Identity

Define yourself using 5 nouns.

I am …

identity

Name, identity papers,

1) The state of being (philosophy),

2) feelings, interests (social science)

Social psychology

Charles

Cooley,

George

Mead,

Erving

Goffman

Human Nature and the Social Order (1902)

“looking-glass self”

Mind, Self & Society: from the Standpoint of Social Behavorist (1934)

“I” + “Me” = “The Self”

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956)

1) theatre, 2) contexts: social, personal, ego

[i] is always [i] within a socially constructed world, in which an individual defines his/her place

two sides of one coin

The dance metaphor:

no individual without

society and vice verse

“People are in close

inter-relation with

each other.”

“habitus”

“preservation of unity

among diversity of “I”

and the feeling of the

self amid internal and

external changes” in

the context of

synthesis of Ego.

Norbert Elias (1897-1990) Erik Erikson (1902-1994)

„So far I have tried out the term identity almost deliberately — I like to think — in many different connotations. At one time it seemed to refer to a conscious sense of individual uniqueness, at another to an unconscious striving for a continuity of experience, and at a third, as a solidarity with a group’s ideals.”

Psychology – “identity crisis”

Erik Erikson Identity: Youth and Crisis(1968)

STAGES:

Unexamined

Exploring

Identity Achievement

For Erikson, identity represents a self-image. [I] is

the perception of sameness in time, and is

connected to the perception of the others. [I]

develops through experiences of the crisis and

contradictions, crucial to overcome, in order to raise

to the next development phase.

Kellie

Gonçalves,

Conver-

sation of

inter-

cultural

Couples

(2013)

[i] as a static, fixed concept thatpeople are or possess;

[i] are social, discursive constructionsthat are performed in social interactionembedded in relations to power =

Multiple identities

Goncavles Kellie:

[i] is an „everyday word for people’ssense of who they are” and „whopeople are to each other”

Identity

Personal (Self)

Social (a collective self-

concept, based on a basic need

for the positive self-esteem)

Group (conformity,

stereotyping, in-group

favoritism, ethno-centiricity)

Ethnic

Cultural

Gender

Regional

Socioeconomic

National (territory,

historical memory, common

laws, economy, culture)

Civilization (Western,

Confucius, Japanese,

Islamic, Hindu, Orthodox-

Slavic, Latin-American,

African)

Hybrid Identity

Sociological

analysis of

hybridity

investigates

th erange of

types [HI]

that are

explored

theoretically

and

empirically in

the

literaature

on identity.

[i] that exist across borders,

Duality

Gender

New identities

The diaspora (birderless)

Internal colony hybrid (formed without boundaries)

States – borders – „two-ness”

* Ken Smith, HI: theoretical examination

Postcolonial criticism

The

Postcolonia

l Studies

Reader,

eds. Bill

Ashcroft,

Gareth

Griffiths and

Helen Tiffin

(London/Ne

w York:

Routledge,

2006)

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In

Other Worlds

Bill Ashcroft, The Empire Writes

Black

Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and

Narration

Edward S.Said, Culture and

Imperialism

Teachers TV: Britishness

Social

engineering

28:00

Mass Immigration and British

Identity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu

mysBMMnzU 0:56, values 8:28

http://www.sarahcrossan.com/books/the-weight-of-water/

Sarah Crossan

“When I am aloneI do not know who I am.

When I am aloneI am nothing.”

Nadeem Aslam (1966- ) 2nd novel (2004)

How often do you take a selfie?

First known selfie, taken

by Robert Cornelius in

1839.

Bill Nye takes a selfie with US

President Barack Obama and Neil de Grasse

Tyson at the White House.

Italian Renaissance, C14-16th

From church-religious

to „humanistic

movement”

(humankind as the

measure of all things)

Columbus 1492

Copernicus 1514

Discovering the New World

E PLURIBUS UNUM (OUT OF MANY ONE)

________________________________

E PLURIBUS PLURES (OUT OF MANY

MANY)

CONSTRUCTING AMERICAN IDENTITY

American vs. English/European

Imagined Identites

Luis Claudio

Villafane G.Santos

Imagined

Identites:

Identity Formation

in the Age of

Globalization,

2014

United Statian,

USAmerican,

Unitedstatesian,

Usonian,

Usanian, Usan

gringo

„American was not discovered, but invented by Europeans” (Edmindo O’Gorman)

The American republics vs. Old Europeanmonarchies

… the adoption of the adj. American to identifyU.S. citizents is the manner U.S. nationalismwas invented (p.295)

The New World

Janus-faced reality

Earthly paradise and a hell full of terrible creatures

Climate, famine, diseases

Wars with Indians

Set of cultural values based on individualism and self-reliance,

Which shaped heroes and themes of the search for freedom, justice, prosperity, adventure

Emphasis on nature

American myth of the frontier

the Promised Land, the

land of Canaan, to which

God led Moses and the

Jews from Egypt

The New Jerusalem or

“the City on the Hill”, i.e.

the city created by God

for the redeemed

Christians after the Last

Judgement, or the new

church announced by

Christ in his first sermon

AmDream

a cornerstone for nation’s identity

as a concept of …

* Road map

*Journey

(to a new country, across generations, within one’s life)

The main reasons for leaving Europe were religious persecution, political oppression and poverty. They dreamt:

the personal dream of freedom, self-fulfillment, dignity and happiness,

the economic dream of prosperity and success, the dream of rising from poverty to fame and fortune i.e. from rags to riches,

the social dream of equality (of opportunity) and a classless society,

the religious dream of religious freedom in a “promised land” in which they were God’s chosen people,

the political dream of democracy.

A society formed of all the nations of the world… people having different languages, beliefs, opinions; in a word, society without roots, without memories, without prejudices, without routines, without common ideas, without a national character, yet a hundred times happier than our own… what serves as the link among such diverse elements? What makes all of this into one people?

Alexis de Tocqueville, 1831

Asylum of all nations,

Drawing the energy of Irish,

Germans, Swedes, Poles, and

Cossaks, and all the European

tribes – of the African and the

Polynesians, creating a “new

race” as “vigorous as the new

Europe which came of the

smelting pot of the Dark Ages”

Ralf Waldo Emerson, 1845

We are not a nation, so much as a

world… we are the heirs of all time,

and with all nations we divide our

inheritance. On this Western

hemisphere all tribes and people

are forming into one federal whole”

Herman Melville, 1849

Henry Wardsworth Longfellow

Evangeline,

A Tale of

Acadie

(1847)

A story of an Acadian girl named

Evangeline and her search for her

lost love Gabriel, set during the time

of the Expulsion of the Acadians

(August 10, 1755 – July 11, 1764) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRMzqi2MYyg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIJKmFisrPg

Evangeline

which was originally used to describe the first-generation offspring of European settlers and colonizers born in the New World, later expanding to indicate people of mixed race but then, in the Gilded Age, narrowing down once more to indicate Creoles (and Cajuns, in the lower classes) as ‘white’

the term ‘Creole’

Creole

A Creaole is a ‘white person descended

from the French or Spanish settlers of

Louisiana and the Gulf States and

preserving their characteristic speech and

culture’

In the times of

Kate Chopin

+ Kate Chopin

Katherine O’Flaherty of an Irish and French descent, St.Louis, Missouri

Eliza Faris O’Flaherty Kate’s mother became a widow in the age of 27, never remarried; Kate’s grandmother (15 children) and great-grandmother had also widowed at a young age and never remarried.

At the age of 19 Kate met Louisiana native Oscar Chopin, a cotton broker and married him on June 9, 1870; New Orleans was her new home. In 1879 they move to his family’s plantations in Natchitoches Parish, where Kate became acquainted with the Creolecommunity. In 1883 Oscar died, leaving Kate to return to St.Louis with their 6 small children.

+

“Lilia’s Polka” (a piece of

music)

“If It Might Be” (a poem

published in a Chicago

periodical)

“Wiser Than God” & “A Point

at Issue” (sh.st.)

1890 “At Fault” (1st novel),

“Young Dr.Grosse” (2nd novel)

1893 “Desiree’s Baby”(sh.st.

in Vogue magazine)

1894 a collection of 23

stories “Bayou Folk”

1897 24-storries “A Night in

Acadie”

“A Vocation and a Voice”

(incl. The Story of an Hour)

1899 “The Awakening”

(rediscovered in 1950)

+A Woman Far Ahead of Her Time

When she published a

novel “The Awakening”

in 1899, Kate Chopin

startled her public with

a frank portrayal of a

woman’s social,

sexual, and spiritual

awakening.

The nation in 1899 had

seen vast changes in

the American way of

life and action. But the

idea of a true

autonomy for women

or more astounding yet

– a single sexual

standard for men and

women – was too

much to imagine.

Desiree's Baby

+ Characters

Armand Aubigny: owner of L’Abri

Désirée: foundling, wife of Armand

Madame Valmont: woman who raised Désirée

Sandrine: servant at L’Abri

La Blanche: slave

Time: before the American Civil War

Place: Louisiana

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eNV0BX6N_8

+ Notions & themes

miscegenation

„one-drop rule”

Tragic Mulatto

Blankness vs. Blackness

Blankness vs. Blancheness

Désirée vs. La Blanche

Désirée vs. Armand’s mother

Désirée

- A catalyst of

action

- A mirror of desires

- A woman without

past„He was reminded that she

was nameless.”

Concepts of African-American Literature

Slavery, segregation, racism,

oppression

‘Double consciousness’ W.E.B.Du’Bois

Criticism of minstrelsy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGbNaYFsI5w

Music (spirituals, gospel, jazz, blues,

rap)

Literature created from non-European,

non-canonical perspective

The

Melting Pot, 1908,

a play, that fixed the metaphor

Israel Zangwill

“symphony orchestra” -

each distinctive group

making harmonious

music with other groups

Horace Kallen, 1915; 1924

“cultural

pluralism”

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

...at the centre of a dispute over

American identity and racial justice

and re-interprets it as a crucial

moment in the history of the

Progressive era (1890-1920).

Rylance, David. “Breech Birth:

The Receptions to D. W. Griffith's The Birth of

a Nation. ”Australasian Journal of American

Studies” 24, no. 2 (December 2005)

Jefferson’s idea of equality in America

The Birth of a Nation (2016)

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

Tom Dixon (1864-

1946)

The Clansman (1905)

“my object is to teach

the North, the young

North, what it has never

known – the awful

suffering of the white

man during the dreadful

Reconstruction period.”

David Wark Griffith

(1875-1948)

Socio-Cultural Ramifications

William

Monroe

Trotter in

Boston

Economic

success –

$13-18 mln

The National Assosiation for the

Advancement of Coloured People

(NAACP)

KKK reincarnated in 1915 by

Atlanta businessman William

J.Simmons (5 mln by 1925) was

also anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-

immirgant.

Multiculturalism in the 20th century

Signs of interest in immigrant life in AmLit

In 1920s works of immigrants written in

languages other than EN, were discovered

and translated into EN

Yiddish lit. pioneered by the émigrés from

Ukraine, Poland, Russia (Sholom Aleichem,

Isaac Bashevis Singer became popular after

the WW II)

1920s Harlem Renaissance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90PTxd

sqfsA 3:20

Harlem Renaissance

the "New Negro Movement"

1920s

NYC

“transnational America” –

“the world-federation in

miniature”

Randolph Bourne, 1916

Multiculturalism after 1945

New developments in Am society, esp. the efforts of the immigration from East and South Asia, Mexico and other Latin American countries, and the cultural emancipation of Indians, marked the appearance of

Asian,

Chicano,

Latino and

Native American writing.

The Civil Rights Movement

History

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URxwe6LPvkM

+ From Martin Luther King to Barac Obama

+ Feminism

Sociopolitical [F] is a collection of movements and ideologies aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights for women

Academic [F] is a kind of intellectual [F], which provides theoretical background for the [SPF] and interpreting different cases involving women.

Woman’s Studies → feminist criticism → gender criticism

+ Social impact of feminism

greater access to education;

more nearly equitable pay with men;

the right to initiate divorce proceedings;

the right of women to make individual decisions regarding pregnancy (including access to contraceptives and abortion);

the right to own property

+ Distinctions

Feminist – political

Female – biological

Feminine – cultural

Sex

Gender

“mechanisms of patriarchy,

that is, the cultural 'mind-set' in

men and women which

perpetuated sexual inequality”

Feminist Movement

FEMINISM

Liberal

Radical

Social

Cultural

Grows directly out of 18th-century liberal

philosophy with an emphasis on

traditional liberal conceptions of autonomy

and self-fulfillment for the individual.

Influential texts: Mary Wollstonecraft’s A

Vindication of the Rights of Women

(1792), John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection

of Women (1869). LF is a revisionist, not

a revolutionary philosophy, interested in

reforming existing structures so as to

accommodate women.

Arose in the late 1960s motivated by

the failure of civil rights & New Left

activists to address the oppression of

women as a class. RF are committed

to revolution & to building of a mass

movement; they popularize the

expression ‘the personal is political’,

i.e. marriage, domestic labor,

childrearing, heterosexuality, etc.

were not private activities but

patriarchal institutions and additional

target of political activism.

Liberal Radical

Also known as Marxist F, arose alongside RF & LF in the 1970s. SF seeks to redefine both, Marxism & RF, putting them into dialogue. Targeting male supremacy & capitalism, issues of reproduction & production, women as mothers & wage labors, SF has elaborated the concept of women’s “invisible labor” (unpaid work: cooking, cleaning, childcare) as an illustration of the interrelated exploitations of capitalism and patriarchy.

Growing out of RF, involves an analysis &

usually a celebration of women’s

culture and community. The aim is to

seize upon many of those qualities

traditionally ascribed to women –

subjectivity, closeness to nature,

compassion, reliance on others – and

claim them as positive, even superior

traits. As opposed to LF desire to

access the existing male institutions,

CF argue that these must be radically

re-imagined in terms of such ‘female’

values. The move towards ‘gender

studies’ in 1990s has brought a return

to looking at men and women together.

Social Cultural

Academic feminism

Third-Wave Feminism/

Postfeminism/ Revisionism

Gender criticism

Feminist criticism

Women’s Studies

Gynocriticism

→ Arachnology

→ Écriture féminine

+ Écriture féminine:

Is there a natural feminine language?

Virginia Woolf: A woman’s writing is always

feminine; it cannot help being feminine; at its best

it is most feminine; the only difficulty lies in

defining what we mean by feminine.

HélènCixous: It is impossible to define a feminine

practice of writing, and it is an impossibility that

will remain, for this practice will never be

theorized, enclosed, encoded – which doesn’t

mean that it doesn’t exist.

Literature as the reflection of women’s life & experience which can be interpreted and evaluated in relation to reality. + Importance of historical and outside literature context (diaries, memories), social history, history of medicine – a room of one’s own

The Feminine, beg. with the use of

the male pseudonym in the 1840s

until 1880 with George Eliot’s death;

The Feminist, 1880 until the winning

vote in 1920;

The Female, 1920 till the present-day,

including a “new stage of self-

awareness about 1960”.

+ Feminist Impact onto Literary Criticism: what do feminists do?

Rethink the canon, aiming at the rediscovery of texts written by

women.

Revalue women's experience.

Examine representations of women in literature by men and women.

Examine power relations which obtain in texts and in life, with a view to

breaking them down, seeing reading as a political act, and showing the

extent of patriarchy.

Raise the question of whether men and women are 'essentially' different

because of biology, or are socially constructed as different.

Explore the question of whether there is a female language, an ecriture

feminine, and whether this is also available to men.

'Re-read' psychoanalysis to further explore the issue of female and male

identity.

The Bridge Poem by Donna Kate Rushin

https://www.

youtube.com

/watch?v=C

N76iunaUQc

Feminist Art

History https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDLuLbu6Y0A

Judy Chicago on feminist art

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UA9cp9jqHZE

The Dinner Party (1974-1979)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP3j3klF144&t=61s

Margaret Harrison

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qpby5HCdy-0

Diversity revolution, 1970-80s

Demographic changes;

wake of the civil rights

movement; “third

generation law”

(M.Hansen); need to

offset the alienating and

dehumanizing pressure of

post-industrial society

Multiculturalism since 1970s

Now the notion of M incorporated

women, gay and lesbian literature,

and various forms of ethnicity, that

is the groups which were marginal

or marginalized in traditional,

patriarchal, authoritarian and white

society.

Ethnic

At the dawn of modern European and American

culture ethnic originally meant “heathen”, “non-

Israelite”, “non-Christian” (e.g. the American

Indians because their customs were not in keeping

with the Puritan notions of Christian morals)

mid-19th century: ethnic = “peculiar to race and

nation”

US notions of ethnicity and nationality are distinctly

polycentric, based on the belief that “every

discrete people is entitled to be free of foreign

domination” (20th cent)

Ethnicity

First attempts to define ethnicity emphasized belonging to the ethnic group against “foreign birth”

E is a matter of importance that individuals ascribe to it, including, of course, scholars and intellectuals

Conformist re-definition of one’s identity to join a specific group

“ethnic” as euphemism for the heavily charged word “racial”

Themes of ethnicity and race have become prominent features of AmLit after 1945 (Toni Morrison, William Styron, etc.)

The Human Stain, 1999

AN OPEN LETTER TO WIKIPEDIA by Philip Roth

SEPTEMBER 6, 2012

Anatole Broyard

(1920-1990)

an American writer, literary critic and editor born in

New Orleans who wrote for The New York Times. In

addition to his many reviews and columns, he

published short stories, essays, and two books during

his lifetime. His autobiographical works, Intoxicated

by My Illness (1992) and Kafka Was the Rage: A

Greenwich Village Memoir (1993), were published

after his death. After his death, Broyard became the

center of controversy when it was revealed that he

had "passed" as white as an adult, when he wanted

simply to be accepted as a writer.

AN OPEN LETTER TO WIKIPEDIA by Philip Roth

SEPTEMBER 6, 2012

“The Human Stain” was inspired, rather, by an unhappy event in the life of my late friend Melvin Tumin, professor of sociology at Princeton for some thirty years. One day in the fall of 1985, while Mel, who was meticulous in all things large and small, was meticulously taking the roll in a sociology class, he noted that two of his students had as yet not attended a single class session or attempted to meet with him to explain their failure to appear, though it was by then the middle of the semester. Having finished taking the roll, Mel queried the class about these two students whom he had never met. “Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?”—unfortunately, the very words that Coleman Silk, the protagonist of “The Human Stain,” asks of his classics class at Athena College in Massachusetts.

AN OPEN LETTER TO WIKIPEDIA by Philip Roth

SEPTEMBER 6, 2012

A myriad of ironies, comical and grave, abounded, as Mel had first come to nationwide prominence among sociologists, urban organizers, civil-rights activists, and liberal politicians with the 1959 publication of his groundbreaking sociological study “Desegregation: Resistance and Readiness,” and then, in 1967, with “Social Stratification: The Forms and Functions of Inequality,” which soon became a standard sociological text. Moreover, before coming to Princeton, he had been director of the Mayor’s Commission on Race Relations, in Detroit. Upon his death, in 1995, the headline above his New York Times obituary read

„ MELVIN M. TUMIN, 75, SPECIALIST IN RACE RELATIONS.”

AN OPEN LETTER TO WIKIPEDIA by Philip Roth

SEPTEMBER 6, 2012

My protagonist, the academic Coleman Silk, and the real writer Anatole Broyard first passed themselves off as white men in the years before the civil-rights movement began to change the nature of being black in America. Those who chose to pass (this word, by the way, doesn’t appear in “The Human Stain”) imagined that they would not have to share in the deprivations, humiliations, insults, injuries, and injustices that would be more than likely to come their way should they leave their identities exactly as they’d found them. During the first half of the twentieth century, there wasn’t just Anatole Broyard alone—there were thousands, probably tens of thousands, of light-skinned men and women who decided to escape the rigors of institutionalized segregation and the ugliness of Jim Crow by burying for good their original black lives.

The Bluest Eye. 1970.

Sula. 1973.

Song of Solomon. 1977.

Tar Baby. 1981.

Beloved. 1987.

Jazz. 1992.

Paradise. 1997.

Love. 2003.

A Mercy. 2008.

Home. 2012.

God Help the Child. 2015

Toni Morrison Novels

Musicians, inventors,

educators, writers, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fN5HV79_8B8

May 2018

Meghan Markle

Prince Henry of Wales

NATIONAL IDENTITIES

AT LEASURE

Mona Hatoum

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJbVpFo66c4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4jK-LZrnWA

Damiel Hirst

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvdqtA85zTA

Rachel Whiteread

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CN3OkoRz8Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Rx_V7OnHeA

Zaha Hadid

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhHiYU3kL0E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9n0EQBa7dQI

Mona

Hatoum

KAPANCIK

2012

25 3/16 x 13 3/8 x 13 3/8 in. (64 x 34 x 34

cm)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-

kxfpofILV8

Damien

Hirst

(1965-)

British artist Damien Hirst has shocked and surprised the art world with his unusual works, including glass displays of dead animals and medicine cabinet sculptures.

www.biography.com/people/damien-hirst-20683781#awesm=~oGBKKu4WbkAjA0 3:58

https://www.khanacade

my.org/humanities/globa

l-culture/beginners-

guide-contemporary-

art1/v/hirst-s-shark-

interpreting-

contemporary-art