Intercultural Communication and the Concept of Double Consciousness

The existence of ethnic minorities around the globe and especially in the west, has historically been subjugated by the dominant culture or hegemony. Since the mid-twentieth century there has been great research in cultural studies and memory studies on the construction of identity of these silenced groups within the complex social context of a nation. These investigations of diverse nature often result in debates for the almost inevitable intersectionality between these two fields of study. That is, the intrinsic relationship between the identity of an individual or groups of individuals and their memoir. Memory is a tool for ethnic minorities to reconstruct their present through their past via dialectical process.

As explained by Judith Martin and Thomas Nakayama (1999) in their 1999 essay, “Thinking Dialectically about Intercultural Communication” the shared memory of a nation is built on the basis of a lived and inherited history and the ideological framing of its past. This construction is a metanarrative controlled by the dominant power that sets aside and oppresses the counternarratives of minorities. Therefore, voices not represented require an analysis that not only uncovers the past, but also their disadvantage with respect to the privileges of the hegemonic discourse. Furthermore, these dialectics aim to achieve friction of ideas, meanings and practices in hopes of generating a collective culture to which to belong.

One of the names that comes to light in the world of academia when it comes to cultural analysis is Raymond Williams. His thought focuses on the way culture creates and transforms individual experiences, everyday life, social relations and power via perpetually engaging conflicts. In his 1973’s essay “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory”, Williams provides an insight into the power dynamics of the main ideological agents that form society established by Marx; namely, the base and the superstructure.

The base comprises the driving forces of the economy, such as the division of labor or modes of production and it is determined by a superstructure that is formed by theories, values, ideologies, opinions or beliefs. Although he uses the same terms, Williams is critical of the dynamics established by his predecessor and the determinist ideas to which both sides of society are subject. Instead, he proposes the equity and continuity of both and uses notions of the theorist Antonio Gramsci and the philosopher Georg Lukács to reshape the Marxist theory from an economic perspective to a cultural one.

Based on Lukács notion of totality these clear cut categories should be at the same level as “there may be no direct or easily apparent similarity, and certainly nothing like reflection or reproduction, between the superstructural process and the reality of the base, but in which there is an essential homology or correspondence of structures” (Williams 5). On the one hand, society is regulated by laws and rules that reinforce the base and superstructure to be a single one according to Luckács totality. On the other, Gramsci used the term hegemony to designate a majority that exerts its power upon other voices that are dominated and claimed illegitimate.

Hegemony is, therefore, a central system that is imposed but perceived as if it set the limits of common sense; as natural, self-evident, inevitable and universal. Mainly because apart from validating itself, it is able to remain dominant by acting according to the selective tradition since it “is not singular, indeed that its own internal structures are highly complex, and have continually to be renewed, recreated and defended; and by the same token, that they can be continually challenged and in certain respects modified” (Williams 8). Hegemony silences voices which are not useful; namely, archaic values that are passé and no longer operative, for they have no echo in society. On the contrary, it integrates the differences in marginal groups that believes convenient via force or consent progressively, like residual values that are left from previous times and have been replaced, or emergent values, that are those gestating but still unclassified, struggling to be heard. The emergent values that refuse to be incorporated do so by strategies of resistance and dissidence, rather being passively alternative and not constituting a danger to the totality or being subversive against it. This opposition leads to collision, which is convenient according to Williams because it “allows for this kind of variation and contradiction, its sets of alternatives and its processes of change” (Williams 8) and sets a space through which minorities can reclaim their space within the system.

An important form of belonging for every individual of a society is its collective memory. This sociological theory of memory was developed by sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who is considered by many the ‘founding father’ of cultural studies. Collective memory indicates a type of memory which is shared by all members and helps understand social dynamics. Lewis Coser, the translator to some of Halbwachs writings into English, provides the following synthesis: “Halbwachs was without a doubt the first sociologist to stress that our conceptions of the past are affected by the mental images we employ to solve present problems, so that collective memory is essentially a reconstruction of the past in the light of the present” (qtd. in Gensburger 372).

Halwachs’ presentist argument establishes that time passes collectively because individual consciousness and its evolution are marked by the social nature of mankind. Accordingly, collective memory is not stable and unified, but rather a collection of memories of various standpoints. This memory does not have an origin, is not focused on the event that took place in a particular time, but in those who remember it, recognize it and reconstruct it in constant interaction with one another.

In 1995, The critic Jan Assman threw alternative conclusions to the debate using the collective memory of Halbwachs in his essay 'Collective memory and Cultural Identity”. He asserted that remembering and forgetting are a subjective experience, but is critical of the the “decissive dismissal of numerous (…) attempts to conceive collective memory in biological terms (…) instead, (…) shift the discourse concerning collective knowledge out of a biological framework into a cultural one” (Assmann 125). To amend the voids in the latter discourse, Assmann distinguishes between communicative and cultural memory.

Communicative or everyday memory does not possess cultural characteristics. It results the from articulation of language among social groups in the field of oral history. This memory is energetic, as disorganized as archaic since it is not specialized neither does it have thematic stability. A joke, a memory or a gossip are examples of communicative memory (Assman 126).

Cultural memory, however, is organized to the extent that it has fixed points, namely past events, and remains immutable to the passing of time. Assman speaks of collective memory as if it was a file; society keeps inside of it in a stable and solid way the events that represent it through its objectification as texts, rites or monuments that he called figures of memory and their institutionalization as in commemorative acts forming island of time. As a result of this transcendental process, memory merges with history.

Cultural memory has the normative and formative capacity to specify the identity of the group both positively and negatively in such a way that it formulates who they are and who they are not or how they position themselves in regard to narratives. In addition, it is formative because it is established and perpetrated through the transmission of an institutionalized heritage in the form of pictorical images and rituals (Assmann 130) not merely writings.

These manifestations enable the present condition of this type of memory, which is in constant self-reflexivivity in the measure that it is maintained going back to itself and fitting and drawing back to itself in order to interpret, criticize, renew and control the sense of the group This practice serves the interests of the dominant group that seeks new ways of seeing the past at their convenience. It is for its favor to the hegemony that the collective memory acts according to the previously explained selective tradition established by Raymond Williams. Memory, besides a metaphorical file or crypt, is a way to perpetrate the values of powerful voices and bury subjugated ones.

These pessimistic notions about the dynamics of power and how hegemony absorbs all the markers of identity in a society, viz. Its knowledge, memory and history continue to leave unanswered if a resistant minority is able to manifest and be heard instead of joining the dominant voice. Homi K. Bhabha, in his seminal work The Location of Culture (1994) wrote “When historical visibility has faded, when the present tense of testimony loses its power to arrest, then the displacements of memory and the indirections of art offer us the image of our psychic survival” (Bhabha 18). This statement is the core of his theory: how shifty, unstable the concept of culture is. Bhabha’s collection of essays, thought focused on the colonial process, leaves space for the empowerment of the marginal voices within the hegemonic, mainstream discourse. He does so by establishing hybridity as a process of inbetweenness and third space that incorporates cultural difference to the individual identity.

Several scholars such as Spivak and Foucault have claimed that if marginal voices can find a way to express themselves or investigate for their visibility, it is depending on Western consent. Such manifestation must be developed following the dominant method, like the English language and most white institutions. Bhabha's hybridity solves this paradox and proposes to use the tools of the oppressor precisely to escape from their oppression. In other words, he seeks to embrace the cultural difference resulting from the dynamics of power in order to form an alternative identity that is able to articulate different discourses. In this way, Bhabha expands the dualist point of view developed by the critic Edward Said in his influential book Orientalism (1978) beyond self and Other, coloniser and colonised. Bhabha appropiates colonial identities as 'neither the One... nor the Other... but something else besides”(Bhabha qtd. in Hanlon 6).

Bhabha places the focus on the complexity implied by the identity of the minority, exemplifying it with the relationship between oppressor and oppressed as one of desire and aversion. That is to say, the Other is seen on the one hand as exotic or different but on the other as savage and dangerous. Similarly, it appeals to the voices being silenced for being considered inferior but also for constituting a risk for the established order. It is in the space between the two that the individual can articulate 'a strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal” (Bhabha 159). Bhabha appeals to the claim of identity through embracing inbetweeness while rejecting fixed identities since they do not exist. To support this statement, he refers back to Said's orientalism and affirms that identities are fragile rather than static, especially those of the colonizers.

The construction of those mainstream identities that control the system is really possible thanks to the Other. In other words, the colonizers do not form their image by themselves, but by denial of the characteristics of the colonized ('I am not x' instead of 'I am x”). Thus, it is in this dependency upon the other that the colonizer is reduced to a state of ambivalence, uncertainty and anxiety rather than the assumed authority and power. According to both Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, stereotyping the marginalized is the most effective way to essentialize them and cause them to believe that they are not in possession of the capacity to differentiate themselves and face their encapsulation.

However, the two critics also point out the other side of the coin of the paradox in the binary relationship of colonizer and colonized as it sets the ground for its inversion in the form of mimicry.

As Hanlon explains through historian David Huddart, it is this hybrid space found within the double-ness and spitting of the colonial discourse that allows the colonized to resist colonial discourse. This betrayal ultimately enables colonial modes of power and representation to be challenged and reversed into a tool of agency for the colonised; the mimic, no less. (10) The mimic arises from the colonized desire to become like his oppressor, as Bhabha puts it “almost the same (…) but not quite” (Bhabha 86). This interest for imitation can get to the extreme that can get both ways: it is capable of contributing the colonial ideology and perpetrate it or underdetermining the legitimacy of the colonizer’s self-identity and create an ambivalent space for Bhabha’s mimicry and resistance. That is so because mimicry turns the emulation of the dominant power’s values into questioning through parody. The mimic, while a mirror of the identity of self, never quite reaches its full presence. Rather, it reveals its lack of authenticity and fluidity.

It is the capacity of the marginal to find agency and power through the very institutionalized tools that oppress them, to mimic them, that turns the hybridity into a form of dissidence. Bhabha, like Raymond Williams, advocates a blank canvas for friction as a way to uncover voices excluded by and from hegemony. It is these spaces that are his true “location of culture”; those which allow ambivalence and cultural difference in their own identity and the nation’s as a whole, and “provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood (...) that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites for collaboration, and contestation, in act of defining the idea of society itself” (Bhabha 1).

Bhabha describes this hybrid site as a 'liminal' space in which there is a continual interface and exchange of cultural performances that represent a rewarding recognition of everyone's cultural differences. To explain it, he uses the metaphor of the stairs that divide two floors of a building: “The stairwell as liminal space, in-between the designations of identity, becomes the process of symbolic interaction, the connective tissue that constructs the difference between upper and lower, black and white. The hither and thither of the stairwell, the temporal movement and passage that it allows, prevents identities at either end of it from settling into primordial polarities. This interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (Bhabha 4).

His liminality engages culture productively in that it enables a way of thinking “the realm of the beyond”. It not only applies to the space between groups, but also historical periods, theory and application, etc. The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize identity hybridizes that emerge in moments of historical transformation.

The sociologist and cultural theorist Stuart Hall, so-called the ‘godfather of multiculturalism’, found in Bhabha’s texts various readings that were suitable for his crux theory of cultural identity, developed in his book Questions on Cultural Identity (1996). Hall describes identity as a structured representation which only achieves its positive through the negative. That is, that the self cannot be formed in isolation, but only when it comes in contact with others is it capable to construct itself. In the same way, he defends that it is necessary to recognize an a common origin or characteristics with other individuals and collectives in which the the person is in touch and keep articulating one’s nature. Identities, as Hall claims, are subject to a radical historization, and are constantly in the process of change and transformation (Hall 4). Thus, identity construction should not only be based on an immutable collective memory that keeps states in the past, but on the constant interrogation of past and present.

Rather than being what history tells they should be, identities should become through language, culture, and history too, in a self-representative style. Identities are not strictly dependent, they relate to the invention of tradition as much as tradition itself (Hall 4). The very act of writing against the oppression is in itself a place of discussion and mediation in which minorities can claim their right to be heard. It has been through literature that in recent history minority groups have gained visibility by uncovering the privileges of (white, western, upper middle class, educated, male, heterosexual…) hegemony. Some examples are Chimamanda Adichie's activism and novels about African-American women like Americanah (2013); those of the political activist, writer and poet from Chile Gloria Anzaldúa about mestizaje as Borderlands/La Frontera (1999), the emphasis on the partition in India in Clear Light of Day (1980) by the scholar Anita Desai and the case of hermeneutic study of this dissertation, Maud’s Line the Cherokee descendant Margaret Verble published in 2015.

Although it is not about Native American literature, the novel The Souls of Black Folk (1903) by W.E.B. Du Bois is an appropriate narrative piece for the closure of previously expressed cultural and memory theories. Du Bois belonged to the minority of the black race in the United States and wrote his book at a time of racial tension. It is a compilation of essays in the form of a novel that has made history and a founding text for the movements and struggles of an entire population (Marable 96) precisely because it is a member of the subjugated voices that were allowed to speak for themselves thanks to him. Buried under the narrated experiences of blacks in North America, there are great conclusions and whole concepts about the minority identity that Du Bois revealed.

The most important is that of the double consciousness. This term coins the feeling on an individual whose identity is divided into several parts, making it difficult or impossible to have a unified one. He describes “double consciousness” as follows:

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history o9f this strife- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He wouldn’t bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face” (Du Bois 2-3, emphasis added).

This fragment is very illustrative of the ideas that Du Bois intended to convey about how the individual who is caught between two realities, in the previously explained site for in-betweeness, suffers for the risk of interiorizing the harmful mainstream discourse that essentializes him through stereotypes. These prejudices lead double consciousness to create an element of conflict in the individual that struggles to unite the different components of his identity. Although the term double-consciousness is here described negatively, it subscribes to Bhabha's third space theory insofar as the narrative voice is able to see the dominance before which they are being subjugated and expresses the desire to invert it in their favor in order to reconcile their identity.

Another concept closely related to the aforementioned double consciousness that allows minorities to embrace their third space and develop a hybrid self-consciousness is the 'veil'. Du Bois speaks of it as a metaphorical element that designates a gift with which African Americans are gifted because it provides them with a second gaze, which can potentially be a blessing and a curse. At the beginning of the novel he speaks of the veil as an enemy for their integration 'the veil that hung between us and Opportunity' (Du Bois 28); and at the end the narrative voice finds it an advantage characteristic for the position of the African-American collective in society:

“He grew slowly to feel almost for the first time the Veil that lay between him and the white world; he first noticed now the oppression that had not seemed oppression before, differences that erstwhile seemed natural, restraints and slights that in his boyhood days had gone unnoticed or been greeted with a laugh (Du Bois 89).

The progression of the narrative, together with the constant allusion to the double-ness of its identity and experience, is an indicator that it is possible to have a discordant voice within the narrative of hegemony and mainstream culture.

Du Bois’ concepts of double consciousness and veil can transcend racial boundaries and apply to all social minorities, in this case specifically in the analysis of Maud’s Line’s female Native American protagonist that struggles to find her place within a society that is subjected by the hegemonic power. In the same way, the notions of Raymond Williams on the power dynamics between the ideological agents and the insight of Halbwachs and Assman in the conflictive relationship between cultural and communicative memories serve to establish a ground for the analysis of the dialectic in the construction of hers and the community’s identity. Lastly, Bhabha’s comprises and joins the rest of the theories through his insistence on the importance of the minority groups constructing the narrative of the nation, therefore, its memory.