2nd Global Conference
Wednesday 3rd September - Saturday 6th September
2008
Mansfield College, Oxford
Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Session 4: Social Imaginary and Identity
Chair: Farrah Ahmed
Do People Make History?
Eleni Pavlides
School of English, Journalism & European Languages, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
“Do people make history? What is the relationship between people and historical forces?” The questions are posed to author Richard Flanagan during an interview and Flanagan has no ready answer. He responds that he has written two novels trying to address this issue, an issue which for him is “the big one” (CNN 2000). As well as Flanagan’s “The Sound of One Hand Clapping”, this paper also examines another literary text published in Australia in the 1990s: Raimond Gaita’s “Romulus My Father”. Where Flanagan writes fiction, Gaita writes memoir. Both writers address the post war European exodus to Australia (which ultimately brought about the country’s multicultural policies in the 1970s) motivated by a common desire to answer the questions posed to Flanagan.
Within the public sphere, the possibility of multiculturalism co existing with Australianess had been vehemently debated since the late 1980s. Opponents to multiculturalism saw diversity as antagonistic to social cohesion. Bi-partisan government support for multiculturalism broke down in 1988 - the year of the Australian bi centenary - and positions became further entrenched when the Howard conservative government was elected to office in 1996. Yet, in spite of the many criticisms of multiculturalism “Romulus My Father”and “The Sound of One Hand Clapping”proposed a different post war synthesis for Australia. Flanagan, the son of Irish Australian settlers married to a Slovenian: Gaita, growing up in Australia as the son of Yugoslav and German refugees - wrote in new ways about “Australianness”. These authors linked the national conversation, to urgent global questions that arose at the end of the twentieth century, regarding who was entitled to claim the rights of citizenship and national belonging. Although ostensibly books about Australia in the 1950s, these texts responded to the global need to “rethink the politics of identity” (Papastergiadis 2). By making these texts “present” in what Raymond Williams calls “active readings” this paper looks at the actualities these texts were trying to reclaim (Williams 129).
The Myth of Homogeneity and its ‘Others’: Migrant Workers as Political Agents and Their Everyday Struggles and Negotiations in Globalizing Japanese Political Economy
Hironori Onuki
Department of Political Science, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Since Japan’s self-modernization project in the prewar period, conservative political discourse has conceptualized the modern “nation-state” as a racially homogeneous entity. This conceptualization established the cultural and political foundation for both Japanese identity and the country’s relationship with the outside world, deeming the incorporation of culturally and ethnically different “Others” as serious threat to the “security” of a homogeneous society. In this context, the remarkably increased flows of foreign migrant workers into Japan in regular and irregular manners since the 1980s, as consequences of both severe labour shortage and “privatization” of some spheres of labour market formation, have generated heated debates as to whether and how Japan should include this new segment of the population. Here, while undertaking a contextualized and historicized interrogation of Japan as a labour receiving site, this essay will illustrate the concrete, contingent and situated practices of global labour migrations. In particular, through comparatively investigating the everyday struggles and negotiations of Japanese descendents from Latin America and the so-called “overstayers” from various regions within the context of contemporarily globalizing Japanese political economy, it will explore: how and with what consequences have global labour migrations (re)constituted capitalist relations of production and social reproduction? This is the part of my larger project that attempts to argue that global labour migrations are the social practices that not only participate in and depend upon but also contest and negotiate the neoliberal restructuring of the global political economy. The objective of this project is to highlight migrant workers as agential political subject within the social relations of global politics while contributing toward emergent crucial efforts to pursue the possibilities for emancipatory projects and political resistances.
Imagining the Diasporic African Community in Dublin: Identity, Identification and Experiences
Theophilus Ejorh
School of Sociology, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
This paper focuses on the conjuncture of the diasporic identity, identification and experiences of African immigrants in Dublin. African peoples face a particular existential challenge in the western world. Robert Cummings (1986) recognized this as the challenge of being demanded of Africans by history to define themselves. This problem of self-definition and self-identification has remained a dominant and recurrent theme in African history since ancient Egypt. There exists a tendency in both western and Africanist scholarships to disconnect Maghrebian Arabs and other racial categories from belonging to the African continent, and to essentialize African identity around a common notion of blackness and cultural unity. This parochial construction of African identity contradicts existing reality. The intent in this paper is thus to problematize the commonsense homogenization and racialization of both African and diasporic African identities, and to demonstrate instead how the interplay of modern globalization and multiculturalism in the diaspora space engenders the construction, negotiation and re-negotiation of diasporic identities by African immigrants in Dublin. Drawing significantly on extant literature and findings from my own doctoral research, this paper will thus argue that the diasporic African community in Dublin is an “imagined community” (Anderson 2006), in particular because of the characteristic historical complexity, racial and ethno-cultural multidimensionality of members of this community. Thus, it is essentially in the sense of this diversity and “imagineness” that the African community in Dublin can be properly appreciated. My PhD research, now in the third and final year, is a qualitative study of African immigrants in the Dublin inner city. Primary data were collected between September 2006 and December 2007. I conducted 24 semi-structured and in-depth interviews with Africans from different nationalities, ethnicities, cultures, religions and racial backgrounds, 4 focus group discussions, ethnographic observations and also obtained data from the documented records of African community organizations.
