Tag Archives: multiculturalism

Zadie Smith: On Optimism and Despair

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Laurie and Debbie say:

On November 10, two days after the U.S. election, author Zadie Smith  gave a speech in Berlin, accepting the 2016 Welt Literaturpreis. With less than 48 hours to take in the news, Smith’s speech offers important insights and clear direction. Read the whole thing. Read it more than once.

President Trump rises in the west, a united Europe drops below the horizon on the other side of the ocean—but here we still are, giving a literary prize, receiving one. So many more important things were rendered absurd by the events of November 8 that I hesitate to include my own writing in the list, and only mention it now because the most frequent question I’m asked about my work these days seems to me to have some bearing on the situation at hand.

The question is: “In your earlier novels you sounded so optimistic, but now your books are tinged with despair. Is this fair to say?”

… Sometimes it is put far more explicitly, like so: “You were such a champion of ‘multiculturalism.’ Can you admit now that it has failed?” When I hear these questions I am reminded that to have grown up in a homogeneous culture in a corner of rural England, say, or France, or Poland, during the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s, is to think of oneself as having been simply alive in the world, untroubled by history, whereas to have been raised in London during the same period, with, say, Pakistani Muslims in the house next door, Indian Hindus downstairs, and Latvian Jews across the street, is thought of, by others, as evidence of a specific historical social experiment, now discredited.

Smith’s first key point is invaluable. As she says so perfectly, some people and some experiences are presumed to be normal and therefore implicitly always successful, while others, just as common if not more so, are constantly judged and frequently declared as failures. And yet, the mixed, pluralistic worlds that Smith describes are home to so many of us and our satisfying, sometimes difficult, complex lives.

She goes on to point out one of the key failures of the oversimplified belief that people who come from one place think alike:

My best friend during my youth—now my husband—is himself from Northern Ireland, an area where people who look absolutely identical to each other, eat the same food, pray to the same God, read the same holy book, wear the same clothes, and celebrate the same holidays have yet spent four hundred years at war over a relatively minor doctrinal difference they later allowed to morph into an all-encompassing argument over land, government, and national identity. Racial homogeneity is no guarantor of peace, any more than racial heterogeneity is fated to fail.

This point is impossible to argue with.

Having clearly situated us in a world where people are too complex to be categorized by either how they look or who they fight with, she goes on to give us a place to stand:

I am a citizen as well as an individual soul and one of the things citizenship teaches us, over the long stretch, is that there is no perfectibility in human affairs. This fact, still obscure to a twenty-one-year-old, is a little clearer to the woman of forty-one. …

If some white men are more sentimental about history than anyone else right now it’s no big surprise: their rights and privileges stretch a long way back. For a black woman the expanse of livable history is so much shorter. What would I have been and what would I have done—or more to the point, what would have been done to me—in 1360, in 1760, in 1860, in 1960? I do not say this to claim some pedestal of perfect victimhood or historical innocence. I know very well how my West African ancestors sold and enslaved their tribal cousins and neighbors. I don’t believe in any political or personal identity of pure innocence and absolute rectitude.

And finally, she pulls us back from both the divisions among us and the history which makes those divisions so real … back into our complex selves:

If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world—and most recently in America—the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind. Here in Germany you will remember these martial songs; they are not a very distant memory. But there is no place on earth where they have not been played at one time or another. Those of us who remember, too, a finer music must try now to play it, and encourage others, if we can, to sing along.

Read the whole thing. Read it more than once.

Hagiwara Hiroko: Pictures of Diversity?

Hagiwara Hiroko has recently written an introduction to Women of Japan.   A dean and professor at Osaka Prefecture University, she is a feminist scholar and activist who who has written extensively on issues of gender, race, art and history in the context of cultural and women’s studies.

As one of the first women I photographed for the Women of Japan project, she was involved from the beginning.  She came on several shoots to translate and to thoughtfully participate in the process.  Our conversations over the years about the concepts involved in the project were invaluable in shaping it.  As part of the project’s Models Words texts she wrote this about being photographed.

She has recently written an introduction to Women of Japan,  Pictures of Diversity? (Both the English and Japanese are on the site).

The quotes below from her essay reflect her thoughts about the project on issues of diversity and multiculturalism.

Women of Japan is a series of forty black and white photographs of women from different backgrounds taken by the American photographer Laurie Toby Edison during her three visits to Japan from 1998 to 2007. The title Women of Japan was chosen as a counter-framework to the phrase ‘Japanese women.’ The photographer intends to resist the idea that women who are of ‘this society’ are ‘real, native and authentic Japanese women endowed with essential characteristics guaranteed by blood and culture, and who have the legal status of the Japanese national.’

…The women in Edison’s photographs are from diverse backgrounds. There are Korean, American, Ainu, Okinawan women and women from ‘Buraku’ area s which are the target of ongoing discrimination. Their cultural backgrounds and their legal status are different. They are of different generations, ranging from their twenties to nineties. They have different occupations such as dancer, teacher, politician, artist, writer, truck driver, scholar, and student. Their concerns and passions are also diverse. They have different standpoints on femininity and being a woman. They are all socially positioned as women but viewers of these works will first of all be impressed with the diversity of women in Women of Japan.

The concept of diversity, however, is not as simple as it looks, and is not easy for any photographer to represent. Edison reached every model through the networks of various women’s communities. Many of the models were introduced or recommended by someone who had posed for Edison. It was a laborious but pleasurable process for the photographer, who speaks little Japanese, to get acquainted with women from various communities in Japan. Nothing was planned for the shoots; one encounter led to another in the process of creating the series.

…Since the 1980s, when people’s mobility across borders accelerated and grew constant on the global level and highly industrialized societies became undeniably multicultural, the word ‘cultural diversity’ has been often used to represent an affirmative attitude towards the situation. Japanese society has not yet acknowledged the constant presence of foreigners in society as components of a joyous diversity. Nevertheless, no one can deny that people from diverse backgrounds work and live in Japan. People know that there are those from Japan’s ex-colonies such as Korea and China, and Japanese-Brazilians, Americans, Filippinos, Iranians, Russians, Nigerians, and Bengalis to name a few. The word ‘multiculturalism’ is normally used in the context in which such multitudes must be favorably welcome and encouraged. I want to question whether Edison’s work Women of Japan can be positioned in that context.If we examine this question carefully, the answer in my view is ‘no.’ Multiculturalism is based on the assumption that each culture comprising the multitude is static and homogeneous and that multicultural society is a mosaic made of such individual components. Women in Edison’s photographs, however, are not representative of their communities. Some models wear their national costume, but they are not here as national representatives. Other models, who share a national origin or community, are in plain dress. Only one woman is in Kimono, which is generally supposed to be the Japanese national costume. Her adornment represents not Japaneseness but herself. Edison’s Women of Japan are not meant to be specimens in an ethnological museum. Cultures are fluid and always mingling to generate something new. While the legal system tries to demarcate the border, to maintain homogeneity within the borderline, and to exclude the extraneous that looks uncontrollable, people meet and cultures mix. People’s cultural identities become hybridized. The words ‘multi’ and ‘multiple’ are based on the idea of countability. Edison’s photographs convey that this is a site of exchange and mingling of people and cultures and that diverse women, whose physical expressions and postures are inscribed with this experience, live in Japan.

Women of Japan photos are here.  The front photo is of Hagiwara Hiroko and her best friend Fukazawa Junko.