Session 12: Social Constructions of Identity

Session 12: Social Constructions of Identity
Chair: Bryan Fanning

‘A paranoia of Identity Crisis’?: Recent South African Literary Historiography and the Discourse of Cultural and Political Transformation
Margriet van der Waal
University of Groningen, the Netherlands

Using Michael Chapman’s recently published (2003) literary history, Southern African Literatures as point of departure, this contribution considers the process of cultural transformation in South Africa inspired by radical political change – from a society characterized by the racially and ethnically divisive ideology of apartheid to a constitutional democracy characterized by an ideology of inclusion and multiculturalism. Departing from a literary sociological point of view, I will focus on the complexity of the South African literary field, where different competing processes of constructing literary value exist, which are indicative of struggles about cultural value within a context of contested ideological power, which ultimately underlies identity formation and politics. I will argue, for example, that Chapman’s literary history constructs an alternative (multi)cultural identity in line with a newly dominant political ideology that has redrawn the lines of socio-cultural inclusion and exclusion. During a period when authority, ownership and control over matters of cultural production and cultural identity were placed under severe scrutiny, it was to be expected that the choices and selections made by Chapman would be criticized, and I therefore also take into consideration reactions on Chapman’s literary history, representing different position-takings on the issue of aesthetics in the transfer of cultural values and the construction of cultural identity/identities and national/cultural loyalties.

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Dance, Rituals and the Performance of Transnational Identities: A Mexico-United States Case
Alejandro Cervantes-Carson
Director of Research & Project Development, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain

No abstract is presently available

De-/ Re-constructed Jewish Identities in Post-Holocaust Europe and America
Catalina Botez
English Department, University of Konstanz, Germany

My paper takes up a comparative view on individual identity as featured in three literary works that deal with traumatised Jewish youth in the aftermath of the Holocaust: Imre Kertesz’ Fateless (1992), Anne Michael’s Fugitive Pieces (1997), and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2002). As I intend to show, the trauma of the Holocaust forces an arbitrary process of identity deconstructionupon the juvenile characters’ incompletely developed selves, which triggers in their adult lives a need for self-reconstruction, essentially experienced against thoroughly altered cultural, historical and geographical backgrounds. These characters’ initial flight for their lives and concurrent transgression of various national borders, with all the tribulations that they entail, will be regarded as complex steps towards mapping a physical trajectory of inner change. Ultimately, this survival journey will be retraced and re-mapped in old age in an attempt to reconstruct, negotiate and reconcile with an original identity.
Indubitably, forceful migration engenders a break with former patterns of selfhood and generates a re-shifting of identity elements such as the cultural, ethnical, national, psychological and geographical. Particularly, post-war Jewishness differs from its pre-war analog through the change of emphasis onto the ethnic element, as opposed to other identity constituents. The prevalent prevailing ethnic factor is the lens through which these characters later perceive their rapidly changing time and space, while their mature interest for poetry, literary discourse and architecture expresses an inner need to assume and incorporate this change. Comparatively, this focus on ethnicity will be regarded against current views of plural identity affiliation and multiple membership, in an attempt to enquire into the extent to which these destinies strike an incipient balance between localism and cosmopolitanism, exclusion and inclusion, alterity and sameness.
My purpose is to explore the physical and emotional distance between the deconstructed and reconstructed types of Jewishness as embodied by these fictional characters, and to stress the uniqueness of their physical and mental path back to themselves.

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