Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

e here (or there) now 83
in a little corner of the globe that most English people can’t identify on
the map.
The Return of the Repressed
So it’s a very profound part of the Thatcher project to try to restore the identity
that in their view belongs to Great Britain—Great Britain, Inc., Ltd.—a
great fi rm, Great Britain restored to a world power. But in this very moment
of the attempted symbolic restoration of the great English identities that
have mastered and dominated the world over three or four centuries, there
come home to roost in English society some other British folks. They come
from Jamaica, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India—all that part of the colonial
world that the English, just in the 1950s, decided they could do without.
Just in the very moment when they decided they could do without us, we
all took the banana boat and came right back home. We turned up saying
“You said this was the mother country. Well, I just came home.” We now
stand as a permanent reminder of that forgotten, suppressed, hidden history.
Every time they walk out on the street, some of us—some of the Other—are
there. There we are, inside the culture, going to their schools, speaking their
language, playing their music, walking down their streets, looking like we
own a part of the turf, looking like we belong. Some third generation Blacks
are starting to say “We are the Black British.” After all, who are we? We’re
not Jamaicans any more. We have a relationship to that past, but we can’t
be that entirely anymore [. . .].
Ethnicities: Old and New
What does all that I’ve been saying have to do with ethnicity? I’ve left the
question of ethnicity to the last because ethnicity is the way in which I
want to rethink the relationships between identity and difference. I want
to argue that ethnicity is what we all require in order to think the relationship
between identity and difference. What do I mean by that? There is no
way, it seems to me, in which people of the world can act, can speak, can
create, can come in from the margins and talk, can begin to refl ect on their
own experience unless they come from some place, they come from some
history, they inherit certain cultural traditions. What we’ve learned about
the theory of enunciation is that there’s no enunciation without positionality.
You have to position yourself somewhere in order to say anything at
all. Thus, we cannot do without that sense of our own positioning that is
connoted by the term ethnicity. And the relation that peoples of the world