Catalog-ing ethnicity
Clothing as cultural citizenship
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3583431 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sivagami Subbaraman (University of Maryland, College Park, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1999 |
| Volume | 1 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 572-589 |
| Publication date | 1999-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Interventions (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1369-801X • E-ISSN: 1469-929X |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/13698019900510831 |
| OpenAlex | W1581565227 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 18 |
Several cultural studies commentators have noted the processes by which the transnationalization of corporate identity has also come to signal paradoxically an increasing process of global localization. This article explores the complex articulations of the global/local as they are played out in the everyday, existential dilemma of clothing matters for immigrants. It examines the relationship of clothing to questions of cultural citizenship in the US, and remarks on the reinscription of ethnicity as part of a similar though different nationalizing process in India. The study argues that such fetishization of cultural identities is deeply embedded within the consumerist and capitalist politics that seeks to commodify such identities. It examines the paradoxes of this dialectical movement by looking at how mail order catalogs in the US market ‘ethnicity’ as a sign of a non-contestatory process of ‘Americanization’ to a public increasingly desirous of consuming an ethnicity that can also be relinquished at will. Ironically, the process of ‘Americanization’ has also involved the contradictory process of identifying with a smaller number of privatized identities. US consumers thus not only have the ‘empire’ and its goods available for consumption at their bedside and a telephone call away, but ethnicity itself can now be manufactured for a price by anyone in the global market of ‘ethnic laborers’. Curiously, this consumption by US consumers has also led to a (re)inscription of ethnicity in the developing world. In India, for example, it has led to a development and marketing of ‘ethnic chic’, marketed now not only for foreigners in search of the exotic, but also for the Non-Resident Indian (as Indian expatriates are termed) in search of the ‘representative’ and the ‘traditional’, and for the ‘local’ (Indian) urban elites in search of the ‘fashionable’ and the ‘authentic’ non-western. This article explores the complex role which consumerism can have in constructing ‘cultural’ and ‘national’ citizenship identities both transnationally and within the US
Americanization · Clothing · Dialectic · Dilemma · Ethnic group · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Racialization · Social science · Sociology · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Gender Studies · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy
The Anti-aesthetic
The Social Life of Things
Distinction
The Local and the Global
Global/Local
Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies
Fictions Of Feminist Ethnography
About Face
Not Asian, Black or White? Reflections on South Asian American Racial Identity
Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital
Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy
From Expatriate Aristocrat to Immigrant Nobody
Global Local
Dream and Drama
Being in the World
Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture
Culture, community, nation
| Citations per year | 0.4 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2021 - 2021 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |