Dancing Toward Democracy— unmarking
Too often we see the reproduction of all community as requiring moments that mark inclusion and moments that mark exclusion. Our idea of a “collective imagination” needs these reminders of who is allowed in and who is kept out. We look for boundary conditions as integral to community self-identity. Many times these boundaries are articulated spatially. The community clubhouse has its locks, gatekeepers, and its annual invitation-only affairs. But one unintended result of such practices is the privatization of the ethnic community: belonging goes both ways, and the group is no longer open to public membership.1 Another unintended outcome may be the use of “traditional” practices to reproduce internal exclusions based on age, or gender, or social status. Community membership may be a “package-deal” where the member is not given the authority to propose alternative practices within its boundary.
Spatially exclusive gatherings generally do the task of sorting out the others, and the right of admission displays the privilege of membership. These are events where solidarity is built as a boundary condition that marks the differences between the community and others. As long as a community's regular practices are only of this sort, the community remains “private” in its self-definition. And many communities, ethnic or social, do today mark their exclusiveness through spatialized practices of exclusion. However we also need to see how a community might make a practice of excluding exclusion.
- “In discourse politics, marginal groups attempt to contest the hegemonic discourses that position individuals within the straitjacket of normal identities to liberate the free play of differences. In any society. Discourse is power because the rules determining discourse enforce norms of what is rational, sane, or true, and to speak from outside these rules is to risk marginalization and exclusion. All discourses are produced by power, but they are not wholly subservient to it and can be used as ’a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy’... Counter-discourses provide a lever of political resistance by encapsulating a popular memory of previous forms of oppression and struggle and a means of articulating needs and demands”
(Best and Kellner 1991, 57).
Ethnic communities that imagine and articulate their sense of identity and the tasks and privileges of membership through practices that operate through this moment of exclusivity have acquired the logic of the dominant discourse: a logic of exclusion. But other logics are also available to them. Meetings, marches, and media discussions can articulate the contours of membership above that provided externally: above the stereotypes and the slurs. These practices can transform an external ethnic designation into a shared ethnic imagination. But they can do so only when the group also transforms the logic of external designation by refusing to design its own boundary conditions. Ethnic “pride” and self-marked identifications may result if there is a voluntary commitment to the community.
1I am well aware that it may seem odd to note that group membership which is presumably based upon some inherited circumstance is thereby “private” to those who claim to share in this inheritance. Here I am simply opening up to the politics of recognition, away from the politics of identity. For the transformation of putative ethnic/gender identity into a self-inscribing identity does not create a place of resistance to the original “hailing.”
