“It
is imitation…when the child holds the newspaper like his father. It is
identification when the child learns to read” (Annie Reich in Bhahba, 2004, p.
87).
Annie Reich’s
distinction between imitation and identification seems a perfect place to begin
my response to Bhahba’s (2004)
treatise about the nature of cultural identity. In “Interrogating Identity”, the
second chapter of his book, The Location
of Culture, Bhabha introduces many concepts that are central to his
theories about identity explicated throughout the twelve chapters of his book. Born
in Mumbai, India and the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American
Literature and Language, and Director of he Humanities Center at Harvard
University, Bhabha is a notable scholar in the field of post-colonial studies.
His writing style is verbose and dense with complex ideas about the conflicting
and shifting nature of power and resistance among historically subjugated and
marginalized populations since the period of Western colonization. Throughout
his work, and particularly in this chapter, he makes allusions to other
literary works and scholars, which are at times intimidating to a novice
scholar, or reader that may be unfamiliar with the literary elements he
incorporates throughout his writing. The ability to successfully read and
comprehend The Location of Culture
requires not only a vast command of English vocabulary, but also advanced knowledge
of English literature, and familiarity with post-colonialism. Key concepts usually
associated with Bhabha presented in the chapter, “Interrogating Identity”,
include the terms: enunciation,
ambivalence, hybridity, mimicry, and liminality. I aim to adequately use
these terms to describe myself, and my positionality as a cultural being with
many identities, who has spent most of my life negotiating variable liminal
spaces within multiple contexts over at least the last fifty years.
As a woman, a
mother, a sister, a daughter, an aunt, an educator, a researcher, a doctoral
student, a Catholic, a divorcée, White, Latina, American, trilingual, and a budding
scholar, I realize that I inhabit multiple spaces that have evolved over time,
many years before I was born even, and as I once heard the critical theorist
and educator, Maxine Greene say about herself in a taped interview, I am an
existentialist, because I am still evolving. Throughout the evolution of these various
persona, I have come to realize that during each step of the way, I have often
sought to imitate someone else as a means of finding myself or in the process
of defining personal identity, but that the realization of any of my multiple
identities hasn’t really become me, or been fully actualized until I could claim
ownership of the roles I have created or aspired to play throughout my lifetime.
For this reason, Annie Reich’s analogy speaks loudly to me: “It is
imitation…when the child holds the newspaper like his father. It is
identification when the child learns to read”. Yet, identity, as culture,
according to Bhabha and other scholars is complex.
Identity
is culture: an object manifested through action
Identity creation
begins with imitation and becomes identification in the same way that objects
can be transformed into actions, or nouns into verbs. As a noun it involves
labels, and as a verb it involves activity. Therefore, culture as identity can
be defined as a verb (Heath
& Street, 2008).
It is an emergent process, that sometimes appears to be intermittent, possibly
even static, when one rests in limbo, or in a neutral state of feeling stuck.
Regardless of the pace or the path involved in identity creation, the process
is fluid and dialogic (Bakhtin
& Holquist, 1981). This
relationship between object and action is intrinsic to identification. In other
words, many people would say that identity creation is an ongoing process of defining
oneself through a set of objects, such as values and ideals that can be both adopted
and/or imposed upon a person or group of people. In this way, identity, very
much a label, regardless of how well warranted, is often used to categorize
people. The labels I used to identify the many roles I have played throughout
my lifetime, i.e., mother, daughter, sister, teacher, and student, for example,
can be used to classify my identity as objects. However, it is important to
note that these self-imposed, personal identity labels, are also created
through the attitudes and dispositions I adopt concerning them.
In that sense,
identity is an inhabitance, as in Bourdieu’s (1977) notions of habitus and capital. I have a family;
therefore, I am a mother. I have a job or students; therefore, I am a teacher. These concepts are interesting because in one
sense they suggest that culture and identity may be thought of as a tangible
product or entity, as in the sense of capital goods. By contrast, habitus infers that culture and identity
are ways of being tied to one’s environment or lived in space and how one lives
in or creates that world. I view
Bourdieu’s notion of habitus as both
a noun and a verb. In other words, habitus
“as systems of dispositions, are effectively realized only in relation to a
determinate structure of positions socially marked by the social properties of
their occupants, through which they manifest themselves” (Bourdieu
& Johnson, 1993). Further
examination of Bourdieu’s ideas would reveal strong socio-historical ties to
the ways in which identities or cultures are created and carried out in
society.
For this reason, I
prefer to consider identity in terms of activity, and synonymous to culture in
the ways that they are both associated with transactions. Although During
(2005) seems to disagree with Bourdieu, when he says that culture is not a
system, I believe that habitus is
very much bound by activities that define it.
Culture is not a
thing or even a system: it ‘s a set of transactions, processes, mutations,
practices, technologies, institutions, out of which things and events (such as
movies, poems or world wrestling bouts) are produced, to be experienced, lived
out and given meaning and value to in different ways within the unsystematic
network of differences and mutations from which they emerged to start with (During,
p. 6).
Indeed, I believe that culture and
identity do emerge from what Bhabha refers to as interstitial places created in and by historical transactions that
are manifested in the present, and which can be projected into the future. For
this reason, identity is fluid and dialectical. Identity is situated in time
and place, and informed by the relationships people have with others. My
identity, for example, as a United States born citizen, reared as a child in
California, Connecticut, Chile and Mexico help to define my cultural identity
through some of the significant places where I have lived while growing up. The
values of the family and social communities I lived in during those early years
influence my attitudes and ways of being today, in part because the people and
places I have interacted with are part of a history that I cannot deny, and
also because I choose to embrace my heritage. Therefore, to borrow, Bhabha’s
notion of hybridity, I am mixture of
multiple cultures. The attitudes and stances I carry out in my daily life
today, have been shaped, and continue to be shaped by the combined influences I
have experienced throughout my life.
Identity
as liminal reality
More
significantly, my identity from whatever perspective is continually emerging
from the in-between spaces that
position me in the frays of perpetual transition. Some identity attributes about
me are not typically contested. I look like and am in fact, a White woman, for
example. My race and gender will not change. However, how I perceive and enact
my womanhood can change and has evolved over my lifetime. Some of the social
ideologies that I was exposed to as a child led me to believe in and aspire to
a patriarchal middle-class White American hegemony. June and Ward Cleaver, of
the Leave it to Beaver television
show popular in the 1960s when I was a child, taught me that mothers should
stay home to rear the family in a perfect harmony, and that fathers make the
important decisions related to family. Yet, the reality of that cultural dogma
did not fit my experience.
I was born in 1957
to an unwed mother and given a fictitious last name at birth in order to
protect my mother and me from social scrutiny.
My mother married twice during my childhood, bore three more children,
and provided all of us with the security and love expected of any “normal”
family. Although I was eventually
adopted by the man I call my father, my history and the age difference between
my siblings and me has kept me in a liminal
state of in-betweenness throughout my
life. My place in the family has always moved between various states of
belonging and not belonging. This is not to suggest that my experience has been
a negative one. I have always had that “special” place in the family,
affectionately known as the Wa. My brother defined this particular aspect of my
family identity best when he was toddler, when he told his teacher that he has
a mother, a father, two sisters and a Wawa. Clearly I did not fit the category
of sister or mother, therefore, he defined me as an other by calling me Wawa because he couldn’t at the time pronounce
my first name properly. This is just one example of several experiences where I
haven’t always completely fit in, or have had to negotiate juxtaposing
identities between two different worlds. Yet my life’s story doesn’t
necessarily contain the kind of anguish and hardship often experienced by
people who have lived in the margins of racial or gender discrimination.
Although I never realized it until recently, I believe this is the case because
I have been shrouded in the protective cover of Whiteness (Wise, 2005). Yes, I am White, but I am
also Latina in heart, soul, and biological heritage. Yet, I don’t look
“Hispanic” as the government classifies people of Spanish speaking origin, and
to some people, I am not really Latina because I have lived most of my life in
the United States and have for the most part lived a rather privileged
life.
Therefore, do I
really understand what it is to live in marginality? Many would claim not. I
certainly haven’t experienced the kind of prejudice people of color have
experienced. Perhaps I could conjure up stories of invisibility or discrimination
because I am an independent woman, or because I am divorced and Catholic. I
think it is important to note that liminality is a temporary space, usually
defined by centers of social power and its grand narrative. Yet, at other times
it can be defined by the decisions people make about how they lead their lives.
Feminist scholar, bell hooks, has demonstrated that one can move in and out of
liminal spaces by choice. As a Black female, she rose above the plight and
stigma of the racialized poverty she knew as a child growing up in Tennessee,
and then chose to return to her birthplace after becoming an accomplished
adult. I don’t mean to compare myself, in the least, to bell hooks. We have
lived different lives and experienced different realities of cultural identity.
Identity
is relative, relational and repetitive
For this reason,
cultural scholars would claim that cultural identity is relative and
ambivalent, particularly as a construct of hegemonic status quo. Bhabha
describes identity as “the representation of a time that is always elsewhere, a
repetition” (p. 73). Identity is relative to current value systems and
ideologies, but also steeped in the history that preceded it. In that way
identities are recursive and become significant only in relationship to what
has been, what is and what is to come. Human existence is in a state of perpetual
flux and therefore some form of liminal reality. Beech defines liminality
(2011) as fluid movement between self-constructed and social-constructed
identities, at it is this process that leads to the construction of new
identities.
Certainly as a
graduate student, I have been redefining both my professional and personal
identities over the course of the last several years. When my last child left
home to go to college, I was left alone to redefine my role as an empty-nested
divorced woman and mother. Then during the course of acquiring new knowledge in
graduate school, I discovered new agency as an advocate for education reform in
light of the neoliberal education policies that I had for so many years endured
as a passive bystander. Although I am at times made to feel a little insecure
with each new idea and philosophy I encounter in my studies, I feel both
empowered and humbled by the intellectual transition I am experiencing. Yet,
being more knowledgeable doesn’t always equate with being more accepted or
better placed in society. Suddenly I sometimes feel a bit out of place in both
my new and old worlds. Colleagues and friends from my day job as a middle
school teacher aren’t interested in my experiences in higher education. I feel
as though I represent a threat to them, and that our worlds are slowly growing
further and further distant from each other. Although we can relate on the same
grounds of the daily routines and grunge of daily teaching activities, I find
myself sometimes slipping away from my old world as a classroom teacher and
sliding into my new role as a budding scholar. And yet, I am not yet a scholar. I do not
teach in at the university, therefore, I do not have a collegial relationship
with other doctoral students who live the daily life as a graduate fellow. Our
class discussions are invigorating as we share the same mental space of new
learning and frustrating queries. But the fact that is, I am in between
professional identities and the struggle to redefine my identity as an academic
scholar is part of my own process of enunciation
(Bhabha, 2004) which commands me to reshape preconceived notions about
education as I negotiate new relationships among circles of friends and
colleagues. I equate the enunciation process
as a form of separation anxiety between the old and the new, which in Bhabha’s
view is a necessary part of the process of recognizing power, domination and
consequently eliminating racism.
The enunciative process introduces a split
in the performative present of cultural identification; a split between the
traditional culturalist demand for a model, a traditional, a community, a
stable system of reference, and the necessary negation of the certitude in the
articulation of new cultural demands, meanings, strategies in the political
present, as a practice of domination, or resistance (p. 49).
Identity
as emergence and transformation
As a literacy
researcher and educator, I am keenly interested in the relationship between
cultural identity literacy pedagogy. As a student of critical theory, I am
interested in activist and agentic ways educators can embrace identity theory
to create equitable and culturally responsive learning environments for
students. At least, within the last twenty years, sociocultural scholars in the
fields of literacy and teacher education have widely acknowledged an important
relationship between identity and literacy. Numerous studies have documented
the important role that agency and voice have in successful reading and writing
experiences, all of which involve a process of transformation. Effective
literacy and advocacy are emergent processes. Each begins with the simple
imitation of those who we observe and possibly even admire. I have grown to
appreciate the work and wisdom of critical education scholars I have studied,
such as Giroux, Gee, Luke, Street, Bomer and Bomer, Christiansen, Harste,
Gutierriez, Enciso, Mosely, and Rogers, among others. As a buddying literacy scholar,
perhaps I am a bit like the young toddler who watches and imitates his father
holding the newspaper. I have discovered that I am slowly finding my voice and
learning how to break the code of scholarship. Precisely because I am an
existentialist, my identity as a literacy scholar and advocate for social justice
is emerging and transforming across the multiple layers that define the
dynamical nature of critical literacy and pedagogy in the 21st
century. Whether I become a published writer, and/or continue as a teacher, I
am unequivocally poised to helping students and educators find their voices by
better understanding the nature of power and cultural identity.
References
Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H. (2007). Post-colonial
studies: The key concepts. New York: NY: Routledge.
Bakhtin, M. M., & Holquist, M. (1981). The dialogic
imagination: Four essays University of Texas Press.
Beech, N. (2011). Liminality and the practices of identity
reconstruction. Human Relations, 64(2), 285-302.
Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. London; New
York: Routledge.
Bourdieu, P., & Johnson, R. (1993). The field of cultural
production, or: The economic world reversed. The field of cultural
production: Essays on art and literature (pp. 322). New York: Columbia
University Press.
During, S. (2005). Going global. Cultural studies: A critical
introduction (pp. 244). London; New York: Routledge. Retrieved from http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/
ecip0420/2004015958.html
Heath, S. B., & Street, B. V. (2008). On ethnography:
Approaches to language and literacy research. New York: Teachers College
Press.
Hooks, B. (1990). Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness. Yearning:
Race, gender, and cultural politics (pp. 236). Boston, MA: South End Press.
Wise, T. J. (2005). White like me. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull
Press.
No comments:
Post a Comment