#essentializing

Carrie Gillon: Hi, and welcome to the Vocal Fries Podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination. Megan Figueroa: I’m Megan Figueroa. Carrie: And I’m Carrie Gillon. Megan: Hey, I’m glad to see that you’re up and not sick anymore. Carrie: Yeah, I’m finally not sick. I finally stopped coughing a few days ago. Megan: That sounds good. Carrie: It’s been nice. Megan: It’s been nice enough…

W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge

The main interest here is the question of knowing and essentializing in contemporary context. If we live in a globalized world, do we assume we can know more about other places than Maugham could have? How real are the realities we assume to experience through connections formed over the internet? How different is it from the experience I have of a place through a novel?

Defamiliarizing Modes of Essentialism:

On the Construction of the Aboriginal through the White gaze

Amy Saunders

In Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal, Julia Emberley argues that colonialism did not simply ‘misrepresent’ the Aboriginal but was constitutive. By stating this, Emberley means to express that there is no “Aboriginal”, as there is no “essence of the Aboriginal” – and instead, through practices of colonization, the Aboriginal is a concept created by British imperialist colonizers.

This ‘creation of the Aboriginal’ called for a violent reconstruction of any sort of Aboriginal culture in Canada and was achieved through two mediums: family destruction and what Emberley calls ‘spectral violence’ (12).  Chandra Mohanty also lays this out in her text, but rather, in relation to the construction of the western feminist in Under Western Eyes, stating that there are two methods of power being used: “the first is one of deconstructing and dismantling: the second is one of building and constructing” (17). The methods used to appropriate both ‘othered’ cultures (Aboriginal and ‘Third World’) are very much the same but discussed in a different type of language.

Relying on Emberley’s text, the first discursive method used to constitute a colonial-Aboriginal identity, was the family (see: Mohanty, deconstruction and dismantling). The Aboriginal family was forced to adopt patriarchal methods of functioning and governance – this happened through violent means; the raping of Aboriginal women and children, the removal of children from their schooling systems and placed into ‘white’ schools, etc. There is also the aspect of the deconstruction of the Aboriginal family through a non-physical violence, a form of violence that becomes apparent through the homosocial relations between white colonizers and the Aboriginal male – a sort of psychological violent relationship, one that aimed for fraternity in order to preserve ‘whiteness’ through other cultures. As such, this violence took form in an implementation of private and public divides, in tandem with forced embodiment of patriarchal gender roles that acted in tandem with a white hegemonic narrative that boasted for reproduction of capital. This happened through an installation of the nuclear family- a white hegemonic ideal created, in essence, to operate as the sole path to happiness.

As this ideology of family spread throughout Aborginal families and communities, photography became an important tool in the control and constituting of the Aboriginal identity (see: Mohanty, building and constructing). As this form of technology claimed to capture history and a ‘Vanishing Race’ (Edward Curtis, Emberley, 73), it in fact created an essential ‘Aboriginal’. The ‘documentation’ of a race is in fact capturing the imagined myth of the ‘Indian’ – telling the story of the Aboriginal, with British imperialist as the narrators of the aboriginal experience. This is all at once a creation and violent erasure of Aboriginal history, now illuminated for consumption through a photographic lens; As the nature of British imperialism was rooted in cultural apartheid, the histories laid before the introduction of a white camera lens were eradicated – both in the world and in the Aboriginal community itself. Rather than ending lives with a bullet, this method created whole lives, a whole history in a snapshot.

Through this technology of research, the invention of the white identity is dependent upon the creation of ‘othered’ communities, as Mohanty discusses in Under Western Eyes. As such, these communities must be knowledgable through certain essences of character (such as a feather, face paint, moccasins) – this comes to being in the Aboriginal community in Canada and in relation to British imperialism through the voyeuristic technology of photography. Created through this spectral violence is a form of voyeurism that allows for pleasure in a racial taxonomy: pornographic in nature, these images create a sense of being and pleasure – the white voyeur takes pleasure in the image, knowing they are not the imagined Aboriginal, they are not the other, for: they are better. This is performative power practice that brings the colonizer into being through the colonized.

To move forward, there are things we must understand about the constitutive nature of the ‘Aboriginal’ identity. Relying on Jen Musari’s article from Bitch Magazine, titled Feminist Intersection: On hipsters, hippies and Native culture, we must critically examine the lens through which Musari is attacking the issue of cultural appropriation through dress, specifically that of Aboriginal culture appropriation. As Emberley highlights for us, that there is no Aboriginal- so far as representations of ‘Aboriginal culture’ within current societal appropriations, we must look to question the nature through which this culture is being represented: Forms of colonial conquest aim to write the Aboriginal as ahistorical, stagnant and forever stuck in time – which creates for the larger society, an imagined temporal existence for the Aboriginal subject.

As such, we must question the significance and repercussions of the type of cultural appropriation Musari discusses. Similar to the question of, if a tree falls in the woods and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound- we must ask: if a hipster wears a moccasin and there’s no culture that identifies with that moccasin, does it make an appropriation? Through the lens of colonialism, it becomes imperative that we question where these concerns of cultural appropriation come from – and perhaps question their role in cultural cultivation. Similarly to Edward Curtis’ photographic illumination and capturing of ‘Aboriginal’ culture, do these signifiers (such as moccasins, feathers, face paint) do the same thing? Musari’s article works to put the Aboriginal in a place of ahistory once again, stifling the modern-day Aboriginal as well as modern-day Aboriginal practices of Aborginhood by uproariously condemning those who seek to blindly appropriate a culture that has been appropriated for the past 600 years.

Intertwining the two messages put forth by Emberley and Musari, one must move towards a critical examination of popular representations of self and culture. This can relate to representations of gender, sexuality, race, ability and many more. Where the majority of identity politics aims to blanket a personhood and find its correlations amongst large groups of people, we must search out the individual stories of such identities. Chandra Mohanty discusses the lenses of research that rely on colonial methods of understanding, versus feminist lenses of research that aim to search beyond the discourses of biopower that would have us looking along the blankets for answers, but rather, we must search upon the seems and tear such strings apart in order to decolonize our modes of thinking and discover the essential difference in experience;

That's too much. And I'm not sure if I've said this, so let me say it here. Questioning is great, but you can't expect the answers. The questioning is important in and of itself. Try for answers, but don't get frustrated if they don't come. I've been a bit too dogged about getting those answers in the past.