Whose Meanings?: Resignifying Voices and Their Social Locations

My philosophical reflections in this essay will revolve around the following question linking meaning and identity: What is the relationship between cultural products and the individuals and groups that create them? More specifically, what is the relation between racial and ethnic meanings and the racial and ethnic groups in which they originate? There are two extreme semantic views that answer this question in highly problematic and inappropriate ways. On the one hand, there are those who tie meanings to their originating expressive communities in a rigid way, claiming that there are proprietary relations between semantic structures and the people who created them. On the other hand, there are those who think that meanings can be completely detached from their originating cultural contexts and completely decoupled from the experiences of their users, becoming portable semantic structures as soon as they are created, that is, becoming usable by anybody in any context. Since meanings are treated as properties to fight over by these polarized views, I will use an economic metaphor to analyze and discuss them. I will call the first semantic view the Monopoly Model and the second one the Free Trade Model. By contrast, my own view departs from these economic views of meaning as property and understands meanings as relational—as complex sets of relations or relational structures—rather than as property.

In the first section of this article, drawing on Alain Locke and Pierre Bourdieu, I will identify the pitfalls of polarized (economic) semantic models and will articulate a critique of their central assumptions. In section 2, I will sketch my relational model of ethnic and racial meanings, which can overcome the difficulties of the existing polarized views. My discussion will highlight the opportunities and obstacles that exist for subversion and symbolic transformations in our cultural practices, trying to show how they are either obscured or clarified by competing semantic models.

1. The Dangers of Cultural Monopoly and Free Trade

Whom does the great art produced by the Harlem Renaissance belong to? And the political values and ideals articulated by the civil rights movement? To African Americans? To all of us? And do African Americans have a more legitimate right to appropriate the products of the cultural movements of the African diaspora (e.g., the Negritude movement) as well as those of cultural movements in continental Africa? It is hard to deny the importance of recognizing that these are the cultural achievements of peoples of African descent. At the same time, it is also hard to deny the importance of these cultural movements and their products being available to everybody. These two insights about the crucial importance of cultural affiliation and cultural availability will guide my reflections on racial and ethnic meanings. Although often ignored in the recent literature, these two fundamental insights were forcefully articulated by classic American philosophers such as Alain Locke.

In the 1920s Locke called attention to the cultural heritage that "New Negroes" were articulating and putting into use in their cultural practices. According to Locke, the Harlem Negroes were reclaiming their past cultural agency as well as remaking their own self-image in their present and for their future. Through this new cultural agency, Locke argues, the New Negro was achieving " a common consciousness," attaining "a life in common": "In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination. It is—or promises to be—a race capital" (1925, 7; emphasis added). This Lockean notion of "race capital" can be understood in Bourdieuan terms as a form of "cultural capital." The overall value of one's modes of expression is what Pierre Bourdieu calls one's cultural capital, which determines the profits that one can make in cultural exchanges. These profits can be gains in social status and influence, but sometimes they are direct economic profits: for example, the profit of the use of language in a job interview (that is, speaking with a certain diction, in a masculine or feminine way, using certain terms, etc.). Bourdieu talks about the cultural capital that particular individuals accrue in their lives and exhibit in their symbolic...