Strategic Essentialism Research Articles

Subaltern Voices and Strategic Essentialism in Silko’s The Man to Send Rain Clouds

This article studies the Subaltern voices and Strategic Essentialism in Leslie Marmon Silko’s The Man to Send Rain Clouds. These concepts unveil individual voices raised against the power structures and the Pueblo characters strategically respond towards the Western’s hegemony and syncretism. There is depiction of rebellion and adaptation through Subalternity and Strategic Essentialism respectively, by the Native Americans in the short story. Leon’s effort towards securing his traditional values and cultural practices, highlights struggle towards autonomy and preservation in the text. The story depicts the uncertainty of preservation and adaptation, as characters suggest to quench the thirst of the old man through Catholic’s Holy water. This paper discloses the harms committed by the Euro-Americans to the Native American culture and the Natives' efforts to preserve their culture and to survive under the oppressive regime.

‘But you’re Asian! How can you not do well in higher education?’

ABSTRACT Asian American college students have increased significantly in the United States, yet little is known about Asian male immigrant doctoral students’ experiences on college campuses. The author links tenets of AsianCrit with counterstories of his encounters with and resistance against whiteness in research preparation and work settings as a Chinese immigrant doctoral student at a predominantly white institution in the Pacific Northwest. Implications include how scholars can historicise research on Asian immigrant doctoral students, combine critical theories to interpret the racialisation and strategic (anti)essentialism of Asian immigrant doctoral students, and use Asian immigrant doctoral students’ counterstories to advocate for just systemic changes. The article concludes by discussing the importance of caring for the well-being of Asian immigrant doctoral students, and empowering them to share their racialised counterstories for justice and healing.

“Awe, Masekinders!”: Kullid Identities from Eden Park, Johannesburg in the Work of Bougaard

ABSTRACT Bougaard, an emerging South African creative practitioner, examines games from her “Coloured” childhood community in Eden Park, Johannesburg, and how these games may offer a window into a reframed Kullid identity. She considers the rhymes used in these games and the role of language—specifically Afrikaaps—in identity formation, and explores through papermaking and art installations the social contexts and meanings embedded in these games. In this article, the authors analyse Bougaard’s use of sculpture, papermaking and printmaking techniques both to mediate and to subvert conventionalised tropes and stereotypes of “Coloured” communities as well as to empower a sense of her familial and community-based identity through an emergent Kullidness. The authors focus on selected paper works and on three mixed media installations (2021–2022). The authors complicate any reading of these works as uncritically affirmative of a declamatory and essentialist identity position by proposing Bougaard’s visual strategies as premised upon mediation, ambivalence, indexicality, and refuting iconicity. The authors identify Bougaard as deploying elements of strategic essentialism in her desire for community visibility and visual sovereignty, and the authors therefore critique the benefits and the limitations of this approach, concluding that Bougaard’s choice of mediating strategies avoids a simplistic narrative of community life.

Gender in Cross-Cultural Encounters: Orientalism and Self-Orientalisation in Chinese-Language Young Adult Fiction

AbstractIn this article, we read and analyse selected young adult novels by Chinese-German author Wei Cheng that address the dilemmas faced by young female Chinese immigrants in Western countries. The aim is to explore the ways in which the construction of femininity and gender are inextricably bound up with categories of race and ethnicity in China-West encounters, and to probe the dynamics of such encounters embedded in the larger socio-political power structures. Through a critical analysis of the representation of Chinese femininity vis-à-vis Western masculinity, the essay interrogates the workings of the “Orientalist gaze” in relation to patriarchy and gender politics. The portrayals of the cross-racial encounter in Shaonv de Hong Chenyi (The Girl’s Red T-Shirt), which reiterate received ideas about the Orient, may be read as a product of self-Orientalisation, where the intriguing position of the adolescent Chinese girl prompts a rethinking of postcolonial gendered subjectivities. While self-Orientalisation may work to legitimate the discourse of Orientalism, the reading of Shaonv de Hong Faqia (The Girl’s Red Hairpin) reveals the ways in which self-Orientalisation could function as strategic essentialism that allows the female “Oriental” Other to gaze back and stand Orientalism on its head. The marriage between gendered and postcolonial approaches to children’s and young adult texts promises to act as a crucial intervention in the global struggle against hegemony.

Udeido: strategically amplifying disruptive Papuan narratives in Indonesia’s art centre

In 2021, the Biennale Jogja turned its vision eastward. Among the artists chosen from eastern Indonesia and Oceania, the Udeido collective (artists and intellectuals from West Papua, now based in Yogyakarta) garnered a great deal of attention. Through their installations, the group repositioned deceased Papuan leaders within a local mythology that prophesises a redemptive saviour and a promised land (Koreri), fusing folk tales from West Papua’s Biak region with imagery drawing on cultural sources ranging from poster art to bark painting, and the kind of phallic appropriation familiar from the (Euro-American) feminist avant-garde of 1970s. While much attention has focused on the subversive nature of exhibiting such overt critiques of Indonesian militarism, toxic masculinity and human rights, less has been paid to Udeido’s tight-rope walk between cultural revivalism, strategic essentialism and tentative assimilation. This extraordinary balancing act peaked in late 2022 when Udeido spokesman Dicky Takndare demanded that discourse and curriculum on curatorial practice in Indonesia attend to the stories of those cultural workers, whose contributions have largely been ignored. This paper will investigate the conception, negotiation and creation of the Koreri Projection, and the creative process behind this work that simultaneously projects a vibrant connection to ancestral traditions, bears witness to ongoing atrocities and proposes future common ground through contemporary art.

En una palabra. <i>Entrevista</i>. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak con Ellen Rooney

In this interview, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak revisits the debate between essentialism and anti-essentialism by reconsidering various theoretical frameworks she has engaged with over her intellectual journey. These frameworks include deconstruction, Marxism, and feminisms, alongside reflections on the role of philosophy. One key focus of her reflection is the concept of strategic essentialism in understanding social movements, diverging from her previous stances. Spivak suggests viewing it as an ongoing critique of essentialist approaches, emphasizing the importance of maintaining critical, strategic, and indispensable elements within a minimalizable essence. She also stresses the significance of authorial positioning and autobiographical narratives, drawing on childhood lessons. She explores teaching as a practice that can convey the impossibility of fixed essences rather than engaging in theoretical debates. She examines her own place within the Subaltern Studies Group and the political connotations of the “Third World.” Towards the end, she delves into the practical perspective on essences concerning empirical realities and the dynamic between researchers and their audiences.

“He doesn't really have bipolar …“. The rise of strategic essentialism and diagnostic possessiveness in bipolar disorder

Bipolar disorder has risen in prominence in recent years, arguably in part through its association with various celebrities and positive related attributes such as creativity. The category itself has also widened with increasing numbers seeking out the diagnosis. Drawing upon observations of a psychoeducation programme for bipolar disorder and semi-structured interviews with those diagnosed, this paper considers the role of diagnostic prestige and essentialism in shaping identificatory practices surrounding bipolar disorder. The data suggests that bipolar comes to fulfil a meaningful explanatory role for participants, providing an important sense of group belonging and identity.This tendency to positively relate to bipolar in order to promote social cohesion and positive self-understandings is linked to the practice of ‘strategic essentialism’ (Spivak, 1990; Voronka, 2017), whereby category homogeneity is emphasised. The benefits associated with the diagnosis arguably encourage boundary making and homogenisation in order to prevent category dilution and loss of meaning. As such, while essentialism can be helpful in maintaining group cohesion, it is also associated with diagnostic possessiveness, whereby individuals undermine the diagnostic claims of others, creating divisions between those with and without the diagnosis.

Unmasking Post-Truth Narratives: Interpreting “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse” through the Prism of Distorted Realities

Post-truth is built as a theory after its recognition by Oxford English Dictionary in 2016, as the word of the year because of the increasing usage by politically active communities and people, among them alt-right and Brexiteer was at the highest use this term in the US for denoting the political situation out there. Post-truth is majorly referring to or indicating situations in which appeals to emotion and personal conviction have a greater impact on public opinion than do factual facts. The signs of the origin of this term can be traced from the word “truthiness” coined by Stephen Colbert in 2005, which could be described as being convinced of something's truthfulness even though it isn't necessarily supported by the facts. Chandra TalpadeMohanty in her essay “Under the Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse.” attacks the bogus Post-truth and monolithic statement of Western feminists and philosophers about third-world women regardless of their race, class, geographic location, or religion and without any knowledge about women of third world nation and their priorities. In order to get the superior position even in pointing out the difficulties faced by third-world women, the first-world feminists judging their way of daily routine in the light of subjugation, suppression, and ostracization, which could be seen through the post-truth theory. The essay was first published in 1986 as the opening chapter of Feminist without Borders. To make her point more clear Mohanty supports her statements with anti-post-truth examples, the gendered division of labour, the veiling of women, or women's financial dependency on males. According to Mohanty, unless these examples are taken into account in context, these data by themselves are not a useful source of knowledge. Western feminists' views will be incorrect and ineffectual in assisting the communities they are attempting to assist if they base them on these observable realities. So the approach of this paper is to analyze these post-truth statements with reference of the essay by Mohanty where she depicts the individual differences of third-world women and asks for strategic essentialism against these postcolonial and post-truth ways of presenting things by third-world nations.

The neoliberal multicultural state and the urban Indigenous associative model in Santiago de Chile.

This article argues that since the recovery of democracy in Chile in the early 1990s, the state has been reshaping the Indigenous socio-political landscape by adopting neoliberal multiculturalism as a governance model. By not posing significant challenges to the state's neoliberal political and economic priorities, Indigenous cultural activity has been carefully channelled to meet state expectations of what constitutes urban indigeneity. Drawing on the minority and multicultural studies literature and ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, this article analyses how Mapuche civil society navigates the complexities of two relational models of state/ethnic minority interaction: ethno-bureaucracy and strategic essentialism. Although Mapuche associations have tried to accommodate their interests within the limits of neoliberal multiculturalism, the article argues that this governance model has established incentives for inclusion and exclusion in the socio-political apparatus, resulting in a fragmentation of the Mapuche associative landscape in urban Chile.

East is East? Beyond the Global North and Global South in Criminology

Abstract This paper identifies an absence in currently constituted criminological discourse on the Global North and Global South. This absence is the Global East. The Global East is not a defined region but a relation of betweenness, geographically and geo-politically, within and between the South and North, representing peoples from countries and societies which fit imperfectly into a North/South binary. We focus on the Eastern European and Eurasian regions to demonstrate this point, concentrating specifically on its omission in punishment and society studies. Our paper makes a positive argument for the Global East concept, disrupting the assumed categories of North and South and producing a strategic essentialism to help better represent peoples thus far overlooked in southern criminology.

Disability and other identities?-how do they intersect?

This paper addresses intersectionality and disability in global contexts. Disability as a category of identity is often omitted in rhetoric about intersectionality, which usually considers race and gender, with some consideration of other identities. However, disability like other identities is socially constructed, and liable to misrepresentation and is often siloed from other issues and experiences. Someone identifying as disabled may not be recognised by those around them as having other identities too. In discussions about intersectionality, a simplistic "additive" approach is common, while the shifting complexities and interactions between people's multiple identities are not considered with nuance. Disabled people may pragmatically adopt a kind of "strategic essentialism". This allows them to claim a disabled identity and a specific dialogic space in order to gain recognition and perhaps access to support and services. However, they may prefer not to be classified in this dichotomised way because this ignores other aspects of them. Often an impairment is only of importance to the extent that it means that the person needs some reasonable adjustments in order to participate on equal basis with others. Arguably the SDGs and other global guidelines and treaties do not address disability as a significant identity sufficiently, nor recognise it as an important aspect of many people in combination with their other identities, rather than a stand-alone feature of them. When analysing the types of disadvantages that people experience, a broader more flexible approach is needed which recognises the ways in which different identities combine and influence people's experiences.

Too Muslim to Be a Feminist and Too Feminist to Be a Muslim? Locating Lived Experiences of Feminism and Muslimness in Social Work Academe

In this paper, two authors seize space as Muslim women feminist social work educators and researchers. We challenge and hopefully silence homogenizing, essentialist and Islamophobic constructions. The first author is a hijabi, Indo-Caribbean, able-bodied cis-heterosexual Muslim feminist; the second author is a disabled, queer Muslim of South Asian heritage. We identify as racialized and firmly rooted in intersectional critical feminist perspectives. Using an autoethnographic, conversation-based approach, we share our narratives (lived experiences) in social work academe. Navigating feminisms, Muslimness, strategic essentialism and Islamophobia while engaging in a critical praxis, we attempt to bring together contradictory discourses for critical examination. We engage with the following questions: How do Muslim women fit (or not fit!) in social work academe? How do Muslim women fit (or not fit!) in critical social work feminist spheres? And what do Muslim feminist futures look like in social work academe? Our lived experiences as racialized Muslim feminists are standpoint perspectives which offer situated knowledges that disempower dominant social work discourses. Social work can no longer be reactionary and preserve the status quo; it must move forward with foresight and be an active player in dismantling inequities.

Individualism, Collectivism, and Identity Politics in Palestinian Life Writing

ABSTRACT This article examines the tensions, (dis)continuities, and precariousness of postcolonial identities in the autobiographical writings of Palestinian authors Ghada Karmi and Raja Shehadeh. The question of identity will be examined considering Gayatri Spivak’s conceptualisation of strategic essentialism and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s collective identity politics in the texts, as well as concepts of multiple affiliations by Amin Maalouf and Chantal Mouffe. Through the textual and contextual analysis, I demonstrate that emphasising an individualist sense of identity is a vital means of empowerment for the subject in a patriarchal and collectivist culture. Simultaneously, identifying with the national collective emerges in these texts as an indispensable means of anti-colonial resistance and steadfastness. Particularly in a context of ongoing settler colonialism, collectivist affiliation becomes inevitable to safeguard Indigenous identity and to challenge the hegemonic colonial discourse that aims to eliminate the native collective. Therefore, a conflict arises between the authors’ desire for nonconformity and individualist expression on the one hand and the imposed collectivist affiliation due to the urgent anti-colonial cause on the other. I argue that the individual author finds him/herself trapped in an unresolvable predicament of identity that dramatises questions of belonging and affiliation. These personal narratives are thus paradoxically and unavoidably relational, dependent, and speak to the collective experience of the Palestinian people. The article concludes that identification in contexts of colonial struggle challenges both the binary opposition of individualism and collectivism, and the notion of a unified and autonomous selfhood.

Is It Time (Yet) to Shelve LGBTIQ Topics? The Contextual Adequacy of (De-)Essentialism as an Educational Strategy

The debate on the relationship between queer theory and identity politics, the hitherto dominant research framework with strong application potential, was expanded by establishing queer theory as a starting point for studies examining sexual and gender diversity in education. The point of contention became the question of the purposefulness of strategic essentialism, with a strong emphasis on the many pitfalls of insufficient intersectional understanding of identity, where sexual and gender diversity is but one dimension. Various pitfalls of de essentialism also became the subject of analysis. With such polarities in mind, in this article we present a part of the data collected within a research project aimed at LGBTIQ inclusiveness of educational institutions. The aim of this article is to analyse potential advantages and disadvantages of using a theoretically progressive strategy of de-essentialism in a heteronormative educational context. Data collected in four focus groups conducted with teachers in a number of Zagreb secondary schools show that, in their attitudes and daily educational practices concerning LGBTIQ topics, research participants are positioned at different points of the spectrum, varying from essentialist to de-essentialist, while the exact positioning is strongly determined by context. The concluding part of the article provides guidelines for future research.

Bringing Asian German Film Studies into Focus

Bringing Asian German Film Studies into Focus Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick (bio) My dissertation project Shifting Focus: Asian German Film Representation since 1910 constitutes the first full-length critical history of Asia and Asians within German cinema. Chunjie Zhang maintains that the new sub-field of Asian German studies "diversifies the paradigm of German national literature in a meaningful way," by challenging Eurocentrism, by expanding beyond canonical writers and thinkers, and by laying bare transnational and transcultural links between Germany and Asia.1 For this project, it was my intention to use an Asian German studies lens to do the same for German film studies. One common way of polemically formulating the state of representation for Asians in Western film is to describe them as invisible or unsichtbar, but I insist on a different perspective inspired by film's formal category of camera focus.2 Instead of being wholly invisible, Asians on German screens are figuratively blurry and out of focus, in a depth of field beyond our line of sight. What happens when we bring those Asian people, characters, and elements, which are seemingly unimportant, marginal, and decorative within the German film frame, into sharp [End Page 134] focus? Recalibrating our focal plane and attuning our ears enables us to trace the visual and aural construction of these Asian German Others, over the last century of film. The main criterion of my selection process for films to analyze was the presence of South, Southeast, and/or East Asian topoi; that is, Asian settings, filming locations, characters, credited actors, coded props, and/or film titles referencing Asia. Through strategic essentialism, the rubric of Asianness helped to bring over 300 films from a variety of different time periods, styles, genres, and contexts into conversation with one another in ways not previously considered. Rather than implying that all of these films signify in the same way, the diversity inherent within my use of Asianness ensures that differences can also be discussed in a productive way. My dissertation begins with a chronological overview that writes Asian representation (back) into all of the typical periodizations of German film history. From the Wilhelmine era to the 2020s, I demonstrate how Asian presences have existed throughout all major periods of German film history, in a variety of styles and genres. Filling in these collective glaring omissions within German film and cultural studies offers new perspectives on the canon, as well as a greater understanding of how Germany has framed and continues to frame Asian racialization. Most notably, Germany's interest in Asianness adapts over time, as illustrated by the number of German films related to China, India, and Japan during the silent and early sound eras, to Hong Kong and Thailand in the 1960s, or to Vietnam during the German Democratic Republic, as well as in post-unification Germany. With this chronological overview as our foundation, the next chapter systematically explores recurring tropes in German cinema's vast archive of Asian racial images, tracing how certain filmic stereotypes employed a century ago reappear throughout history and may still even be present today. As exemplified in productions from the 1910s to the twenty-first century, German cinema has amassed a broad arsenal of enduring strategies for projecting Asian inscrutability and alterity. For example, the Madame Butterfly trope of the beautiful East Asian woman who tragically dies is something seen from the 1910s to the 2010s. I end this chapter with a small selection of brief case studies of films warranting a more thorough and holistic analysis of how a single work can egregiously represent a variety of Asian tropes, thematically and formally. Subsequently, I outline a selection of subversive and empowering moments in film history that complicate the aforementioned representational stereotypes. Films can surprise us when they exceed perceived representational constraints of the times and run counter to the prejudice we attribute to the past. For example, despite cinema's villainization and/or emasculation of Asian men for much of the twentieth century, occasional pictures from as early as the 1920s depict Asian men as heroes and desirable romantic partners. There is an affirming potential for film viewers of the present to learn about lesser-known milestones and...

Imagining Neurodivergent Futures from the Belly of the Identity Machine: Neurodiversity, Biosociality, and Strategic Essentialism.

Several critiques have emerged of the neurodiversity paradigm and of claims made by activists in the Neurodiversity Movement. These critiques include concerns that the Neurodiveristiy movement downplays the differences between Autistic people. In this article, I argue that the neurodiversity paradigm is a strategically adopted response to current realities. Sometimes, it is strategically necessary to appeal to existing narratives about Autism, or to emphasize solidarity within the Autistic community over the autism spectrum's internal diversity. At times, this can lead activists to neglect a more nuanced articulation of the Neurodiversity paradigm, which allows for the diversity of our community while still calling for solidarity in the face of shared experiences of discrimination. I compare this strategy with strategies of strategic essentialism utilized in the Indigenous Rights movement in Canada. I also explore the ways in which discourses of ableism and racism have historically been intertwined. Both Autistic people and Indigenous people represent diverse communities that must grapple with externally imposed identities to access legal rights, and both identities have been denigrated as mentally inferior by non-Autistic and colonial powers. I conclude that it is sometimes necessary to employ these types of strategies to secure needed resources and protections. I call for both scholars and advocates to take a more intersectional approach to understanding how strategic essentialism is being deployed within the Neurodiversity Movement.

An Ecofeminist Reading of Fleur and Lulu in Louise Erdrich’s Novel Tracks

Tracks by Louise Erdrich is a novel dealing with the struggles of Native Americansat the beginning of the twentieth century, but within that broader frame—it alsospeaks out about the connection between the colonial oppression of nature and thesubjugation of women. Although some ecocritical and ecofeminist readings of thenovel, especially relating to Fleur Pillager, are available, not much has been writtenon the character of Lulu Nanapush as presented in Tracks. Therefore, this articleanalyses Fleur Pillager and Lulu Nanapush to discover how the tenets of ecofeminismare implemented in the novel. The research relies on the theories of differentecofeminist and postcolonial authors. After establishing the colonial background ofconjoined oppression of women and nature, the article focuses on how Fleur embodiesand protects nature, while Lulu begins to lose her connection to nature dueto her colonial background. Thus, strategic essentialism of the kind could be understoodas having been implemented with the aim of underlining the exploitation ofNative American women by settler colonizers, as well as the eradication of nature.

Introduction

Introduction

Performing Tsarist Russia in New York: Music, Émigrés, and the American Imagination

Performing Tsarist Russia in New York: Music, Émigrés, and the American Imagination

Archival Silence in the Collections of Dietrich Schulz-Köhn

Archival Silence in the Collections of Dietrich Schulz-Köhn