You and the Other Flashcards
Burr (2003)
Essentialism is the idea that something has inherent properties, and this becomes naturalized over time
This is a way of “understanding the world that sees things, including human beings, as having their own particular essence or nature […] explaining how they behave or what can be done”.
Huntington (1993)
The Clash of Civilizations is a hypothesis that people’s cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world. Huntington argues that the trends of global conflict after the end of the Cold War are increasingly appearing at these civilizational divisions.
Wars such as those following the break-up of Yugoslavia, in Chechnya, and between India and Pakistan were cited as evidence of inter-civilizational conflict.
He also argues that the widespread Western belief in the universality of the West’s values and political systems is naïve and that continued insistence on democratization and such “universal” norms will only further antagonize other civilizations (West vs the rest).
In Huntington’s view, East Asian civilizations are culturally asserting itself and its values relative to the West due to its rapid economic growth. He argues that China’s goals are to reassert itself as the regional hegemon, and that other countries will support China due to history- as opposed to following Western values.
Huntington also argues that the Islamic civilization has experienced a massive population explosion. This is fuelling instability both on the borders of Islam and in its interior, where fundamentalist movements are becoming increasingly popular.
Huntington gives us six reasons why civilizations will clash…
1) Differences among civilizations are too basic
2) The world is becoming a smaller place- interactions are increasing between cultures
3) Local identities are diminishing
4) Non-Western cultures are increasingly rejecting the imposition of western values
5) Cultural characteristics are less mutable and compromised
6) Economic regionalism is increasing
Kearns (2009)
“Huntington’s civilizations function very much like Mackinder’s races: individuals neither choose nor change their civilization. For Huntington, there was a clear hierarchy of civilizations, with only one, the ‘Christian bloc’, demonstrating pacific tendencies”
Said (2001)
“Huntington is an ideologist, someone who wants to make “civilizations” and “identities” into what they are not: shut-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and counter currents that animate human history”
Huntington relies on a vague notion of ‘civilization identity’ and the interactions of 7/8 of these identities; of which the conflict between Islam and the west is his main focus. He relies heavily on Lewis’ (1990) article titled ‘Muslim rage’. Both of which fail to pay attention to the internal dynamics and plurality of every civilization or the ignorance involved in an attempt to speak for a whole religion or civilization.
Huntington is an ideologist who wishes to make civilizations and identities into something they are not: shut down and sealed off. The basic paradigm of the West vs the rest has remained untouched in the recent re-published version of the book.
Interestingly the 9/11 attacks are used as evidence for proof of Huntington’s thesis. These rhetoric’s surrounding Islam still persist in popular media today; all working towards the seclusion of the ‘Western’ identity. One of the reasons for this persistence is that there is an increased presence of Muslims all over Europe and the US. Islam is no longer at the edge, but in the centre. BUT it must be recognized that Islam has been inside from the start; many Muslim people provided the foundations for theories of science, philosophy etc.
Said thus concluded that the Clash of Civilizations is a gimmick- only good for re-enforcing self-pride rather than engaging in a critical understanding of the interdependence of the world we live in
Campbell (1998)
Argues that identity is an inescapable dimension of being- no ‘body’ could be without it. However, identity is not fixed by nature, given by god or determined by intentional behaviour. Identity is constituted in relation to difference.
Valentine (date)
Spatial proximity does not have to lead to more interactions with the other because prejudice prevents this.
Liberal attitudes work counter-productively in making meaningful contact in the sense that encounters with difference are avoided. The author argues that strategies of politeness are used in order to interact.
“Since the enlightenment, dominant western discourses have associated civility and etiquette with notions of moral and aesthetic development… [for some] behaving in a civil or decent way in public… is what Britishness is all about…. This urban etiquette does not equate with an ethics of care and mutual respect for difference”
However, this creates boundaries and difference.
Spivak (1988)
The notion of us and the other results in epistemic violence: violence produced via knowledge. She argues that the clearest example of this is the project of othering in relation to the colonial subject.
Spivak’s intervention is to stress how in speaking for the subaltern, the subaltern is ideologically constituted as subaltern in a particular kind of way. The subaltern’s actual difference, her real agency, is epistemologically irretrievable for the postcolonial intellectual. Though Spivak never quite goes so far as admitting the subaltern can indeed speak, there is an important tension here that might be summed as follows…
Yes, the subaltern spoke, but the true cadence of her voice continues to be effaced and then (re)constituted in different kinds of ways.
Drakillić (2013)
Argues that nothing but otherness is responsible for the catastrophic events of the 20th century…
“I understand now that nothing but ‘otherness’ killed Jews, and it began with naming them, by reducing them to the other. […] Even the worst atrocities like concentration camps or the slaughtering of civilians in Croatia or Bosnia”
Fanon (1961)
Argues that colonialism is a form of systematic violence; everything is violent, even de-colonization. He described colonial subjects are ‘the wretched’, cursed by the earth from which they sprung.
Fanon analyses the colonized world as a ‘Manichean’ structure; a world divided in a binary fashion and people’s behaviour follows from this
We have little agency in becoming (identity), but we are largely ‘thrown into a world’ full of pre-existing, fixed identity containers. Some categories are more favourably received than other. These groupings are consolidated through the construction of “narratives” (stories) in culture, education, upbringing etc.
They produce political subjects – us! Through the politics of affect, emotion, learning, feeling and reaction.
Fanon (1965)
Fanon characterizes the assessment of the native population by the settler class as dehumanizing.
The settlers literally do not see the natives as members of the same species. Colonizers essentially create the colonial identity.
The natives are incapable of ethics and thereby are the embodiment of absolute evil as opposed to the Christian settlers who are forces of good. This is crucial as it explains two things: the idea that decolonization is a replacement of populations and since the native know they are not animals, they immediately develop a feeling of rebellion against the settler
The first group to incite this violence are the working classes. Colonial subjects are kept submissive through overt exercises of power; colonial police, soldiers and the threat of violence
Even decolonization is a violent process (especially because this is repressed during colonial control). During this time, colonial subjects direct their violence at the colonists themselves. Fanon describes a sort of domino effect of violence as well: once the colonized in one village use violence against the colonists, word spreads and soon there are more uprisings, more violent revolts.
Violence unites people across regions and tribes. It has a “cleansing force,” purging individuals of their inferiority complex and their former passivity
From violence emerges a unified fight against the colonists and the creation of a new, active, and liberated subjectivity to replace the earlier colonized subjectivity of submission and passivity.
Haldrup et al. (2006)
With the colonial expansion of European powers from the 15th century onwards, a discourse of civilization values started. Europe was identified with the process of modernity and the primacy of science and rationality; religion was being replaced with science and reason.
The Western cultural identity was defined as an outward movement through colonization of the new world, in contrast to oriental and savage others.
Reproduction of orientalism is dependent on a daily reproduction (not simply through institutions). It is centrally performed, practices and renegotiated in everyday life; establishes itself as natural and self-evident.
Orientalism must be taken beyond the institutional sense- it needs to cover the everyday, reproductive performativity
We can look at identities of the nation state to unpack this; mobilizations of ‘us’ ‘here’ ‘we’ are all at play. Concerns about our imagined communities link up more and more with questions on acceptance of the other, refugees and immigrants (Anderson, 1991).
Crang (1998)
The identities of the colonizer/colonized are relational (one depends on the other). Ideas about what it means to be Western are shaped by what is means to be non-Western. This still has an effect on how Westerners understand the world today.
The mapping of identity onto geography exposes the unequal relationships between groups and the importance of naming/being names/ The Orient and the Occident are not just names, they are constructions of identities which have become territories.
Example: European invasion of the Americas. Native Americans were either seen as ‘noble savages’ or lower orders of humanity. In both ways, they are constructed as being the opposite of Europeans; either more simple and purer, or sexual beastly beings.
The association with the other as being non-rational meant that their lands could be represented as being ‘wasted’, legitimising the appropriation of them. The instruments of science allowed the drawing of maps which could allow these spaces to be divided up into ownership
Hall (1996)
When asking questions about domination and oppression, we have to look at the structures that facilitate and perpetuate them.
We find that discourses of identity both enable and limit who might become, how we have been represented and how we might represent ourselves.
