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Moving the Discourse on Identities in Intercultural Communication

Structure, Culture, and Resignifications

S. Lily Mendoza, Rona T. Halualani, and Jolanta A. Drzewiecka

In this chapter, S. Lily Mendoza, Rona T. Hualualani, and Jolanta A. Drzewiecka advocate an alternative communication-based framework for theorizing culture and identity. They note that the past conceptualizations of identity in the functional and interpretive research traditions are inadequate to capture the complexity and volatility of identity. They embark on the task of theorizing identity as a dynamic and multi-faceted process through the conjunction of the critical and interpretive approaches. In their innovative approach, they define identities as projects, performed jointly by the contingent self and determining structures to produce a coherent, stable, and unified sense of self (subjectivity). In their case studies on Polish, Hawaiian, and Filipino/a cultural identities, Mendoza, Hualualani, and Drzewiecka illustrate that identity can be explored with consideration of both interpersonal interactions and social/historical structures. The first case of Polish identity emphasizes identities as performative, that is, communicative acts that constitute, rather than merely express, subjectivities. The second case of indigenous Hawaiian identities reveals that identities are double-sided, resignifiable, and unforeclosed. Finally, the third case of the Filipino indigenization movement envisages identity as dynamic translation toward a more equitable and just collective cultural identity. Like Mendoza, Hualualani, and Drzewiecka, Kalscheuer (Chapter 11) also ventures to bridge the gap between research at the micro-level (interpersonal/intergroup interaction dynamics) and at the macro-level (social, political, and historical contexts) in intercultural communication.

In this essay, we propose to do three things: first, we seek to provide a focused critique of theories of identity within intercultural communication literature to set the stage for the reconceptualization of identity; second, we propose ways of revising/extending identity theorizing in the field through the use of alternative communication-based frameworks or theoretical lenses that give the construct, “identity,” a more dynamic and multi-faceted re-reading; and finally, we offer empirical examples of the use of such alternative frameworks in three brief case studies drawn from the three authors’ individual works. In all this, the goal is to put the concept, “identity,” as it were, “in to motion,” to borrow a phrase from Rosaldo (1989/1993, p. 91). We do this by surfacing both the structural constraints as well as the subjectivere-creative processes involved in the constructing, construing, performing, and negotiating of identities. Ultimately, we seek to show how the concept, “identity,” might be engaged more adequately taking into consideration its cultural, historical, and political embeddedness in multiple contexts using the lens of communication.

A Critique of Identity Theorizing in Intercultural Communication Research

In this critique, we look at the ways in which cultural identity has been theorized in intercultural communication literature and point to future theoretical directions in the conceptualization of identity. We note how prevailing theoretical perspectives in traditional literature have tended unproblematically to use the following as boundary markers of identity: nationality/ethnicity, presumed group membership, identified shared meanings, stable social context, and purportedly self-evident empirical (behavioral) manifestations of shared cultural practices. With the emergence of more interpretive and critical perspectives in the field, we find beginning conceptualizations of “identity” less as a fixed, and reified phenomenon and more as a contested terrain of competing interests, bringing in the macro social, historical, and political contexts of its enactments previously missing in earlier conceptualizations. We find, however, that although the move from static, essentialist conceptualizations of the construct to a more dynamic one recognizing shifts in significations within diverse contexts is most welcome, there remains a need to analyze both ends of identity construction, namely, its structural determinations, on the one hand, and its ongoing, open-ended, unforeclosed, re-creation and re-construction, on the other. It is this project of bringing these two aspects (of structure and agency) together in the apprehending of identity dynamics that we hope to accomplish in this essay.

In the field of intercultural communication, scholars have looked at the construct, “identity,” mostly from social scientific and interpretive perspectives and most recently from an emerging critical perspective. The traditional social scientific and qualitative studies of identity have contributed great insights into the boundaries of identity and its behavioral/speech enactment. However, these studies have failed to examine identity in terms of historical contextualization and power relations.

Through social scientific approaches, intercultural scholars have studied the salience (and strength) of cultural identity for group members and the consistent forms of behavior expected of such members (e.g., Gudykunst, 1983, 1994; Gudykunst & Nishida, 1994; Gudykunst, Nishida, & Chua, 1987; Hofstede, 1983; Kim, 1984, 1986, 1991; Ting-Toomey et al., 1991; Ting-Toomey, 1993). Such work has greatly contributed to outlining the possible boundary markers around specific national and ethnic identities and their resulting correlates in terms of communication behavior. Yet, theoretically, there exists the assumption that to possess a strong identification with one’s ethnic group means that a set of distinct meanings and symbols is invoked in the same way and to the same degree (i.e., salience) by all members. Those who belong to the same culture, in this view, generally share greater commonality (and homogeneity) in their overall experiential backgrounds than those from different cultures. As a result, the meanings and identities reside within separate cultural groups and are communicated intact, thereby leading to an immediate, guaranteed, communicated subjectivity. Therefore, this vein of research has not fully explored the nature of cultural identification, or what it means to be a member of a particular ethnic group, and how this in itself is historically and politically situated.

Interpretive intercultural communication scholars have focused on cultural identities in terms of shared meanings and values (e.g., Carbaugh, 1990; Collier & Thomas, 1989; Hecht, 1993; Hecht, Ribeau, & Alberts, 1989; Katriel, 1986; 1997; Philipsen, 1975; Weider & Pratt, 1990). Although much of the interpretive cultural identity research focuses on demonstrated identity practices (using the language code, referring to symbolic forms, and creating shared interpretations), interpretive scholars also highlight the importance of historical, contextual, and power-laden aspects of identity through the notions of the ascribed self (or the social definitions and perceptions of “who I am”) and the avowed self (one’s self perception) (Collier & Thomas, 1989). However, the dilemma of interpretive research is that most often a culture is taken solely for what “it is” in its empirically verifiable context. “Context” is conceptualized as a stable, community space that fully determines subjective meanings. That is, identity-in-context is denotatively read like a “text”; no adequate connotative linkages are made to wider socio-political formations and historical influences. This suggests that identities reside in contexts, or are already out there, as opposed to meanings and their relations constituting that very context. Cultural identities, then, become fully apprehendable as a readable, consistent, and coherent assemblage of meanings and subjectivities. Because cultural identity is naturally located “as is” within a context, interpretive scholars (e.g., Carbaugh, 1990; Philipsen, 1975) reason that they must immerse themselves into a community through ethnography and participant observation so as to see “culture talking about itself” (Carbaugh, 1990, p. 1). Cultural meanings comprising the identity of a group or community are, therefore, presumed to be “representable” in an unmediated fashion, and interpretive intercultural communication researchers come to completely rely on the enacted behaviors and performed meanings as the primary reflectors of identity.

Thus, past intercultural communication research has concentrated on the co-construction of identity through social interaction (the interdependent nature of avowal and ascription processes) at the expense of larger politicized forms of social ascription (e.g., governmental/state categories of identity, historical myths about who groups are, a group’s constructions of authenticity), forms that may further explain the enacted communication practices and place them in a dialogic context between structural constructions of identity and re-created group identities by cultural members themselves. Several questions therefore emerge here: How might the nature of communication practices of identity involve more than its empirical face? How is identity multilayered in terms of both the visible and the invisible, or rather, communication practices and rhetorical expressions of identity and power dimensions, structural constraints and constructions, and historical limits that frame identity? How is the communication/speech enactment of identity intricately embedded within power relations (in terms of identities that represent particular power interests), historical contextualization, and political functions?

With regard to critical perspectives on identity or those that examine identity in relation to issues of macro contexts (historical, social, and political levels), and power (Martin & Nakayama, 1999), scholars have studied identity as the dialogic site of both structural constraints and racial categorizations and identity remakings on the part of marginalized groups (see e.g., González, Houston, & Chen, 1997; Hegde, 1998; Nakayama, 1997; Nakayama & Krizek, 1995). However, such research tends to focus on the structural aspects without a fuller discussion of how power manifests itself in communication practices that constitute identity. As an attempt to connect such critical work with past research on identity, Collier (1998) proposes possible theoretical alliances between interpretive and critical perspectives on identity (e.g., poststructuralist, critical, postcolonial, cultural studies approaches). She draws attention to multiple identity categories for individuals and the socio-political and historical contexts surrounding identity. For example, Collier (1998) explains that

Yet, at the same time, Collier implicitly suggests that identity is studied either with an interactional focus or a structural focus as opposed to one based on the relationship between both the interactional/cultural and the structural. She points out that postmodern and cultural studies of identity concentrate on structural factors such as race, class, and gender at the expense of social interactional episodes of identity construction (i.e., the meaning-making processes that constitute shared group membership). It is this noted gap in current critical research studies in intercultural communication that we hope to address in this essay.

Here, we therefore argue that the relationship between identity, communication, and power needs to be thoroughly examined in intercultural communication research. The value of such analysis of interactional/cultural dimensions of identity in relation to those of the structural lies in its potential for revealing new analytical insights about cultural groups (even those groups— like African Americans, Native Americans, Chinese and Japanese communities—whose communication codes and identity criteria are always the focus of continuous study) (see Basso, 1979; Gudykunst & Nishida, 1994; Gudykunst, Nishida, & Chua, 1987; Hecht, Collier, & Ribeau, 1993; Weider & Pratt, 1990). Through a reconceptualization of identity and intercultural communication in terms of power, scholars will be able to examine the changing nature of identity, issues of differential power positionings, historical events and crises embedded in and surrounding identity, shifts in practices and the political/historical reasons for such shifts. Ultimately, such a reconceptualization enables a view of identity as a deeper politicized process of subject formation and identification. As Clifford (2000) notes in his call for a rigorous sustaining of a “double vision” in any scholarly analysis of identity processes:

Critical Articulations: Performativity, Resignifications, and Translation

Accounting for power in processes of identity formation and negotiation, then, transforms the whole terrain of “cultural identity” from a reified, presumably innocent, neutral space into one marked by on going contestations (e.g., contestations over inequalities, differential power relations, forced silencings and exclusions) and, more generally, contestations over meaning and signification. Once we go from the facade of the “givenness,” “naturalness,” and “normality” of social and cultural identities to the historical processes that produced them, we begin to shift the ground of discussion from fixed reified notions of identity as a “thing,” “given in nature” to processes of production, naturalization, and normalization. Several theorists help move us toward this direction beginning with Freud (1940/1949), who first shattered the Kantian and Cartesian notion of a unitary, integrated, sovereign, autonomous self by introducing the “unconscious,” thus, first giving rise to the notion of a “split subject.” This notion of the split subject is later on elaborated and complexified in subsequent psychoanalytic, semiotic, and discourse-centered theories and appropriated in various ways by feminist, postcolonial, postmodern, and poststructuralist theorists in their respective work (Althusser, 1971; Bhabha, 1994; Butler, 1990; Derrida, 1978; Hall, 1996; Lacan, 1977; among others). In these theorists’ view, there is no such thing as an always already pre-constituted identity. Rather, identities are projects, joint (conscious or unconscious) performances by both contingent selves and by determining structures to produce a coherent, stable, and unified sense of self (subjectivity) out of the default splitting that may then serve as a more secure grounding for a way of being in the world. Processes of identity production (identification) then always involve a conscious or unconscious process of suturing, a way of sewing together disparate, sometimes contradictory elements as well as non-necessary relations to produce an appearance or feel of one-ness, continuity, id-entity, stability, and coherence. Such suturing is accomplished communicatively by such practices as narrativization (the production of coherent stories out of the accidents and vicissitudes of history), representation (the symbolic production of meaning), ideological interpellation (the positioning of subjects by institutional discourses or by the ruling ideology), performativity (the linguistic production of identity through acts of naming that draw upon, but are not necessarily determined by, sedimented repertoires of social and cultural conventions), and symbolic resignifications (the struggle to dis-articulate a given identity sign from its normative signified and endow it with different meaning by attaching it to some other conceptual referent or signified). These practices are by no means innocent, but whether employed by the dominant or by the subordinate, always involve the violent exercise of power. This is because the achievement of identity is “always based on excluding something and establishing a violent hierarchy between … two resultant poles-man/woman, etc.” (Laclauas cited in Hall, 1996, p. 5). In this symbolic contestation, however, the outcomes are never determinate. Rather, they are contingent upon the successful (if momentary) aligning and articulation of otherwise disparate elements under the fiction of a singular self-formation. Gramsci’s (1971) notion of hegemony as the achievement of provisional alliance among competing interests through the winning of moral consent in the subject/s/ed may be extended to this process of self-formation to highlight the symbolic character of this form of struggle. In the end, communicative acts implicated in the production of identity formation invariably involve a struggle for the capture and stabilizing of the sign, otherwise un-fixable and in Derrida’s (1978) words, forever “differing” and “deferring” (cf. also Mendoza, 2002).

Within this view of identity and identity construction, institutional/structural formations (e.g., cultures, nations, legal/educational/religious systems), although representing powerful sedimentations of normative practices and conventions that serve to predispose (or discipline) community members to identify in particular ways,¹ by no means single handedly determine identity formation. Given that power does not in here only in those spaces traditionally perceived as sites of condensation of dominant power, but rather circulates more widely in what Foucault (1977) calls the capillaries and micropolitics of power, structural/institutional determination of subjectivity is never a finally completed project.

In other words, even within a given hegemonic order, the successful achievement of an “identity” within the shaping power of ideology (whether cultural, religious, or political) or of any disciplinary regime can never serve as a final guarantee of victory. Rather, everyday communicative acts and performative practices by subjects acting individually and/or collectively constantly rework the given identity repertoires thrown down at them by institutional structures. They do this in ways that either transform, elaborate, resist, displace, or reinforce the institutionalized subjectifying/identification processes. Furthermore, it is to be recognized that any suturing done can likewise be undone by the same exercise of power that made such suturing (articulation) possible in the first place. In the reading of identity processes then, a critical translation is needed, one that is able to get beyond surface appearances of stability, homogeneity, and foreclosed seamlessness to expose the “work” or labor of politics inherent in all identification processes.

A fruitful way, then, to get at a complex analysis of identity politics and dynamics is through a critical interrogation of those sites and practices of articulation (and re-articulation), suturing and unraveling, signification (and re-signification), and other forms of symbolic contestations made manifest through communicative practices. It is the interrogation of these sites and practices that will be addressed in more concrete ways in the next section.

Sample Case Studies

How does one perform such critical interrogation of identity processes, politics, and dynamics? Following are examples of method-driven frameworks that simultaneously get at processes of articulation between and among structure, power and agency in the constitution of identities via communicative practices.

Identity as Performative

Judith Butler’s work on gender has been very influential in theoretical projects rethinking identities and belonging. According to Butler (1990, 1995a, 1995b), identity is performative; the “I” is constituted and comes in to being through a linguistic performative act that discursively establishes what it names. From this perspective, gender identity is a cultural fiction sustained by “the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions” (1990, p. 140). In the enactment of subjectivity, performative acts draw on and engage historically sedimented conventions and re-encode these conventions in the process. Stating “I am Polish” is a performative act that constitutes ethnic subjectivity for the speaker and is made possible by a repertoire of ethnic identifications in general and the meanings of Polishness circulated in the U.S. in particular. Whether it evokes a Polish joke or a “my grandfather was from Poland” statement in response, its meaning is constituted by a variety of discourses brought together in the moment of articulation. The act itself is performed because of the existence of the sedimented conventions that have become entrenched by being repetitively enacted and thus define the universe of possibilities through which a subject can be constituted. These conventions naturalize what they perform (gender, ethnicity, race, etc.) because they are so familiar, so much so that we expect nothing less and nothing more and a performance outside of them becomes inconceivable. However, these conventions a real sore-encoded in the performance they make possible. The notion of re-encoding is important in so far as performative acts are, at once, enabled by an existing repertoire of conventions and capable of changing that very repertoire, infusing it with new meanings, and giving it new forms. Subjectivity is always produced in this double process of negotiating power, even if some conventions are more powerful than others in policing the individuals so produced.

Butler’s notion of performativity enables us to take seriously and push further the notion that ethnic identity is emergent. Communication scholars have argued that ethnicity emerges through communication; however, the radical implications of this argument are never fully realized in communication theorizing when narratives, symbols, and meanings are conceptualized as (merely) expressions of ethnicity. The notion of performativity signals a subtle but crucial shift in thinking about the relationship between communication and ethnicity. Although an interpretive approach in communication indeed advanced a more complex view of ethnicity as both processual and problematic, in studies representing this perspective, ethnicity is still understood to be what mainly shapes communication. One such example can be found in the otherwise excellent study of the relationship between talk, social identities, and social space offered by Philipsen in which ethnicity is characterized as “a pervasive determinant of interaction, association, and residence” (1976, p. 17; see also Philipsen, 1975). In like manner, the works of Hecht, Collier, and Ribeau (1993) define ethnic identity as “perceived membership in an ethnic culture that is enacted in the appropriate and effective set of symbols, cultural narratives, similar interpretations and meanings, and common ancestry and traditions” (p. 30, see also Lindsley, 1999). But the shortcoming of such studies is their unilinear focus on the relationship between ethnicity and communication, imagining the former as unilaterally shaping the latter. In such studies, ethnicity ends up preexisting communication and determining communication while communication becomes merely the passive vehicle for the expression of such an identity. Butler’s concept of sedimented conventions is crucial because it enables us to understand that ethnicity is not an essence, a preexisting factor determining communication. Rather, ethnicity is constituted by an ensemble of discourses, customs, and practices that are not backed up by an essence, but that have been entrenched and assumed to be “obvious” and “natural” because they have been repeated often enough. In this perspective, ethnic identity is an effect of discourses and not vice versa. In this reversal of the relationship between ethnic identity and communication, it is not ethnicity that shapes or determines communication patterns, but rather communication that makes ethnic identification possible. In Butler’s terms, communication is viewed as the process through which sedimented conventions regulate performative acts which bring ethnic subjects into being. It is through communication that ethnicity is re-constituted over and over again, regulated, and made to appear authentic, natural, and continuous. Ethnic identity, in this view, is neither preexisting nor simply “expressed.” Indeed, it cannot be found any where except in expressions. Rather, ethnicity is made up and mobilized each time within specific institutionalized discourses and practices that preexist individual acts, and produce, constrain, and regulate definitions of the collective ethnic body. As cultural acts, cultural practices and rituals constitute, rather than simply express, immigrant subjectivities. Polish food preparation, Christmas rituals, and other practices, for instance, “are reified and naturalized as ‘typical ethnic expressions’” through repetition (Fortier, 1999, p. 43). It is such repetitions that produce the ethnic “I” within existing larger regulatory discursive networks.

The notions of citation and iteration are central to performativity as a communicative process. Citation is a moment of activation of the subject in which the subject is temporarily established as an author but with a derivative status (Butler, 1997). As individuals, we engage in ethnic practices, talk about them, and interpret what others do even as our subjectivity is constituted through the very discourses that engage us. Performative citation is not simply repetition; like a citation in textual work, it is used not only for its content value but also as a legitimizing strategy. Conceivably, I could do anything I wanted to and call it Polish ethnicity. However, my performance is not likely to result in public acceptance as an instance of Polish ethnicity unless I appropriately cite (not as a conscious doer but as a derivative author whose ethnic subjectivity is constituted by the very act of citation) conventions of Polish ethnicity. My performance gains credibility through the citation making me a viable ethnic subject. However, the process of signification is almost never closed; altered or new meanings may result from any moment of discursive production.

Another performance in which ethnic subjectivity is constituted is through participation in food rituals. Although food is a material practice that provides nourishment, it is also a signifying practice. What specific foods are consumed, on what occasion, and in what surroundings marks out a certain terrain of identity. For example, when Polish Americans share a dinner after a Polish mass on Sunday, they collectively reenact Polish ethnicity according to conventions which regulate what food counts as authentic Polish food and how it should be served. Following particular recipes, whether literally or from memory, serves to reiterate and to cite what has gone on for a long time. The repetitive cooking, baking, selling, buying and consuming “is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established” (Butler, 1990, p. 140). It is important to emphasize that although these practices are sedimented, every reenactment is an individualized act of poetic stylization. Particular foods are used repetitively as performative enactments of Polish identity, although each particular dish bears the signature of the cook.

The notion of performativity explains why ethnicity endures in particular forms, why it evokes strong emotions, and how it regulates collective and individual expressions. Performativity problematizes essentializing modes that conceptualize ethnicity as something that precedes communicative acts and is expressed through them. By conceiving identity in general as subject to on going temporal alteration, one may raise the question of “how identities continue to be produced, embodied and performed, effectively, passionately and with social and political consequences” (Bell, 1999 p. 2). It emphasizes the importance of investigating identities within particular regulatory discourses that produce these identities but are said to result from them (Butler, 1990, p. 45). It directs our attention away from the misleading notion of “authenticity” to a more interesting question of how particular conventions are transported across borders, in fused with new meanings, and practiced in specific locations. In other words, the focus shifts from ethnicity as a given, to ethnicity as a project; from core ideas and symbols to sedimentation. From this perspective, it is also possible to address the politics of ethnicity; e.g., one might question the play of visibility and invisibility or appeals to descent and genealogy. Certainly, ethnicity interacts with phenotypical/racial signification; “looking Polish” is an important element legitimizing particular performances. Still, whiteness enables ethnic invisibility and choice as white immigrants and ethnics are not marked in the U.S. cultural politics as Other. The question then is no longer what a particular ethnicity is, but how it is produced, how it is regulated, for what purposes, and whom it excludes.

Identity as Double-Sided, Resignifiable, and Unforeclosed

Identity, although structured for us throughout many contexts, is double-sided, resignifiable, and never foreclosed (Hall, 1980). According to the cultural studies scholars Popular Memory Group (1982), Richard Johnson (1987), and Anne McClintock (1995), identity positions should be analyzed as both structurally framed and never fully foreclosed (not univocally fixed or directly determined). In such a construction, identity is a multivested site invested in structural constraints and the new resignifiable possibilities for remaking identity and agency. This key point of identity theorizing enables intercultural communication studies to examine the political-structural context constituting identities and the potentially changing function, meaning, or form of identities. In fact, both Martinand Nakayama (1999) and Collier (1998) discuss this very point; that identities are both structurally and historically fixed and changing. However, there are few studies in the field that fully and specifically analyze the notion that identity is double-sided and can, in one instance, function as a dominant structure and then in another, without changing its communicative form, potentially operate as a resistive signification. This next case study serves to illustrate the importance of there signifiable potential of identity.

An example of this theoretical concept lies in the case of Hawaiians whose identity as native to Hawai‘i has been challenged since the 1700s when foreigners first arrived, but yet has not been fully foreclosed. In fact, dominant signifiers that have been used in the past to misrecognize or deny Hawaiians their native identity have been remade by Hawaiians as new possibilities for agency in a delimited and structured context. For the sake of clarity, we shall use the provisional term “indigenous Hawaiians” to designate those who have some amount of blood connection to pre-contact Hawaiian society.

Throughout the 1700s and 1800s, the discourse of “nativism” in Hawai‘i had been liberalized out of its ethnic distinction and made to include all foreign residents, explorers, and business interests (see Halualani, 2002). This liberal and power-invested construction of Hawaiianness ultimately had the effect of negating the claim of Hawaiians to be the “natives” and original inhabitants of Hawai‘i. In the 1900s, as business interests flocked to Hawai‘i for its sugar plantations and tourism potential, the U.S. government imposed a blood quantum test on all would-be Hawaiians that pegged state-recognized “Hawaiianness” to an arbitrary standard of at least 50% “Hawaiian” heritage as established by factual parentage and written documents. Thus, Hawaiian identity disintegrates from being a taken-for-granted prerogative of indigenous Hawaiians to a structured identity that most “others” (state residents of Hawai‘i,² tourists, and state/governmental agencies), except indigenous Hawaiians, could construct and/or claim for themselves. Blood itself became the dominant mechanism through which indigenous Hawaiians were denied their identity. Proving blood quantum has proven to be so difficult that many indigenous Hawaiians cannot present enough evidence to lay claim to being Hawaiian. As such, state agencies such as the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, while seemingly claiming to help Hawaiians, represent the arm of the federal and state governments in surveilling the Hawaiian community and further imposing inaccurate hegemonic racial classifications, state policies, and legal proceduralities.

Most recently, in February 2000, in the Rice vs. Cayetano case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that non-Hawaiian residents of Hawai‘i could no longer be barred from voting for officers of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (here after OHA), a state organization purportedly created to aid and serve Native Hawaiians (Ten Bruggencate, 2001). The Supreme Court decision asserted that the previous OHA policies that allowed only indigenous Hawaiian participation reflected unconstitutional race-based discrimination. In addition, this decision ruled that non-indigenous Hawaiians could also run for office in OHA. Such a ruling, in effect, refused the notion that native Hawaiians are indigenous to Hawai‘i and thus are entitled to native claims (for e.g., land, benefits, assistance). Thus, the context of identity surrounding Hawaiians appears to be fully determined and bleak.

However, identity as a field of power forces is resignifiable even in the most structured and determined conditions. Dominant signifiers of identity—such as blood—can be remade at certain political moments and can carry great political strength for Hawaiians. For example, in interviews conducted by one of the authors of this essay, indigenous Hawaiians expressed their identity in terms of blood quantum. Thus, the Hawaiian community’s framing of their own identity may appear to be a type of “false consciousness” in which Hawaiians themselves have uncritically accepted the dominant blood significations created by the state. However, when examining the communication practices of identity more closely and situating them in the historical and political contexts surrounding claims to “Hawaiianness,” “blood” is remade and resignified by indigenous Hawaiians who feel that every other aspect of their identity has been stripped and misrecognized. In the same breath that they claim Hawaiiannness as being about blood, indigenous Hawaiians also critique the state for imposing racial classifications that were created to never be proven. Through such mini-critiques, Hawaiians therefore distinguish their significations around blood as being more than just the state hegemonic classifications, thereby demonstrating the situated power interests of communicative expressions of identity. They uniquely reframe the discourse around blood and re-deploy the unquestioned and naturalized scientific authority accorded the mechanism of blood and parentage for their own purposes. These community members therefore argue that being Hawaiian is not about “behaving” like Hawaiians (for many residents and tourists try to adopt such behavior) but is about having the blood parentage, which is difficult to prove under the guidelines of the state. Thus, in response to past eradications of their native authority, indigenous Hawaiians themselves claim that they are the only ones—in the blood—who are originally and unquestionably Hawaiian—not the state which has created inaccurate procedures for proving Hawaiianness. Hence, identity is resignifiable and should be understood in terms of the changing political context in which it occurs. Indigenous Hawaiians’ blooded speech is not evidence of a subjected group nor is it an illustration of completely autonomous social subjects. Instead, the case of Hawaiian identity, as reclaimed by indigenous community members, demonstrates that social actors can reassemble and resignify their identifications even within the most structured conditions, which challenges scholars to re-interrogate identity in past studies in relation to changing political contexts (see Halualani, 2002).

Identity in Dynamic Translation

In poststructuralist theorizing, a clear dichotomy is often drawn between essentialist and nonessentialist forms of identity avowals with the latter being clearly privileged in the literature as encouraging of more “theoretically correct” democratic politics. The former, on the other hand, tends to be vilified, discredited, and charged with fomenting naive, dangerous, exclusionary politics³ whose ultimate end-logic is often held responsible for the phenomenon of ethnic cleansings, fratricidal wars, and balkanization such as what currently prevails in much of Eastern Europe and other parts of the world. The culprit, it is said, is identity politics’ rigid, reifying, exclusionary logic. Thus, there is a strong tendency among poststructuralist scholars to dismiss any and all expressions of identity politics as anachronistic projects—romanticist at best, offering false guarantee of “correct” politics; dangerous at worst, prone to devolving into repressive exclusionary regimes through their insistence on ideological and semantic foreclosure. Reading identity politics, however, is not a simple matter of categorizing a particular movement under either rubric (essentialist vs. nonessentialist) and assuming that thereby one has figured it all out. Rather, it entails going beyond the surface rhetoric of identity avowals to the strategic and political dynamics possibly propelling such invocations. In other words, a transformational (rather than a static/empiricist) framework is needed to adequately comprehend what is going on when confronted with movements that appear, on surface, to invoke essentialist appeals to primordial belonging (see, for example, the complex politics of native Hawaiians’ appeal to blood for strategic political objectives in the foregoing example). This adequate reading of identity movement politics is important in that automatic delegitimation of such on the basis of a mere surface analysis of the movement’s rhetoric can have dire repercussions on the representation of cultural politics on the ground.

One way of getting at a complex, non-reductive reading of identity politics is by employing the lens of dynamic translation (cf. Nida & Taber, 1969; Spivak, 1990). In linguistic translation, to translate in a merely formalistic (literalistic) way is simply to search for the literalistic equivalent of a word in the source language that formally corresponds with a similar word in the target language regardless of what may be its differing connotative use in the original context. However, with the advent in linguistic science of the Sapir-Whorf linguistic relativity hypothesis (consistent with Saussurean semiotics), linguistic codes are deemed no longer mechanically interchangeable between languages given that

To translate or to read identity politics in a transformational way, then, is to engage in context-sensitive analysis of its formalistic elements (empirical practices) that is able to get beyond its surface rhetoric to its inner dynamic. As Hall (1996) proposes, a productive question to ask might be, “In relation to what set of problems, [by way of assessing the function served by the invocation of identity politics within each historicized context] does the irreducibility of the concept, identity, emerge?” (p. 2). After all, he says, it could very well be that such invocations are

A corollary approach to that of dynamic translation would be to adopt a directional rather than a static positional basis for evaluating or judging the “soundness” of any particular identitarian movement. Deriving his formulation from the mathematical distinctions between “(fixed) sets” and “fuzzy sets,” Kraft (1979) explains:

In other words, the point is to make evaluative/interpretive judgments of the legitimacy of a given identity avowal less on the basis of where some one or something is positionally located at any given point in time, and more on whether one is moving toward or away from an identified purpose or goal. Here, in terms of a starting point, distance from the goal is nowhere nearly as important as which direction the movement is ultimately heading toward. Movements for decolonization, for example, of necessity, are invariably known to undergo a phase that Fanon (1963) refers to as a “passionate search for national culture” (p. 209). This is a form of identification that often uses the language of essentialism in its surface rhetoric (i.e., “This is who you say we are. That’s not who we are; this is who we really are”). But one may argue, using a directionally-oriented dynamic reading, that a movement need not, does not always, stay there, trapped in that phase of reaction. Often, a closer look reveals a complex political project, of which that phase of reaction, along with its strategically essentialist politics, is but a moment in its multi-phase pursuit of colonial liberation.

Such is the case with the indigenization movement among newly-decolonizing Filipinos in the homeland and Filipino Americans in the diaspora. This is a movement easily mis-recognized by some as nothing more than a naive, primordialist project seeking what is deemed to be an “impossible return to an uncontaminated mythic past.” Worse, in the Philippine homeland where the movement mandates a “closed circuit of interaction” normatively confining the discourse only to “cultural members” to the exclusion of “outsiders” (i.e., “non-Filipinos”) the red flag of exclusionary politics is waved all too easily. (On some level, one might say, rightly so, and indeed, debates on who are included in this “we” that’s being constituted around the identity category “Filipino” are rife in and outside the movement.) A more dynamic, directionally-focused re-reading, however, yields yet other kinds of meanings with regard to its politics. One example of such re-reading sees the indigenization project as going beyond the much-legitimated notion of “strategic essentialism” to an even more extreme form of “strategic parochialism.”⁴ This is the deliberate (if metaphorical) “cutting off” of Filipinos’ historic dominant other(s) out of the circuit of interaction if only to begin a first-time constituting of a heretofore non-existent discourse “among ourselves.” Thus, from the reactive phase of constantly needing to counteract colonial ascriptions of “barbarism,” “degraded humanity,” and utter “savagery,” the discourse, by the act of closing down the circuit of interaction, is meant to encourage other kinds of questions that, within the space inclusive of its dominant other(s), are deemed impossible to pursue, e.g., “What is it like to begin talking among ourselves instead of constantly needing to give an account of ourselves to others? What different sorts of agendas might arise? What different norms of communication? What other kinds of concerns (political, cultural, economic, etc.)? What potential conflicts? And now that we no longer need to invoke a mythic united front vis-à-vis an outside foreign power, what new pressing challenges might emerge from our acknowledgment of what is, after all, our internal heterogeneity and regional cultural differences?”

Quite the opposite, then, of the expected logic of movements that appear to be driven by essentialist identitarian politics, one finds instead interesting and complex dynamics when these are read from a non-static, transformational framework using the lens of dynamic translation. Indeed, one surprise that may greet one is finding, not essentialism, but rather, creative invention and re-imagination, as the primary modes of identity and cultural reclamation in such movements. The importance of critically re-reading (re-theorizing) such and feeding back to movement participants their translated work rendered in another language (i.e., in the language of theory and cultural criticism), in these writers’ experience, is in being able to contribute to the hastening of the movement’s process from the curse of a reactive politics to a more transformative, inventive, self-re-creative politics away/apart from the constant gaze of their historic dominant other. Not all identitarian movements, however, may be automatically assumed to have the same transformative dynamics. Rather, what seems to determine the direction of a movement at any given moment in time (whether toward liberatory politics or toward repressive, exclusionary practice) is the context of power. As Boyarin (1994) rightly points out by way of making a case for the importance of power as the most critical context in determining legitimacy of identity articulation, there is a world of difference between Israel’s practice of cultural separatism as a survivalist strategy in the diaspora and its continued use of the same as an instrument of oppression to dominate others with in its new position as an established, powerful nation-state. For that matter, we can note the very different spirit of insurgent nationalism compared to its dominant expression in official state nationalism. And here is where the imperative of dynamic, contextual translation becomes all the more compelling in any reading of identity politics.

Conclusion

The need for more textured and multi-layered analyses of identity constitution, performance, and negotiation in intercultural communication research requires that we pay attention to the ways in which such processes are enacted via communicative practice—“communicative practice” here not only meaning interactions on the interpersonal or even intergroup levels, but also communicative practice as it operates on other levels of the symbolicor the structural, e.g., by way of consideration of discursive, institutional, and representational domains. Such identity processes, however, as we have sought to highlight throughout our discussion, are by no means innocent, but always, are staged with in the complex interplay of structure, power, and agency. The result is the production of contingent, yet non-determinate, moving identity formations that are made to function in the social arena in a variety of ways (in the particular examples given, as sites of resistance and cultural reclamation and empowerment). The examples here of the use of the lenses of performativity, resignification, and dynamic translation are meant to provide alternative re-readings of identity processes that seek to get at the contested, over determined, yet open-ended character of such complex processes.

Notes

1.Cf. Bourdieu’s (1977) notion of “habitus” as the set of structuring structures that shape bourgeois social practice.

2.Citizens of Hawai‘i on the basis of geographic residency, e.g., whites, Japanese, Filipinos, and other immigrants belonging to other ethnicities.

3.The invoking of a fixed, reified, stable identity claims premised on appeals to nature, blood, and other kinds of primordial belonging.

4.A whole system is built around the communicative distinctions of the Filipino pronouns “we-inclusive”(tayo) or “we-speaking-among-ourselves” versus “we-exclusive” (kami) or “we-speaking-with-others.” Called Pantayong Pananaw (roughly, awkwardly, a “for-us perspective”) initiated within the discipline of historiography, it is known to have profoundly transforming effects on the traditional disciplines once adopted (cf. Mendoza, 2002).

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