Violence and trauma as constitutive elements in racial identity formation.
Item
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Title
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Violence and trauma as constitutive elements in racial identity formation.
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Identifier
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AAI3284488
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identifier
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3284488
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Creator
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Kim, Rose M.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Stephen Steinberg
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Date
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2007
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies | Sociology, Social Structure and Development | Black Studies
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Abstract
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Despite the progress in rights for racialized minority groups, racist violence remains an endemic part of life in the U.S. In the dominant sociological literature, racism usually is presented as the attribution of negative traits to a particular racial group, and by implication, the belief in the superiority of another. This dissertation, in contrast, argues that racist violence and its ensuing trauma, both on individual and group levels, are significant constitutive elements in the racial identity formation process; and that race is better understood as a cultural artifact resulting from racialized violence and failed assimilation. By violence, I include physical and verbal attacks on individuals and groups, as well as culture-wide, symbolic violence that naturalizes race. As for individual trauma, it is manifested through: (1) a vivid, hyper-real memory of the attack; (2) an obsession with that moment; (3) an assigned significance to the event; and (4) a narrative that relates the violent attack to the development of a racialized identity. Cultural trauma (Alexander 2004) is manifested in the collective awareness that the group has suffered a horrific event. This dissertation foregrounds interpretive methods to examine racialized discourses, and draws upon a range of theories from sociology, psychoanalysis, feminism, post-colonialism, and cultural studies. It reviews a number of autobiographies that address self-identity formation to document the role of violence and trauma in the subject's racial-identity formation. To consider violence and trauma suffered by a racialized group, it studies the experience of Korean American storeowners in the 1992 L.A. riots/uprising/sa-i-gu. I argue that individual and group levels of violence and trauma are interlaced with one another, interacting like the micro and macro racial projects in Michael Omi and Howard Winant's racial formation theory. The key role of the mass media in circulating images of violence suggests that in a teletechnological society, the mass media with its flow of information is an important part of the racial formation process; and that increasingly racialized identities are tied not just to bodies, but distributed in a machinic assemblage of images, bodies, and information; and driven by an affective circuitry of violence and trauma.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
