“Those whose identities are rarely questioned and who have never known exile or subjugation of land and culture, have little need to trace their ‘roots’ in order to establish a unique and recognizable identity. Yet theirs is only an implicit and unarticulated form of what elsewhere must be shouted from the rooftops: ‘We belong, we have a unique identity, we know it by our ancestry and history.’ It matters nothing that these are so many ‘myths’ and ‘memories’ full of deceptions and distortions. The ‘self-evident’ nature of English or French national identity is made up of such myths and memories; with them, the English and French are ‘nations’, without them, just so many populations bounded in political space.”

-Anthony D. Smith, “The Ethnic Origins of Nations”

  By outlining and examining the complexity of nationalism within fashioned cultural bodies we can look to understand the complex idea of nationhood, national and cultural identity and visual imagery of the fashion industry and Canadian identity.

Nations cannot exist without difference, they create the us vs. them, the Self vs. Other, and they are a political community that is gained, limited and sovereign.

•  Imagined: Not fabricated by creatively invented
• Limited: they have finite boundaries that are guarded not only politically and economically but, in classed, cultural, and moral ways.
• Sovereign: continued within well-defined borders guided by the state.

Stuart Hall, writing on cultural identity and diaspora, outlined that post structural identities are an emergent processes formulated in relation to identity. He also noted that there was two ways of thinking about identity: One true self inside of other artificially imposed selves, and also cultural identity as a process of always coming as well as being. This process belonged to the future as much as the past.

            Canada’s Northern identity inherently emphasis “whiteness”, as tied to the pristine artic climate. The idea of a vanishing culture, assumption of cultural preservation and identity in order to assume and capital native American identity as representative fashion model. The multicultural narrative and structural understanding for society although for a consumption of cultural fashion and embracing narrative.

  Sometimes we latch on the Canadian quisential identity and national culture traits because it allows us to feel a sense of belonging. Articles of clothing can often be used as markers “to interrogate the bodies travelling in spaces is to engage in a complex historical mapping of spaces and bodies in relation, inevitably a tracking of multiple systems of domination and the ways in which they come into existence in and through” (Razack, 2007) The body becomes a space of racisms, oppressions and insecurely produced by the notions of raced place into the body, and across the body. This is seen in the hyper sexuality of raced bodies, the restriction on reproduction, the disenfranchisement of masculinity, and naturalization of disproportionate injustice. These notations that strike the understanding of racialized bodies, but also the perception of racialized individuals as a whole in navigating space within and throughout fashion industry,

Canada Olympic Gear:

“Transnational ideological formation, which is destined to develop towards discourses and social technologies in which the aspect of historical recounting of genealogical myths (the play if substitutions between race, people, culture and nation) will give way, to a greater or lesser degree, to the aspect of psychological assessment of intellectual aptitudes and dispositions to ‘normal’ social life. And ‘optimal’ reproduction” (Balibar, 2007).       As a mixed raced individual who has grown up in an national athletic family and who has always had Olympic gear, it became a way for me to identify, It was the only thing that made sense as a child I could latch on to the fact that I was Canadian and all the other confusion of who I was know longer was relevant. Canadian Nationalism can be a way for people to identify; a national identity assumes a sense of belonging understanding of self through the comforting of culture. We are all apart of a society in which we are already divided into discrete races and culture. But does this only further perpetrate a discourse of colonialism and European Gaze through capitalist notions of nationalism? Or does it give room for people create space for fashioned cultural identity?

In Solidarity,

-Jess

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***LINK TO HBC NATIONALISM ***

http://www2.hbc.com/hbcheritage/

Michael Omi and Howard Winant define “race” as “a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” (pg 123). Race is neither biologically essential nor an illusion that can be simply waved away. It is an ongoing contextual/historically situated social and cultural process that creates certain meanings around certain bodies and/or body parts (skin, hair, facial features, etc).

Omi and Winant also define “racial formation” as “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” in a series of “projects” both large (institutionalized, systemic) and small (pg 124).  Racial projects are sites in which the interpretation and representations of race and “racial dynamics” are negotiated and spaces in which “an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines” occurs (pg 135). This means that not all racial projects are inherently racist; only when it relies on “essentialist categories of race” (stereotypes, etc) to uphold and replicate systems of dominance and power is a racial project racist.

Simply put, racist racial projects are used to keep power in certain hands—white hands—by relying on tropes about racialized identities to justify and perpetuate hegemonic paradigms of white dominance.

The fashion industry—at the very least, the Anglo-European-centric fashion industry in North America—can be conceptualized as one of these racist racial projects.

The particular body enshrined in popular media as the performer, the consumer, and the creator of fashion is inarguably white (and in the case of both “female” and “male” bodies, this white person is hardly ever anything but thin, fit, or well-muscled). This is not to say that there is absolutely no representation of color or racialized difference in the fashion industry. Rather, the inclusion of the Other in fashion is often used to “[make] racial difference commodifiable and palatable through whiteness” (Minh-Ha T. Pham, “Unintentionally Eating the Other”). Symbolic representations of “exotic cultures” (visual markers that represent an Otherness—like patterns, fabrics, styles of clothing, etc) are reproduced and sold, attached to meanings that essentialize diverse cultures into a set of easily consumed tropes. As bell hooks puts it: “within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture” (quoted by Minh-Ha T. Pham, “Unintentionally Eating the Other”).

The hegemonic forces that reproduce white dominance in the fashion industry writ large have an influence on Victoria’s street style. After looking at a limited selection of fashion blogs—

“Victoria Street-Style Muse” and “Victoria Fashion Scene”–-it appears that aside from two fashionably dressed Asians, Victoria is devoid of racialized minorities (or perhaps just lacking anyone of color who wear clothes worth photographing?). The occasional appearance of “ethnic spices” (bell hooks) is evident in clothing items like these:

which do the ideological work of homogenizing a certain culture into one or two markers—in the above case the “Navajo pattern” and the “Cowichan sweater”—that can be mass-produced and worn by white bodies, successfully ignoring historically-rooted and contemporary social injustice/violence experienced by First Nations communities that is enabled by white-dominant power structures. Whiteness, in its strange role as both a measuring stick and an invisible absence (see Ruth Frankenberg’s “The Mirage of an Unmarked Whiteness), allows white bodies to consume culturally appropriated markers without any of the experiences of being racialized. I’m not sure what the presence of only a couple Asian female bodies in the supposed “Victoria Fashion Scene” signifies—obviously, the inclusion of only one, feminized kind of racialized body is problematic; in a street style space where whiteness is the mainstream paradigm the ways in which raced bodies can and do appear speak to the larger picture in which cultures are commodified and consumed by whiteness.

- Sam

mixedbeyondbelief:

The Turkish women’s magazine Âlâ first gained notice in the summer of 2011 by putting the most controversial piece of fabric in Turkey, the Islamic headscarf, on its cover. Four months later, Turkish secularists and traditional Muslims alike are still debating: Can fashion and Islam comfortably coexist?

ofanotherfashion:

A portrait of an African American woman in Victorian fashion. My guess is that this photograph was taken sometime in the 1860s when necklines rose and the bustle was more noticeable. Fashion historians have also observed that skirt fronts flattened out (also drawing more attention to the…

The landscape of difference is always changing.  What constitutes difference and racial difference is always shifting depending on the historical and geographical context.  What does that mean for different peoples cultures?  We had been struggling to grasp what we wanted the scope and content of this blog to entail until we came across this HSBC ad in our research.  The simplicity of the image highlights the complexities of what we are trying to do.

The picture captures the temporal landscape of race, ethnicity and culture and how their interpretation is constantly changing in Western society. Depending on the context, a cultural symbol on a body can be read as “trendy” or “traditional,” desireable or undesireable. And it is here that I want to say cultural appropriation can be understood. Cultural markers are usually associated with people belonging to that same cultural group. When a marker from one culture is used by another, often for different purposes than the marker was initially intended, it is called cultural appropriation.

However, we feel that this is a problematic “definition” because it assumes something concrete about the nature of differences like “culture” “race” and “ethnicity” when in fact the categories we use to define those differences are constructed. The truth of the matter is that cultural definitions shift historically in the same way racial categories do. The idea of cultural “authenticity” leads to a kind of essentialism that can enable more harm than good and actually reinforce racist logic.

Here’s our disclaimer.  Its not our place to define culture, in doing so we would be producing more discourse on the legitimacy of the insurmountable barrier of cultural difference.  Which as I hope you know by now, isn’t true.  Culture changes all the time.

So, how do we move beyond this strict interpretation of culture, because honestly, who are we to say what culture is and what “belongs” to whom?

We live in a society saturated with images, representations, or produced “discourses” (knowledges or “truths”) about difference relating to race and culture, each with their own “biases” so to speak. Specifically, I am talking about the processes of orientalism, colonialism and capitalism. When their progression is traced historically it becomes clear that they inform one another, and rely on each other to produce and represent new “truths” about Others and difference.

What is orientalism? Edward Said developed it as a way to describe a historical system of representation. A recording of the western ‘gaze’ put upon the oriental ‘others’ living in the Orient or what is now the Middle East.  It is found through images, stories, writings: as Edward Said says in very specific terms “archives” (Said, pp. 51) of meaning.  These images were utilized to create false truths about Eastern customs and traditions, marking the East as raced, exotic, mystical, dark and sexual. When European explorers set out for the “New World” the practise of archiving interpretations of Other cultures informed the production of a Colonial “mythology” of the New World, replete with stories about Native “savages” and an eden-like land meant to be “discovered” by the imperial colonizer (Hall p. 56).

“Sometimes we thought it was simply a matter of conquering the Indians, taking their territory and absorbing them out of existence, then America would be ours.  Sometimes we thought just the opposite, that we have to become Indians in order to be home here.  This myth of transformation lies at the heart of Canadian culture - Canadians need to transform themselves into Indians” - (Francis, pp. 238)

Canada is a nation built on Colonization, and our treatment of the First Nations in this land is a prime example of the harms this categorization of Others can do. The systemic violence those communities face today is a result of the history of colonization, conversion, disenfranchisement and genocide enacted against them by colonial government programs and objectives. Much of the Canadian identity is constructed around the idea that North America and its indigenous population were “wild” “untamed” and “uncivilized” and that it was the European Colonizer who made Canada into what it is today (Razack, “When Place Becomes Race”).

“To denaturalize or unmap spaces, then, we begin by exploring space as a social product, uncovering how bodies are produced in spaces and how spaces produce bodies.” (Razack, pp. 80)

In our capitalist society we are saturated with images.  The images that are deployed often draw on these historical constructions of the other.  We consume the Othering gaze(s) around us and from their our identity is produced.  

Armed with this understanding, we can ask again: What is cultural appropriation? It is the appropriation of cultural markers that draw on a specific gaze, saturated with historical representations and meanings, to gain an aspect of “the Other” in order to catpure a certain aesthetic or style.

For Example…

First off, these are weird underpants. Secondly, this underwear names specific group of first nations people (Navajo nation) and deliberately calls on the cultural signifier of the “Indian” I discussed earlier.   Furthermore, it is calling on a specific gendered dimension of representation that highlights the hypersexualizion of indigenous femininity that is a metaphor for the sexualization and further patriarchal conquest of the Canadian landscape. The idea of having a Navajo panty calls on that idea to promote the wearer as erotic, wild, and sexually available,  just as the Canadian landscape was ready to be “tamed” and “conquered” by White European settlers.  This  appropriation draws on a White interpretation of history and indigenous femininity.  It invisiblizes the lived reality of indigenous women in Canada today, while serving to prop up a white supremacist interpretation of how settlers have been interacting with indigenous folks to this day.  The reality for many indigenous women is that they are more likely than any other group of women in Canada to experience sexualized violence and murder.

When we begin to understand the way the Other has been produced historically, it is clear to see the problematic nature of cultural appropriation. It is an uncritical “borrowing” from one culture by another that transforms old meanings and creates new ones. Within our capitalist society, this means the appropriative clothing we buy is part of a power structure that has been defining and re-defining the Other in order to suit the systems’ best interests for hundreds of years. The commodified (re)presentations of Other cultures in clothing is something we must be critical of, as I doubt that the sale of the Navajo hipster panty, and other items like it, serve to promote the interests of the Navajo peoples or other groups that have had their cultures commodified.

- Michelle

tabularasae:

I recently reblogged a post entitled “Hipster Racism,” which was essentially on how white hipsters perpetuate racist language in an “ironic” way. The post was good, albeit a little underdeveloped, but hipster racism is something that I’m passionate about discussing and addressing—seeing as I, myself, am a black “hipster,”—and I figured that posting it wouldn’t be too big of a deal.

I feel as if, though, I should develop my own thoughts about race and hipster culture—not so much about “hipster racism,” per se, but more on how I feel the hipster lifestyle (in general) cherishes, values, and supports whiteness and white homogeneity.

The hipster lifestyle has two major cruxes: non-conformity, and privilege. These two aspects of hipster culture are what define it.

Non-conformity is essentially a way to break away from the status quo; apparel, music, and lifestyle choices are consciously (and sometimes unconsciously) made in response to the current temperature of society. Non-conformity is the reason why many “hipsters” characterize themselves as “liberal” and “progressive,” because progressive and liberal ideals are supported by progress, challenging “normality,” and responding to or against what is considered “mainstream.” These progressive attitude within hipster culture, however, rarely ever translate into systematic or societal changes. The hipster culture can essentially be described as an aversion to rather than a counter to mainstream culture; a disdain for mass consumerism, but never a need to change it; condemnation of poverty but never any real motives or actions to combat it; disliking racism rather than a desire or action to stop systematic oppression, and so on and so forth.

Coming from that understanding of hipster-culture, one can essentially make the connection between hipster culture and privilege. Because hipsters have the luxury of generally being affluent, straight, and white, they have the ability or the freedom to dislike certain aspects of society but never any real motives or intention to stop them. The privilege in this is that hipsters for the most part see issues but never have any apparent impetus to change them. This form of privilege can be represented by the stereotype of the smoking, apathetic, whining hipster, who sees issues, but never feels any responsibility to stop them; their privilege is that they have the time and ability to whine about systemic inequalities, but never feel any sort of responsibility to change them.

So, in describing and recognizing the two main bedrocks of the hipster-lifestyle, non-conformity and privilege, it makes sense that hipster-dom is essentially (and in its broadest form) a lifestyle for whites. This isn’t to say that white people don’t care about societal issues, or are apathetic, selfish, spoiled people. But, issues of non-conformity and privilege are essentially only luxuries that most white people for the majority have the luxury to exercise. The hipster lifestyle is—in many and most ways—a “White-only” lifestyle.

The issue of non-conformity is the first way in which people of color are essentially barricaded from engaging in hipster lifestyles. People of color in America have historically been others; people of color have always had to fight for their right to be seen as equals in society. This strive for equality in many ways translated into a unifying understanding and communal “uniformity,” one that people of color have tried to maintain in order to stick together and stay alive. People of color have in many ways been marginalized and categorized based on their races and ethnicities, and that, in itself, reinforces our otherness. So, essentially, for people of color to become “hipsters,” we have to reinforce and add to our otherness in order to fit in. It’s paradoxical to say the least, but the concept of personally contributing to one’s otherness is an obvious reason why those who have been historically seen as others, as different, and as lesser than, wouldn’t want to become hipsters.

The issue of choosing to be a hipster reinforces and supports the second crux of hipster lifestyle: privilege. Because the social temperature of our society is one in which whiteness is revered in almost all cultural facets, white people essentially have the resources and ability to ignore or fail to recognize their status as dominants in society. Again, this is not an attribute intrinsic to whites, but the ability to choose whether or not one wants to conform is a privilege afforded to only those who have power. This, in the American (and majority of the World’s) lens, means white. The ability to be counter-culture, and at the same time reinforced by and the dominant culture are abilities afforded to whites by our white, euro-centric society. White people, however counter-culture they might be, are always going to be the dominant group in society, until all racial and ethnic disparities are remedied. Obviously, being white and white alone doesn’t afford white people these privileges—other cultural factors like gender, sexual orientation, ability, class, etc. factor—but, when only focusing on race and skin color, one will find that white is dominant, white is mainstream, and white is “normal.”

And even when you look at factors irrelevant to privilege and counter-culturalism, one will find that whites still dominate the hipster lifestyle. Indie music is completely dominated by whites; there are very few popular ”indie” and hipster music icons that aren’t white (the only ones that come to mind for me are TV On the Radio, Janelle Monae [to an extent] and Kanye West). The majority of indie-music songs, too, are white-centric, and focus on issues that lay outside the realm of societal disadvantages; where the majority of indie music focuses on issues of relationships, emotions, and rebellion, rap and hip-hop music focus on issues of oppression, race, socio-economics, and urban lifestyles. These, again, are not qualities intrinsic to any given race, but products of the society in which we live, one in which whites have power and certain luxuries that the majority of people of color don’t have. The movie “Medicine For Melancholy” touches on the issues of what it’s like for black hipsters to listen to music that pertains mainly on characteristically white issues, and how the indie-music scene is almost homogeneously white.

So, I think when discussing issues like “hipster racism,” the irony of hipster jocularity, and counter-cultures in general, one has to not only focus on the products of certain attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, but also their roots. If we look there, we’ll see what hipsterism is all about.

saucy-sarah:

There’s more:

Students Teaching About Racism in Society is a Student Org at Ohio University. I’m the President, any questions… MESSAGE ME! :)