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identities.
yikes. now there's a problematic category.
if this is linked to the other thread on immigration/migrant workers, then what would follow is that these categories are (a) ideological and (b) are imposed on Others as a marker of their exclusion. so it is not surprising that folk who do not experience that exclusion find the matter of category assignment to be problematic.
that's how this business operates: so to the objection that they dont express one's complexity....the answer is: well of COURSE they dont.
anyway: i lived in france for quite a while and fond myself being identified initially as american..which meant that i could nto speak french, was rich and kinda stupid.....then as an american leftist...which was better but had the perverse consequence of making me into a curiousity. so i would find myself being introduced to folk in that way by people in my neighborhood, and the feeling would always creep in that the line between introduction and what a carnival barker does was very thin.
"hurry hurry step right up and see this amazing Freak of Nature..."
on the other hand, living there forced me to deal with my own americanness, which i thought i could slip away from only to find that everything i did and said seemed to demonstrate it. it was not--and still is not--a category i identify with or in terms of: but in my sense of personal space, in how i carry myself, in how i dress and speak, i am it. i guess.
the assignment didnt come from me simply because the category doesnt function for me as it does socially in another country.
i did find it strange that as people got to know me a little, they would create a little space for me to the side of the stereotypes rather than wonder about the stereotype itself. but you see this happening all the time, everywhere, it seems: x is a good exemplar of category 1, which is generally understood to be a negative category, deginating folk that "we" are predisposed to not like, not for any particular reason, but mostly because they are not "us"....i dont know why this happens. maybe there's something unnerving about others because they accidentally reveal the arbitrariness of the "us". and that, apparently, is not good.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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