Session 6: Identity Politics
3rd Global Conference
Tuesday 10th November – Thursday 12th November 2009
Salzburg, Austria
The Qipao and the Politics of Dress
Shih Ying Lin
Leiden University, The Netherlands
Few scholars even regarded dress as part of ”hard core” politics before the 1990s, let alone pay attention to how dress has been used to express a political identity. Mina Roces and Louise Edwards argue that when the concept of a nation first came to be imagined in Asia, national dress became one of the essential aspects of ‘invented tradition’. Later, as the governments experimented with dictatorship and democracy, authoritarian rulers and democrats alike invoked dress as a symbol of their visions of the “nations” they claimed to represent. (Roces & Edwards, 2008: 3) Looking back on the long history of the qipao, I discovered that it has often served as an important signifier of ideological values ad political aspirations as well as an essential way to distinguish social groups as they struggled for political dominancc.The Qipao then was a crucial dress code to be investigated if we wish to build a more complete understanding of formal politicsn Taiwan. When we observe how the qipao was gradually transformed from a tool of social order to a cultural practice that eventually found itself “otherized” from popular fashion, we can see the material reasons for this change. As we observe the evolution of a cultural practice in any culture, we cannot ignore the political and economic issues that may be influencing this change. This article aims to explore how the qipao has been manipulated by the politics of dress, and how it has acted as a visual marker for status, identity, and legitimacy.
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Fragmented Identities in Doron Rabinovici’s Novel Ohnehin
Anabela Valente Simões
University of Aveiro, Portugal
By examining the latest novel of the Austrian Jewish author Doron Rabinovici (*1961), I intend to explore in this paper multiple aspects of contemporary’s identity configurations. Published in 2004, Ohnehin leads its readers through the city of Vienna, portrayed in this text as a mosaic of various identities.
Centred on the emblematic Naschmarkt, Rabinovici’s novel depicts a multicultural social frame, where, apparently, there seems to exist a symbiosis between Viennese inhabitants and several migrant minorities. This harmony, however, is only an illusion: as the individual stories of these men and women are told, the fragility of the immigrant community (legal and illegal) is revealed. This is a community of rootless and homeless subjects who live in a kind of Diaspora, and people for whom this market represents an improvised home.
Alongside the problematic of immigrant’s shattered identity in Austria’s post-war political and social context, Ohnehin develops another important issue as far as the Austrian post-Holocaust generations (Jewish and non-Jewish) are concerned. The National-Socialist past of the Austrian nation – that not until recently considered itself the ‘first victim’ of the Nazis and not its allied, co-responsible for the perpetrated crimes – casts a shadow over the second generation of individuals, who have built their identities over this overwhelmingly hard heritage.
In this novel the author explores the inner conflict of a woman who, after discovering her father’s involvement in the SS, shames herself, revolts against him, and demands recognition of guilt. Later on, when attempting to establish contact with a Jew, son of Holocaust survivors, this woman tries to distance herself from her father’s past actions. But this dialogue between second generation Jews and non-Jews ends up frustrated. The transgenerational transmission of memory and trauma and the consequent problematic identity construction among a generation whose parents survived the Holocaust are responsible for the fragile and complex reconciliatory process of these second generation individuals.
The chosen story time of the novel is 1995, a moment in which the 50 years after World War II were celebrated, and, as if human kind couldn’t learn the lesson, the bloody conflict in the Balkans reminded of the horrors of the past. Yitzhak Rabin was murdered. And Jörg Haider was under the spotlight, leading an explicitly racist campaign.
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