Ethnic Self Research Articles

The disappearing immigrants: hunger strike as invisible struggle

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)This article follows a dialogic approach in an attempt to build bridges between different academic disciplines and actually existing social performances. A social scientist and an applied theatre practitioner adopt a theory of 'performativity' which explores the productive capacities of performances as kinesis, a movement that represents the energies that break political boundaries and trouble social closures. In doing so, we follow Victor Turner's interpretation of cultural performances asnot simple reflectors or expressions of culture or even of changing culture but may themselves be active agencies of change, representing the eye by which culture sees itself and the drawing board on which creative actors sketch out what they believe to be more apt or interesting 'designs for living' (1986: 24).In other words, the term 'performance' refers to actions that incessantly insinuate, interrupt, interrogate and antagonise powerful master narratives. In this line of thought, the social world becomes the theatrical stage of everyday encounters as cultural performances which transcend social, political and, ultimately, academic boundaries. Primarily, we are concerned with how the strategy of engaging with invisible bodies and performative resistances can unpack hierarchies of representation. The article focuses on a specific resistant act which can be read as a performance; dealing with the narratives that provide the act with its socio-political context, as well as the categories of audience witnessing of the act.The article analyses a large-scale hunger strike act, performed by 300 immigrants and staged in the Law School building in Athens. In order to unpack the complexities of such a performance, we critically reflect on our own position as occupying overlapping roles as witnesses, audience, researchers, artists and social scientists. We engage with Turner's 'emphatic view of performance as making not faking', and then we move to 'Bhabha's politically urgent view of performance as breaking and remaking' (Conquergood, 1995: 138).The starting point of our analysis is the socio-political context in Athens which prepares the stage for that performance. We then move to the actual stage of the Law School building in order to critically reflect on the 'academic asylum' state and the multiple meanings of being in a space always already inscribed by powerful social memories. We draw on Henri Lefebvre's work on the social production of space and the power of remapping. To remap means to engage into a compelling negotiation of space, stereotypes, feelings and practices such as inclusion, recognition and openness. Next, we examine hunger strike as a means of practising resistance and as a spectacle. We refer to the importance of the image in our postmodern societies to evoke genuine human reactions, analysing the performance from the audience's perspective (knowingly including several images to underscore this point). Meanwhile we remain critical on issues of participation and representation in grassroots resistance movements. Finally, we discuss what a possible end could be and the wider social, political and cultural implications of such a performance.PREPARING THE STAGE: ALIENATION IN THE ATHENIAN LANDSCAPEThe ethnic self in Athens is perceived through a feeling of superiority, which is the result of ancient Greek heritage. The constitution of solid nationalist identities has involved a procedure of homogenisation, namely, the purging of vibrant Eastern elements that were remnant of Ottoman rule which ended in 1834. Modern Greek identity is based on the assumption that 'the Greeks are the distinctive heirs of the ancient Greek civilisation' (Papataxiarhis, 1998: 3). Considering Greece's history of occupation, it may come as no surprise that the main interpretation of national identity has an obvious xenophobic shade and brings forth a rather defensive definition of Greekness, which seeks to 'establish identity not on the affirmation of us, but on the rejection of the other, leading to an effort to retain its integrity through isolation and ethnocentrism' (Tsaousis 1998: 19). …

“Cuz They Care About the People Who Goes There”: The Multiple Roles of a Community-Based Youth Center in Providing “Youth (Comm)Unity” for Low-Income Chinese American Youth

This article will explore the role of “CYC,” a community-based youth center, in providing a sense of what I call “Youth (Comm)Unity” for Chinese American youth from low-income immigrant families. While CYC combines the youths’ home and school worlds, it is also distinct from these worlds by forming a new and hybrid culture/space. In doing so, I argue Youth (Comm)Unity consists of three critical concepts: (a) the Multiple Worlds model developed by Patricia Phelan et al. (1991, 1993, 1998); (b) Angela Valenzuela’s “authentic caring” (1999); and (c) similar to Gloria Ladson-Billings’s “culturally relevant pedagogy,” “culturally relevant” understanding (1994; 1995a; 1995b). Through providing the youth with a sense of Youth (Comm)Unity, CYC is able to offer the following kinds of social and emotional support: sense of trust and caring, sense of ethnic self and identity, sense of home and safe space, serving as role models, and sense of being a teenager. Data for this article is drawn from a larger study based on 15 weeks of ethnographic-based research. As this article illustrates, community-based organizations bridge such gaps for youth from low-income and working-class immigrant families, and Youth (Comm)-Unity is key in order to better serve low-income students of color.

Gay Mexican Pornography at the Intersection of Ethnic and National Identity in Jorge Diestra’s La Putiza

This article aims to offer an analysis of the way that issues of national and ethnic self identity are structured and constructed in Mexican gay pornography. Unlike theorists who regard pornography as a matter of sex discrimination and argue that it simply undermines any positive attitudes towards homosexuality, this article argues that Mexican gay male pornography has served as a point of self reference for homosexual men in the country, while it has also helped to foster a degree of visibility for the gay community in mainstream culture. Through an analysis of the film La Putiza (2006), made by the emerging porn house Mecos Films, it will be demonstrated that Mexican male homosexuals do not regard pornography as a cultural product intended to the objectification of the gay community and its members. This film clearly stresses ethnic and national identity as the basis to contest the hegemony of Anglo-European gay pornography in which notions of Latin(o) identity have been caricaturised and heavily troped. This film borrows elements that are pertinent to the specificity of the national gay imagery, as well as film genres that are regarded as quintessentially Mexican. Therefore, the combination of Aztec heritage narrative and wrestling subtexts permit to posit this film as an alternative to the kind of images of Latin(o) homosexuality that are portrayed in Western pornography, while it also stresses national identity by using themes that circulate in the national imaginary as exclusively Mexican. In short, the emerging Mexican gay pornographic industry and the film that it produces prove to be a site of contestation of the hegemony of “Latinised” images that have been offered in foreign pornographic accounts, while they also become a site of validation for gay men whose physicality or ethnic heritage has been rejected within the politics of the erotic.

John Fante’s Ask the Dust and Fictions of Whiteness

Research Article| December 01 2010 John Fante’s Ask the Dust and Fictions of Whiteness Matthew Elliott Matthew Elliott Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2010) 56 (4): 530–544. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2010-1007 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Matthew Elliott; John Fante’s Ask the Dust and Fictions of Whiteness. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 December 2010; 56 (4): 530–544. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2010-1007 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Essays You do not currently have access to this content.

Improvising Chicago

Aldo Rossi's The Architecture of the City articulates how civic space intersects with collective agency: "One can say that the city itself is the collective memory of its people, and like memory it is associated with objects and places [. . .] The collective memory participates in the actual transformation of space in the works of the collective, a transformation that is always conditioned by whatever material realities oppose it" (130). Rossi's contention—that the development, or "transformation," of urban space is accomplished by a collective deploying memory in its struggle with material reality—is the scene of Stuart Dybek's southside Chicago in, The Coast of Chicago. Where this short story cycle deals with musical improvisation it dramatizes Rossi's contention by showing how memory not only resists "material realities"—in this case the demolition of southside neighborhoods initiated by Mayor Daley—and not only preserves ethnicity—especially the Polish and Chicano diasporas Dybek writes about—but also enables what Thomas S. Gladsky has called "a trans-ethnic urban America [. . .] a diverse cultural landscape where ethnicity transcends national origins but remains vital" (117). Dybek's ethnic self is a processual subjectivity, improvisatory rather than definitive, "based [less] on national origins [than] on a shared sense of ethnicity as a condition of Americanness" (Gladsky 115). In the story "Blight" characters inhabit a neighborhood where "the city was tearing down buildings for urban renewal and tearing up streets for a new expressway, and everywhere one looked there were signs in front of the rubble reading: sorry for the inconvenience / another improvement / for a greater Chicago / Richard J. Daley, Mayor" (44). Yet it is this demolition of monuments, this assault on what Rossi calls "the Locus" ("a relationship between a [. . .] specific location and the buildings that are in it" 103), this demonstration of the materiality of civic space that allows the characters to reawaken to the transformative potential of community: "It was the route we usually took to the viaduct, but since blight had been declared we were trying to see our surroundings from a new perspective" (45). Awakening to "new perspectives" as a result of civic "improvement" Dybek's characters cast off a determinate subjectivity and realize the action of the collective in the determination of civic reality. When the characters go to the viaduct off Douglas Park and begin improvising a "blues" by "slamming an aerial or board or chain off the girders, making the echoes collide and ring [. . .] clonk[ing] empty bottles and beer cans [. . .] shouting and screaming like [. . .] Howlin' Wolf" (48) they are joined by "a train [. . .] booming overhead like part of the song" (48)and by "a gang of black kids" at the other end of the viaduct who "stood harmonizing from bass through falsetto just like the Coasters, so sweetly that though at first [the characters] tried outshouting them, [they] finally shut up and listened, except for Pepper keeping the beat" (48). The fragments of the city are used to enable collectivity, to remember what the city is for. The attempt of civic authority to wrest memory from its inhabitants by making it impermanent, fragmentary, demolished, is precisely what restores agency by giving way to a subjectivity that is the scene of salvage. In this way communities become aware of their ability to define landscape, to alter "perspective" and take possession of space, to regard ethnicity as a common instrument, as if out of material destruction it might be possible to make of memory something more powerful than memorization, defying institutional permanence—civic or ethnic—for a community that is elastic, responsive, aware of its relationships with and within the spaces it inhabits.

Being in the minority is my circumstance, not my identity

Among scholars, practitioners, politicians, and the media, the term ‘minority’ is often used to refer to people of colour – human beings of African and Asian descent. However, the etymology of the term ‘minority’ means the smaller part or number, or an amount forming less than half of the whole. Minority also suggests diminution. To say that people are in the minority because they are not part of the racial, ethnic and political majority in the United States is accurate. But is it appropriate to use a group's statistical representation as the euphemism for their identity? Besides, are people in the majority labelled as ‘majorities’? In an autoethnographic, ‘open-form’ or ‘free verse’ poem format, the author explains her racial and ethnic self and suggests that, when referring to her and other people of colour, it is most fitting to do so by name or identity rather than by circumstance.

Residential Segregation Influences on the Likelihood of Ethnic Self–Employment

Geographic and environmental influences on economic action have a long history in managerial research. This paper develops and estimates a model of the potential of a broad set of U.S. racial minority groups to enter self–employment based on individual–level, household–level, and metropolitan area–level factors. The model allows for an analysis of two distinct residential segregation processes on self–employment likelihood. Results indicate that clustering by race has group–specific influences, increasing the likelihood of self–employment for some groups and diminishing for others. Higher levels of racial exposure raise the likelihood of entrepreneurial careers for all groups, but especially for Blacks.

Beyond Affirmation

Identity development is a dynamic process which involves reconciling multiple messages. While ethnic minority adolescents' development is affected profoundly by discrimination, positive racial/ethnic encounters can also transform one's identity. Questionnaire data were gathered from 122 tenth-grade Mexican Americans in a low-performing school that had over 60% “Hispanic” students. Based on the data, 12 second-generation youth were selected for interviews based on their level of academic engagement and experiences with negative racial/ethnic encounters in school. Interviewees' descriptions of positive encounter experiences revealed ways in which schools can reinforce equal status and integrate Mexican American youth. Youth felt a renewed commitment to their ethnic selves when they participated in events that they perceived as dispelling stereotypes and when they had concrete experiences in which their bilingual competence was perceived as an asset. This qualitative study identifies avenues for future research on positive racial/ethnic encounters and academic engagement.

Teaching in culturally diverse contexts: what knowledge about ‘self’ and ‘others’ do teachers need?

This article draws on data from a small‐scale qualitative study conducted in Australia that explored how pre‐service teachers engaged with students from culturally diverse backgrounds during practicum and how they understood their own ethnic identities. The findings of the study suggest that pre‐service teachers have simplistic understandings of their students' cultures and limited understandings of how their own identities are constituted through, and by, ethnicity. Such limited knowledge about the ‘ethnic self’ and the ‘ethnic other’ has implications for the development of multicultural pedagogies. The article raises concerns for teacher education including the need to provide opportunities for pre‐service teachers to understand the ‘ethnic self’ in relation to the ‘ethnic other’ through ongoing critical reflection.

The New ‘Creative’Brick Lane

This article is a narrative study of local multicultural encounters taking place along Brick Lane in East London, UK. Although the area has been primarily researched for its Bangladeshi community, this article focuses on the ‘creative’ professionals who work and/or reside within the vicinity. It is a narrative investigation into their attitudes towards difference, ethnicity and the ethnic self. A multiplicity of local multicultural tales comes to the fore. In short, the multicultural realities of the area become narrated in many different ways, which clearly manifest a narrative complexity, unfolding within the new ‘creative’ Brick Lane. These different local multicultural narratives could also be indicative of the ways that multicultural meaning is created within London at large.

The True Name Movement: Japanese Teachers' Struggle for Empowering Korean Children.

AbstractPersonal naming has been central to the state's control of Koreans in Japan, but it has also been an important political strategy for Korean activists to challenge Japanese authorities. In the 1970s, Japanese teachers in public schools formed a true name movement, in which they encouraged Korean students to discard their false (Japanese) names, declare their true (Korean) names and true identities, and fight against ethnic discrimination. When the movement began, this rhetoric effectively captured the minds of Korean students. However, it became problematic in the 1980s, when the movement gradually spread. More and more Korean children became attached to their Japanese names and took those names as their true names; For them, the rhetoric was a rigid system of ethnic classification, in which a personal name, an ethnic self, and the true self signified one another. Yet, the movement helped them learn the political significance of personal naming.

Who is the rogue? Discourse, power and spatial politics in post-war Sri Lanka

Abstract This article analyses ethnic antagonisms and related political discourses in Sri Lanka after the ceasefire agreement in 2002 using the Derridean notion of vouyou (rogue) and Agamben's concept of state of exception. In all three ethnic groups in Sri Lanka, we can observe discourses on ethnicity, space and territories that create fictions of ethnic homogeneity and purity based on a social construct of the ethnic other as “rogue”. Roguishness is linked with issues of territorial control, political justice and virtual or real “rogue states”. It is also pertinent in the justification of violence and the differentiation of just(ified) and unjust(ified), roguish violence and the rivalry over sovereignty. I will argue that these “rogue others” are needed to legitimize a state of exception where force stands out-of-the-law, but needs to be justified as being within the law, since the state of exception is part of a project leading to an ideal state-to-come. This ideal state-to-come to is to be a “pure” state-to-come, in the form of the “pure” Singhalese–Buddhist state, the Tamil homeland, and more recently, the Muslim homeland as expression of distinct Muslimness. Derrida argues that identifying “rogues” is rationalizing and covering deeper rooted fears. In Sri Lanka, the rogue rationale reveals deeper lying anxieties that link security with ethnic homogeneity and the ethnic self and insecurity with multi-ethnicity and the ethnic other. The ethnic other is a force preventing the (ethnically) pure state-to-come to come into being.

The Diasporic Subject in Ariel Dorfman's Heading South, Looking North

Esta es la historia de una pesadilla. Y de su comprension y superacion por medio del arte. Todos hemos vivido, hemos visto vivir, hemos sonado esta pesadilla. No todos hemos sabido superarla. This is the story of a nightmare. And o fits understanding and overcoming through art. We have all lived, have seen live, have dreamed this nightmare. Not all of us have known how to overcome it. --Ariel Dorfman in El absurdo entre cuatro paredes Dorfman wrote this epigraph to his first book in Chile in 1908 during a time when hopes for revolutionary change were sweeping the globe. Little did he know that his musing on the ways that art can overcome nightmares would undergo an extreme test after September 11, 1973 when Salvador Allende's presidency was brutally overthrown by Augusto Pinochet and all those who had worked with Allende, including Dorfman, became victims of a violent military dictatorship. In an act of foreshadowing that has consistently haunted Dorfman's literary career, these first words could also be used to open his memoir. (1) Heading South, Looking North is surrounded by pain and guided by hope. To read Ariel Dorfman's memoir is to engage with some of the most pressing questions concerning the ties between literary representation and historical event; art and activism; and writing memoir and recording history. Heading South, Looking North asks the reader to play an active role in the recovery and recollection of Dorfman's life, and his memoir highlights the multiple ways that his life story intertwines personal memory and the history of the Americas. (2) Paralleling Amitav Ghosh's notion of the shadow line as the blurry, shifting boundary between the self and the nation that is both absurd illusion and a source of terrifying violence (n.p.), Dorfman's memoir points to the conflicts that distinguish identity from identity markers. These conflicts between the self and the terms used to define the self are alternately imposed and desired, external and internal, national and transnational, material and imaginary, fixed and fluid. Identity is not only shaped by the tensions between agency and cultural politics; it is also governed by competing forces of time and space, history and nation. A carefully constructed text that tests the form of memoir and the boundaries of bicultural identity, Dorfman's Heading South, Looking North requires a reading that moves beyond many of the traditional critical categories used to understand ethnic, diasporic life writing. Academic studies of US ethnic literature, exemplified by the early work of Werner Sollors, were originally organized around a dominant critical paradigm that understood the ethnic self as bicultural: divided across two cultures, two languages, two identities, struggling between assimilation to and dissimilation from mainstream culture, caught between dominant and minority culture. (3) This focus on the bifurcated subject receded when ethnic studies increasingly considered the self as hybrid, multiple, and plentiful. With the work of such scholars and creative writers as Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga, axes of identity registered a number of markers that exceeded traditional ethnic categories and included gender, sexuality, and class. Recent globalization theory has expanded further on this sense of self by considering the subject in relation to local and transnational spaces (Mendieta; de la Campa). In addition, the concepts of postcolonial, subaltern, and postnational chart interpretations of ethnic writing as seen, for example, in the work of Azade Seyhan. In a parallel vein, the theoretical bases for autobiography studies have shifted recently. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson provide a periodization of critical approaches to life writing; they highlight three key phases: 1) studies that focused on the way that autobiographies record the life of a great man; 2) studies that problematized the representation of the subject; and 3) contemporary studies that focus on the referentiality and relationality of life narrative (139). …

New Lines, Shifting Identities: Interpreting Change at the Lingsar Festival in Lombok, Indonesia

I hardly recognized the event. Over the course of twenty years, I had visited the temple t ns of times and was witnessing its festival for the fourth time. But this one was different: many elements, once presented by officials as stable requirements, had changed. Though I knew that the festival, after over three hundred years, had to adjust to contemporary realities to remain meaningful, I was unprepared for the extent of change and believed that core musical offerings, in any scenario, would be preserved and that substan tive additions would be rejected. I was further confounded by officials and friends insisting that, despite the apparent changes, the festival was tetap sama (still the same). I soon discovered that there existed various idioms available to enfold change as perpetuation and to rationalize additions as perkembangan (development) orperbaikan (improvement). This festival, like others worldwide, defines its participants' negotiations with history (particularly tradition), the present, and cultural values.What distinguishes the festival at the Lingsar temple in Lombok (a neighbor isle of Bali) is the conjoining of two ethnic groups: the migrant Hindu Balinese and the Muslim Sasak. Each festival plays out ethnic tensions and contestations over the festival's central position. This locating of the ethnic self requires mediating local sociopolitical realities?which in turn adapt to regional and national developments. Every performance is thus a contextualization of the myriad negotiations of its participants. Though endemic to human life and academic fields, change may be dis orienting and may threaten established identities. My surprise at the changes of the 2001 festival originated in my attachments to earlier findings, and my evolving status and research agenda. I first witnessed the festival as a Master's

Arab American Literature: Gendered Memory in Abinader and Abu-Jaber

With Children of the Roojme: A Family's Journey from Lebanon, published in 1991, and Arabian Jazz, published in 1993, Elmaz Abinader and Diana Abu-Jaber have respectively contributed to the genre of the journey to the past, recurrently adopted in contemporary minority group writings and meant to restore that past for the assertion of a distinctive ethnic self. Through memoir and fiction, the two women writers explore the transformative power of narration and interfere to break the confining construction of Arabness which rests on a combination of socio-historical factors and contemporary political events. (1) In fact, in the case of Arab Americans, the Arab-Israeli and its impact upon the Jewish American population in particular and the US population at large has contributed to shaping general public opinion in a way that maintains and reinforces the already existing negative stereotypes of the Arab as the mysterious and inferior 'other,' constructed over a long practice of the Orientalist mode of representation. Together, the two sets of factors shape negatively the present experience of Arab Americans in the United States, making the restoration of the past an appealing alternative. But in addition to asserting their ethnicity in a hostile, image-ruled environment, Arab American women must also voice their femaleness. Their experience of self is strongly gendered on account of the serious limitations for women that the journey to the past leads them to (dis)/(un)cover. The articulation of the self through the traditionally empowering return to the past, in their case undertaken to negotiate the Arab and the American parts of the self, requires the use of a gendered memory guiding through the silences about the female past. Abinader and Abu-Jaber investigate the interconnectedness of the past and the present in the making of the Arab American female self and create a space of self-invention for Arab American women where they negotiate a new sense of self in the layers of a buried ethnic and female past. They use memory and the journey to the past of their female family members and fictional characters respectively, in order to examine the implications of their own ambivalent perceptions of self and to devise a constructive way of dealing with the present. The reclamation of the Arab past by Abinader and Abu-Jaber and its reconstruction from a female perspective is instrumental for the writers' own agency and the empowerment of their Arab American women characters. It is this struggle to define a mode of agency capable of responding to the historical and political exigencies of the identity 'Arab American' which, according to the Arab American critic Lisa Suhair Majaj, resonates through contemporary Arab American literature (Arab 280). Far from using memory for a nostalgic recollection likely to fix the past in an idealized depiction and identity in an essentialized conception, the two Arab American women writers engage in a constructive invocation of the past. Identity is no longer viewed as exclusively dependent on ethnic history but as dependent on the way that history relates to the American present and gives meaning to a blend of Arab, American, and female components of a continuously negotiable conception of oneself. Yet, the position of Arab American women is complicated by the little support they receive from mainstream American feminists who tend to foreground the gender experience. In their exclusive preoccupation with subverting the dominant patriarchal discourse, mainstream American feminists fail to regard differences of female experiences dictated by race and ethnicity and endorse an alternative hegemonic discourse. For instance, Evelyn Shakir denounces the racist assumptions of American feminists who had generally followed (and sometimes led) the crowd who believe that all Arab women are victims of genital mutilation and forced marriage, and that all Arab men are oil sheiks, terrorists, or religious fanatics (104). …

The Paradox of Experience: Black Art and Black Idiom in the Work of Amiri Baraka

One of the perplexing ironies of recent theoretical work on ethnic writing and the ethnic self in Afro-American literature is that work's tendency to exclude any serious discussion of the writer who, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, sought an art form that would express the radical, singular ethnicity of African American existence. Amiri Baraka, whose explorations and experiments as an avant-garde poet span more than three decades, had helped to establish the problematic of African American ethnicity and of a radical black subjectivity in his role as the organizer and leader of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) and co-founder of the idea of a black aesthetic. This benign neglect, which usually confines itself to a few obligatory remarks on Baraka's lasting influence, is all the more perplexing when we consider that several new volumes of his work have been published in the last decade. (1) The reasons for the present neglect are several. Undoubtedly, Baraka's outspoken and uncompromising political commitment to black revolution from his earlier days as a nationalist to his present affiliations with Third World Marxism renders him less than palatable to the now-institutionalized study of ethnic literature. However, political stance alone does not deny such a writer admission to the new canon. Of a more present concern are certain critiques, labeled as postmodern, leveled against the Idea of as a narrow metaphysical form of essentialism, which is said to uphold the political and aesthetic principles of the Black Power Movement and its artistic counterpart, the Black Arts Movement. Houston Baker serves as a prime example of this. Although he claims a lasting spiritual kinship based on his own involvement during the decade of the 1960s, in retrospect he finds BAM unable to properly theorize the culturally specific aspects of Afro-American literature and culture because the Movement's artistic aims rested on the assumption that there exist unique aspects of African American creative expression in the form of music and performance, aspects that lay closest to the verifiable emotional referents and experiential categories of African American culture. Such an assumption led the members of BAM, including Baraka, to construct an aesthetic theory that was based on cultural holism, which not only relies heavily on the Herderian and Romantic idea of the Volk, but implies an impressionistic chauvinism that in the final analysis represents a modified form of intuition; that is, a direct and immediate vision of the essence of blackness. Commenting upon Stephen Henderson's theory of black poetry, Baker finds that his idea of a unique and separate Black Aesthetic simply inverts the humanist principles of an integrationist poetics and then constructs an ontology of blackness that leads to the closure of meaning and, with it, the closure of culture: For it is, finally, only the black imagination that can experience blackness, in poetry or in life (Baker 74, 81). Despite the validity of Baker's critique, what is disturbing about his treatment is the ease with which the BAM and Baraka are classified as an important though underdeveloped stage in the process of creating a black ethnic writing--a process that has reached fruition, we are led to believe, in recent fiction. Moreover, his and other postmodern critiques have a tendency to pass over certain radical artistic possibilities that Baraka had explored with an uncommon rigor, possibilities that have remained unthought and which may, ironically enough, represent a far more radical attempt to articulate a heterogeneous black self than more recent writing that favors the narrative deconstruction and reconstruction of identity in an often autobiographical or quasi-autobiographical style. (2) This essay proposes to reexamine the central task of Amiri Baraka's poetry within both the period of the Black Arts Movement and beyond. …

Variants of Ethnicity

Ethnic identities are socially defined cultural contracts. Reworkings take place according to historic changes as well as in specific social situations. To speak about identity of 'X'-s and of 'Y'-s is a complex issue mainly in diasporic contexts where a uniform or homogeneous identity of the specific ethnic categories and groups is hardly accepted. In spite of this, in public discourse it is common to speak about the identity of Hungarian-Americans for instance. Based on historical and contemporary investigations of Hungarian immigrants and their descendants in the United States the paper analyses the complexity of ethnic identities. It does so in particular by raising the problem of ethnic identity from two directions: on the one hand, taking into account the differing situation of those who emigrated and of their descendants and, on the other hand, on the basis of theoretical considerations. Variants of ethnic self and group identification is related to historical flows of immigrants, size and composition of population concerned as well as to power relations.

Postmodern Jewish Identity in Philip Roth's The Counterlife

Of all Philip Roth's novels, The Counterlife (1986) is perhaps his most pivotal. Read within the context of his oeuvre, it occupies a curious and highly revealing place in the author's literary trajectory. The novel is significant for several reasons. First, when it was written it was the most intricate and experimental (and postmodern) work Roth had ever created, especially in terms of (re)writing the self. He had attempted something like this in My Life As a Man (1974), but the textual ambitions of this exploration in The Counterlife make the earlier text pale by comparison. Second, it is the novel that temporarily suspends Roth's most significant narrative voice, Nathan Zuckerman (at one point in the novel he dies), and largely paves the way for Roth's next four contributions, the autobiographical works. As he does later in such texts as The Facts (1988) and Operation Shylock (1993), Roth explores the possibilities of the writer (in this case Zuckerman) recreating himself through a series of deceptive reinventions. Also, it is Roth's first novel to be set, at least partially, in Israel. Alexander Portnoy visits the country in Portnoy's Complaint (1969), but his stay is brief and, compared to the sojourn of Nathan and his brother, Henry, does not function as a significant determinant of self. [End Page 422] Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the novel foregrounds a desire to understand the Jewish ethnic self, a theme that permeates the entire novel. Although Roth had been concerned with Jewishness in earlier works, there was not the overriding need for the male subject (whether Portnoy, Gabe Wallach, Peter Tarnopol, or David Kepesh) to find his place within the larger ethnic community, in either Israel or America, and define himself in relation to it. If anything, the ethnic subject attempted to turn away from his community, as is the case with Portnoy. And even when the protagonist undertook a journey back toward his ethnic home, as Neil Klugman does in Goodbye, Columbus (1989), the act was performed on a more limited personal scale, ignoring issues of history. In The Counterlife, however, Zuckerman gravitates toward his ethnic roots in his native United States, in England, and most certainly in the Israeli homeland, a territory that Zuckerman's English wife, Maria, refers to as "the Jewish heart of darkness" (263). For these reasons, it is reasonable to consider the novel as the starting point in Roth's exploration of postmodern ethnicity. It is his first work to take on fully the ethnic self and to do so within the boundaries of postmodernism.

Turks in the New Germany

The Turkish community in Germany is fractured along ethnic, class, religious, and generational lines, although the practice of reciprocity provides stability and continuity in ethnic identification. Turks are also categorized by German discourses, which shifted after reunification, incorporating Turks into an anxiety‐laden east‐west problematic. Turkish responses to antiforeigner violence reflect ethnicity both as category and as practice: withdrawal behind communal boundaries or creation of a transnational creole ethnic self around the practice of reciprocity.

Modern Folklore, Identity, and Political Change in Burundi

Political change in Burundi has been influenced by a number of factors that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. In this paper, the impact of folklore on national unity and division is examined in the hope of shedding light on the cultural complexities-as expressed folkloristically-that have affected the formation of rigid ethnic identities and ultimately the violent landscape of Burundi.This research builds on Liisa Malkki's work on identity construction among Burundian Hutu refugees in Tanzania (1989; 1990; 1995) and Rene Lemarchand's analysis of political discourse as a system of possible definition of ethnic selves and on how, through such discursive techniques, ethnicity is transformed, mobilized and ultimately incorporated into the horrors and irrationality of genocide violence (Lemarchand 1994, xxii). The and social manipulation of folklore has the potential to exacerbate conflict along ethnic and sub-ethnic lines while it can also facilitate national and sub-national unity. Both of these processes often occur simultaneously, thus complicating the academic quest for parsimonious explanation of complex social and phenomena. We contend that the folkloric foundation of the long-term, transformative process of identity creation needs to be factored into analyses of change in the multi-ethnic terrain of Burundi society.2 Folklore is defined in this paper as a process of narration and interpretation, which serves as an integrated framework that comprehends narrated event and narrative event within a unified frame of reference (Bauman 1986, 6). We specifically examine events and their actualization in stories as an ongoing process that uses traditionally recognized genres of expressive folklore such as, inter alia, ritual, songs, personal stories, poems and sayings. Before the advent of colonialism, ritual was used as a means through which the power of the monarchy and the social values of a predominantly horticultural people were reinforced. Rituals such as umuganuro contributed to this process and impacted the construction of fluid and