my america a critical and photographic investigation of “americanism�
kanisha williams
june 5th, 2016 arth 25940 final project prof. yesomi umolu
peter chicago, il
do you feel othered by your other ethnicity? what does it mean to be othered? “i think it has to do with how much a minority being armenian is, especially where i grew up. my family’s the only armenian family at a school of 1,500 people. the culture itself is very rich, very different from american culture; it gets intertwined with different places. now, here, on campus, it get’s more mixed than it does back when i was at home, but i wouldn’t say i felt othered just because it was not well-mixed with everyday culture. it’s just that the separation between armenian culture and american culture kinda creates a perceived separation in my sense of self.
i feel fully armenian and fully american at one time.
[i’m] not really ‘othered’ in that respect. when i was in high school, my armenian culture didn’t come into play whatsoever because there’s no other armenians there—so, i just act american, i guess, whatever that means—but at church and summercamps and visitng other armenian family’s households, i’d say that’s more like feeling othered from american cultures, but there, you don’t feel othered either because everyone’s armenian-american.”
harold morganville, nj
“the construction of america is an america for white people. it’s hard to pin down american culture. it feels more like a place i live; my actual culture is in china with my family. ... it feels almost like assimilation, i guess, where it’s like if you consider yourself ‘asian-american,’ it almost feels like you’re considering yourself american, foremost. i feel like i’m from here because i was born here and i grew up here, but i’m not of here.”
juliette san francisco, ca
“i always think of america in terms of personality and emotion because, for me, i’ve always struggled to be like ‘am i more french or american?’ i feel very american whenever i’m in france and very, or not very, less so over the years, but definitely very french when i was a kid—i had an accent which i later got rid of. so, i’ve always thought of it in terms of a personality thing: it surprises me how much people love or want to love america. clearly, at least some people want to love america, and when i vist people in france, they love their country, but not the way americans love america. i honestly believe america’s an abnormal country and ego is a huge part of it. no country has an ego like america, and i will say it makes living here enjoyable. i enjoy living here a lot, and i think i enjoy that in that i’m outspoken and i can get away with so much stuff, and it’s not okay, but i’m still going to live here. i don’t want to move to europe because the girls who are pretty look like each other, and that’s something i see less of here. in all of these ways, it’s become a matter of the most minute details, but it’s come to the point where i’m choosing this country my over country because it’s a more enjoyable place to live and because there are more opportunities for jobs, at least for me. it’s really weird—you talk to people from other countries, and they can be patriotic and nationalisitc, but they never think their country’s perfect. they have this disillusionment engrained in them. it’s really weird because a lot of people love their country, but they never really believe in it like americans love america.”
hassaan new delhi, india
“india is so diverse. in some ways, nothing is truly surprising to you. we’re used to a lot of it…we were colonized. you’re used to people trying your culture out…we’ve always been more inclined to share that culture with others slash like capitalize off of it for tourism purposes. with kurtas, it’s something we associate with happiness, comfort, festivities. it’s more about being a part of it than anything else—me and my friends sitting in a circle all wearing our kurtas—that’s my culture. [kurtas are] just, like, ethnic wear. it’s not deeply involved in any rich history. with bindis, it’s something completely different. it depends on how people appropriate the item and the history behind it. what rubs off on me about american culture is the extremely highly organized infrastructure that america is. i definitely fuck with how miles ahead this country is in terms of infrastructure, agriculture, producing things….the consumer has so many options. this country is a very attractive option for a reason, and when you see that in person, it speaks for itself. the reason people are pissed off is because it’s a superpower and there are expectations that come with that.”
kwesi pembroke pines, fl
“sometimes, i’m not gonna lie, i feel kinda ashamed to be american just because my family comes from a culture in a third world country. they had to grow up really hard [sic] to survive, they had a really hard life, and they were blessed with the privilege to get to come to this country...the way america operates, the way we treat the world around us, the way we take advantage of this burgeoning bubble of privilege and power that america has managed to hoard over the past 200 years just makes me feel really bad because people talk about privilege all the time. a lot of people don’t realize the privilege that comes with being an american alone, just how many tragedies our country caused around the world to get that privilege alone. it’s sobering to think about that— by virtue of being in this country, you’re benefiting from catastrophe.”
gaurav detroit, mi
“the way i grew up, we had this strong civic education, almost to the point of indoctrination, and you learn about all of these ‘american’ values like truth, freedom, justice, and the pursuit of happiness, and you’re like, ‘even if america has problems, i’m super down with everything that it was founded on.’ then, you get to a certain point, and you learn about american history from the beginning, and you’re like, ‘has this all been a lie?’ not once were we ever upholding these things. ...i still have this idea in my head of what america should be, but in reality i know not once has it ever really aspired to those ideals. every time we pushed progression forward, it’s been against people who supported those ideals.”
allison watchung, nj
“i would just call myself ameican. there are definitely people who would look at me and say i’m asian-american, but i just self-identify as american. there’s definitely a difference between being asian-american and just american. growing up in a place where there’s predominantly white culture where it’s very white and republican...the term ‘white-washed’ was thrown around a lot. my whole life, i didn’t really ascribe to being asian, but now i’m trying to reclaim that.”
fatima crystal lake, il
“my mom, she’s told me this before, if she were to go back to pakistan at this moment, it’d be foreign to her because she’s become so american, even though she lives here and is patronized because of her accent for not being american enough, and that’s the common comment i’ve gotten a lot, being told i’m ‘too white’ and ‘too brown’ at the same time. so, it’s funny because i feel like my family that’s come here, we’ve all been americanized, but don’t feel like we’re allowed to consider ourselves american. i think that recognizing that you can change your situation, though there are many different barriers in place for every person, but being able to change your destiny is what ties people as americans. the term ‘american’ is, itself, ironic—being a nation of freedom based on oppression is ironic. it’s hard to say what america is, but i think what people want ‘american’ to be is that ability to change your own destiny. there’s this idea of opportunity, but it’s very hard to find opporunities here, especially if you wear the label as immigrant or foreigner, if you’re not white, if you have an accent. yet, people still believe it, so i think believing in it is enough to keep it true. my family in pakistan has this notion that this is the land where you can become something. i guess they still believe that, and it’s enough to make them want to come here.”
andie houston, tx
“i was born in houston, but i moved to amarillo for elementary school, and i felt very physically different from everyone because everyone had blonde hair and blue eyes. in fact, there was one kid who pointed at me and two other asian girls and said if it weren’t for martin luther king jr., i wouldn’t be in his class. maybe that was pretty formative because when i get to middle school, i still felt like that, even when i was in an environment where it was more multicultural. now, it’s weird because i feel like a lot of people think i’m white or see me as white, but really feel white. i don’t feel comfortable checking white on a census box—i always check other. i don’t always feel like part of the category, but i understand that you can’t make a category for everyone.”
keegan walnut creek, ca
“one word i think of [when thinking of america] is ‘exclusive,’ though perceived as open. ...sometimes i feel kind of ashamed because i think the world has a pretty bad perception of americans, and i think that’s pretty justified. i do feel kind of cynical about being from american and being american, and then, i wouldn’t consider myself very patriotic, but there are other places that i would definitely want to live a lot less. i’m really skeptical of patriotism here because sometimes i feel like it goes beyond ‘i love my country’ to ‘i love my country and think all other countries are shit.’”
melissa weston, fl
“i think participation can vary. people have a choice in their labels to an extent - for example, whether or not i practice judaism, i’ll always jewish roots and ancestry. it’s personally important for me to remain connected to that, but i have a lot of friends who barely subscribe to any connotation of judaism (even cultural or ethnic). calling myself american feels natural. i’m a second and a half generation american (second on one side, third on the other) so i feel pretty close to the label (particularly in contrast to friends who are first generation americans). however, knowing my family’s history in coming to america to escape the holocaust and persecution definitely gives me the empathy and sympathy toward newer americans - i know the stories of how difficult it was for my family to adjust, and i’m more appreciative of living here than i think older american generations (ie. seventh, sixth) are. the object i brought was a shabbat candle holder i bought in tel aviv last summer on the birthright israel trip. it’s one of the most markedly jewish objects i have (besides this charm on my necklace, but i felt that was too small to showcase). i personally love shabbat because it’s a day each week to reflect on the things important to us and appreciate the company of friends and family. shabbat is kind of my motivation to connect to judaism: if i manage to observe shabbat in some way, i feel much more connected to my identity.”
olamide san fernando, ca
“when i think of america, i think of heartbreak and genocide because that’s all this is. especially when you have a parent that’s an immigrant, coming here, it’s just heartbreak: how do you come here with two degrees and you drive a taxi because you’re a big, black person; and, genocide, obviously, because i do have privileges for being american—i can sort of stomp around in the world in a lot of ways—but, also, i was owned at some point in this country. it’s such a cognitive dissonance to be american, black, and first-generation on one side, but i don’t know if i’d be able to be myself in another place.”
averi laurel, md
“i think there’s this kind of thought where being white or black means you’re american, but being latino or asian or anything else means you’re not american. growing up, i had people asking me ‘do you even speak english?’ when i only speak english, but when people call me ‘white,”’it does hurt, but it’s not as if i can come back at the in spanish, so i don’t feel enough of either label. ... i think you can only really hold on to whatever identity that you have an identity for. i think that’s why ‘people of color’ became a thing—we don’t really identify as the exact same thing, but we have a similar experience. i feel like i wanna be more latina. it’s something where it’s kind of on a cusp; i want to feel like i have proof. i don’t feel very el salvadorian very much, so i wear [the purses] when i want to connect with my culture. my grandma actually has a coffee bean farm and lives in a rural part of the country, so the purses kind of remind me of that. they both have little el salvador stuff—[the smaller one] has the crest that’s in the middle of the flag. so, they’re just things that make me feel more connected.”
maria chicago, il
“my parents left mexico when they were 19 and 20, and they’re literally the only reason i can call myself american, but even when i was young, calling myself american was really weird…calling myself american meant that accepting the fact that if my parents left here if I went with them, we couldn’t go back. it’s a very limiting term. i’m growing up as a part of something that’s limiting them…growing up with these people who rejected them, who are rejecting them. saying i’m american feels like i’m rejecting an obvious part of myself. i want to call myself american because of the opportunities that it gave me and that i’ve gotten because i’m here, but it’s hard. there’s this generational gap of oppression—my parents are experiencing otherness in a very different way than i am. gaining something from the titile ‘american’ feels like you’re claiming something that you don’t own, but you lose things, as well. my mom hadn’t seen her mom in 14 years because her mother stayed in mexico, and my other couldn’t leave the country. it was so hard for the stars to align to see each other. i chose to have my photograph taken with books because my parents couldn’t leave the country. books were the only way i could travel. growing up in my neighborhood, travel was a big part of the lives of my friends. books were the only way i could leave….i had to read. i had to read about my culture i had to read about my heritage.”
camila miami, fl
“something about identity is so rooted to not only the individuals, but the community, i think, especially the term ‘ethinicity.’ especially in miami, ethnicity was really important—it was really important to identify with you ethnicity and be proud of it. when i was in miami, i definitely didn’t use my ethnicity as part of my identity until i got here, but it became so important for me. it became important for me to understand it and embrace it and figure out how it made me who i am. i felt like i was in this weird limbo where i felt like i should be more cuban than i actually am, but i came here and realized that doesn’t matter. there’s not something that’s missing in me at all. just because i was born in cuba and left doesn’t make me any less of a cuban person. when you think about it, america does have a lot of culture, and not the word ‘america,’ but what american actually is with a bunch of different people contributing to that, but you can also think about america as a bunch of white americans telling people what to do, and what that means, and that does not have a culture. the acknowledgement of america as a melting pot...as much as we like to pretend it exists, it really doesn’t. whiteness is something you can’t distance [america] from.”
afterword
completion of this project for the course required an accompanying essay describing my goals for the project, meditations on its creation, and possible areas for improvement. the essay can be found in its entirety below. I designed my project to allow me to study the people around me and explore their identities while also incorporating a creative aspect into the project. For this reason, I decided to explore what I’ve referred to as “American-ism,” a reference to the culture and influence that the rhetoric of the country has on the development of personal identities of the people who live here for any period of time. I wanted to know, from an insider’s experience, what could be characterized and distinctively “American,” and how those ideas had been personally internalized. I used photography and interviews to create a project that put in the role of artist and ethnographer simultaneously, while evoking the classical ideas and methods of both roles. Since presenting my proposal to the class, I made two major decisions about the project: 1) I decided to use excerpts of the interviews of my conversations with the participants, rather than writing summaries of our conversations, and 2) I decided to abandon the idea of taking half the photographs in such a way that they resembled historical busts. I made these decisions not only for the ease of completing the project, but also to streamline the ideas within it. While I felt that using the bust-like photographs would have been an engaging way to introduce a layer of institutional critique into the project, and present another way of evaluating identity, I felt that doing so would also compromise a certain facet of “authenticity” that I hadn’t explicitly engaged with or thought about when I first conceived of the project. As I went along, the theme of authenticity suddenly became more relevant to me—from the off-the-cuff nature of the interviews, to the hundreds of extra photos produced from each of the sixteen shoots. I felt that the form of identity I wanted to study was relational, but also inherently personal. My focus evolved from elucidating a definition of what it meant to be American and what American culture was, but to understand how each person’s personal conception of America developed within them and manifested to their outward behavior and more expressed
ideals. I found authenticity in the intimate, the personal, rather than the imagined and communal, which is ironic, when compared to the statements of identity given by the participants. When I initially thought of the project, I wanted to directly engage ideas presented in the readings from Glissant and Okwui Enwezor. I found Enwezor’s “Intense Proximity: Concerning the Disappearance of Distance” interesting and relevant to my past studies in sociology. While identifying the problems that were meant to be addressed as the “curatorial purpose” of Intense Proximity, Enwezor writes, “In the last half-century, increased mobility and immigration have forced the revision of the rules of proximity, eroding cultural borders, exacerbating the relationship between guests and hosts. …This means that contemporary societies need to define how to manage conflict, live with cultural disensus within conditions of hostility and non-recognition.” I felt that this work related to my interests in that I spent the past year thinking about the construction of self-hood and identity theoretically as I settled into classes within the sociology major. Within these classes persisted ideas from thinkers who suggested that self-hood and identity were creations of a society—particularly Georg Simmel and George Herbert Mead. I felt that exploring this through ethnographic and creative methods would be not only personally fulfilling, but also allow me to see these theories in practice, especially in those who may not actively explore them. This prior coursework ignited my interest in identity, and it was Enwezor’s writing that made me feel sure in my decision to use a creative project to explore identity politics and identity formation within the people around me. I found that Glissant’s discussion of “relation identity” was particularly relevant. In my discussions with the participants, many identified this feeling of the label American being relational, in some ways. They felt a need to be “American enough” and saw themselves as fitting into, or being excluded from, some conceptual whole that they saw America as. One participant, Camila, explicitly stated the importance of community in for the formation of identity, and I wanted to extend these ideas of presentation, performance, and relational projection (of self-hood) into my project. These theories eventually turned into what I continuously referred to as “gaze” and “ethnic relativism” when ex-
plaining my project to my participants. I began the project by identifying a particular problem that I observed when engaging my own identity: while I hear experiences similar/identical to mine being described as inherently American—the effect of the diaspora on my family, our ties to slavery, the several generations that my family has been through and their part in America’s history—I still felt a desire to claim to some idea of “pan-Africanism,” to know where my ancestors descended from in the continent, and to represent that. I originally thought that it was something particular to feeling “black” in America. Then, I realized that the concept of America as a “melting pot” forced that gaze internally and outwardly for me, and that this was an experience that could be a part of America’s zeitgeist in itself; I deemed the sensation as “ethnic relativism,” and the act as “gaze.” Then, I proceeded to find out. I chose interviews and photographs for my methodology because of the integration of interviews into ethnographic practice historically. It is a classical ethnographic method. I chose photography for its historical relevance to the field, its creative implications, and theory we’ve explored in class on the capability for film and photography to be “objective” or “authentic,” thus tying into the evolution of ethnography. chose to tackle authenticity and gaze on multiple levels: the authenticity of projecting an identity vis-à-vis the authenticity of the excerpts selected from the interviews to be presented alongside each photograph—the hyper-focused gaze of the dark, constructed photographs that direct the viewer’s attention to certain parts of the subject’s face vis-à-vis the more natural, candid photographs of some participants, and the role of flags versus actual, functional objects in terms of cultural materialism. These ambiguities come together to create a sense of haphazard anxiety and sharp juxtaposition within the project, matching the conflicting responses of the participants, the inconclusiveness of the of the title “American,” and the emotional distress caused when facing cultural misrecognition or non-recognition within a space. I felt that distance or “proximity” was an apt mechanism for describing personal relation to the label because it denotes intimacy— how intimate the label feels to the participants. As I complete my project and meditate on my methods and philosophy while interviewing and interacting with the participants, I’ve narrowed down multiple inspirations: Coco Fusco’s writing on her performance piece The Year of the White Bear and Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West. I felt that by assuming these rules and en-
gaging these people who I spend time with casually, I was engaging in an odd type of performance. The distance that the camera provided me with was surprising and isolating. I felt that same distance when questioning my subjects. It felt odd to study those who I spent time with casually, those who I felt I knew, and even stranger to find that I didn’t really know them. Beyond that, I wondered how my position in the project reflected and amplified parts of my identity that I normally would not have analyzed. As a black woman in America asking my friends questions about identity, othering, and oppression, how did I affect the answers of my participants, many of those who were my friends? Did my presence and dominating role in the project force their answers? What did my context do to affect the project? I hoped counteract that possibility by repeatedly reassuring my participants that each of their interviews were personalized, that I was thinking about who they were as much as they were possibly thinking about who I was with regards to the project, and that that openended questions were intentionally structured in such a way that the project was more about them, their identities, their personal feelings, than any evaluation that I could ascribe. I didn’t make any requirements for those who chose to participate. I wanted my field to be as open as possible, and made my appeals on Facebook. I think this approach limited the project in that it predominantly targeted participants that were my own age, from the University, and who I had interacted with before. While I was interested in speaking to strangers, and met with one, the project overwhelming consists of people who I consider friends. While these factors do limit the kinds of responses I could have possible received, I think that the usual pretense of intimacy in other interactions I had with my participants helped in that they felt more comfortable discussing the more sensitive facets of their self-hood. Transcribing their comments from the recordings to their spreads was a very invasive process for me. Like quotes from pictures on the internet that are obviously misattributed to to prominent figures, I felt as though I were putting words that made no sense, that were ridiculous, next to their faces. While putting the document together, there was an extreme dissonance between their comments and how I perceived them. I also was anxious about misrecognizing my participants themselves, picking statements that were definitive for their photographs to unknowing eyes. You don’t learn who someone is until you take a photograph of them, until you write about them, until you have to study
them. That has been my experience with this project. I feel the same way about choosing to study my own culture. I feel that it can be done, and that I chose an interesting and innovative way of doing it. However, I also felt a sort of anxiety about the shortcuts I could possibly be taking in the explanation of the sentiments expressed. Because I, and all of my participants, are familiar with channels of discourse regarding these topics because of the overlap within our contexts, I became increasingly anxious about the shorthand in our language, along with our comfort and familiarity with the topics discussed. I consistently wondered if someone from outside the culture would be able to understand the possible justifications for our evaluations of our own cynicism, patriotism, and relation to self? Had I done enough to explicate that, or was I blinded by my own participation? I think that this pressure was what we’ve discussed over and over again in class as a possible problem of ethnography and its reflexive nature. In all, this project felt like a satisfying way to end my experience in the class. I got to work the ideas that struck me the most in our discussion and apply them in a way that was relevant to my other coursework and personal interests.
kanisha williams 2016