Abstract
In this chapter, Eglinton uses the corpus of ethnographic data and offers an analysis of the ways in which young people at the Hope after-school club in New York City used visual material culture (VMC) to make sense of, maintain, and (re)construct racial identities and the racial boundaries or ‘borders’ making up their worlds. Describing three intertwined cultural processes, she demonstrates how young people made sense of and constructed black, white, and Latina/Latino identities through the deployment of ‘racialised’ VMC which included those cultural artefacts and practices that the youth associated with particular racial groups. Using the case of the ‘n-word’, Eglinton illustrates how the youth used popular VMC to construct, claim, and invoke a particular form of authenticity. Finally, the author shows how the unique intersection of authenticity, VMC, aspects of place, and youth experiences supported the reworking or reconstructing of racial borders and, consequently, the production of new racial identities.
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Notes
- 1.
While race has been variously theorised and while some knowledges, such as scientific discourses that essentialise and fix race to static notions of culture, tend to wield power and dominate our everyday conceptualisation of social categories (Hall, 1997; Solomos & Back, 2000), young people continuously cited racialised forms of VMC as the main constituents of race. This is not to say that young people did not also draw on common discourses found in schools such as ‘unity in diversity’ (see also Archer, 2003) or, for example, on themes of racism and white superiority – as Freddie told me, ‘it’s racist to be white’ – but rather that VMC was one of the primary ways youth constructed race as well as asserted their own racial identities.
- 2.
Hall is drawing on linguistics, anthropology, and the work of Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin.
- 3.
Dolby (2001) uses the work of Anzaldúa (1987) and Anzaldúa and Hernandez (1996), and writes of borders as an effect of Scott’s (1995) ‘enunciation of difference’ (p. 79).
- 4.
With the young people, I almost never used the word nigga; if the young person used the word and I was seeking a meaning or discussing rules and issues around the word, I would employ it once only so we had a common language. In this book, I use n-word and niggainterchangeably, depending on the context.
- 5.
In 2007, the year after this fieldwork was conducted, the New York City Council passed a resolution symbolically banning the n-word. The ban encourages people not to use the word but is not enforceable. Media controversy surrounding this word continues to grow today. Contemporary use of the n-word, current debates, and the history of this word are the subject of many scholarly articles and popular publications (e.g. Asim, 2007).
- 6.
Kanye West is an African-American hip-hop artist who often intermingles his work with black history and politics, including the marginalisation and social injustices that are part of the black experience in the United States.
- 7.
- 8.
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Eglinton, K.A. (2013). (Re)constructing Race: Racial Identities and the Borders of Race. In: Youth Identities, Localities, and Visual Material Culture. Explorations of Educational Purpose, vol 25. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4857-6_5
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