Anti-racism, multiculturalism and the ethics of identification

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 28, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 419-449

  Cornell, Drucilla ^a   Murphy, Sara ^b  

^a Rutgers University ^*

^b RUTGERS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

multiculturalism; racism; recognition; U.S. politics and culture

Indexed keywords

EID: 84998013852     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453702028004526     Document Type: Article

References (46)

1. Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Amy Gutmann (ed.) Multiculturalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
2. ‘Je veux montrer à mes semblables un homme dans toute la vérité de sa nature; et cet homme ce sera moi…. Moi seul. Je sens mon coeur et je connais les hommes. Je ne suis fait comme aucun de ceux que j'ai vus; j'ose croire n'être fait comme aucun de ceux qui éxistent. Si je ne vaux mieux, au moins je suis autre. Si la nature a bien ou mal fait de briser le moule dans lequel elle m'a jeté, c'est ce dont on ne peut juger quéaprès m'avoir lu.’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions, 2 vols (Paris: Ganier Flammarcòn, 1967), Vol. I, p. 43.
3. See Georg W. F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. Baillie (New York: Macmillan, 1931).
4. For a critique of Hegel's Philosophy of History for his uncritical acceptance of the colonial imaginary, see Enrique Ducell, ‘Eurocentrism and Modernity’, in John Beverley, Jose Oviedo and Michael Aronna (eds) The Post-Modern Debate in Latin America (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995).
5. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 59–60.
6. Frantz Fanon, ‘Racism and Culture’, in Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 34.
7. See Ella Shohat and Robert Stam's discussion on the political significance of confounding the colonizer to unreadability in Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 44.
8. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), pp. 118–20.
9. K. Anthony Appiah, ‘The Multiculturalist Misunderstanding’, The New York Review of Books XLIV(15) (9 October, 1997): 30–6.
10. See Drucilla Cornell, Transformations: Recollective Imagination and Sexual Difference (New York and London: Routledge, 1993).
11. Although there is much support in the literature for Appiah's conclusion about ‘Hispanics’, there is also a counter-trend. Latinos and Latinas are seeking to maintain the Spanish language through the generations. It should also be noted here that one aspect of this is the use of ‘Latino’ and ‘Latina’ in the place of ‘Hispanic’ in order to signify and affirm the political and ethical aspiration to maintain a cultural identity which includes an affirmation of identification with the Spanish language, while at the same time maintaining a historically blurred distinction between the cultures of the Americas and that of the Iberian peninsula. There are other factors that also seem to be influencing a trend counter to that which Appiah rightfully notes has been true of most groups of Latinos and Latinas. Many Cubans have defined themselves as exiles with the historic mission of returning to Cuba; therefore they have worked to keep their children bilingual, succeeding in keeping the language alive into the third generation. Other factors influencing the tendency to break with the immigrant pattern of loss of the mother tongue by the third generation are the rise of the South American community and the establishment of nation-states in the Americas which seek to break from the economic dominance of the USA. More immigrants are returning to their homelands as a result — or are anticipating it as an eventuality. Some, following recent examples of Mexican-Americans, retain dual citizenship where possible. For a detailed discussion of the pattern of Latino/Latina assimilation, see William Bratton and Drucilla Cornell, ‘Deadweight Costs and the Intrinsic Wrongs of Nativism: Freedom and the Legal Suppression of Spanish’, Cornell Law Review 84(3) (1999) and
12. Drucilla Cornell, Just Cause: Freedom, Identity and Rights (Boston and Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). The point that we would like to stress is that economic and political factors shape the ways in which ethnic groups constitute their identifications.
13. Appiah, ‘The Multiculturalist Misunderstanding’, p. 34.
14. We borrow this term, ‘pervasive culture’, from Avishai Margalit and Joseph Raz: ‘The group has a common character and common culture that encompasses many and varied aspects of life, a culture that defines or marks a variety of forms or styles of life, types of activity, occupations, pursuits and relationships. With national groups we expect to find national cuisines, distinctive architectural styles, a common language, a distinctive literary and artistic tradition, national music, customs and dress, ceremonies, holidays, etc.’
15. See ‘National Self-Determination’, in The Rights of Minority Cultures, ed. Will Kymlicka (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 83. For Margalit and Raz, the existence of a pervasive culture is one of the conditions that should be met in a case for self-determination. While they are specifically addressing the conditions under which a people can legitimately demand self-determination, we think that their definition describes the kind of ethnic identity Appiah believes to have been either lost or significantly diluted in the USA.
16. Appiah borrows the term ‘cultural geneticism’ from Henry Louis Gates, Loose Canons (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
17. See Appiah, ‘Race, Culture, Ethnicity: Misunderstood Connections’, paper presented to the Program for the Study of Law, Philosophy, and Social Theory, New York University Law School, 9 October 1997.
18. K. Anthony Appiah, ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’, Critical Inquiry 23(3) (Spring, 1997): 617–39.
19. Appiah, ‘The Multiculturalist Misunderstanding’, p. 36.
20. Toni Morrison, Jazz (New York and Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin, 1993), p. 79. All other references are to this edition and will be inserted in the text.
21. See Appiah, ‘Race, Culture, and Identity: Misunderstood Connections’, esp. pp. 2–24:
22. ‘We have followed enough of the history of the race concept and said enough about current biological conceptions to answer… the question of whether there are any races’ (p. 23).
23. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 134.
24. Of course, the story of jazz reception is a notoriously long and complicated one; in fact, the course of the development of many modern musics is unthinkable without it. But as a salient example of the racialized complexity of that reception among musical minds, one can think of Adorno's peculiar position on jazz. See ‘Perennial Fashion — Jazz’ in Prisms, trans. Samual and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1983), pp. 121–132.
25. see also Juliet Flower McCannell, ‘Race/War: Race, War, and the Division of Jouissance in Freud and Adorno’, Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 2(2) (Fall, 1997), for an interesting reading of Adorno's trouble with jazz.
26. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 5.
27. Morrison, ‘Unspeakable Things Unspoken’, in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Vol. XI (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990), p. 134.
28. Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, p. 359.
29. Morrison, ‘Unspeakable Things Unspoken’, p. 150.
30. In certain instances, we would even recognize the right of a group to something like linguistic self-defense. Examples are the Quebecois in Canada and Chicanos/as in the Southwestern USA. See Bratton and Cornell, ‘Deadweight Costs and Intrinsic Wrongs’.
31. See Appiah's reading of Taylor, ‘Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social Reproduction’, in Gutmann (ed.) Multiculturalism, pp. 149–64.
32. See Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967). Also see Homi Bhabha's lectures.
33. Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation’, in Houston A. Baker Jr., Manthia Diawara and Ruth H. Lindenborg (eds) Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 211.
34. See Benita Parry, ‘Resistance Theory/Theorizing Resistance’, in Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue, ed. Nigel Gibson (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1999), p. 224.
35. Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, in David Morely and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 441–9.
36. Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Gutmann, pp. 63–4.
37. Imposition of such pre-established values is also inconsistent with the understanding of the social basis of self-respect as a primary good. See Drucilla Cornell, The Imaginary Domain (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 10: ‘It should go without saying that hierarchical gradations of any of us as unworthy of personhood violates the postulation of each one of us as an equal person called for in a democratic and modern legal system.’
38. Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, p. 443.
39. Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, p. 447.
40. Hall's evocation of the ‘transparency’ effected by the hegemony of British national identity recalls for us Conrad's Heart of Darkness, particularly the novella's ambivalent imperialist narrator, Marlow, who famously begins his shipboard story with a glance at the banks of the Thames: ‘And this, too, has been one of the dark places of the earth.’
41. Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, p. 448.
42. Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, p. 448.
43. Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, pp. 66–7.
44. See Bratton and Cornell, ‘Deadweight Costs’, for further discussion of the implications of this on Spanish language rights.
45. Another approach to the problem of the relations of representation and the crisis in traditional conceptions of an aesthetic observer is presented by John Guillory in his excellent Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
46. See especially Part Three, ‘Aesthetics’, pp. 269–340.