Cultural Identity: Reality or Façade?

I found Stuart Hall’s discussion of cultural identity as a production process to be especially eye opening. In our globalized world it is impossible to imagine that a nation can exist that has one unified identity. Even the constant flow of news media across national borders evokes a sense of identity-relation among the average citizen.

In order to better understand the idea of a cultural identity, I decided to look up one of the artists Karim cited in his chapter, “Mapping Diasporic Mediascapes”. Author and Professor, Bharati Mukherjee, was born in India and has lived in Europe, Canada, and the United States. Bharati uses her talent for writing to share her experience as an Indian woman and immigrant. Much of her writing is reflexive of her family’s journey to and from various countries to find a better life. As a child, Bharati returned to India with her family after having lived in Europe for three years. There she completed her Undergrad and also a Masters Degree. She received a scholarship to the United States and today teaches at Berkeley University, specializing in the field of Asian-American Literary Studies. Her experience as a ‘cultured’ woman gives her agency to talk about her experiences from a variety of perspectives. In a speech at Litquake 2007, Bharati shared her thoughts on having a homeland. She told the audience that she was “proud to call this city home”, home being San Francisco, California. Her storytelling is magnificent and would not be if it were not for her upbringing in India. She can identify a world beyond America. She knows what a life separate from commodities can look like. She is an animated writer, because she has lived an animated life.

I know it may sound cliché to say this, but in drawing attention to the struggles of her native homeland as well as the challenges of being an Indian woman, Bharati is able to be a voice for Indian woman. As a multicultural nation, Canada too is able to act as a voice on behalf of many subordinated people’s groups. I think diasporas in our country play a major role in influencing the way in which Canada operates at a national level. Our close ties to many countries around our world, do not merely stem from capital interests, but rather from the close ties between immigrant families and their homeland. This may sound idealistic, but I feel extremely blessed to be a part of people’s lives who have lived outside of the idea of modernism or postmodern. They literally do not know what it means to be modern; they simply know what it means to be Canadian. Just as Bharati’s life brings diversity to her writing, with diversity come opportunities to form community and reach out to groups of people who we would not otherwise have had contact with because of geographical restraints.