Ethnic nationalist challenges target symbolic capital via counterdiscourse

Evidence

East Indians in Trinidad and Guyana have employed different strategies to challenge Creole nationalist construct and to redefine national identity. Each challenge represents a specific instance of the amalgamation over time of multiple and competing claims to nationalist space. Each is a particular response to colonial and postcolonial discourses of exclusion legitimized in the historical production and reproduction of creolite. These responses emerge as assaults against the rituals, symbols, and institutions of Caribbean self-representation. In the final analysis, they represent counterdiscourses to the complex of cultural and racial representations and practices constitutive of Creole identity, and to the honor and prestige that, as symbolic capital, underlie Creole claims to privilege and power. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3267

Categorization

• DEFINE: Frames ethnic counterclaims as counterdiscourses aimed at the symbolic capital (honor, prestige) that underwrites Creole privilege — extends Bourdieu’s symbolic capital into postcolonial ethnic conflict.
• XREF: Connects to Bourdieu’s symbolic capital and to postcolonial discourse theory (exclusion legitimized through creolite).