狗男孩和丢失的东西;或锚定一个浮动的能指:

D. Dudek
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In Race: the Floating Signifier, Hall defines race as a sociohistorical or cultural category, not as a biological, category, and I employ his definition in this article. Hall, following Appiah, emphasizes that the idea of race he deconstructs is not an anthropological and biological imperative based on skin, hair, and bone, but is rather a way of reading the body as text, and, in this case, as racialized text. He calls race a discursive category, a system of classifying difference, and he states that race works like a language. Hall believes that one of the most difficult, urgent, and important tasks is \"to live with difference without eating the other.\" What matters to Hall, and what I am engaged with in this essay, is articulating a system of meaning by which difference is made intelligible. I believe that critical multiculturalism, which I define as a version of multiculturalism that is self-reflexive insofar as it examines how race underpins culture within narratives of multiculturalism, can be such a system of meaning, a system which allows one to recognize and to include racial difference into culture rather than to promote a multiculturalism that privileges homogeneity under a rhetoric of multicultural difference. By reading children's literature via critical multiculturalism I suggest that readers will be able to flesh out ideologies of race that are being advocated and will, in turn, have a better understanding of the racial dynamics from which the literature stems. In the first part of this article, I argue for a critical multiculturalism that acknowledges and makes visible how race forms the foundation of multiculturalism. 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引用次数: 0

摘要

在她2004年出版的关于多元文化主义的书《困扰的国家:多元文化主义的殖民维度》中,Sneja Gunew坚持认为多元文化主义是一种浮动的能指。(1)虽然这种浮动能指的概念是有帮助的,因为它承认多元文化主义在特定背景下以不同的方式发挥作用,但当它浮动得太大以至于失去任何意义时,它可能就没有帮助了。虽然我认为自己是一个后现代主义者,因此经常抵制普遍主义的术语,但我发现自己处于一个特殊的位置,想要给“多元文化主义”这个词施加限制。(2)我想知道,如果多元文化主义可以意味着什么,那么为什么从多元文化主义的角度来分析儿童文学很重要?我对这个问题的回答源于斯图尔特·霍尔(Stuart Hall)的断言,即随着多元文化主义的兴起,种族主义也随之兴起。值得认同的是,当今社会最难理解的一件事是——多元文化主义和种族主义的绝对巧合。多元文化主义和种族主义并不是一个极点的两端,因此人们可以用一方的崛起来对抗另一方的衰落,而多元文化主义和种族主义似乎绝对是社会的核心,它们同时在增加。(48-49)虽然霍尔说的是英国社会,但这种动态并不是英国独有的,如果事实上,多元文化主义和种族主义相互结合的说法是可以得到支持的。相反,种族和多元文化之间的联系是本文的重要目的。我认为,为了反对种族主义,理解种族如何锚定多元文化主义是至关重要的。在《种族:漂浮的能指》一书中,霍尔将种族定义为社会历史或文化范畴,而不是生物学范畴,我在本文中也采用了他的定义。霍尔,跟随阿皮亚,强调他解构的种族概念不是基于皮肤,头发和骨骼的人类学和生物学的命令,而是一种将身体作为文本阅读的方式,在这种情况下,作为种族化的文本。他把种族称为一种话语范畴,一种对差异进行分类的系统,他说种族就像一种语言。霍尔认为,最困难、最紧迫和最重要的任务之一是“与差异共存,而不吞食对方”。对霍尔来说重要的,也是我在这篇文章中要做的,是阐明一个意义体系,通过这个体系,差异可以被理解。我认为,批判性多元文化主义,我将其定义为多元文化主义的一种自我反思,因为它考察了种族如何在多元文化主义叙事中支撑文化,它可以是这样一种意义体系,一种允许人们认识并将种族差异纳入文化的体系,而不是在多元文化差异的修辞下提倡一种特权同质性的多元文化主义。通过批判性的多元文化主义阅读儿童文学,我认为读者将能够充实被提倡的种族意识形态,反过来,也会更好地理解文学所源于的种族动态。在本文的第一部分,我主张一种批判性的多元文化主义,这种多元文化主义承认并表明种族如何构成多元文化主义的基础。在下一节中,我将绘制多元文化主义和澳大利亚儿童文学领域的图表,并主张将批评多元文化主义作为该领域的另一个方面。在本文的最后一部分,我通过分析肖恩·谭(Shaun Tan)的绘本《遗失的东西》(the Lost Thing)和拉努尔福(Ranulfo)的青年小说《涅槃的孩子》(Nirvana’s Children)来运用这一理论。我认为,这两本警世小说揭示了多元文化社会固有的危险——比如排斥和消除——这种社会无法以既不消除差异、也不默认宽容的多元文化主义的方式将种族化的其他人融入社会。…
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
Dogboys and Lost Things; or Anchoring a Floating Signifier:
In her 2004 book on multiculturalism, Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms, Sneja Gunew persistently refers to the term multiculturalism as a floating signifier. (1) While this notion of a floating signifier is helpful because it acknowledges different ways in which multiculturalism functions in specific contexts, it may be unhelpful when it floats so much as to lose any signification. While I identify myself as a postmodernist and, therefore, regularly resist universalist terminology, I find myself in a peculiar position of wanting to put limits on the term multiculturalism. (2) If multiculturalism can mean anything, then why is it important to analyze children's literature through the lens of multiculturalism, I wonder. My response to this question stems from Stuart Hall's assertion that with the rise of multiculturalism comes the rise of racism: it is worth identifying with one of the most difficult things to comprehend nowadays about this society--the absolute coincidence of multiculturalism and racism. Far from being the opposite ends of a pole so that one can trade the rise of one against the decline of the other, it seems to be absolutely dead central to society that both multiculturalism and racism are increasing at one and the same time. (48-49) While Hall speaks about British society, this dynamic is not unique to Britain, if in fact, this claim that multiculturalism and racism are increasing in conjunction with each other is one that can even be supported. Rather, the link between race and multiculturalism is what is important for the purposes of this essay. I believe it is crucial to understand how race anchors multiculturalism in order to fight against racism. In Race: the Floating Signifier, Hall defines race as a sociohistorical or cultural category, not as a biological, category, and I employ his definition in this article. Hall, following Appiah, emphasizes that the idea of race he deconstructs is not an anthropological and biological imperative based on skin, hair, and bone, but is rather a way of reading the body as text, and, in this case, as racialized text. He calls race a discursive category, a system of classifying difference, and he states that race works like a language. Hall believes that one of the most difficult, urgent, and important tasks is "to live with difference without eating the other." What matters to Hall, and what I am engaged with in this essay, is articulating a system of meaning by which difference is made intelligible. I believe that critical multiculturalism, which I define as a version of multiculturalism that is self-reflexive insofar as it examines how race underpins culture within narratives of multiculturalism, can be such a system of meaning, a system which allows one to recognize and to include racial difference into culture rather than to promote a multiculturalism that privileges homogeneity under a rhetoric of multicultural difference. By reading children's literature via critical multiculturalism I suggest that readers will be able to flesh out ideologies of race that are being advocated and will, in turn, have a better understanding of the racial dynamics from which the literature stems. In the first part of this article, I argue for a critical multiculturalism that acknowledges and makes visible how race forms the foundation of multiculturalism. In the next section, I chart the field of multiculturalism and Australian children's literature and argue for the inclusion of critical multiculturalism as another aspect of this field. In the final part of this paper, I put this theory to work by analyzing Shaun Tan's picture book The Lost Thing and Ranulfo's young adult novel Nirvana's Children, which, I argue, are cautionary tales that bring to the surface the dangers--of exclusion and erasure, for instance--inherent in a multicultural society that fails to embody racialized others into a society in ways that neither erase difference nor default to a multiculturalism of tolerance. …
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