Contesting the ‘model minority’: racialization,youth culture and ‘British Chinese’/‘Oriental’ nights

While racialized youth are often central in debates on citizenship, multiculturalism and belonging, those ascribed as ‘British Chinese’ are constructed as model minorities, lacking a hybridized culture but insulated from racism, and thus invisible in these discussions. This article argues, however, that the model minority discourse is itself a specific form of contemporary racialization that revives ‘yellow peril’ discourses on the capacities of particular ‘Oriental’ bodies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it examines how young people challenge these constructions, by drawing on popular culture to organize and participate in what they call ‘British Chinese’ and, more provocatively, ‘Oriental’ nightlife spaces. It analyses how through these spaces participants forge a sense of identity that allows them to reimagine themselves as racialized subjects. It demonstrates how these spaces constitute transient sites of experimental belonging, facilitating new cultural politics and social identifications that at once contest reified conceptions of British Chineseness yet also create new exclusions.     

Longings and belongings: Indian American youth identity,folk dance competitions,and the construction of ‘tradition’

This article examines the development of the ‘cultural competition’ as a site for the production of multiple identities by Indian American youths on American college campuses. Through the examination of two categories of folk dance competitions (bhangra and raas-garba) at a private university in Washington, DC, we argue that these competitions appear to resist hybridity and produce rhetoric that marginalizes diasporic culture in favour of the ‘pure’ and ‘authentic’ culture of the homeland. However, the goal of expressing uncontaminated ‘authentic’ culture is not realized as diasporic identities and cultures consistently interrupt and undermine homogenizing narratives of ‘tradition’ and ‘authenticity’. We also demonstrate that these folk dance groups often reinforce an ethno-regional distinctiveness rather than a hybrid or pan-Indian identity.     

The Social Life of Death on Delhi's Streets: Unclaimed Souls,Pollutive Bodies,Dead Kin and the Kinless Dead

ABSTRACT

How does the status of ‘street children’ in life inflect the narrative representation of their deaths? Street-dwelling children's interactions with death in North India reveal much about how their identities are produced in public domains. In this paper, I examine several instances of ‘homeless child’ death to illuminate the place of such subjects in society and urban space, and to interrogate the degree to which they can be rendered ‘recognizable’ or ‘grievable’, in Butler's (2010) terminology. In particular, I explore the presence or absence of kin in the ways that child death is narrated. I also explore the related question of how living ‘vagabond (aawara) children’ situate their status in narratives of death and loss. I conclude with discussions of how children negotiate their orientations towards death through ghost narratives, and of the space-, economy- and age-bound assignment of pollutive tasks once reserved for low castes to street-dwelling children.     

Embodied narratives of disaster: the expression of bodily experience in Aceh,Indonesia

The devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of 26 December 2004 caused massive destruction to coastal Aceh, Indonesia, and left countless numbers of people dead or wounded. This article focuses on the embodied narratives of three Acehnese women who survived the disaster and, like many others in Aceh, told their stories ‘through’ their bodies. A detailed ethnographic account of their narratives reveals how the body stretches temporally between the ‘narrated event’ and the ‘narrative event’, both through the representation of the body in narratives and through the embodied performance of narratives. Moving beyond meaning‐centred analyses of narratives, I argue that the central accomplishment of these narratives is that they convey poignant bodily experiences to others and thereby create a shared, post‐disaster, world. Ultimately, through these embodied narratives of disaster people remake their world, with others, in the wake of its ‘unmaking’.     

Shopping für den Regenwald – Tipps und Tricks,wie der Wald voll Affen bleibt

The rainforests of the world are threatened by the consumer's behaviour. The habitat of many primate species is cut for wood and paper products and burned for palm oil and rubber plantations. Orang-utans and gibbons in Asia as well as gorillas in Africa are therefore threatened by immediate extinction. The exhibition at the great ape house at Zoo Zuerich informs about the source and production means of these consumer goods responsible for forest destruction and gives concrete action proposals. Themes are products like palm oil, shrimps, rubber, beef, mineral resources, tropical wood and paper. The exhibition found large visitor attention and received 2008 the Prix Expo of the Academy of Natural Sciences Switzerland (SCNAT).     

Hate groups targeting unauthorized immigrants in the US: discourses,narratives and subjectivation practices on their websites

The narratives and images on websites of US hate groups that oppose undocumented immigrants represent and reproduce discourses that contribute to the subject formation of group members, who feel ethically obliged to counter unauthorized immigration. Left alone by the government, which is seen as unreliable and uncaring of patriotic values, they position themselves as heroic saviours of the nation. We argue that these hate groups’ ‘games of truth’ develop in response to the perception that irregular immigration threatens specific social orders and values, for instance about citizenship, national identity and otherness. This article helps to understand the ways in which anti-immigrant narratives serve the functions of countering these threats and of asserting the group members’ ethical obligation as a form of care of the self. In other words, from a Foucaultian viewpoint, we interpret the problematizations of ‘illegal’ immigration as discursive practices for the subject formation of hate group members.     

The Double Bind: Performing Arts in Hongkong

In Hongkong, local identity is muted not only by the master narrative of ‘history of Europe’, but by that of ‘Chinese history’ and ‘Chinese civilization’. This comprises a ‘double bind’ on those who write and present drama, and the dance. This paper examines the way in which the two master narratives both conflict and assist one another in the elite performing arts. It points a schematic model which tries to take account of the self-conscious efforts of some local intelligentsia to insert a specifically Hongkong dimension between the two master narratives. This cultural refiguration has much to do with the sense of instability and concern for the future which has recently gripped the island.     

For Love,Money, or Normalcy: Meanings of Strategy and Sentiment in the Russian-American Matchmaking Industry

Public debates about international matchmaking highlight the victimization of impoverished women by western men or the self-interested instrumentalism of women who marry for visas. Meanwhile, agencies and many of their clients portray this as a linking of well-intentioned lonely hearts who just want normal family lives. A meaningful anthropological account must incorporate and move beyond both types of narratives, acknowledging that deeply felt sentiment and ‘strategic’ plans to improve one's life overlap in all kinds of social exchange, romantic or otherwise. How the relationship between self-interest and affect is understood depends upon historically specific and gendered experiences of political economy. Participants’ framings of their own and their prospective spouses’ ‘sincerity’ and ‘seriousness’ are diagnostic of structural pressures each group has experienced, which they seek to address through international marriage.     

Radicalization and counter-radicalization at British universities: Muslim encounters and alternatives

Abstract

This paper explores the ‘spaces’ left over for Muslims to be ‘radical’ and the management of minority identities in light of their securitization in the UK. The paper considers a key site of this management of ‘radical’ identities: the university. The university works as prototypical case because of the ways in student activism and identity are a priori drawn together but also because of the prevalence of higher education among terrorists in the UK and USA. As a result, universities have been specifically targeted in counterterrorism and counter-radicalization measures. The paper reveals through student narratives how security discourses of ‘radicalization’ constrain their activism, university experience and identities. Yet, alternative identity constructions emerge that work against the moderate/radical binary. These narratives show how incomplete the process is of incorporating Muslims into the nation.     

Policy actors' narrative constructions of migrants' integration in Malmö and Bologna

Governments have policies explicitly directed at the integration of migrants. This article addresses how policymakers and politicians privilege certain constructions of the social relationship between migrants and the majority society (expressed through narratives of ‘integration’), while making it seem as if they were presenting facts in their policies. These constructions provide the justifications for adopting a direction in policy-making over other alternatives. This article sets to analyse comparatively how policy actors in two urban contexts construct migrants' integration through policy narratives and how, within this, they evaluate migrants as ‘integrated’ and ‘non-integrated’. Through narrative analysis, the article sheds light on how migrants are positioned by political institutions within the normative order of the society in which they live. Furthermore, it shows that local policy-making is shaped by national citizenship regimes, models of steering, welfare regimes and stories about the nation and its people.     

The Impact of West African Trade on the Distribution of Chimpanzee and Elephant Populations (Guinea,Guinea-Bissau,Senegal, 19th–20th Century)

This article elaborates a relational historical geography of human, chimpanzee and elephant populations, working mainly from precolonial and early colonial (nineteenth and twentieth century) narratives by travellers to regions now corresponding to parts of Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal. It then compares a global ‘West African trade’ model of human and animal population’s spatial distribution with elements of an ‘East African settlement colony’ model drawn from other historical research. This perspective balances mainstream evolutionary approaches to animal biogeography with the human history, ecology and the geopolitics of their habitats. Taking such historical processes into account helps to unravel contrastive spatial and temporal dynamics of large mammal populations and to raise new questions about the anthropogenic causes of present-day population distributions.     

The contested meanings of 'Asian American': racial dilemmas in the contemporary US

This article explores the contested meanings of the ‘Asian American’ concept in the US today. Since its emergence in the late 1960s, ‘Asian American’ has been defined by pan-Asian groups and organizations in the US as a collectivity bound by shared racial interests. Contemporary conditions have sharpened and highlighted the inherent contradictions and ambiguities of this conception of ‘Asian American’ as a racial interest group. Especially important have been the shifts in the composition of the Asian American population that followed the immigration reforms of 1965. Contestations of ‘Asian American’ also reflect larger uncertainties about the meaning of race in the US today, in particular, the nature of racial boundaries and racial disadvantage.     

‘Make-up’: Personhood through the lens of biotechnology

This paper looks through the ethnographic lens of ‘new reproductive and genetic technologies’ (NRGT) at the idiom of ‘make-up’ in English understandings of personhood and relatedness. In the kinship thinking of interest here, persons are both ‘made’ and ‘made-up’. There are both unpredictable and inevitable elements in the way in which people ‘turn-out’ and their character or personality is meant to be idiosyncratic, lumpy and unique. The paper draws on the way in which residents of a town in the north of England explore possibilities presented by NRGT in ways that make explicit their understandings of personal identity, interpersonal relatedness and communal belonging. The paper attempts to integrate the quotidian and personal narratives of residents with broader social and economic changes occurring in their town.     

Tracing the shifting sands of ‘medical genetics’: what’s in a name?

This paper focuses on the structural development of institution-based interest in genetics in Anglo-North American medicine after 1930 concomitantly with an analysis of the changes through which ideas about heredity and the hereditary transmission of diseases in families have passed. It maintains that the unfolding relationship between medicine and genetics can best be understood against the background of the shift in emphasis in conceptualisations of recurring patterns of disease in families from ‘biological relatedness’ to ‘related to chromosomes and genes’. The paper begins with brief considerations of the historical confluences of, first, heredity and medicine and, second, genetics and medicine which, in a third section, leads to a discussion about a uniquely ‘genetics-based approach’ to medicine in the second half of the twentieth century.     

Mobility,white bodies and desire: Euro‐American women in Jakarta

This paper illustrates how cultural logics of desire are being transformed in the context of the global economy refashioning intimate lives. Exploring the experiences of Euro‐American female professionals in Jakarta, it suggests that they become uncomfortably visible as ‘white bodies’; their desirability appears compromised, especially given Orientalist discourses which valorise Asian women's bodies. At the same time, women's position as well‐paid employees generates a contradictory logic of desire: the ‘ego‐boost’ they experience at work may intensify their demands on the masculinity and enlightened views of potential partners, thus rendering Indonesian men, with their perceived bodily effeminacy and ‘traditional values’ unattractive. As one response to the lack of desirability, some women engage in a moral discourse that casts Indonesian women whom they consider ‘bargirls’, as well as the Euro‐American men they attract, as morally deficient. The paper thus provides an alternative perspective on reconfigurations of desire in the context of global gendered mobility.     

Gender and the dynamics of mobility: reflections on African migrant mothers and ‘transit migration’ in Morocco

By describing the everyday lives of African migrant mothers and their children in Morocco, this paper highlights how migration and ‘immobility’ in so-called ‘transit countries’ are gendering and gendered experiences. Relying on migrants' narratives, the paper demonstrates how migrants' transitions to motherhood create both specific and gendered spaces for agency and particular and gendered constraints upon agency that shape women migrants' mobility dynamics in space and time.     

Diverse cities and good citizenship: how local governments in the Netherlands recast national integration discourse

Western European national policies increasingly portray diversity as negative and migrants as ‘others’ who do not belong to the national community. This article examines how local governments articulate alternative discourses of belonging based on residents' shared membership in the civic life of the city. In a Dutch case study, the ways in which local policymakers diverge from exclusionary national narratives are examined. It is argued that discourses about urban citizenship offer opportunities for the inclusion of migrants by drawing new boundaries between ‘good’ citizens and those who are unwilling to participate.     

From oasis to outlier: sugar beets,an endangered fish,and the moral economy

Farmers in the arid high plains of Eastern Montana had long irrigated with water shunted into their fields by a dam on the Yellowstone River. Growing water-hungry sugar beets processed at a factory in a nearby town, they created a verdant and prosperous oasis: a good life nested within a satisfyingly moral economy. However, in short order, the economic basis of this life was challenged: the dam was threatened with removal because of claims that it adversely affected an endangered fish; and the factory was threatened with closure because of claims that it was insufficiently profitable. As farmers and townsfolk confronted these challenges and the motives of those making them, they were compelled to probe the fundamental questions of what is ‘moral’ and what is ‘economy’. Confronting their uncertain future, they wondered whether their oasis was to become an outlier.     

‘The best borough in the country for cohesion!’: managing place and multiculture in local government

Abstract

In the interface between national and local levels of UK government, narratives of place are made to fit particular tropes of ‘success’ or ‘failure’ at multiculturalism. Thinking through ‘community cohesion’ policy in England between 2001 and 2010, this article shows how (reputations of) relative success at ‘living together with difference’ become a medium through which local government practitioners negotiate the space between national and local priorities, needs and ambitions, by examining how practitioners in English local authorities negotiate narratives of ‘failed multiculturalism’ associated with the places they work and, in doing so, how they re-inscribe or subvert local reputations and their ‘elsewheres’.     

Money,museums, and memory: cultural patronage by black voluntary associations

While the middle- and upper-class is typically cast as using museum patronage to support narratives that reinforce the position of dominant racial groups, this paper presents an alternative perspective. Drawing on ethnographic and archival data, I conceptually and empirically elaborate how gifts by black middle- and upper-class voluntary organizations to African American museums are enabled by racial uplift ideology and directed at nurturing counter-narratives about African Americans. As patrons of memory they aim to reconstitute recollections of African Americans by challenging master narratives of national life where they are either absent or marginalized. Gifts to black museums also support the inclusion of their own organizations and members as protagonists in this counter-memory. By turning attention to cultural patronage among black middle- and upper-class voluntary organizations, this paper demonstrates how museum patronage among elites can unsettle, rather than reinforce, master racial narratives.