"Social Identity versus Culture?"

a presentation by

Barbara Buchenau

Thursday, February 10, 2005
Board Room, Stanford Humanities Center, 4:00-6:00 PM

Reading: A draft version of "Social Identity versus Culture?"

Abstract: According to Kwame Anthony Appiah, identity is prior to culture. Culture, for Appiah, is neither at the heart of American race-related conflicts nor a possible venue toward better human relations. Appiah's challenge is purposefully staged against the ubiquity and concomitant imprecisions of culture, taking issue in particular with multiculturalist projects which often conflate culture and belonging, envisioning cultural diversity as an exit strategy in a world of heightened social conflict. This essay, which is part of a larger project investigating complex struggles for recognition and participation carried out in environments of broadening, yet exculsivist definitions of whiteness, challenges Appiah's dismissal of culture. Reading Paula Moya's theory of identity in the context of Pierre Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital I argue that a distinction between identity and culture, while heuristically valuable, will ultimately distort any analysis of human conflicts. The case of a Mohawk-Canadian cultural activist who sought to turn her social identity into both an epistemic privilege and cultural capital supports my claim for the complex and conflictive dynamics between (racial, ethnic, but also national) identities and major aspects of culture, i.e. its production, its consumption, and the ever pivotal intercultural contact.

Barbara Buchenau is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the Goettingen University, Germany. Working in the field of inter-American and transatlantic cultural studies, Buchenau's interest in the cultural politics of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century North American literatures is decidedly comparativist. She received her PhD- and Postdoc-training in a number of inter-disciplinary research centers on cultural mediation and national identity, and is the author of Der frŸhe amerikanische historische Roman, a book about literary disaffiliation and the making of identities in early nineteenth-century historical fiction (2002). She has edited, with Annette Paatz, Do the Americas Have a Common Literary History? (2002), and, with Marietta Messmer, Intercultural Negotiations in the Americas and Beyond (special issue of CLCWeb, 2001). Her current project, Forging Pluralist Paradigms in North America, investigates complex struggles for recognition and participation carried out in environments of broadening, yet exculsivist definitions of whiteness.