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Where
Are You Comin' From, Where Are You Goin' To:
Placing The activity that Kingsolver (1992) coined as "placing" could be considered a microprocess of resistance (or consent). The activity of placing usually occurs when people introduce themselves to others, and through this interaction negotiate which community they "belong" to. By constantly and creatively "placing" oneself and others in shifting discourses, one situates herself or another "socially, temporally, spatially, ideologically, and relationally" (p. 131). Through this context-specific communicative ritual, people can construct, maintain, or disrupt relatedness with others, as well as access to resources considered vital (Gooding, 1994; Keith & Pile, 1993; Kingsolver, 1992, p. 131). People also place themselves in relation to authority, articulating their proximity to loci of power, and possibly contesting the ways in which they are placed by others. Kingsolver (1992) and others (Gooding, 1994; Mertz 1994a, 1994b) have explained that official discourses, for instance, recognize identities as fixed, not negotiated, and may position people in ways in which they feel powerless: "There are constraints on the process of asserting one's identity in that we not only construct, we are also constructed, in powerful ways" (p. 128). Other researchers have described practices similar to placing,
but do not mention the power of actors to resist being "placed"
(see Cohen, 1985; Hummon, 1990). Hummon (1990) acknowledges that people
tend to represent (place) their community as favorably as possible, possibly
resisting negative representations, but he does not acknowledge multiple
community memberships nor the multiple ways people can place themselves. One practice related to placing is what Holt (1972) refers to as inversion -- a process through which Blacks have assigned reversed meanings and functions to words and phrases: "the idea is to make any word of denigration used by the power group take on shades of meaning known only to the inverter" (p. 154). Accordingly, the adoption by Blacks of the noun "Black" was a means to ". . . wrest from whites the power to define; ergo, the term 'Black' is made respectable and good" (p. 155). Inversion was created by Blacks during slavery, explains Holt, but the practice continues today as a means for cultural and racial assertiveness. During slavery,
Through inversion, individuals and community members resist being placed through discourse by replacing the meaning of words in that discourse, and in effect constructing a new discourse. The 1960s declaration that "Black is beautiful" exemplifies this notion. Other communication strategies of Blacks are discussed by Stanback and Pearce (1981), who identify four ways in which Blacks sometimes talk to Whites without attempting to change the unequal power differential between the two groups. These four strategies are referred to as shucking, dissembling, tomming, and passing. Strategies such as shucking and dissembling are similar to inversion in that a Black person may appear to conform to a stereotype, and may place themselves as Whites expect them to be placed even though they do not internalize this "location." They only place themselves stereotypically when in the company of Whites (pp. 25-26). In the film "Malcolm X," for instance, a scene portrays Malcolm X as the "sandwich man" on a train, walking the aisles and grinning to White customers while he imagines shoving the food in their faces. As Malcolm X wrote in his autobiography (Haley, 1965):
According to hooks (1992), Blacks may still "wear the mask" as many Blacks learned to do during Jim Crow segregation, pretending "to be comfortable in the face of whiteness only to turn our backs and give expression to intense levels of discomfort" (p. 169). Tomming differs from shucking and dissembling in that the "Uncle Tomming" is not faked; it is internalized (Stanback & Pearce, 1981). Blacks who tom place themselves as Whites expect them to, but do so consistently, even in the company of other Blacks (p. 25). "White and black people alike believe that racism no longer exists," hooks (1992) notes, "This erasure, however mythic, diffuses the representations of whiteness as terror in the black imagination. It allows for assimilation and forgetfulness" (p. 176). Likewise, Blacks who pass--or act as if they were White because they may appear to be White--must consistently place themselves as White in order not to be placed as Black. Unlike Blacks who Tom, they may pretend to subscribe to White racist ideologies that internally they do not support, in order to maintain their façade (Stanback & Pearce, 1981, p. 25). Blacks "who imitate whites (adopting their values, speech, habits of being, etc.) continue to regard whiteness with suspicion, fear, and even hatred," explains hooks (1992, p. 166). She adds:
The power to place is directly related to the power to name. In naming, individuals may defy the names that others (especially elite interests) assign to their community or to significant symbols within their community. Naming is not random, but is negotiated with others through social interaction. It is a means through which community is created and community ideologies contested. Gooding (1994) comments that "group names are an extremely productive practice for establishing and mediating identity" (p. 1187) and "names are always part of a larger socially based system, with its own rules for name giving, and a wider set of values in which names are meaningful" (p. 1189). In her essay on naming, Tanno (1994) explains how her own life is an example of how the different terms or names persons use to identify themselves each communicate a particular story. Asked "What are you?" over the course of her life, Tanno has offered responses ranging from "I am Spanish" to "I am Mexican American" to "I am Latina" to "I am Chicana":
In these multiple names, Tanno places herself in different locations depending on the cultural, historical, or spatial context, and is able to negotiate multiple subjectivities. An example of how naming is enacted can also be found in the research of radical geographer Pred (1990), who described a "popular geography" used by lower class residents of Stockholm during the late nineteenth century. Pred (1990) explains how the upper class of Stockholm attempted to "place" poorer residents in ways that served elite interests. The official street-naming policy was an attempt to "solidify order, to eliminate chaos and potential anarchy, to reform the threatening 'under class'" (Pred, 1990, p. 209) and promote a community of experience that transcended class boundaries and political differences. The poorer residents rarely referred to local streets and areas by their official titles and "proper" locational signifiers, however (Pred, 1990). By assigning their own meanings to familiar locales, especially popular gathering places, and by re-naming the territory of the rich in ways that indicated irreverence toward them, lower-class residents defied the official placing of themselves and chose their own "places" instead. Pred considers this defiance a conscious and subconscious resistance to the ideological domination of the upper class (p. 201). It was, in his words (Pred, 1990):
Pred (1990) acknowledges, however, that lower income residents
may have resorted to conventional and official designations when addressing
those in higher positions of power (p. 186). Placing allows a person to
shift community memberships--in this case, from a community of resistance
to a framed community of the lower class. Temporarily placing oneself
in an "acceptable" community (lower class), like the shucking
and dissembling strategies (Stanback & Pearce, 1981) mentioned earlier,
does not mean one subscribes to dominant re-presentations of that acceptable
community. Nonetheless, even when people just pretend to place themselves
according to dominant expectations, they still do nothing to change existing,
unequal relations of power. One may put up an acceptable "mask"
out of fear. According to hooks (1992):
According to Whitaker (1993, March 15), middle class Blacks may avoid speaking out due to fear they will be labelled "difficult" (p. 54). Community members can also attempt to protect their interests through the ambiguity of the symbols they use--for example, coining names that are open enough to interpretation that they cannot be attacked or subverted (Cohen, 1985). Through the "strategy of ambiguity," individuals may avoid being pigeonholed: placed in a cultural, historical, or social location that may not re-present them as they would like. Another example of placing and naming is described by Sarah A. Radcliffe (1993), who studied the attempted resistance of Argentinian women to the oppression of a military dictatorship from 1976 through 1983. The women of the Madres movement decided to conduct their demonstration in a main plaza that was considered a symbol of the nation. The Madres became associated with the Plaza, and they developed a community of resistance by placing themselves where they were not supposed to be: ". . . they literally and symbolically transposed private/personal issues and identities into a public/political space" (p. 112). A final example of placing is illustrated by Susan Staiger Gooding's (1994) study of naming practices among the Colville Tribes in Oregon. She found that this Native American community uses intra- and intergenerational naming formulas in order to establish community identity and to negotiate historical change and colonization (p. 1181). Members of this community associate identity with the various places they have lived throughout their lives, and thus their (multiple) subjectivities are layered in both space and time. The naming procedure that this indigenous community uses existed in order to negotiate these identities and social relations at the local level. Federal Indian law, however, "placed" the Colville Tribe in a racialized space (Gooding, 1994). The colonially designated names in the legal terminology of treaties indexed the boundaries between two spaces, racial and non-racial, ignoring the fluidity of identities that the indigenous groups had acknowledged through their naming practices. Placing and naming could also be interpreted as a means
through which individuals create, reproduce, and contest differing ideologies.
"Ideology provides the underlying logic which guides and constrains
discourse," explains Dennis Mumby (1989), "while at the same
time discourse is the means by which ideology is continually produced
and reproduced" (p. 302). For instance, when Blacks adopt the ideology
of assimilation, they place themselves in an inferior position on a hierarchy,
warns bell hooks (1989). Through the discursive practice of naming, community
members can negotiate and contest ideological commitments. This next section
focuses on how scholars have defined community ideology and its functions. Next: Community Ideology
Placing and Black Students' Discursive Construction of Community Copyright (c) 1996, Corinna J. Moebius |