Cultural Identity: Commonality or Diversity - Book Report/Review Example

Cultural Identity: Commonality or Diversity? I. Introduction Culture is a concept that refers to the traditions, languages, practices, belief system, worldviews and values that characterise social and cultural groups such as concepts founded on nationality, racial affinity, ethnicity or shared knowledge and interests. Cultural identity is essential for the sense of self of individuals and how they associate to others. A firm and powerful cultural identity positively influence individuals’ wellbeing. Cultural identity is a vital provider to individuals’ wellbeing. Recognising with a specific culture creates the sense of belongingness of individuals and provides them a feeling of security. It as well offers membership to social groups or units, which give out support as well as shared interests and objectives. Social units can aid in breaking down obstacles and put up a sense of reliance between individuals, an observable fact occasionally called social capital (Matthews 2000). Though, powerful cultural identity articulated in the incorrect manner can contribute to obstacles between social groups. A secure cultural identity has as well been associated to positive results in realms such as education and health. However, in this paper, scholarly reflections on the two-fold character of cultural identity will be explored. Specifically, works of Toni Morrison and Amin Maalouf carry cultural undertones which demonstrate that cultural identity could either generate a feeling of belongingness or cultural conflict. If a cultural syncretism is possible in a world beset by globalisation is still debatable. II. Cultural Identity: Convergence or Divergence A. Paradise by Toni Morrison In its analysis of the character of Ruby, Toni Morrison’s Paradise deals with one of the most sacred cows of African American culture, the parable of unity and idealism in black society unburdened of white oppression. The parable is founded on actual, historical black-dominated institutions and artistic achievements. The black-controlled towns formed by Exodusters and black cathedrals, for instance, illustrated African Americans ruling themselves. Black artistic creations such as folktales, blues and gospels, were acknowledged as contributions of African American to global culture (Hutchinson 1997). Analysing this using Stuart Hall’s assumptions on cultural identity, this African American parable is primitively in touch with a fixed vital centre, which is eternal, joining the past to the present and to the future in a continuous line. This unbroken line is what we refer to as ‘tradition’, the trial of which is its veracity to its roots or origins, its existence to itself, its legitimacy. It is apparently a parable, with all the genuine influence that leading parables carry to form our dreams, control our decisions and actions, provide purpose and meaning to our lives and sense to our history (Hall 1994, 393). This is exactly how African American cultural identity is shaped by their history. However, the question is does this strong cultural identity sufficient to foster a shared community or strong enough to shun cultural differences? Morrison answers this question through the analysis of the parable that is portraying resentfully conflicting forces within a community that is totally governed by blacks. In reaction to acts of segregation, Ruby is recognised as a separatist, particularly sinister black community. However, it creates its own practices of segregation. Most evidently, men and women are differentiated, and the assault on the Convent establishes the clash of the sexes factual. Black men and black women are in constant conflict. Ruby’s men are as well segregated among themselves. While a number of them show aggression, others attempt to hold them down. Paradise explores the discrepancy between the social realities of personal identities or a separatist organisation and cultural identities or black-dominated perfect society. The movement of Ruby clearly shows that because of the strong cultural identity of the black community, personal experiences and identities are detested. The novel perceives the roots of separatism sensitively, but portrays it as in due course harmful of the community that it is intended to safeguard. The novel situates the thrust for separatism in the knowledge and experience of social segregation, and not merely the segregation of blacks by whites; a town dominated by blacks, Fairly, Oklahoma, will reject to accept the ancestors and mothers of Ruby because of their dark skin. In self-defence, this segregated group labels its own character, objectives and values. Yet its developments of definition certainly entail the construction of an ‘other’ and ‘them’ in contrary to ‘us’; unsurprisingly, good qualities come out in us; wickedness in them. Humanity and the larger realities surrounding it are identified in absolute terms, without a neutral ground, merely binary opposites. In this note, there is a clear separation between the larger black community and several of the members who feel that the prevailing cultural identity does not give justice and respect to their individual differences. African American society is a post-colonial one, the rediscovery of identities by the Ruby is frequently the theme of Frantz Fanon’s assumption as a passionate research... directed by the secret hope of discovering beyond the misery of today, beyond self-contempt, resignation and abjuration, some very beautiful and splendid era whose existence rehabilitates us both in regard to ourselves and in regard to others (Hall 1994, 394). New types of cultural practice in communities such as the Fairly, Oklahoma attends to themselves in this mission for the rationale that, as Fanon claims it, in the not so distant past, Colonisation is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it (Hall 1994, 394). Once started, there is no end to these phony oppositions. In order to sustain the opposition, people attempt to confirm their good qualities through detaching themselves from everything that they consider evil or even doubtful. This process separates a larger cultural identity that is grounded on historical and cultural experience to families and individual psyches. For instance, when their response to the domination of the white varies, Zechariah the patriarch renounces his twin, whose very name is obscured from the Bible of the family. In another episode, the necessity to attest for Patricia that she is deserving of Ruby pushes her to abuse her daughter, Billie Delia. There are other instances in the novel that show obviously insane values needed to sustain the Ruby/Convent divide. Sweetie does not react to the self-hallucination and mental disorder of Arnette Fleetwood Smith. Not capable to admit that she attempted to terminate her pregnancy and deserted her son, she claims, and perhaps thinks that the women of the Convent pushed an abortion on her. The essential process of separatism, bipolar opposition, splits society and results into insanity. This clearly shows that cultural identity is negatively at odds with personal experiences. When different personal identities and experiences are reconciled through force and not through the natural progression of a shared community experience, madness will certainly arise. The patriarchs of Haven did not conceive bipolar opposition, evidently. The racism that overthrew Zechariah from his administrative position and the racial prejudice that prohibits his faction from Fairly, Oklahoma also lies on a bipolar opposition, which is white represents good while black represents evil. Significantly, in that case, the patriarchs of Haven and Ruby have not devised a novel way of thinking. Through applauding blackness, they have just upset the ideals of the traditional way. In this light, cultural identity takes a powerful lead but refuses cultural syncretism by exclusively acclaiming blackness and casting out cultural diversity. Ruby’s social exclusion from outsiders is believed to preserve the purity its blood. Whatever this deceptive cleanliness is believed to consist of it, cannot genuinely be entirely African. One of the founders of Haven, Drum Blackhorse, was given an American Indian name. Straight hair comes out in Dovey and Soane, then in the twins of Soane. Moreover, Consolata, born in South America, immediately links the founders of Ruby with her early cohorts: “And although they were living here in a hamlet, not in a loud city full of glittering black people, Consolata knew she knew them” (Dehn 1998, 168). The false oppositions of the separatist movement can on no account hold since reality is made up of fusions, analogues and associations. Ruby is a part of the world and the world is a part of it. The complex array of sentiments within which Toni Morrison notes down represents a fragile balance between contradiction and assertion of personal identity and position within the cultural community. But for each condition appears a determination of assertion that leads to the possibility for cultural renewal; through history and life story, aspiration and song, Paradise constantly concentrates beyond the secluded, dystopian self-identity and en route for the aspired, collective self-identity. The Paradise characters recognise, though unclearly, that they should seek out for identity through returning to the locality and to the collective experience. They perform this so as to, as Morrison puts it, “to survive whole in a world where [they] are all… victims of something” (Dehn 1998, 39). Hence, the community is capable to become the place of regeneration for its members. Their reaction to the appeal for collective experience decides ceaselessly their direction in life, and grants them a considerable degree of hope and relieve and belongingness in an otherwise estranging and impersonal world of oppressed and oppressors. There can certainly be, in that case, “a joy and protection in the clan” (Dehn 1998, 46); specifically, a joy and protection that is present not merely as a respite from the changes in everyday living, yet more significantly, a joy and protection that serves as a preserver and a moulder of identity. In portraying an entirety of collective sentiments and cultural experience, Paradise shows that the community is a compound, disobedient space within a self-identity which, as it deprives and cultivates, misleads and educates, assaults and soothes, functions as the vital criterion in the pursuit for self-identity and place. B. Ports of Call by Amin Maalouf The first novel of Amin Maalouf to be situated in the 20th century is Ports of Call which was published in France in 1996 and which was proficiently translated from French by Alberto Manguel. The novel narrates the tale of two unfortunate lovers living in the Middle East, namely, Ossyane and his much-loved Clara. Ossyane is a Muslim and the main narrator whereas Clara is a Jew. They decided to marry after World War II; unluckily, the disordered displacements that result separated them for decades, at some point in time the prince is unfairly admitted to a mental asylum. Their marital union is portrayed here as an excellent denunciation of distrust and extreme dislike between peoples, specifically in the Middle East. Possibly the penchant of the author for metaphor is the explanation why the story of Ossyane seems more like cultured writing than genuine speech, and the explanation why the characters frequently appear more like thoughts than people. The reunion of the couple in Paris, which is the concluding scene, is narrated by a different narrator; the outcome is that the readers can imagine Ossyane and Clara together yet not perceive the sound of what they are speaking of. Readers then are left speculating whether peace and harmony, between peoples or nations, is nothing more but a dearly loved dream. On a more detailed note, the father of Ossyane was the son of the crazy daughter of an ousted Ottoman ruler and an Adana doctor; his mother came from an Armenian family line. The name Ossyane means ‘disobedience’ in his birth land Beirut. He was educated to become a leader of a revolution someday. Ossyane decided to join the French Resistance while studying in Montpellier at the start of World War II. He initially worked as a messenger and then later on a forger. He then marries Clara upon returning home as a distinguished hero. However, the Arab-Israeli War in 1948 was tragic for the couple, fraternal antagonism surfaces, and the life of Ossyane is deferred. Now, three decades after, he waits for a rendezvous on a bridge in Paris that will conclude whether his story will be a misfortune or not; this is the tale Ossyane recounts over a few days to an anonymous narrator, who has identified him from a photograph found in a history book. With a light plot and writing style, Ports of Call is a type of myth, a myth of insanity and family bonds, of love and misery, of various and doubtful identities. Amin Maalouf touched evenly on imposing premises and grand topics without appearing shallow or unnatural. The historical setting, for instance, is interesting, the Armenian holocaust, the French Resistance, the collapse of social stability in Beirut, yet it remains setting, never occupying the narrative. Nevertheless, in order to analyse the cultural identities in Ports of Call it is important to explore the author’s own cultural background, Amin Maalouf. He was raised in Lebanon and currently resides in France. He thinks that a significant portion of the world’s hostility emerges from the way individuals resolve problems of identity. In the age of globalization and of the ever-accelerating intermingling of elements in which we are all caught up, a new concept of identity is needed, and needed urgently. We cannot be satisfied with forcing billions of bewildered human beings to choose between excessive assertion of their identity and the loss of their identity altogether, between fundamentalism and disintegration (Suarez-Orozco 2008, 12). Coercing individuals to decide between one identity and another, or literally speaking, between being Lebanese or French, Chinese or American, worsens tensions and broadens the partition between the ‘us’ and ‘them’. Maalouf advises us to acknowledge the numerous identities we all possess. In spite of the difficulty to choose an identity, numerous youngsters have started to categorise themselves as bicultural, multicultural, or transnational (Suarez-Orozco 2008). Our experiences and ways of thinking as individuals or as members of a cultural identity are to a significant degree formed by illusory and real stories, both those that we create and the tales that other people create about us, that which could totally be at variance from our own. Different tales about our identity constantly have a profound effect upon our thoughts and sentiments; they could bring about a useful tension but, if the difference is intolerably high, a schizophrenic feeling. With respect to cultural identities, there are at present a minority of individuals who experience this clash between identities as characterised by themselves and by others as intensely, and with significant implications, as Ossyane. Edward Said, the late remarkable Palestinian scholar, on one occasion stated that the West rejects the Palestinians the right to narrate. In reality, Palestinians at present exert great effort as much for physical subsistence in their homeland as for preserving their cultural narrative animate in a power-driven realm of Western-governed global communications (Weaver 2003). The indication of a family discourse in the Ports of Call already signifies the opportunity of working not just vertically, reflecting through predicaments, but as well as horizontally through linking with characters and individuals beyond one’s urgent everyday life realm. When you relate from an established identity towards significant others in an enlarging sense of temporal and spatial reality, a story can develop into what looks like a family saga or a cultural narrative in which an individual’s story connects to a story of broader social networks. Linking stories from everyday existence during the Second World War with family stories from the previous periods resulted in novels such as Ports of Call. Moreover, situating one’s personal story in a characteristic Middle Eastern actuality of diverse and overlapping identities, as Amin Maalouf has accomplished to remarkable impact can give way into a civilising and unfettering possibility through the recounting of transnational identities. The world is opened up for explorative sojourns into meaning while simultaneously a feeling of home is not eliminated. It is as well important from an educational point of view to connect to other circumstances of oppression and confrontation outside the Middle Eastern environment, and thereby institutionalise transnational community values. Therefore, a sense of absorbing oneself into history is encouraged in the Ports of Call, and also recognition of the significance of supporting humanity in circumstances in which an individual wrestles against apparently great odds, constantly a trademark or excellent individual, family, or community narratives. Such a perspective can be understood by for example making assessments with other circumstances of war, invasion or struggle outside the Middle Eastern environment. III. A Reflection on Cultural Identity Since the discussion on cultural identity is a conceptual and empirical endeavour, these questions arise: how does the concept of Diaspora affect frameworks of cultural identity? How are we to understand or envision identity, diversity and membership or belongingness, following a Diaspora? For the reason that cultural identity bears numerous implications of important unity, ancient accord, inseparability and homogeneity, how are we to reflect upon identities written within power relations and established across diversity, and disjuncture? Basically, it is thought that cultural identity is permanent by birth, partially of nature, indented through kinship and ancestry in the genes, representative of our intimate selves. It is resistant to something as earthly, material and shallow as for the time being moving from a place of residence. Poverty, the absence of equal opportunities, underdevelopment, and the heritages of Empire far and wide could compel people to move or migrate, causing the spreading out, the dispersion. Yet, diffusion is accompanied with the hope and assurance of the return. According to Stuart Hall, there are two perspectives of cultural identity. The first premise characterises cultural identity as a shared cultural reality, a kind of collective identity positioned secretively inside the veil of the many other, shallower or unnaturally constructed identities, which individuals with a shared history and lineage posses in common. In line with this perspective, our cultural identities manifest the common or shared historical realities and shared cultural meanings which offer us, as a unified whole, with secure, fixed and constant belief systems and meaning, underneath the changing partitions and variations of our factual history (Hall 1994). There is, though, a second, associated but different perspective of cultural identity. This second premise acknowledges that, in addition to the several points of commonalities, there are as well decisive points of profound and important difference which represent ‘what we really are’ or for the reason that history has interfered, ‘what we have become’ (Hall 1994, 395). However, here then, is the irony. Now, our predicaments commence. A people cannot survive with the absence of hope. Yet there is a dilemma when we interpret our allegories too factually. Concerns of cultural identity in Diasporas should not be understood in this manner. They have confirmed so bothersome and confusing for Caribbean people, particularly for the reason that, in our company, identity is hopelessly a historical concern. Our societies are made up of not merely one, but of numerous individuals. Their roots and origins are not just one but varied. Those to whom the territory or a patch of land formerly belonged have already suffered, annihilated by difficult labour and disease. The land should not be sacred for the reason that it is in fact violated; not vacant but vacated. Everyone living here formerly belonged to another place. Far from being uninterrupted with our history, our connection to that past is defined by the most atrocious, brutal, sudden, ruptural intervals; instead of the gradually developing contract of civil society so vital to the freethinking discussion of modernity in the West, our civil society was instated by an effort of imperial resolve. According to Stuart Hall, what we now refer to as the Caribbean was revived in and through bloodshed. The trail to our cultural identity is defined by invasion, occupation, oppression, genocide, and the extensive sponsorship of colonial dependency (Hall 1994). Palestinian reality is at origin one of exile. Edward Said claims that Palestinians establish “a community, if at heart a community built on suffering and exile” (Weaver 2003, 439). Palestinians are scattered widely, divided by geographical borders, casted out from one another. Palestinians are hence repeatedly removed from their perspectives and discover themselves trekkers in an unknown world. “The Palestinian is very much a person in transit,” Said claims. “Suitcase or bundle of possessions in hand, each family vacates territory left behind for others, even as new boundaries are traversed, new opportunities created, new realities set up.” For instance, as Said argues, exile generates new opportunities then the life of exile as well is deeply alienating. “Exile is a series of portraits without names, without contexts,” Said notes; “Images that are largely unexplained, nameless mute” (Weaver 2003, 439). Therefore, with the absence of permanence of place, Palestinians have no permanence of cultural identity. Palestinian existence is dispersed, broken, characterised by the false and obligatory agreements of sporadic or restricted space, by the displacements and inharmonious tempos of interrupted time. Said further explains: “where no straight line leads from home to birthplace to school to maturity, all events are accidents, all progress is a digression, all residence is exile.” Outcast, the Palestinian existence turns out to be one of journey without predetermined destination: “our truest reality is expressed in the way we cross over from one place to another,” Said maintains. “We are migrants and perhaps hybrid in, but no of, any situation in which we find ourselves. This is the deepest continuity of our lives as a nation in exile and constantly on the move” (Weaver 2003, 440). Break of continuity is the destiny of the overpowered, whereas the champions, the dominant and the powerful, remain in position. “Continuity for them, the dominant population,” Said argues, in contrary to the “discontinuity for us, the dispossessed and dispersed.” The stress of Said on the ‘privilege of obduracy’ of Palestinians, their determination, the statement that “Here we are, unmoved by your power, proceeding with our lives and with future generations,” (Weaver 2003, 440) is a means of urgently attempting to hold on despite the passage of exile, in order that the outcast character of exile does not turn out to be termination. For the Palestinians, the life of exile has not merely been physically and emotionally agonizing, but has had harmful impacts on individual exiles and the exiled cultural population as a whole. The collective history of the Palestinians has been remarkably disastrous, increasingly awkward, unblessed, unconventional, de-centred and estranged. Exile can make people feel secluded, creating a kind of sectarian removal which bans those outside the cultural community. Exile is a resentful condition, as Said notes, which can generate an overstated feeling of group cohesion or cultural identity, and an ardent antagonism to strangers, even those who could actually be in the similar difficulty as you. Individuals, on the other hand, who defy the lure to become involved to political activities, confront the lure of individualistic removal from all cultural communities. Exile is defined, as Said claims, through the pure fact of seclusion and displacement, which generates the type of egotistical chauvinism that refuses to accept all attempts at acculturation and cultural community. IV. Conclusion Common practices, attributes, knowledge could be obvious indicators of collective cultural identity, yet most importantly it is established by diversity or difference: we sense belongingness in a group, while a group classifies itself as indeed a group, by observing and emphasising differences with other cultures. All cultures identify themselves in connection, or rather in conflict to other cultures just like the Ruby in Toni Morrison’s Paradise. The members of the black community, who sense they belong to a common culture, embrace this thought for the reason that they depend to some extent on a shared set of standards, yet the knowledge of such shared symbols or meanings is possible merely thru the argument with their nonexistence with other cultures. To state it plainly: if you believe you are just the present culture you clearly do not perceive yourself as a culture. Hence the presence of a cultural identity indicates an uninterrupted interaction between cultures. In Toni Morrison’s Paradise cultural identity takes on a larger significance and unusual turn. Instead of fostering shared feelings of community the strong cultural identity of the black community cultivated individual differences which then led to the movement of separatism. Stuart Hall will interpret this as the clash of the two forms of cultural identity, namely that which is influenced by history and colonial experiences and that which is formed by personal experiences and self-perception. Furthermore, those interactions are never relationships of equality, for the reason that they never subsist in a secluded form: the intricate network of relationships generated by the imposition of economic, political, technological, social and cultural interaction, transforms any relationship between two cultures into an uneven form. In Amin Maalouf’s Ports of Call the mixed cultural identities of the characters, specifically Ossyane and Clara, shows that there is at all times a prevailing culture, or a prevailing cultural tradition beneath the existence of a variety of cultural identities. Unlike in Paradise, Maalouf’s novel showed that cultural differences do not always hinder a strong sense of collective identity. In his novel, he showed that through love and familial affection, cultural differences can be united as one. The uneven quality of intercultural relations, specifically, the reality that the construction of identity is related to uneven relations of power, indicates that construction of identity can be viewed as ideological: in constructing its identity, a culture as well establishes, duplicates, or undermines social awareness and power relations. References Cheng, Vincent J. Inauthentic: The Anxiety over Culture and Identity. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Dehn, Missy. 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London: Routledge, 2000. Morley, David & Robins, Kevin. Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries. New York: Routledge, 1995. Morrison, Toni. Paradise. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. , 1997. Powell, Timothy B. Beyond the Binary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Context. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Said, Edward. "The Mind of Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile." Harper's Magazine (1984): 269. Stychin, Carl F. A Nation by Rights: National Cultures, Sexual Identity Politics, and the Discourse of Rights. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998. Suarez-Orozco, Carola. Stories of Identity. Brookline, MA: Facing History and Ourselves Foundation, 2008. Weaver, Alain Epp. "On Exile: Yoder, Said, and a Theology of Land and Return." Cross Currents (2003): 439+. Read More