ideas are everywhere

A few themes/concepts/tropes have been recurring for me, and present in different academic/intellectual contexts.

The site of authority: I’m starting to see that authority can be viewed as existing in social locations instead of individual or oligarchic ones. I think this gets to Bourdieu’s idea of hegemony and the maintenance of authority by all parties in a given social context. Dis-empowered/oppressed/dis-enfranchized “members” in a social situation participate in the constitution and maintenance of a particular social reality. In this way, the authoritative situation is constituted socially, not imposed. How is this relationship initiated, though? Is it access to resources that lead to an imbalance in power that precede the hegemonic construct? In other words, what is happening to a group prior to participation and occupation in a given social location?

Identity construction: This idea of the site of authority relates to identity construction. Given group participation in a social location, there is a discursive relationship among members of groups in that social location. Individuals claim membership to some groups and not to others relative to an individual idea of belonging. Still yet, self-perception and the notion of individual identity is a social construction. I am who I am relative to others who I identify with along a relational continuum.

Authenticity: Agreement with or discord between an individual and a group with regards to membership (or belonging) cycles back to authority via authenticity. What are the determiners for membership? Or, who determines authenticity? If an individual desires membership and acquires and maintains what she perceives as the tropes of membership (think Gee’s identity kit), what constitutes authentic?  I’m thinking of Pennycook’s Global Englishes where he grants authenticity in terms of the performance of Hip Hop in an international context, without returning to the social location of authority of that culture. Implied here is the concept of ownership: specifically that the culture has a group that could be identified as “originators” and therefore constitute the litmus for authentic performance. I think Pennycook may be getting at the idea that performance cannot be owned. While I’d agree with that, there is still the idea of authenticity as a valid performance. The determiner of validity is the authority.

Embodiment and Spatiality: Enslaved entrance into American society for people of African descent afforded no land (ala nation-state) as a site of reproduction for the culture. I’m interested in viewing the body as that site. The black body is the landscape for the reproduction of black culture. Along these lines, performance is also a site; the act is an embodiment of cultural identification. I’m painting a corner here, but this conflicts with Pennycook’s idea of the trans-cultural flow and a dis-embodied authentic performance. I’ll grant the imative (although bordering on impostership). Can I go so far to say that to do hip hop is to do blackness? Maybe that’s to far, there are some racial implications there. And I ultimately divest components of culture (esp. language) from each other. This is still messy for me…