ENG 320 Final Review

Stuart Hall

Cultural Identity and Diaspora

• Identity “production” never complete

• Cultural identity = collective “one true self”

  • Reflect common historical experiences creates oneness

    (Frantz Fanon)

    Exclusionary, creating homogeny where there is none

• Points of similarity from slavery

  • African vs Caribbean black

• Internal, cannot subject person to knowledge of dominant discourse and narrative

• Caribbean identity between axis of similarity and continuity and axis of difference and rupture

• Presence Africaine - site of repressed language and customs

• European Presence - endlessly speaking, power and domination

• New World/Americaine presence - junction of culture

Identity as a ‘production,’ which is never complete, always in process

Identity changes as people move/people around them change, new cultures introduced, make unique blend of past history and new experiences (Hall)

Two ways of thinking about identity

Cultural identity as static vs ever changing (Hall)

Cultural identity is terms of “one, shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self,’ hiding inside the many other”

Idea that culture is static and reflect common history, false homogeneity (Hall)

Cultural identity, “a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’”

Past informing the present

History of colonization impacts current culture (Hall)

Past constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth

Past changes depending on who’s telling the story (Hall)

Identity as constituted, not outside, but within representation

Identity individualized, cannot generalize all culture to all individuals within it (Hall)

Gurinder Chadha

Bhaji on the Beach

• Asha - older mother and shopkeeper, religious visions, fight between British and traditional Indian culture

• Ginder - mother of family’s grandson, forced in abusive relationship to fit role

• Hashida - pregnant by Oliver, black family accepts her, Indian family has high career expectations for her, doesn’t tell anyone about baby or relationship

• vacation - escape restrictive family values for Indian women, Indian vs British culture and identities

• men served by women breakfast, men go after Ginder to punish her and bring her back into motherly role, family thinks Ginder’s husband has been soft for letting her go

diasporic identity

How indian culture combines with british culture, culture of homeland and new home intersect (Chadha)

Identities of the women defined through their relationships

Asha - older mother and shopkeeper, religious visions, fight between British and traditional Indian culture

Ginder - mother of family’s grandson, forced in abusive relationship to fit role

Hashida - pregnant by Oliver, black family accepts her, Indian family has high career expectations for her, doesn’t tell anyone about baby or relationship

(Chadha)

The role of culture, place, and patriarchy in their British-Asian diasporic identity, Female characters and their identities defined through space (the home, the shop, the holiday to Brighton)

at home must comply to Indian standards of family role, on vacation away from husbands can enact British identity (Chadha)

Difference between the two generations in terms of their diasporic identity

Older women more traditional, hold home values more closely, younger women more willing to experiment with Western ideas of love and identity (Chadha)

Hashida, Ginder, Simi, and the teenagers Ladhu and Madhu and their negotiation of their cultural and gender identity as British South Asian women

fight with expectations from family and their reality (being successful in career vs being in relationship with child, being mother vs escaping abusive relationship, wanting to look for white boys) (Chadha)

Asha and her journey to individuality and freedom (interaction with Ambrose Waddington)

Experiment with white male, different from traditional way of life expected from her, realizes her place in Indian culture (Chadha)

Ambrose Waddington, Englishness, Masculinity

White man tells her Asha loves her, sees religious vision, “remember who you are” “duty honor sacrifice” (1:19:01)

Went to college, shouldn’t have lived traditional life (Chadha)

Ambrose contrast with young white British men

Ambrose ideal man outside Indian culture, young white boys mock the older Indian ladies, directly against, young teenage girls try and get white boys (Chadha)

The brothers, Ranjeet, Manjeet, and Balbir and their diasporic masculine identities

demand wives obedience, wait for wives to serve them breakfast (Chadha)

Hashida and Oliver’s relationship

Oliver’s dad supportive of Hashida’s pregnancy, Hashida’s family didn’t know about relationship

Oliver wanted baby and Hashida didn’t, family values and cultural values impact what they want (Chadha)

Cheryl Shanks

Nine Quandries of Tourism

• Tourists decide what they want to see, give value

• Natives dress up in stereotype to fulfill fantasy

• See “the real thing,” blocked off to separate real world with authentic experience

• Developing countries use tourism to capitalize on unique culture

• ecotourists - respect environment, but can only have little to have little impact on environment, then doesn’t provide revenue for citizens

• Commodifying cultural artifacts preserves tradition of creating artifacts, but changes meaning behind it

• Tourists pay private companies, money doesn’t reach locals

  • prevents cultural contamination

• Govs geared towards tourists rather than actual locals

• Culture must be fixed to be commodified

• Tourist sites compete with another, interchangeable in tourist eyes 

• Can be destroyed with hurricane or terrorist attack

  • Creates economic loss

• Political, problems of power dynamics 

Tourist and native interactions permanently alter contexts in which they live

Tourists decide what they want to see, what has value (Shanks)

Tourism has economic, environmental, cultural and political effects

Tourists run economy, not enough ecotourists and doesn’t make enough revenue to make a difference, politics caters to tourists more than natives to keep economy running

Tourists naturally cause eco degradation, ecotourists can only exist in small numbers to be truly environmentally friendly, but then don’t add revenue for locals (Shanks)

Mimi Sheller

Natural Hedonism

• Imperial gaze in travel guides, tourists expect to see what they read

  • Written by imperial way of looking at place, informs how we think of the Caribbean

• Caribbean tourism market as paradise for Europeans

• Excessive fruitfulness

  • Fantasy of sustenance without labor

• Support slavery in making wild lands “productive”

• “Monarch-of-all-i-survey”

• European vulnerable to creolisation from proximity to natives

  • Feminine

• Romanticism era, wild untamed place

• Objectify Caribs as part of natural landscape

• Landscape = sexuality and corruption

• Caribbean sexually available

  • Prostitution rampent 

  • Black bodies inherently sexual

Sheller’s engagement with Mary Louise Pratt and imperial travel writing

Tourists expect to see what they read in travel writing from an imperial view, informs how they view the location (Sheller)

Elaborate 18th European discourse about the Caribbean

The Caribbean was resource rich, good for labor (Sheller)

Delineate the shifts from 18th century European discourse to 19th century European discourse about the Caribbean

Changed from labor to paradise for Europeans as commodity, sustenance without labor, land sexually available (Sheller)

Three steps through which the social and economic inequalities of the contemporary tourist economy are naturalized

Objectification of natives as part of landscape, landscape erotic and corrupt, market imagined geography as sexually available (Sheller)

Sexualization of “exotic” bodies as tool of Caribbean tourist promotion

Caribbean exotic and alluring (Sheller)

Stephanie Black

Life and Debt

• World Bank created for capital of rebuilding Europe

• Jamaica independent from Britain but still not self ruled

• Private banks don’t lend 

• IMF devalue Jamaican money, make foreign currency more expensive

• Dependent on imported goods, costs go up for citizens, foreigners control 

• Jamaica small, can’t thrive producing for itself

  • Integrate into world market than rely on little economy

• Forced to abandoned farms of local subsidies, lost control of import 

• Powder milk favored over fresh milk, milk industry collapsed

• Guaranteed non tariffed market in Europe, Europe agree to help former colonies rebuild

  • No access to American market

  • Big American companies control most world market

• Free Zones - create more job opportunities, based on loans from World Bank to create structures

  • Without systems of country

  • Can be paid less than legally allowed

  • Workers not protected

• Brought in asian workers

  • Treated better than natives

  • Given more overtime

  • Paid in USD when Jamaicans paid in Jamaican dollars

• IMF still has influence even though not giving money

  • Want voice in IMF politics, protest taxes 

Running Contrast between images of tourists and the life of the Jamaicans

Compare Western expectation of Jamaica vs reality for natives (Black)

Role of the international agencies, IMF, World Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank

Offer opportunities for Jamaicans in loans, get access to all informations and control trade to maintain profitability, put local farmers out of business, look overseas for international trade

International agencies gained more control over government from debt of loaned money

(Black)

Free Trade Zone in Jamaica, Contrast between Free Trade Zone and employee homes/neighborhoods

Give jobs to workers, unregulated with no employee protections, factories put in cheaper neighborhoods, people without jobs (Black)

Rob Nixon

Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

• Offload rich-nation toxins into poorest countries

  • Decrease pressure from rich-nation environmentalists against garbage dumps

• Slow violence - violence over time, not highly visible or newsworthy

  • Exponential 

  • Casualties postponed

  • Unspectacular, open ended

• Disposable people - environmentalism of poor

  • The poor encapsulates ethnicity, gender, race, class, religion, region, generation

• Slow violence not in sync with electoral change

  • Politicians treat as critical but not urgent, not in office long enough to pan out

  • No political rewards

• Humanity altered biophysical systems of Earth

• 9/11 more sensational violent threat than climate change

• Social authority of witness of violence

  • Ex. definitions of rape in different countries

  • Witnessing authority discounted

• “Second scramble for Africa” - corps look to resource-rich, war-fractured African nations

• Claim nature can fix itself, downplay effects on wildlife

Environmentalism of the poor, Disposable people

people most impacted by environmental impacts don’t have the power to prevent or mitigate effects, seen as disposable because threat isn’t active enough for those in power to help (Nixon)

Environmental violence as contest not only over space, bodies, labor, resources, and time

Industrialization causes environmental impacts on countries being exploited (Nixon)

“Past is never dead. It’s not even the past.”

Long reaching impacts of past still acting out (Nixon)

Relationship between structural violence and slow violence

slow violence effects don’t last until next presidential election, no political reward for addressing issue (Nixon)

The Anthropocene

Human industrialization’s impact on environment, becomes geographical (Nixon)

Awareness of Great Acceleration unevenly distributed, “ecosystem of interruption technologies”

Those who are most impacted by effects more aware than those who aren’t impacted, also the people who have the wealth to help but won’t spend it (Nixon)

Representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by slow violence

Not a big enough headline to make news (Nixon)

Who counts as Witness

News portrays slow violence through short term small effects, shaping how general public views this issue, those with more power and influence taken more seriously than others actually facing issue (Nixon)

Writer-Activists and their strategies

Show full extent of slow violence outside short term view (Nixon)

slow violence, slow violence as exponential

Violence that has long term effects, Effects slowly increase until it’s too late to stop it (Nixon)

Karen Tei Yamashita

Through the Arc of the Rainforest

• Telenovela

  • Characters stagnant, unreal aspect

  • Not truly about characters, somewhat removed

• Kazumasa - all seeing ball connected to Matacao, used as pawn, move from Japan to Brazil, ball makes him rich, donates money to poor, ends living with Lourdes in quiet life witho

• Batista and Tania - pigeon messanger business, both jealous and protective of each other, separated from business

• Mane - healing impacts of feathers, from small farmer to intellectual,

• Chico Paco - pilgrimage in honor of his friend to Matacao , religious figure, dies from someone targeting Kazumasa

• JB Tweep - three arms, background of GGG, commodifies feathers and Matacao plastic, becomes large figure of GGG, jumps off building when feather and plastic business gone

• matacao - religious site and tourist attraction, drilled for plastic business

• Matacao plastic - replace food, plants, animals, eventually breaks down, reliance on finite materials

Genres in the novel

Telenovela everyday slice of life aspect, fantasy elements escape from reality contrast to real life aspects (Yamashita)

Purpose of telenovela archetypes to engage themes of slow violence

Over long period of time from different perspectives, ends of culpability spectrum, over whole book

JB archetype (Yamashita)

Thematic significance of Matacao as solidifed plastic garbage especially in the wake of the New Plastic Age

overreliance on finite materials, plastic will run out, environmental impacts (Yamashita)

Various forms of commoditization in the novel

Feathers, Matacao plastic, pigeon service (Yamashita)

Origin and spread of Typhus and its solution

destroy feather business, kill a bunch of birds and people to remove disease (Yamashita)