3.3 Postcolonial and cultural studies‟ conception of identity
3.3.1 Postcolonial and cultural studies theory
Paul Gilroy (1993) has taken on the mission of deconstructing both absolutist and nationalist conceptions of cultural identity. Taking the conception of racial and ethnic purity to task, Gilroy denounces all attempts to construct identity in national or absolute terms. This argument has particular relevance for African American scholars. Gilroy (1993:15) writes, “[m]uch of the precious intellectual legacy by African-American intellectuals as the substance of their particularity is in fact only partly their absolute ethnic property”. Gilroy calls this effort to make such claims “ethnic particularism” and warns that it promotes a form of “cultural insiderism”, his term for an essentialistic construction of ethnic difference. Gilroy (1993:3) notes that this cultural insiderism has “maximized so that it distinguishes people from one another and at the same time acquires an incontestable priority over all other dimensions of their social and historical experience, cultures, and identities”. What Gilroy appears to be arguing is that cultural insiderism makes a case for only the “authentic” insiders or natives of a community to speak on its behalf. What Gilroy fails to address is the tendency of the West to speak on behalf of the
“Other”. In such relationship blackness becomes a political vision of reality that produces binary opposition to whiteness.
Gilroy‟s (1993:xi) position is grounded in “a concern to repudiate the dangerous obsessions with
„racial‟ purity which are circulating inside and outside black politics”. He notes that by asserting an ethnic absolutist stance, cultural insiderism is often used to legitimate claims of racial or ethnic authenticity that are unleashed to promote and justify Afrocentric notions of a black essence. At the same time, this homogeneous focus on authenticity through experience denies a place for those who do not fit some prescribed cultural characteristics such as place, age, birthright, and social class standing.
Steve Fuller (2000:16) names this practice as one of the elements within a process he calls
“hypercapitalism, an exaggerated – perhaps essentialised – sense of cultural difference that tends unwittingly to incapacitate the people on whose behalf it advocates”. In a sense, only natives of a culture are authorised to speak on its behalf. Others‟ voices are regarded as suspect because they have not immersed themselves in the life of that culture. A critique of this cultural insiderism
52 also illuminates the importance of “otherness” in the production of not only hegemonic discourses, but also counter-hegemonic efforts to subvert dominance. In discourses where subaltern groups use their marginality in order to claim a privileged authenticity, they often simultaneously construct the dominant group as an excluded Other. Thus, anti-essentialist critics may be correct in asserting that nationalist, essentialist and absolutist notions of cultural identity require a necessary “other” in order to gain currency. However, writing off essentialism as an
“othering” strategy does not address the importance of marginality in the critique of an oppressive, hegemonic discourse. Again directing his critique at the practice among many black intellectuals, Gilroy (1993:19) notes:
Marked by its European origins, modern black political culture has always been more interested in the relationship of identity to roots and rootedness than in seeing identity as a process or movement and mediation that is more appropriately approached via the homonym routes.
Typical of many postcolonial and cultural studies scholars, Gilroy locates essentialism within a modernist frame, questions the origin‟s thesis and is sceptical about the place of essence within discourses of cultural identity. In this regard Gilroy (1993:24) asserts:
At this point, it is necessary to appreciate that any discomfort at the prospect of fissures and fault lines in the topography of affiliation that made pan-Africanism such a powerful discourse was not eased by references to some African essence that could magically connect all blacks together. Nowadays, this potent idea is frequently wheeled in when it is necessary to appreciate the things that (potentially) connect black people to one another rather than think seriously about divisions in the imagined community of race and the means to comprehend or overcome them, if indeed that is possible.
More importantly, Gilroy (1993:xi) believes that our interests would be better served through recognition of the “inescapable hybridity and intermixture of ideas”. Gilroy posits a theory of the
“Black Atlantic” which he argues is necessary to engender a “diasporic” consciousness among blacks in order to move beyond essentialism, and “discrete national dynamics” that have
53 characterised cultural criticism. He uses the term „Black Atlantic‟ to refer to intercultural and transnational formation of identity imported from a particular continent.
Gilroy‟s attack on essentialism may also be applied to a wider conversation. Feminist scholar Diana Fuss (1989) brilliantly illuminates some of the critical tensions surrounding the use of essentialism as a cultural strategy. Fuss (1989:xii) asserts: “To some essentialism is nothing more than the philosophical enforcer of a liberal humanist idealism which seeks to locate and to contain the subject within a fixed set of differences.” From this perspective, essentialism is defined as the antithesis of cultural difference, whereby “the doctrine of essence is viewed as precisely that which seeks to deny the very radicality of difference” (Fuss, 1989:xii). However, Fuss notes that other scholars find usefulness in essentialism. Fuss (1989:xiii) continues, “[t]o others, essentialism may not be without a certain tactical or inventionary value, especially in our political struggles and debates”.
Spivak (1993) is among those who find essentialism to be useful within discourses of cultural identity. Spivak is interested in a specific use of essentialism, what may be called “strategic essentialism”. Spivak (1993:3) finds a way of articulating essentialism as a strategy for mobilising people to engage in political work “without invoking some irreducible essentialism”.
Spivak (1993:3) relies on the Oxford English Dictionary which defines the word “strategy” as:
“Usually an artifice or trick designed to outwit or surprise the enemy.” She notes that one of the most crucial things to consider is that a strategy is neither disinterested nor universal but must always take into consideration the location and position of those responsible for its invocation.
Spivak (1993:4) claims that “If one is considering strategy, one has to look at where the group the person, the persons, or the movement is situated when one makes claims for or against essentialism. A strategy suits a situation; a strategy is not a theory”.
In taking this position, Spivak appears to be echoing Fuss who is similarly reluctant to dismiss essentialism. Rather than expose or “discredit closet essentialists”, Fuss (1989:3) argues that it is more important to “investigate what purpose or function essentialism might play in a particular set of discourses”. Fuss is more interested in the historical and discursive events that motivate people to use essentialism in order to mobilise others. This focus on essentialism as a strategy
54 may be somewhat useful for thinking about identity construction in non-totalising ways. By denouncing the tendency to think about essentialism as having a universal and timeless meaning, Spivak (1993:3) paves the way for a particular use of essentialism at “strategic moments”.
Spivak (1993:3) further writes:
The strategic use of an essence as a mobilizing slogan or master word like woman or worker or the name of a nation is, ideally, self-conscious for all mobilized. This is the impossible risk of a lasting strategy. Can there be such a thing?
While Spivak (1993:3) embraces some uses of essentialism, she recognises that “the strategic use of essentialism can turn into an alibi for proselytising academic essentialisms”. In this case, she argues that unfortunately the bigger problem is that “strategies are taught as if they were theories, good for all cases”.
Hall (1992; 1996), Mercer (1994) and Gilroy (1993) also seem to be in agreement with Spivak (1993) and Fuss (1989) about the value of a “strategic essentialism”. They all view such a complex political formation of black identity as undermining the essential black subject. As Hall (1996:166) argues:
What is at issue here is the recognition of the extraordinary diversity of subjective positions, social experiences, and cultural identities which compose the category “black”, that is, the recognition that “black” is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category, which cannot be grounded in a set of fixed transcultural or transcendental racial categories and which therefore has no guarantees in Nature.
Within Hall‟s (1990:223) formulation, we can think about cultural identity in at least two different ways. In the first he says:
Shared culture, a sort of collective “one true self” hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed “selves”, which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common. Within the terms of this definition, our cultural identities
55 reflect the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us “as one people” with stable unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of our actual history.
Thus, in this first instance, Hall claims that one way to consider identity is as being consistent with a singular, shared culture. This cultural identity is underpinned by a shared history and heritage of a people. Hall (1996) admits that this form of identity has been extremely useful for postcolonial and anti-racist struggles, such as the Pan African movement. He cautions that even though this form of identity is somewhat essentialist, “we should not, for a moment, underestimate or neglect the importance” of this conception. Here Hall seems to recognise the use of essentialism as a “strategy” for mobilising disenfranchised blacks and others at critical, strategic moments. While Hall (1996:3) recognises the limitations of this form of essentialism, he is not willing to dismiss its usefulness altogether. And, though he never directly endorses a strategic essentialism by using those words in any specific sense, one gets a sense that his focus on a “strategic or positional identity” is somewhat similar to the strategic identity that Spivak embraces. Hall appears to be extremely cautious about embracing essentialism. He is particularly concerned about the tendency among some African Americans and other diasporic Blacks to invoke notions of biological or genetic essences. In his view, this move valorises the ground for the racism that it tries to problematise. He illustrates this point in his (1995) essay entitled,
“What is this „Black‟ in Black Culture?”
Cultural identity in this second sense is a matter of “becoming” as well as “being”. It belongs to the future as much as the past. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, it is subjected to the continuous “play” of history, culture and power. What Hall is getting at here is that meaning, while constructed through difference, is not fixed, and that history plays an important role in its formation. This sense of fluidity in meaning is akin to Derrida‟s notion of
“difference”, whereby meaning is always deferred, never fixed, and therefore open to slippage.
Such an understanding of identity as “becoming” rather than “remaining” allows one to acknowledge that identity is not just about being a subject of or subjected to a discourse, but that one can position one‟s self in relation to differing meanings. Thus in this study such understanding enables the problematisation of black identity as culturally homogenous.
56 It should be noted that Hall shows some concerns about the use of the term “Black” to denote a category that is fixed and absent of historical and political influences. Hence he rejects the idea of any pure form of art, citing that this promotes a type of ethnic absolutism. Like Gilroy, Hall believes that these art forms, which we often mistake as “authentic”, are the results of “partial synchronization” and negotiation between minority, subordinate and dominant cultures. Hall and other scholars have referred to this so-called “partial synchronization” as cultural hybridisation.
It is important to note here that Gilroy also makes this same point by illustrating that, contrary to the common perception of hip-hop culture as a “pure” African American invention, its roots can be traced directly to the Caribbean. In addressing the specific concern of the use of the word
“Black” in the term “Black Popular Culture,” Hall (1996:129) writes:
It has come to signify the black community, where these traditions were kept, and whose struggles survive in the persistence of the black experience (the historical experiences of black people in the Diaspora), of the black aesthetic (the distinctive cultural repertoires out of which popular representations were made), and of the black counter narratives we have struggled to voice.
Here, Hall joins Gilroy and wants to replace the notion of an essential racial identity with a perspective that links Africans in the Diaspora to historical experiences. According to Hall (1996), the focus on origin or essence is not the only way to conceptualise cultural identity. A second way is to think of identity not as essential and buried underneath the colonial experience waiting to be uncovered or recovered, but as the product of history. Therefore, rather than talk about who we are, Hall‟s vision of identity focuses on who we have “become”. From this vantage point, identity should always be conceived as both “being” and “becoming” or as Hall puts it, as a production. This view problematises the very authority and authenticity to which the term „cultural identity‟ lays claim (Hall, 1990:51). Here „production‟ means not only to be determined by others but also to be committed by one‟s own self. He gives an example: the emergence of the new „black‟ identity by both Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities in the 1970s in Britain. In this regard Hall (1997:163–164) says:
57 This is the moment when the term “black” was coined as a way of referencing the common experience of racism and marginalization in Britain and came to provide the organizing category of the new politics of resistance, among groups and communities with, in fact, very difficult histories, traditions and ethnic identities. In this moment, politically speaking, “the black experience”, as a singular and unifying framework based on the building up of identity across ethnic and cultural differences between the different communities became “hegemonic” over other ethnical/racial identities – though the latter did not, of course disappear.
He illuminates the fact that identities have histories, and like everything historical, they are constantly transformed. With regards to his conception of cultural identities, Hall (1992:52) writes:
Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past, they are subject to the continuous „play‟ of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in a mere
„recovery‟ of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which, when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past.
Hall‟s preference for the positional view of cultural identity is somewhat tempered by the reality that a strategic use of essence has been effective for some important cultural movements in the past. Sharpe (2000:113) notes that “in order to do so they had to break the authority Western culture had over indigenous languages, forms of knowledge, and literary production”. Hence, postcolonial studies emerged to counter the hegemony that was put in place during the colonial period. bell hooks (1992) identifies the necessity and advantages of challenging essentialism within the African American community. For hooks, such a challenge provides the opportunity to undermine racism in the guise of the “authentic black”. Further, she sees it as a way of acknowledging how class mobility has altered collective black experiences, as well as enabling blacks to affirm multiple identities, and a varied black experience (hooks, 1992).
58 Several excellent texts have been written on the complex identities that emerged as a result of the tense relationships between the coloniser and the colonised. Albert Memmi (1965) is among those who brilliantly articulate the pervasive elements of colonialism. Memmi traces the roots of colonialism to a desire for economic privilege. Memmi (1965:xii) argues, “… the idea of privilege is at the heart of the colonial relationship – and that privilege is undoubtedly economic”. Memmi (1965: xii) offers this explanation in order to debunk the common myth of
“the so-called moral or cultural mission of colonization and shows that the profit motive in it is basic”. He further argues that “[t]he deprivations of the colonized are the almost direct result of the advantages secured to the colonizer”. However, Memmi (1965) cautions that it is important to recognise that colonial privilege is not solely economic. In this regard, Memmi (1965:xii) says:
To observe the life of the coloniser and the colonized is to discover rapidly that the daily humiliation of the colonized, his [her] objective subjugation, are not merely economic.
Even the poorest coloniser thought himself [herself] to be – and actually was – superior to the colonized. This too was part of colonial privilege.
Memmi interrogates the logic of colonialism and the subsequent responses to it by the colonised.
While denouncing the oppressive colonial discourse, he attempts to rationalise the dehumanisation process in order to make sense of the inner workings of colonialism. In the introduction to Memmi‟s (1965:xxvi) text, Jean Paul Sartre says Memmi is clear that “[t]he coloniser can only exonerate himself [herself] in the systematic pursuit of „dehumanization‟ of the colonized”. Sartre queries this fabrication of history. He asks:
How can an elite of usurpers, aware of their mediocrity, establish their privileges? By one means only: debasing the colonized to exalt themselves, denying the title of humanity to the natives, and defining them as simply absences of qualities – animals, not humans.
This does not prove hard to do, for the system deprives them of everything (Sartre in Mmemi, 1965: xxvi).
59 Again, Sartre‟s appropriation of Memmi allows us to understand the discursive production of Blackness worldwide where a colonial relationship existed.
Moreover, Memmi is also concerned about a form of ambivalence that exists between the colonised and the coloniser, even after colonisation ceases to formally exist. While on the one hand, the colonised may resent the former master and what he/she stands for (oppression, violence, self-righteousness, etc.), paradoxically there is a kind of admiration for what the coloniser has vis-à-vis privilege. In view of this privilege, former oppressed people are confronted by somewhat contradictory options. Faced with a crucial moment of self- determination, the former colonial subject struggles to choose between two limited choices.
Memmi (1965:120) attests that “[h]e (the colonized) attempts either to become different or to conquer all the dimensions which colonization tore away from him”. Memmi (1965:120) further explains:
The first attempt of the colonized is to change his condition by changing his skin. There is a tempting model very close at hand – the colonizer. The latter suffers from none of his deficiencies, has all rights, enjoys every possession and benefits from every prestige.
He is, moreover, the other part of the comparison, the one that crushes the colonised and keeps him in servitude. The first ambition of the colonised is to become equal to that splendid model and to resemble him to the point of disappearing in him.
In postcolonial circles, this practice is known as purgative mimeticism, whereby the colonised may seek to purge every suggestion of indigenous culture from his or her thought or action (Bhabha, 1994). Traditionally, marginalised people want so much to empower themselves, according to this logic, that is, that they detest what their current identity stands for. Here Memmi appears to be echoing the argument made by Frantz Fanon (1967:10) that the “Antillean Negro wants to be white”. Fanon, like Memmi, cites the oppressive colonial relationship as central to the self-hatred that is common among many black and former colonial subjects.