Nationalism and Race PDF

Nationalism and Race Week 9 Nationalism and Race: Narrating the nation A national culture is a discourse – a way of constructing meaning which influences and organizes both our actions and our conceptions of ourselves. National cultures construct identities by producing meaning about “the nation” w...

Nationalism and Race Week 9 Nationalism and Race: Narrating the nation A national culture is a discourse – a way of constructing meaning which influences and organizes both our actions and our conceptions of ourselves. National cultures construct identities by producing meaning about “the nation” with which we can identify → these are contained in the stories which are told about it, memories which connect its present with its past, and images which are constructed of it. → How is the narrative of the national culture told? Nationalism and Race: Narrating the nation There is the narrative of the nation as it is told and retold in national histories, literatures, the media, and popular culture. These provide a set of stories, images, landscapes, scenarios, historical events, national symbols and rituals which represent the shares experiences, sorrows and triumphs which give meaning to the nation. → As members of such an “imagined community”, we see ourselves in our mind’s eye sharing in this narrative. It lends significance and importance to our existence, connecting our everyday lives with a national destiny that pre-existed us and will outlive us. Nationalism and Race: Narrating the nation There is the emphasis on origins, continuity, tradition, and timelessness. National identity is represented as primordial. That is, it is there from birth, unified and continuous, “changeless”. National cultures are constructed through the invention of tradition: Invented traditions are a “set of practices (…) of ritual and symbolic nature which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviors by repetition which automatically implies continuity with a suitable historical past.” (Hobsbawm). Nationalism and Race: Narrating the Nation National cultures are also narrated through a foundational myth: a story which locates the origin of the nation, the people, their national character so early that they are lost in the mist of “mythic time”. → foundational myths provide a narrative in terms of which an alternative history or counter-narrative, which pre-dates the ruptures of colonization, can be constructed. New nations are founded on these myths. The idea of “one (national) culture” grounds a national identity which is symbolically connected to the idea of “a pure, original people.” Nationalism and Race: Narrating the nation What about Canada? What is Canada’s myth of origin? →The Settler Colonial Narrative: Canada’s foundational myth is rooted in settler colonial history. This narrative portrays white European settlers as the “original immigrants” or rightful inhabitants of Canada. This myth overlooks the displacement and extermination of Indigenous peoples by colonizers. →The Myth of Peaceful Settlement: Canadian national promotes the idea of a peacefully settled North America, downplaying the violent conquest and cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples. This narrative relegates Indigenous histories, cultures, and issues to the past – erasing their presence and struggles. →The Peaceful Nation: Canada is a peaceful, tolerant, and multicultural nation. This narrative presents Canada as a country built by immigrants. Canada is a “mosaic of cultures” rather than a melting pot, where different communities are unified by shared values rather than common origins. Nationalism and Race Are the national cultures and the national identities they construct unified? →National identities bring the two halves together: they offer membership of the political nation-state and identification with the national culture. →However different its members may be in terms of class, gender, or race, a national culture seeks to unify them into one cultural identity. Is national identity a unifying identity which cancels or subsumes cultural difference? A national culture has never been simply a point of allegiance, bonding, and symbolic identification. It is also a structure of cultural power. Nationalism and Race Most modern nations consist of disparate cultures which were only unified by a lengthy process of violent conquest (by the suppression of cultural difference). Each conquest subjugated conquered people and their cultures. → These violent beginnings which stand at the origins of modern nations have first to be “forgotten” before allegiances to a more unified, homogenous national identity could be forged. → Nations are always composed of different social classes, gender and ethnic groups. Nationalism and Race Instead of thinking of national cultures as unified, we should think of them as constituting a discursive device which represents difference as unity or identity. They are cross-cut by deep internal divisions and differences, and “unified” only through the exercise of different forms of cultural power. One way of unifying them has been to represent them as the expression of the underlying culture of “one people”. Ethnicity is the term we give to cultural features (language, religion, custom, tradition) which are shared by a people. But using “ethnicity” as a unifying force is misleading → modern nations are all cultural hybrids. Nationalism and Race It is equally difficult to try to unify national identity around race. Race is not a biological or genetic category with any scientific validity. Race is a social construct – a discursive, not a biological category. It is the organizing category of those ways of speaking, systems of representation, and social practices which utilize a loose, often unspecific set of physical differences (skin color, hair texture, physical and bodily features) as symbolic markers in order to differentiate one group socially from another. → biological notions of race have been replaced by cultural definitions of race, which allow race to play a significant role in discourses about the nation and national identity. Nationalism and Race “We increasingly face a racism which avoids being recognized as such because it is able to line up "race" with nationhood, patriotism and nationalism. A racism which has taken a necessary distance from crude ideas of biological inferiority and superiority now seeks to present an imaginary definition of the nation as a unified cultural community. It constructs and defends an image of national culture - homogeneous in its whiteness yet precarious and perpetually vulnerable to attack from enemies within and without (…) This is a racism that answers the social and political turbulence of crisis and crisis management by the recovery of national greatness in the imagination”. (Gilroy, 1992, p.87) W.E.B Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk Du Bois – The Souls of Black Folk → Du Bois’ life is intimately connected with the history of African Americans. He is a child of Emancipation, born in 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War. → He was a founding member of the important National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) where he acted as Editor of the monthly journal: The Crisis. His life will alternate between the life of a scholar and the life of an activist, up to including, following the postwar years, his involvement in the peace movement and his close association with the American Communist Party. → His book, The Souls of Black Folk, is a classic in African American literature. It represents the peak of the cultural, intellectual and political rise of the African Americans after Emancipation. Just imagine the situation: 35 years after Emancipation, and once the right to vote has been acquired, and with the first generation of African American having gone through university education will come of age, the work of W.E.B. Du Bois will represent the intellectual summit of this movement or Renaissance he will put into powerful words. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk Du Bois’ most important contribution to the understanding of the Black question is expressed in the idea that the experience of living “under the veil” (the separation between the Whites and the Blacks) results in an “altered” feeling of humanity, while being informed by this very idea of universal humanity, so that it takes the shape of double consciousness through which one sees itself through the eyes of the (ruling) other. For Du Bois, Black Folks are born and live “within the veil”. The ideas of the “veil” and the “color-line” (the separation between blacks and whites) represent some of the first efforts to articulate a critical social theory of racial oppression, racial exploitation, and racial violence – (1) of the ways in which racial oppression, exploitation, and violence racially divide and socially separate (the color-line) (2) distort cultural communications and human relations between those they racially divide along the color-line (the Veil) (3) the two latter cause blacks to suffer from a severe inferiority complex that induces them to constantly view themselves from whites’ supposed “superior” points of view (double-consciousness) Du Bois – The Souls of Black Folk The Veil practices of concealment racially (re)organize everything that crosses the color-line, every interaction between “the two worlds within and without the Veil”. It thus blurs or (more frequently) blinds those who are white and who negligently wish not to view nonwhites (nonwhites’ humanity, history, and culture). → Blacks, on the other hand, are not a “homogenous mass” within the Veil. However, one of the consequences of whites’ sociopolitical dominance and their ability to amplify their ideology of black invisibility is that blacks begin to internalize the dialectic of white superiority and black inferiority – and the development of a “double-consciousness”. Du Bois – The Souls of Black Folk The theory of the Veil is interconnected with the concept of the color-line, but they should not be collapsed into one another. → Du Bois uses the metaphor of the Veil to talk about a racially colonized and a racially divided life along the color-line, and to explain the ways in which an invisible social construction such as the “color-line” becomes visible when viewed from the long-veiled perspective of blacks in a white supremacist world. → Because blacks are veiled in invisibility in a white supremacist world, Du Bois brought whites’ tendency to approach blacks more as problems than as human persons to his readers attention at the beginning of The Souls of White Folk – Du Bois, in other words, problematizes whites’ misconceptions of blacks by asserting blacks’ humanity and agency. Du Bois – The Souls of Black Folk “Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanics ville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.” (Du Bois, 1903c, 1–2). → We should understand the The Souls of Black Folk as part of Du Bois answer to what the “white problem” – whites’ problematic, racial colonial approach to black lifeworlds and black life struggles. →The Veil and the color-line are imperceptible (to most whites) and visible (to most blacks), present in each and every one of their interactions, in racial myths and cultural stereotypes that the media (re)produces for mass production. Du Bois – The Souls of Black Folk →Du Bois developed the concept of double-consciousness to capture the anguish that the dialectic of white superiority and black inferiority inflicted on blacks. On the other hand, his theory of “second-sight” explained the unique insight (knowledge) blacks gained from their experience of the white superiority/black inferiority dialectic. These two ideas overlap in the sense that they seek to explain that blacks’ The Veil efforts to gain self-consciousness in a Double-consciousness white supremacist world will be always and everywhere distorted because of the prevalent and pervasive ideas and images of blacks and blackness. Du Bois – The Soul of Black Folk “After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self- consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. (Du Bois, 1903, 3–4)” → Here, Du Bois connects the ideas of “the Veil” with “second-sight”, and “America”. → The concept of double-consciousness asserts that the very color-line that racially divides the white from the black world creates a tortured “two-ness”, driving blacks to constantly question whether they are “Africans” or “Americans”. “Double-consciousness” represents the consequences of blacks’ racial colonization and the ways in which the color- line dives society and blacks’ selves. Du Bois – The Souls of Black Folk → Second-sight symbolizes blacks’ ability to see both Africa (the black world) and America’s (the white world) strengths and weaknesses, and the way these two worlds should learn from one another. Second-sight provides blacks with a For Du Bois, to transcend this double- window inside and outside the Veil, which consciousness, black folks armed with enables them to begin the dialectical with second-sight would have to process of revolutionary decolonization synthesize black (African) and white and human liberation by calling into (American) “gifts” to articulate a new question double-consciousness. understanding of themselves.