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INTRODUCTION: Cultural Identity in Discourse
- Indiana University Press
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i n t r o d u C t i o n Cultural Identity in Discourse This book offers a critical discussion about cultural identity in Zimbabwe by analyzing talk and texts about the cinematic arts. Zimbabwe’s economic and political crises have been well documented by scholars and the Western media; I argue that a related cultural crisis is also under way. With a dual focus on cinematic texts and on discourse about them, this book shows that a reductive framework of foreign and local identities assigned to cultural products, as well as to those who produce and consume them, not only builds on a history of exclusion from Zimbabwe’s national resources but also helps perpetuate current inequalities and consolidate an authoritarian state. Attention to marginalized discourse, however—talk produced by viewers and filmmakers—opens up possibilities for less polarized identities and more democratic futures. Becoming Zimbabwean: Understanding Identity as Socially Constructed When we use talk or writing to communicate with others, we present ourselves in ways that construct our own and others’ identities and produce meanings that may come to be shared. Cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall outlines two ways of understanding identity, the first of which focuses on the shared meanings that can develop through talk about national or cultural concerns. “The first position defines ‘cultural identity’ in terms of one shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self,’ hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves,’ which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common .” Hall argues that, although such a position ultimately offers only imagined identities, it remains important because of the critical role it played in struggles against colonialism. Moreover, “it continues to be a very powerful and creative force in emergent forms of representation among hitherto marginalized peoples” such as the cinema of black Caribbean filmmakers that Hall examines.1 The second view of cultural identity Hall offers is more complex and is the one on which this book is premised. Among people of shared ancestry or experience , “as well as the many points of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and significant difference which constitute ‘what we really are’; or rather—since history has intervened—‘what we have become.’ . . . Cultural identity, in this 2 introduCtion second sense, is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being.’ It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history, and culture.”2 The concept of cultural identity as predicated on both similarities and differences is important not only for understanding identity as complex and variable but also for the critical project of exposing the use and misuse of imagined monolithic identities by those in power. Hall offers a useful framework for understanding cultural identity as variable, but his focus on becoming doesn’t tell us much about how cultural identity becomes what it is. Critical discourse analysis, however, shows how identity is constructed through talk and texts and what material effects it produces. By understanding the complex relationships between discourse, power, and identity, we can also explore resistance. “True” Zimbabweans are constructed through state discourse as black people with rural ties, belonging to a limited number of ethnolinguistic groups, supporters of the ruling party, and as opposed to the West. Can Zimbabweans construct other meanings that incorporate their racial, ethnic, linguistic, and political diversity and their complex relationship with the West? Unlike forms of scholarship that claim to present unbiased accounts, both cultural studies and a critical approach to language use acknowledge that all discourse—including academic analysis—is always biased and rejects “any possibility of critical distance or objectivity.”3 My aim is not to contribute to the accumulation of knowledge for its own sake but rather to critique how dominant discourse on Zimbabwe’s cinematic arts and cultural identity maintains the interests of those in power and to explore other possibilities that are present in the marginalized discourse of filmmakers and viewers. Creating and Questioning Identity: Identities in Discourse A conversation with a Zimbabwean filmmaker and a film review published in an English-language newspaper illustrate the contrast between these two ways of conceiving cultural identity, how they play out in discourse about Zimbabwe’s cinematic arts, and one way of constructing a Zimbabwean identity, through race. In a 2001 conversation with filmmaker Simon Bright, who advocates a regional definition of “local” cinematic arts among the southern African states, I asked...