The Continuing Relevance of Old Ethnicities

I’d like to start with a quote:

Racism’s effects are dismissed as insignificant until the next tragic death or inflammatory eruption makes it newsworthy once again. At that point, a thing called race gets discovered afresh with the utmost, sincere surprise. Expressions of racism will be approached with horror through a fog of novelty. This pattern, in which tragic and disturbing events punctuate quitter periods of apparent forgetting that endure long enough only for the inevitable lament of ‘we did not know’ to appear plausible, is itself a significant part of the problem that interests me (Gilroy 29).

The broad tendency that Gilroy describes, toward viewing race (and ethnicity) as a problem instead of an ongoing process is all too familiar. It haunts both this week’s readings and films. How is it that time and again, we find ourselves lost in the “fog of novelty,” bamboozled by the fact that racial difference exists, and shocked when it manifests itself in ugly ways in our culture?

Hall sees the designation of race as a process, of course, and he uses the term ethnicity to describe the ways that “history language and culture” assist in the “construction of subjectivity and identity” (446). At the same time, I do wonder about the validity of his hybridity model of new ethnicity as a replacement for the “old” ethnicities that he suggests are too simple. While these old models overlook cultural nuance and identity categories, to be sure, they do at the same time foreground the huge amount of influence that factors like nationality have on ethnicity. Hall’s new ethnicities imagine a post-national, diasporic world that seems not to have arrived yet, over twenty years later. When notions like hybridity (which problematically carries with it a kernel of originary ethnic purity) and diaspora attempt to celebrate the transformative potential of culture, they downplay or overlook the continuing power of history and the state in forming ethnic subjectivities.

The Parker and Song article shares my critique, as it suggests the possibility of “emergent cultural formations [that] cut across any simplistic binary between ‘pure’ old ethnicities, and multi-dimensional, progressive ‘new ethnicities'.” The self-aware British Chinese citizens that they describe exhibit the cultural complexities that Hall describes, or that we found in My Beautiful Laundrette, but at the same time are “ultimately concerned with forging a long-term place in British society” (600). Identity formations like these remind us of the ongoing power of the nation in a way that Hall’s cultural utopianism might not.

As for history, the other great bugbear of “old” ethnicity, maybe we can look to the film Bamboozled to provide us with a cautionary tale? The film presents us with characters who think they have mastered their ethnic history through their command of culture, yet as Sloan insists repeatedly over the course of the narrative, going back to read a book or to watch archival materials awakens awareness that changes everything. The true horror of the film is that it devises a scenario in which hateful, racist images can be looked at as mere objects of culture, without any historical awareness. Gilroy’s commonsensical insistence upon our recurrent cultural amnesia when it comes to understanding race suggests that the forces that underpin notions of “old ethnicities” are decidedly not out of date themselves, and must still be taken into consideration no matter how globalized, translocal, or intersectional we think we might have become.

- Jeremy