Culture and Identities

Research Area 6: Culture and Identities

picture_culture_and_identities The research area Culture & Identities explores the different ways in which identity is constitutive of culture and in which cultures forge identities. For a long time, the concept of identity has served as a privileged category of research and self-reflection in the humanities and the social sciences, for instance in philosophy, psychological and sociological theory, postcolonial studies, historical linguistics and contemporary cultural history. Contemporary research agrees on the fact that identities do not exist prior to processes of remembering, but are an outcome of ephemeral, emergent narratives of the past (J. Assmann). Identity as a relational and process-based construct on collective as well as on individual levels is closely connected to cultural and psychological concepts of alterity (Goffmann, Said, Kristeva). Collective images of the self and the other and the differentiating impact of identity and identification on the levels of race, religion, class and gender have been studied in the frameworks of postcolonial and cultural studies (Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’, Hall’s ‘cultural identities’ or Butler’s deconstruction of ‘sex and gender’) and through questions of identity politics (Frazer) and popular culture (Hall, Yúdice). This critical reflection on identitary constructions also shows the persistence and re-emergence of essentialist, apparently solid and stable identities on an individual and collective scale (for example in still quite common conceptions of sexuality or gender roles, and in different forms of nationalism).

Deconstructions and Developments

In response, critical theory has questioned these kind of identitary politics and strategies (Adorno, Horkheimer) and, deconstructionist and poststructuralist the-ory has analyzed the very mechanics of the “effects of evidence” in linguistic and symbolic significance (Derrida, Foucault), as well as in images of the self and the other (Lacan, Baumann). Postcolonial studies have drawn attention to the fact that collective-cultural identities are never homogenous, monolithic and definite entities, but rather inherently syncretistic and constantly shifting phenomena, which are based on intricate processes of cultural contact, exchange, and differentiation (for example Spivak on ‘subalternity’, hooks on ‘race/class/gender’ or Gilroy on ‘nation and racism’). Material, social and mental elements (such as languages, art objects, people, institutions, ideas and concepts) are transferred from one culture to another and in this process shape and alter concepts of identity.

Research Approach and Further Projects

The cross-fertilization of issues of cultural identity with notions of transcultural dynamics has a great, and so far scarcely tapped, interdisciplinary potential: Both concepts play an important role in virtually all disciplines constituting the study of culture, for instance, in literary studies (‘transculturación’ and ‘hybridity’ in Latin-American and New English Literatures for example; cf. Ortiz, Rama and Bhabha), in linguistics (‘creolization’ of languages as identity markers) and in cultural history (‘appropriation’, Burke).

Activities

The research area’s activities and focus emerge from within the participants’ interests and projects, serving as a common platform for exchange, synergies and new ideas. In discussions with visiting experts, workshops and symposia, the thus “emerging concepts” of identity will also be linked with the activities of the other research areas and GCSC’s “travelling concepts”.