UC Berkeley GAIA Books Title Modern Peoplehood: On Race, Racism, Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Identity Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/73c5c0cg ISBN 9780984590940 Author Lie, John Publication Date 2011-04-01 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Modern Peoplehood Modern Peoplehood On Race, Racism, Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Identity John Lie Global, Area, and International Archive University of California Press BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON The Global, Area, and International Archive (GAIA) is an initiative of the Institute for International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in partnership with the University of California Press and the California Digital Library. GAIA volumes, which are published in both print and open-access digital editions, illuminate complex global phenomena and contribute to the renewal of area studies. University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. Reprinted by arrangement with Harvard University Press University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2004 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z 39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). for Charlotte Contents Preface ix Prelude 1 1 In Search of Foundations 13 2 Naturalizing Differences 55 3 Modern State / Modern Peoplehood 98 4 The Paradoxes of Peoplehood 144 5 Genocide 191 6 Identity 232 Postlude 265 References 275 Index 377 Preface “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.” Unlike Stephen Dedalus, I shan’t fly by those nets that I call modern peoplehood. Instead, I strive to disentangle and displace them. I hope at once to illuminate and to sublate the major categories of modern peoplehood—race, ethnicity, and nation—and the cognate phenomena of racism and genocide—the nightmares from which we are still trying to awake. Caveat lector: I have excised expressions of my scholarly limitations and doubts, as well as warnings about the tentative nature of all propositions. Cowardly creatures we scholars are; I ask of you not so much the suspen- sion of disbelief as of distrust. I also want you to read the whole book. In order to entice you to do so, I have sought to smooth the textual flow. Alas, its texture is encrusted by the canard of scholarship. Quite obviously, a habit of an academic lifetime is hard to halt. The gravitas of citations drags the narrative thrust—not to mention the aesthetic blight—but the academic apparatus also expresses scholarly exactitude and gratitude. The Reverend Stephen Dedalus, S.J., would have approved. There is, in any case, curious comfort in citing authorities, especially in languages with which one must struggle. I spent an inordinate amount of time eliminating citations during the final stage of revision. As long as the list of references remains, it is humbling to ponder that many other uncited but excellent essays and books exist and disturbing to realize that I have undoubtedly failed to learn from many of them. The solitary pleasure and pain of reading and writing—that voluntary x Preface servitude we call research—depended on all sorts of peoples and institu- tions. I am afraid that I was an agent for entropy at the libraries of the University of Oregon, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Harvard University, and the University of Michigan. I wish to thank my colleagues and students at Oregon, Illinois, Michigan, and elsewhere. In particular, I am grateful to Aya Ezawa, Bob Lee, Libby Schweber, Charis Thompson, Thembisa Waetjen, Maxim Waldstein, and Brennon Wood for reading a preliminary draft. Serife Genis, Nao Terai, and Leslie Wang helped me with the references and the index. Most importantly, Charis read and discussed this book, even as she carried, gave birth to, and nurtured Charlotte, to whom it is dedicated. Ann Arbor, Michigan May 2003 Prelude By modern peoplehood I mean an inclusionary and involuntary group identity with a putatively shared history and distinct way of life. It is in- clusionary because everyone in the group, regardless of status, gender, or moral worth, belongs. It is involuntary because one is born into an ascrip- tive category of peoplehood. In addition to common descent—a shared sense of genealogy and geography—contemporary commonality, such as language, religion, culture, or consciousness, characterizes the group. It gropes toward a grouping larger than kinship but smaller than humanity. It is not merely a population—an aggregate, an external attribution, an analytical category—but, rather, a people—a group, an internal conviction, a self-reflexive identity. The discourse of modern peoplehood is rich and resonant, providing a comprehensive and comprehensible vocabulary to make sense of the world. It is a commonplace belief that the major categories of modern people- hood—race, ethnicity, and nation—reveal something profound about the human condition. As a repository of deep truths about our subjectivity and individuality, peoplehood identity is primal, experienced as somehow in- effable and infallible, authentic and cathartic. Whether grounded in the memes of cultural tradition or the genes of racial belonging, individuals are described and explained in terms of their peoplehood. The metaphysic of modernity turned out to be closer to the irrational Being of Heidegger than to the rational Reason of Kant. Why is peoplehood identity so important? What is identity? 1 2 Modern Peoplehood 2 Identity is one of those topics that, like time for Saint Augustine (1991: 230), is at once obvious and obscure: “We surely know what we mean when we speak of it. We also know what is meant when we hear someone else talking about it....Provided that no one asks me, I know.” Posing the question seems to expunge the answer; the mind hankers for the cer- tainty that seemed to be. I am I, but who is this I, me, myself? John Locke’s classic discussion in An Essay Concerning Human Under- standing (1689) equates personal identity with the psychic unity and tem- poral continuity of individual consciousness. According to Locke (1975: 342, 344): “Personal Identity consists, not in the Identity of Substance, but . in the Identity of consciousness....Nothing but consciousness can unite remote Existences into the same Person.” In his view, the faculty of memory underpins the unity and continuity of the self. The Lockean idea informs Erik Erikson’s (1985:142) influential formulation of identity as something that “provides the ability to experience one’s self as something that has continuity and sameness.” Occasional oscillations are categorized as identity crises and mark important but infrequent biographical stages (cf. Erikson 1958:14). Countering Locke’s confident and commonsensical account in A Treatise on Human Nature (1777); David Hume (1978:259) stresses the indefinable and impermanent nature of personal identity: “The identity, which we as- cribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one.” Rather than a unitary entity, he (1978:253) envisions it as “a kind of theatre, where several per- ceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different.” Rather than Locke’s continuity and homogeneity, Hume suggests discontinuity and hetero- geneity. Hume’s pronouncement resonates with self-conscious and self-reflexive people. John Keats’s (1990:418) letter of 27 October 1818 to Richard Woodhouse reads: “As to the poetical Character itself . it has no self.... A Poet...hasnoIdentity.” This is because the poet is constantly “filling some other Body.” Consciousness is fleeting and flowing, eluding easy iden- tification. Indeed, a hallmark of the modern self, whether for J. W. G. von Goethe’s Faust or W. E. B. Du Bois’s black folk, is divided or double (cf. Miller 1985:viif,49). The intimation of a fluctuating and multiple self be- Prelude 3 comes the commonsense of literary modernism, whether in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) or Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaft [The Man without Qualities] (1930–43). As Franz Kafka’s (1994:225) diary entry of 8 January 1914 records: “What do I have in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself.” The indeterminacy of identity, dislodged from the unity of memory and the entelechy of life, shapes the source of the ludic, and at times ludicrous, self. Extending Keats’s theme, Jorge Luis Borges (1995:4) observes: “It is to my other self, to Borges, that things happen....ButIrecognize myself much less in the books he writes than in many others or in the clumsy plucking of a guitar. ...Icannot tell which one of us is writing this page.” Diversity and discontinuity in self-identity, we should recall, manifest themselves as mental illnesses: multiple-personality disorder and amnesia. The stability of the self is the condition of possibility of mental sanity and social life. As Thomas Reid (1846:344) noted in 1785: “The conviction which every man has of his Identity...needs no aid of philosophy to strengthen it; and no philosophy can weaken it, without first producing some degree of insanity.” The Lockean criteria of continuity and unity are in fact necessary for self and identity, even if the Humean recognition of discontinuity and diversity captures the reality of consciousness.