization and exclusion and assumed benefits of amalgamation initiated construction of this new inclusive identity, but did not foment a popular sense of difference and competition until Mau Mau emergency lent shape, menace, and immediacy to communal fears. Approaching independence opened up political competition and economic production to African citizens, thus creating new opportunities for ownership and control of power, wealth, and geographical space. This in turn raised expectations of development in newly independent country, but also heightened fears of groups that felt potentially threatened by other powerful groups of Kenyans. Lynch's central argument is that while processes of ethnic construction and negotiation are limited by need for ethnicity to be rooted in primordial discourses of cultural similarity and shared pasts, main motivation for construction and politicization of alliance was, and continues to be, a nexus of fear of loss and potential for gain. From outset, ethnic narratives of territoriality, threat, and opportunity were intertwined with a portrait of community's marginality and vulnerability as ethnic others to rising power groups in post-independence Kenya. To this point, narratives made a collective claim to Rift Valley on basis of prior residence and an assumed right of locals to own and control their homelands. Lynch's analysis is most convincing as she traces construction and popularization of inclusive identity and its early and active rejection of Mau Mau. Anti-Kikuyuism discourse came to fore just prior to independence as did an ethnically delineated notion of territorial ownership and control. By independence, popular logic encouraged by colonial experience to think and act ethnically classified regional disparities in economic development, including formal employment, mission influence, and divergent fortunes of agricultural and pastoralist communities. …

Minority Cosmopolitanism

The topography of literary production and consumption has been transformed as writers and texts travel, ethnic literature is taught and translated in multiple national venues, and writers’ locations, audiences, and subject matter resist ready alignment. he growing internationalization of ethnic literary production has produced a heterogeneous range of texts, which challenge the established boundaries of ethnic and world literature. Because they focus on minorities, these texts have been slow to win recognition as world literature even though they depict transnational movements and identifications that diverge from those in canonical ethnic narratives. I develop the analytic of minority cosmopolitanism to examine the ways in which these literary narratives of worlding contest contemporary economic and political processes of globalization and Eurocentric accounts of globality. This essay considers how the gendered figure of the diasporic citizen serves as a vehicle for minority cosmopolitanism in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies (1999).

Entangled traditions of race

This article discusses the relationship between race and physical anthropology in Hungary and Romania between 1900 and 1940. It begins by looking at institutional developments in both countries and how these influenced the most important Hungarian and Romanian anthropologists' professional and research agendas. Drawing from a wide range of primary sources, the article reveals the significant role the concept of race played in articulating anthropological and ethnic narratives of national belonging. It is necessary to understand the appeal of the idea of race in this context. With idealized images of national communities and racial hierarchies creeping back into Eastern European popular culture and politics, one needs to understand the latent and often unrecognized legacies of race in shaping not only scientific disciplines like anthropology, but also the emergence and entrancement of modern Hungarian and Romanian nationalism.

Fractured narratives, fractured identities: cross-cultural challenges to essentialist concepts of gender and sexuality

Narrative understandings of identity have gained prominence in recent years, and much of the distress people take to counsellors or psychotherapists may be conceived of as narrative breakdown. When I am no longer able to tell myself and others a coherent, unified story about my life, my sense of self may feel threatened. Attempts by sexual-minority individuals to create a unified narrative-of-self are often undermined by the incompatibility of competing, intersecting narratives. The potential limitations of language to adequately narrate lived experience are thus revealed. This article explores the impact on a British Indian Sikh gay man of colliding narratives (of religion, ethnicity, nationhood, gender and sexuality) which threaten an existing stable sense of self. His struggle to achieve unity in his narrative-of-self is hampered by contradictory narratives of same-sex attraction and behaviour in his ‘home’ Indian culture and his ‘adopted’ white, British culture. I explore some implications of adopting a queer perspective – encouraging and cautionary – for therapists working cross-culturally.

Race, ethnicity, and power in Ecuador: the manipulation of mestizaje

Introduction. Foxes and Lions: Studying the Upper Classes. Constructing Identities: The 2001 National Census. Economy, Etiquette, and Ethnicity: Defining Ecuadorian Elites. The Mestizo and the Other: Ethnic Narratives in Ecuador. The Port and Mestizaje: Ethnic Narratives in Guayaquil. Learning Mestizaje: Ethnic Narratives in Quito. Ethnic Narratives and Socioeconomic Development. Responsibility and Change. Conclusion. Appendixes: Brief Chronology. Methodological Overview. Statistical Data.

“All ah we is not one:” Historical and Ethnic Narratives in Pluralist Trinidad

Globalization has been impacting the Caribbean region since the end of the fifteenth century, when it was incorporated into an Atlantic economy within just a few generations. One of the results of this earlier phase of globalization was to bring people from many different parts of the world to the region, creating colonial societies with a high degree of ethnic diversity. Trinidad and Tobago, in the southern Caribbean, is a good example; currently people of African and of South Asian (Indian) descent each constitute about forty percent of the population, and several smaller ethnic groups are also represented. The modern (late twentieth-century) globalization trends have tended to deepen ethnic identities, partly as a defensive reaction to their homogenizing and westernizing effects. One aspect of this has been the emergence of ethnic narratives of the nation, challenging the earlier colonial and anti-colonial narratives. This paper will examine the development of an Indocentric and an Afrocentric narrative of the nation's past over the last few decades. I hope to show how the Afrocentric narrative of the country's history is continually challenged by spokespersons for oppositional ethnic versions.

Roma Nation? Competing Narratives of Nationhood

This article considers two alternative accounts of Romani ethnogenesis, an ethnic narrative exuding the romance of exoticism and a functional one underpinning the pathos of deprivation. Neither of these accounts conveys the specificity of the Romani condition which cannot be defined by mythical nomadic lifestyle, by the legal and political situation of an ethnic minority, or by social economic status. The article argues that the imbrication of the twin accounts of ethnogenesis and of their corresponding structures of legitimization has distorted both analysis and policy with respect to the “Roma Question” in East Central Europe.

Narratives of the social scientist: understanding the work of John Ogbu

This article contextualizes the work of the late educational anthropologist John Ogbu in terms of uniquely American narratives that have explanatory and motivational value for different segments of the US population. The narrative Ogbu championed has explanatory value among several educational researchers, and is consistent with an ethnic immigrant narrative that has long held motivational value among African, Asian and European immigrant students in the United States – quite possibly including John Ogbu – who came to the US as an immigrant student himself. While I point out specific problems that undermine the accuracy of Ogbu’s assessments and the quality of his analysis, I also point out that (for better or worse), when it comes to the effectiveness and acceptance of such narratives among different groups of people, historical accuracy and objective truth is not as important as the extent to which the explanations offered hold explanatory and motivational value and resonate with individual or group experiences and understandings of the world.

Contested Identities: Narratives of Race and Ethnicity in the Cape Verdean Diaspora

This article presents the case of Cape Verdeans living in Boston, Massachusetts, as a community faced with the dilemma of constructing social identities within a racialized society. The Cape Verdean diaspora community of Boston is one that is fragmented into two distinct sectors of “Cape Verdean Americans” and “Cape Verdean immigrants.” Through an analysis of “identity narratives,” this article illustrates how Cape Verdeans’ diasporic identity formation is constructed out of processes of negotiation and contestation. In determining whether Cape Verdeans living in Boston associate more with their cultural group or other larger racialized groups whom they resemble (e.g., African-Americans, Latinos), this article reveals how diasporic identities are not merely a given, but are a matter of heated debate. The Cape Verdean diaspora of Boston provides an interesting example of how immigrants of African descent are actively reshaping the boundaries of racial categories by creating a space for cultural differentiation. The self-identification practices of Cape Verdeans are not unlike those of many other racially and ethnically defined immigrants in the United States, who continue to relocate to the United States, permanently or temporarily, due to personal choice, economic necessity, political persecution, ecological escape, and familial reunification. This article demonstrates how racial and ethnic categories are expanding and thus challenging our common sense notions of race, ethnicity, and culture.

Minzoku no katari no bunpo: chugoku seikaisho mongoruzoku no nichijobunso kyoiku (The syntax of narratives of ethnicity: daily lives, disputes and education of the Mongols of Qinghai Province in China).

Minzoku no katari no bunpo: chugoku seikaisho mongoruzoku no nichijobunso kyoiku (The syntax of narratives of ethnicity: daily lives, disputes and education of the Mongols of Qinghai Province in China).

Dreaming as Cultural Work in Donald Duk and Dreaming in Cuban

I must trust my own recollections. I must also depend on the recollections of others. Thus memory weighs heavily in what I write, in how I begin and what I find to be significant [...] But memories and recollections won't give me total access to the unwritten interior life of these people. Only the act of the imagination can help me. --Toni Morrison, The Site of Memory (302) In recent studies of ethnic literature, much discussion has surrounded the subject of ghosts, whose spectral or literal presence in contemporary works of fiction is thought to evidence a renewed interest in historical detail. One might begin by citing Kathleen Brogan's influential text, Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature (1998), in which she locates in ethnic narrative a process of mourning, so that haunting becomes a metaphor for the act of inventing and recovering one's cultural heritage. Brogan figures this trope as central to texts of ethnic origin, for haunted tales ... bear witness to some sense of breach with the past (164). Frequently underpinning discussions like that of Brogan is the suggestion that forgotten pasts (and the stories, moments, and peoples which accompany them) may be accessed through acts of the imagination, and that such interventions may help to reconstitute cultural histories which might be otherwise erased. Using the founding premise that the recuperation of such pasts is in part the objective of ethnic fiction, this analysis will proceed by identifying dreaming, as it appears in Frank Chin's Donald Duk (1991) and Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban (1992), as a motif that does cultural work similar to that of haunting. Specifically, since dreaming allows characters to relate both emotionally and corporeally to their cultural heritages, dreaming can be conceived of as a mode of historiography that reshapes what counts as history and knowledge. In this sense, dreaming has a manifold application: although it acts as a literary motif that advances the narrative of a fictional text, it also signifies a mode of history-making by which characters are invited to make imaginative interventions into their own cultural pasts. This investigation will commence with a discussion of Donald Duk, the twelve-year-old boy featured in Frank Chin's eponymous novel who, during the fifteen-day period of the Chinese New Year, begins dreaming that he is his great-great-grandfather, working alongside other Chinese laborers in 1869 on the Central Pacific Railroad. As Donald gets more interested in his dream, he develops an increasingly politicized awareness of the inaccuracies surrounding historical accounts of Chinese contributions to the railroad. Similarly, in Dreaming in Cuban, Pilar Puente is beckoned by her Cuban grandmother, through dreams and telepathy, to carry on the legacy of her family heritage. Pilar, too, is asked to become an arbiter of the who will negotiate its translation into the future. I would like to invite comparison between Donald and Pilar, in part because the texts in which they appear both suggest an appreciation of the fact that the construction of a modern day ethnic identity relies on the act of making imaginative connections with one's cultural heritage; additionally, each text reaffirms the idea that previous generations can help to mediate this process. I will argue, however, that the texts differ in some significant respects. Although Chin suggestively interrogates the relationship between dreaming and cultural identity, his text at times overestimates the ease with which knowledges gained from dreams might be called upon to advance revisionary histories. This move, I suggest, reduces the generative power of Donald's imaginative intervention into the project of creating a politics of memory. Conversely, Garcia's text demonstrates a more complicated awareness that the knowledge provided by dreams is, in fact, fragmentary and provisional. …

Black Immigrants in the United States and the "Cultural Narratives" of Ethnicity

This article argues that social science representations of post-1965 Black immigrants in the United States employ the concept of "ethnicity" in ways that reinforce the racialist myth of Black (American) cultural inferiority. Specifically, the discursive use of Black immigrant "ethnic" and "cultural distinctiveness," while admittedly reflecting an important recognition of the heterogeneity of the United States Black populations, is in fact predicated upon a repackaged "culture of poverty" discourse that serves to reaffirm the overarching racial order. In a discussion of the theoretical and historical development of the concept, I show how the current discourse of "ethnic distinctiveness" perpetuates a form of racism under a theory that denies the relevance of race while it continuously recodes the biological notions of race as "culture." Thus, Black immigrant distinctiveness, when presented through the prism of the cultural narratives of ethnicity, allows for the perpetuation of a "cultural racism" that adversely affects all Blacks in this country. I therefore call for a rejection of ethnicity theory as it is currently conceptualized and suggest the need to ground theories of Black distinctiveness within analyses of power relations and ongoing practices of racial subjugation.

Creating Narratives of Place and Identity in “Little Sweden, U.S.A.”

In Lindsborg, Kansas—“Little Sweden, U.S.A.”—the streets are lined with shops offering “An Adventure in Swedish Tradition,” and residents put on numerous festivals throughout the year highlighting Swedish folk customs. Such ethnic tourist towns have become increasingly widespread in the United States over the past thirty years. Tourists tend to perceive these places as towns where folk culture has been passed down unchanged for generations, while academics tend to dismiss residents' ethnicity as crass commercialism. Neither view is correct. Ethnicity and tradition are not static but constantly invented and reinvented. Modern folk ethnicity, among European Americans in particular, is simply the most recent incarnation of this process, one that attempts to recover ties to a specific, small‐scale landscape and history. This article explores the changing nature of the narratives of ethnicity and place‐based identity that the residents of Lindsborg have used to create a place for themselves in American society.

Using African American Narratives to Analyze Social Policy

This paper explores how African American literature can enrich the analysis of social policy in social work graduate courses. The historic debate between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois about black progress, and its reflection in subsequent works by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Shelby Steele, and Cornel West, illustrate that the debate remains present in contemporary affirmative action and welfare reform policies. Using ethnic narratives can expand adult students' ability to analyze the purposes, consequences, and values underlying social policies and help social workers formulate, document and buttress new policy positions. Such abilities are especially critical for social policies in which race remains a critical influence.

The Semiotics of China Narratives in the Con/texts of Kingston and Tan

How ‘Chinese’ is The Woman Warrior?' Sau-ling Cynthia Wong asks in her essay “Kingston's Handling of Traditional Chinese Sources” (27). The native-ness of ethnic American literature is a complex issue that deserves serious consideration and intelligent discussion. I have noticed that to date it is not the nativeness of our ethnic narratives that has escaped critical attention but the narrative reconfiguration of nativeness in literary representation. That is to say, the whole issue of nativeness in literary texts requires careful examination in the context of cultural differences and in relation to subject positions. In this essay, I explore the theoretical implications of that “native” issue by inquiring into the semiotics of “China experiences” in terms of “China narratives” within the contexts of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and China Men and Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife.

Ethnic Communality and Conflict Resolution

Ethnicity is defined as a way of typifying the world, and as such it is a way to form a community. Ethnic conflicts, however, are characterized by the emphasis on ethnic criteria as a foundation for communality, by closed off ethnic narratives as well as by the practices of ethnocraft through which a coherent identity of the ethnic group is maintained. Conflict resolution in dialogic communities offers a means of dealing with these, because the dialogic community brings about a constructive shared search for knowledge of the conflict in question through conversation. Furthermore, conflict resolution in dialogic communities with the help of the third party provides a means to get involved in projecting and imagining alternative communities, new ways to unite with people.

Memory, Narrative and Identity: New Essays in Ethnic American Literatures

The fourteen insightful essays in this timely volume focus on the different ways in which ethnic American writers use memory as a device to redefine history and culture, to validate both a personal and a collective identity, and to shape narrative. The contributors articulate how the works of diverse American writers of African, Mexican, Irish, Chinese, South Asian, Jewish, and Native American descent chart memory's forays into language, narrative, and identity. The cultural and political realities of race and ethnicity in American life - as refracted through memory and imagination - give a special meaning to the identity crisis of hyphenated Americans. In examining the complicated issues of cultural memory, the contributors pay attention to historical conditions, hegemonic discourses, and differences of gender, class, and region. Some of the essays consider a single writer, while others adopt a comparative approach. Some are multi-disciplinary, drawing on insights from anthropology or semiotics, while others provide close textual analysis. Rather than providing systematic coverage of major ethnic writers of all ethnic literatures, Memory, Narrative, and Identity: New Essays in Ethnic American Literatures demonstrates the broad range of suggestive and provocative approaches that may be employed in studying the traces of memory in language and narrative. In their introduction, the editors have provided a valuable backward glance at how issues of race and ethnicity have come to be acknowledged as central to current literary debates. This group of critical essays not only approaches issues of memory, narrative, and cultural politics in defining the complex realities of American ethnicityand cultural identity, but also focuses on the roles of time and orality in validating both historical and narrative experience. This collection also addresses the ways in which immigrant or racial memory filters through the expanding net of language and consciousness, at the same

Postmodernism and the Reclaiming of Tradition

‘The history of the Zulu people is the history of myself’.1 In Africa, as elsewhere, the notion of tradition is bound up with the discourses of ethnicity and nationalism. Typically invoking pre-colonial identities as the basis of peoplehood, such narratives of common descent are imbued with a strong sense of ‘pastness’, orientating the modern self in traditional terms. Anderson explains this invocation of tradition as a feature of the inverted nature of ethnic narratives of common descent.2 More common are accounts which focus on the ‘loss of meaning’ brought about by modernisation and the psychic security offered by an idealised past. Recent theories look to supplant this sense of tradition as reaction with a sense of tradition as creation. One example is Lonsdale’s argument that the affirmation of ethnicity in post-colonial Africa, with its associated invention of tradition, must be seen in the context of internal debates over civic virtue as pre-colonial moral economies are re-structured by the state and capitalism.

Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth-Century America (review)

Reviewed by: Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth-Century America Carla Cappetti Thomas J. Ferraro . Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth-Century America. Chicago: Chicago UP. xii + 229 pp. No price given. Tom Ferraro has written a book that both welcomes immigrant mobility stories into the fields of twentieth-century U.S. literature and of mainstream literary criticism and takes on the task of modernizing and deromanticizing the ethnic narrative tradition. Ethnic Passages self-consciously balances its argument between two positions. First, Ferraro creatively engages the traditional claim that ethnic writers have made significant contributions to American literature in general, and to specific nineteenth- and twentieth-century genres in particular. This side of the argument finds illustrations in Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers as a modern and neo-feminist appropriation of the classic up-from-the-ghetto model, in Henry Roth's Call It Sleep as an immigrant reinterpretation of the modern portrait-of-the-artist genre, and in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior as a feminist and ethnic revision of the postmodern narrative of hyperreality and hyperunreality. At the same time, Ferraro pursues a more recent position. Both the most popular and the most modern artists are writers whose popularity (in the case of Mario Puzo's The Godfather) and whose modernity (in the case of Henry Miller's "The Tailor's Shop") are inseparable from their respective experiences within Italian America and German America. Far from representing dichotomous forms of universality—Puzo's by way of the mass market and Miller's by way of an experimental modernist aesthetics—the mass market bestseller and the modernist icon, Ferraro shows, have roots in particular ethnic experiences which, in turn, permeate the works at both the thematic and the aesthetic levels. Ethnic Passages is first and foremost a positive contribution to the argument that the high modernist tradition can no longer be seen as the sole representative of twentieth-century U.S. literature. The study spends little time berating the canon and instead devotes itself to authors who are on their way to becoming integral to twentieth-century U.S. literature but for whom critical commentary lags far behind. Ferraro relies on a range of approaches, engaging most consistently the traditional close reading methodology while at the same time selecting in different chapters from such late twentieth-century critical menus as critical theory, new historicism, psychoanalysis, gender studies and feminist theory. The passion and intelligence that Ferraro brings to his readings has little to do with the critical apparatus and everything to do with his success. And Ferraro is successful in bringing one of the most ubiquitous literary genres of nineteenth-century U.S literature—the up-from-the-ghetto story—out [End Page 359] of the ghetto and past the 1890s. He has opened a dialogue between these stories and the Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville of U.S. literature, or the Joyce, Proust, T. S. Eliot of modern literature. He has brought the ethnic narrative of transition and self-making into our age by tracing its variegated development into the twentieth century, and into the modern and postmodern periods. No one who has read this book will uncritically reproduce the simplistic notion that "ethnic experience" and "modernist universality" are to be found on opposite sides of the Atlantic, or in distant parts of the city, of the anthology, and of the syllabus. Ferraro concludes with what amounts to a closing dedication to the "millions of new immigrants." "When I see their offspring in my classroom," he writes, "I imagine what it must have felt like at City College in the 1920s or at Harvard in the 1950s and I rejoice." As someone who does teach at City College in the 1990s where at least sixty percent of the students are foreign born and where virtually all students are "new immigrants" to post-secondary education, I rejoice as well. Ethnic Passages makes it possible to teach the offspring of immigrants and migrants by creating bridges between the literary traditions of the past and those of the present and the future. Carla Cappetti The City College of New York Copyright © 1994 Purdue Research Foundation