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🪵 The Threshold

Marginalized scholars must accept powerful groups border-crossing into their terrain despite real risks.

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tagsja-picks, causal_relationships, singleton, xref, contrarian_or_surprising, category/causal-relationships
aliases@roderick_m_kramer_social_2011, loc. 1425

4 min read

Marginalized scholars must accept powerful groups border-crossing into their terrain despite real risks.

Evidence

1n1st practice of “solidarity” had any valence whatsoever, it could not be grounded in the ur.- of feminism, progressivism, liberalism, or Is.. lamism, but could only ensue within the uncertain, at times opaque, condi.. tions of intimate and uncomfortable encounters in all their eventuality. I say this not to resurrect a redemptive narrative of anthropological reckoning or universal humanism that claims the power to break through the thicket of prejudices and find a common human essence . To do so would be to reduce yet again all that remains irreconcilable into the trope of a shared humanity and its assumed teleological futurity. Rather what I mean to gesture at is a mode of encountering the Other which does not assume that in the process of cultur.. ally translating other lifeworlds one’s own certainty about how the world should proceed can remain stable. This attitude requires the virtue of humil.. ity: a sense that one does not always know wha one opposes and that a politi.. cal vision at times has to admit its own fi itude in order to even comprehend what it has sought to oppose. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 1311 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

This is an enormous act of what I want to call imaginary political reidentification, reterritorialization and reidentification, without which a counterpolitics could not have been constructed. I do not know an example of any group or category of the people of the margins, of the locals, who have been able to mobilize themselves socially, culturally, economically, and politically in the past twenty or twenty-five years who have not gone through some such series of moments in order to resist their exclusion, their marginalization. That is how and where the margins begin to speak. The margins begin to contest, and the locals begin to come to representation. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 228 (#expands, via linked claim)

How does this picture comport with our emphasis on the minority’s successes? We have argued that minorities can affect majority beliefs and behaviors, but only when they are accepted as legitimate members of the larger group. Minorities attempt to move into this status for many reasons, such as to fulfill belongingness needs and to enable them to move the majority. Minorities that are of low status, heavily stigmatized, or socially disadvantaged are not likely to be accepted by the majority as in-group, irrespective of their desires for inclusion. When the minority is not accepted as legitimate or acceptable for inclusion, its power to influence is forfeit. Satisfying uniqueness needs may motivate individuals to distance themselves from the majority; however, unless the uniqueness is reigned in and the minority is accepted as a legitimate part of the majority, it is destined to remain out-group and thus surrenders its power to influence. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1425 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Scholarship from marginalized communities requires engaged praxis, not detachment; Marginalized groups require imaginary re-territorialization before they can mobilize against exclusion — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 228; Minority influence on majorities requires social legitimacy, which stigmatized groups cannot attain — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1425 (+2 more)

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