COMM301 Cultural Studies

1. COMM301Cultural Studies 5. Race, ethnicity and national identity

2. Race • The concept of race bears the traces of origins in the biological discourses of social Darwinism that stresss ‘lines of descent’ and ‘types of people’. ( skin colour) • In the 19th century there were numerous attempts by European investigators to classify people according to racial groups (whıte, yellow, black) and ascribe unchanging characteristics to them. • The physical attributes are linked to ‘İntelligence’ and ‘capabilities’. These are used to rank ‘racialized’ groups. • Race is widely believed to serve as a potent marker of cultural difference.

3. Race, like sex, is a set of genetically defined, biological characteristics. However, like gender, it is also a set of culturally defined characteristics. • The idea of ‘racialization’ or ‘race formation’ is founded on the argument that race is a social construction and not a universal or essential category of biology.

4. Racism • Racism refers to various belief systems maintaining that the essential value of an individualperson can be determined according to a perceived or ascribed racial category and that social discrimination by race is therefore justifiable.

5. Racial groups are marked by a hierarchy of superiority and inferiority. This is the root of racism. • In racism racial classifications are constituted by constitutive of power and the forced social and material ranking of 'racialized' groups.

6. Races exist inside of representation and are formed in and by it in a process of social and political power struggle. • Observable characteristics are transformed into signifiers of race including the false appeal to essential biological and cultural difference.

7. The historical formation of 'race' has been one of power and subordination so that for example, in Britain and the USA, people of color have occupied structurally subordinate positions in relation to almost every dimension of life-chances. • Low salaries, less skilled jobs, in school, in media and cultural representations etc.. • Race formation or racialization is racist at a structural level because it involves forms of social, economic and political subordination which are lived through the categories of race.

8. Differential racialization • The meanings of race can change and are struggled over within a given social formation so that different groups are differently racialised and these groups are the different targets of different racism. E.g. Africans, Asians, etc… second class, third class citizens.

9. Race and National difference • The meanings of race differ across distinct cultures. For example, Britain the homogenous white character was disturbed in the 1950 by the arrivals from the Caribbean and Indian subcontinent, making questions of national identity a crucial category through which racialization operated. • However in the history of US from the beginning there was discrimination and genocide of native American peoples and a long history of slavery so that questions of race are posed at the very beginning of the USA. More longstanding but less concerned with nationality than in Britain.

10. Representation of race in the media can consist of the same sort of rigid stereotypes that constitute gender portrayal. • However, stereotyping of race is seen as more harmful than stereotyping of gender, as media representation may constitute the only experience of contact with a particular ethnic group that an audience (particularly an audience of children) may have. • Racial stereotypes are often based on social myth, perpetuated down the ages.

11. Thus, the media depiction of, say, Native American Indians, might provide a child with their only experience of Native American Indian culture and characters, and may provide that child with a set of narrow prejudices which will not be challenged elsewhere within their experience. • The need for a more accurate portrayal of the diversity of different races is a priority for political agendas, but, as ever, it seems as though it will take a while for political thinking to filter through to programand film-making.

12. Most work on Race & The Media has concentrated on the representation of black men and women. • This has partly been because there is a strong African-American counter-culture which provides viable alternative role models and demands that they are represented. • In recent years, the success of actors such as Denzel Washington, Whoopi Goldberg, Laurence Fishburne and Morgan Freeman in a diversity of roles has meant that black characters in movies and on TV are no longer 'stock' types.

13. Some of the time. However, there are many negative representations of black people, portrayals which seem deliberately designed to inflame the fear and hatred of other cultures - how positive a representation is the archetypal African-American gangsta? • Yet these are representations coming from within black culture itself...

14. Attention is now being paid to the representation of other ethnic groups, notably Asian Americans and Latinos, who represent a much larger proportion of the US population than their TV coverage would suggest. • Things are changing - on the one hand the success of John Woo and Ang Lee in Hollywood is pushing the boundaries back for Asian Americans, and the Latin Music Explosion of 1999 has led to much wider acceptance of Latino performers (Jennifer Lopez is now in the upper echelons for pay for female actors).

15. Racism in advertising

16. Sony under fire for "racist" advertising • “Sony, seriously, this is getting out of hand. Every time we want to rethink what you're doing and try to back you guys up, you go and pull some stunt like this latest ad campaign in Holland, which, as one can see above, depicts a "white PSP" avatar/model violently holding the mouth of a "black PSP" avatar/model -- in commemoration of the launch of the ceramic whitePSP, of course. The billboard pictured here is one of supposedly somewhere near 100 evocative images created for the campaign with the same theme, which found viewers of the ads -- and game lovers alike -- crying foul at Sony's latest foible cum PR fiasco (and believe us, we're sure to catch some fire for calling it just that). “ By Ryan Block

17. Unsurprisingly, lots of people are slightly uncomfortable with the imagery and significance of a white woman physically dominating a black man, and organisations such as the NAACP (whose business, admittedly, this is none of, since it's happening in the Netherlands) have prevailed upon Sony to withdraw it.This is Sony's statement:quote: Whilst the images used in the campaign were intended solely to highlight the contrast between the different colors available for the PSP, we recognize that the subject matter of one specific image may have caused concern in some countries not directly affected by the advertising. As a result, we have now withdrawn the campaign.We further recognize that people have a wide variety of perceptions about such imagery and we wish to apologize to those who perceived the advert differently to that intended. In future, we will apply greater sensitivity in our selection of campaign imagery, and will take due account of the increasingly global reach of such local adverts, and their potential impact in other countries.

18. Racism in the ads • A recent row over a television advertisement for a skin-lightening cream has fuelled a debate in India over why fairer skin should be considered more beautiful. • While India has seen a phenomenal growth in the number of skin-lightening products, women's groups in the country claim recent adverts are insulting, as they equate fairer skin with beauty and success. • One advert - for a product named Fair And Lovely - has now been taken off the air.

19. The advert was known as "the air hostess ad". • It showed a young, dark-skinned girl's father lamenting he had no son to provide for him, as his daughter's salary was not high enough - the suggestion being that she could neither get a better job or get married because of her dark skin. • The girl then uses the cream, becomes fairer, and gets a better-paid job as an air hostess - and makes her father happy.

20. Fair & Lovely… Dark & Undesirable? Africa Kuwait

21. Bollywood and race • India’s leading movie industry, Bollywood (Indian film industry), produces more movies in one year than any other country, and is considered to be the largest movie industry in the world. • Bollywood movies are enjoyed by millions in and descending from almost all countries throughout the South Asian subcontinent.

22. However, this enormous and powerful institution only houses maybe a handful of actors and actresses that are dark in complexion. When we do see a dark-skinned actor on screen, he is usually either the comic or the villain, and hardly ever the hero or heroine (i.e. Johnny Lever, Nana Patekar). • Bollywood films are also popular for their musical scores, in which one will always hear references to a fair gal (gori) or a fair guy (gora), but never the contrary

24. Ethnicity • While race is a cultural construct camouflaged as biological science, ethnicity is a distinctively cultural concept centered on the sharing of norms, values, beliefs, cultural symbols and practices. • The formation of 'ethnic groups' therefore relies on shared cultural signifiers which have developed under specific historical, social and political contexts and which encourage a sense of belonging often based on a common mythological ancestry.

25. But it is clear that ethnic groups are not based original ties or universal cultural characteristics but they are formed through discursive practices, which are constructed and maintained under specific socio-historical conditions. • For example black subject and black experience are constructed historically and politically. • The term ethnicity acknowledges the place of history, language and culture in the construction of subjectivity and identity, as well as the fact that all discourse is placed, positioned, situated and all knowledge is contextual.

26. The concept of ethnicity does have some problems of usage. For example, white Anglo-saxons use this concept to refer to other people, usually with different skin colour. Whiteness is seen universal. Accordingly, whiteness is equated with being normality and so becomes invisible. But, white people (white english, australians, americans) are ethnic groups too.

27. Ethnicity is constituted through power relations between groups. It signals relations of marginality, of centre and periphery. For example, industrialized nations are regarded as the centre in relation to a periphery of developing nations. • Other examples of ethnic discrimination: Nazi Germany (germans and jewish), South Africa (whites and blacks), Bosnia (christians and bosnians) Ireland (catholics and protestants, Ruanda (Hutus and Tutsis)

28. National Identities • Race and ethnicity have been closly allied to forms of national identity and nationalism. • Nations are not only political formations but also systems of cultural representation so that national identity is continually reproduced through discursive action.

29. The nation state as a political apparatus and a symbolic form has a temporal dimension in that political structures endure and change while symbolic and discursive dimensions of national identity narrates and creates the idea of origins, continuity and tradition. • The national identity is a form of imaginative identification with that nation state as expressed through symbols and discourses.

30. National Identity • National Identity is one of the key concepts of cultural studies. • National identity is the shared identity of the naturalized inhabitants of a particular political-geographical space-that is, a particular nation. • How and why do people identify themselves as members of distinct national collectivities and what are the implications of this? • Is national identity something we are born with as subjects of a particular nation? Or is it something we learn?

31. National Identity • If we were to consider national identity as in part a question of appearance, of physical attributes, then we might conclude that national identity is something we are born with. • Most Italians have dark hair, most Swedes have light hair, most Kenyans are Black, most Britons are White.

32. National Identity • But this will clearly not do, since not all Italians have dark hair, and there many Black Britons. • Similarly it would be difficult to distinguish between the Belgians and French on the basis of physical attributes. • Yet for various political and historical reasons, national boundaries have been drawn around the proximate geographical spaces we call Belgium and France, legally dividing into two a body of people who have many shared physical attributes.

33. National Identity • This suggests that it would be inadequate to define national identity on the basis of physical attributes. • We might therefore conclude that national identity is not biological but cultural, and to that extent something that is learned, often subconsciously.

34. Nationalism • In nationalism what we can see is the cultural relationship between the individual and the collectivity as it is understood through territoriality. • We see that it is a portion of the earth’s surface or a specific landscape that is divided off and given a particular meanings with which people identify.

35. Nationalism • This is to argue that ‘premodern’ identifications with locality, tribe, family or religion are shattered in a modern world whose new social and cultural relations and the global identifications of religion. • Nationalism is about finding an alternative that is in tune with the modern world in various ways. • It is about providing a collectivity hat has some effectiveness in the new situation and which offers something around which people can build their identities and those of others. • A key way to understanding this is through Benedict Anderson’s (1983) notion of nations as ‘imagined communities’.

36. Imagined communities • For Benedict Anderson the nation is an imagined community and national identity a construction assembled through symbols and rituals in relation to territorial and administrative categories.

37. Nations as ‘Imagined Communities’ • Anderson sets out to understand the intense and deep personal attachments that nations generate. • Why is it that so many people have been willing not only kill but to die for their countries? • This, he argues, is especially hard to believe, given that the philosophical bases of the nationalist arguments for which people go to war are so shallow.

38. In part, his answer is about the ways in which nations offer a sense of identity and security in the modern world by replacing wider and ‘vertically’ ordered religious and dynastic forms of social organization with a new sense of time and a new sense of space which shore up some of the insecurities of modernity.

39. They are imagined ‘because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’. • It is only in the imagination that collectivities at this scale can exist.

40. These communities are imagined as limited because even the largest of them has finite, boundaries beyond which lie the other nations. • There are two points here: • First, this means that nations are identified with particular territories, part of the world that are meaningful to them as the historical home of their nation. • Second, this means that nationalisms and national identities are always built as much on the exclusion of people who do not fit and the drawing of boundaries as on the imagining of a community and the territory where they can live together.

41. National identity and communication • For Anderson communication is of central importance to the rise of national identity and the nation-state. • Thus the mechanized production and commodification of books and newspapers, the rise of print capitalism, allowed vernacular (native) languages to be standardized and disseminated providing the conditions for the creation of a national consciousness.

42. Broadcasting brings major public events into private worlds of viewers and in doing so constructs a kind of national calendar which organizes, coordinates and renews a national public social world.

43. The unity of the nation is constructed in narrative form by which stories, images, symbols and rituals represent 'shared' meanings of nationhood. • National identity is constitutive representation of shared experiences and history told through stories, literature, popular culture and television. • For example televised sport; one of the prime promoters of national discourses

44. National symbols • National symbols are symbols of any entity considering itself and manifesting itself to the world as a national community – namely sovereign states, but also nations and countries in a state of colonial or other dependence, (con)federal integration, or even an ethnocultural community considered a 'nationality' despite the absence of political autonomy. • National symbols intend to unite people by creating visual, verbal, or iconic representations of the national people, values, goals, or history. • These symbols are often rallied around as part of celebrations of patriotism or aspiring nationalism (such as independence, autonomy or separation movements) and are designed to be inclusive and representative of all the peoples of the national community.

45. Common official national symbols • The flag of a nation-state • The coat of arms, seal (device) and stamp of the land and/or ruling dynasty • The associated device and/or motto can also be use separately • The national colours, often derived from the above • emblematic animals and plants/flowers, whether related to the above or not • either the above or more abstract symbols, especially crosses, • National anthems, royal and imperial hymns; alongside such official hymn(s) custom may also recognize the national symbol value of very popular songs, such as • The office of the Head of State, and in case of a monarchy (often to some extent even after its political elimination) certain of its regalia, such as crown jewels • The Father of the Nation and other founding fathers

46. Common unofficial national symbols • National myths about the country's history or founding • National epics • National dishes • National dress - this can have a more official character in the case of court dress or military uniforms • National holiday • National instrument • Nationalism (music) • National pastimes • Folk dances • Folk hero • Folk instrument • Folk music • Culture hero • Tricksters • Monuments and cliches associated with tourism • National personifications • Various other national emblems, including special plants, animals and objects associated with the nation, • in a nation largely stamped by a particular religion, some of its mste revered symbols may be adopted as national symbols (occasionally even officially), e.g. the patron saint or equivalent deity, a major pilgrimage site, church or temple