Border culture fuses language, lineage, and politics for Chicana identity

Evidence

Thus, cultural identities tend less to be truly organic expressions of belonging or affiliation than marriages of convenience encouraged by the political ideologies of the time. Those liberal characters who are not denounced as hypocritical tend to be well meaning but misguided in their attitudes to cultural difference. Deedee packs her students’ curriculum with representative texts from black music and culture. Jimi Hendrix and Marvin Gaye provide a soundtrack to her teaching of the U.S. civil rights struggle, and she encourages her students to treat canonical and popular texts as interchangeable. Interestingly, though, whereas popular culture provides a valorized means of youth identification in The Buddha of Suburbia, it is treated with more suspicion in The Black Album. On the one hand, Shahid and Chad bond over their pop-music tastes. On the other, Kureishi’s determination to define art and culture as an antidote to religious fundamentalism requires that he reassert the liberal humanist reading of the European canon as personally liberating and culturally vitalizing. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 174 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Border studies reframes Chicana identity as crossings and memory rather than a fixed blueprint — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2487; Migration erodes boundaries between languages, cultures, and nation-states — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3805; Diasporic people negotiate multiple, hyphenated identities across cultural difference — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 355 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Cultural identities are political marriages of convenience more than organic belonging #complicates (0.82) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 174