Forget Not Who Thou Art: Contradictory Identification in Ruiz de Burton's Play Don Quixote de la Mancha

In her play Don Quixote de la Mancha. A Comedy, in Five Acts, Taken from Cervantes’ Novel of that Name (1856), María Amparo Ruiz de Burton is seen to identify with her Don Quixote, a cathartic character who views himself as impotent and mistreated. The identification of Don Quixote as a colonized, mad Californio is not accidental, but done for ideological effect. He serves as an expression of an incipient —even if problematic— oppositional identity for Californios within the new Anglo/US hegemonic regime post-1848. It is a contradictory identification, loaded with racial and class anxieties, which aims to redress the decentering and despoliation of Californios as a whole while shining a light on those upper-class Californios who associated with their US colonizers. This article suggests that the play’s significance, and indeed uniqueness, is the creation of an incipient border identity for the Californios through the prism of madness.

Build the Army

This chapter talks about a group of white ministers who aided Black Rochesterians in their struggle to create a police review board and expanded their commitment to the struggle for racial justice. It details how the white ministers acted through the local council of churches and joined forces with Rochester's Black ministers to found and fund an organizational structure capable of building a Black movement. It also traces the abortive engagement with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Chicago's Saul Alinsky and his Industrial Areas Foundation. The chapter refers to FIGHT, Action for a Better Community (ABC), and the Urban League as the three groups that were competing for the hearts and minds of Black Rochester within a year of the uprising. It argues that in order for FIGHT to attract and retain the loyalty of the masses, it adopted an “oppositional identity.”

Oppositional Identity and Back-Vowel Fronting in a Tri-ethnic Context

This study considers the dynamic trajectory of the back-vowel fronting of the BOOT and BOAT vowels for 27 speakers in a unique, longstanding context of a substantive, tri-ethnic contact situation involving American Indians, European Americans, and African Americans over three disparate generations in Robeson County, North Carolina. The results indicate that the earlier status of Lumbee English fronting united them with the African American vowel system, particularly for the BOOT vowel, but that more recent generations have shifted towards alignment with European American speakers. Given the biracial Southeastern U.S. that historically identified Lumbee Indians as “free persons of color” and the persistent skepticism about the Lumbee Indians as merely a mixed group of European Americans and African Americans, the movement away from the African American pattern towards the European American pattern was interpreted as a case of oppositional identity in which Lumbee Indians disassociate themselves from African American vowel norms in subtle but socially meaningful ways.

Italian Narratives of Oppositional Identity

Drawing together scholarship on the late antique and medieval holy man, and modern theoretical work on affect and identity, this article seeks to analyze one method by which group identities in the Mediterranean region broadly, and in Italy specifically, have been defined trans-historically through rhetorical emphasis on the “invasion” of foreignized bodies. The discussion first focuses on late antique Near Eastern Passio texts commemorating Christians who faced persecution under Muslim Saracens, before then shifting to tenth- and eleventh-century southern Italy and Sicily, and to the corpus of Italo-Greek Vitae in which holy individuals regularly encountered the Saracen as a dangerous invader. Such discourses of opposition obscured the inter-reliance between populations, and reduced relations to inherited, primordial struggles, simultaneously shifting attention away from the heterogeneity of non-Muslim resident populations. A similar approach is pursued in modern Italian discourse on migrants, where a selective rhetoric of “invasion” forefront the risks posed by migrants in ways that create a sense of unity in an otherwise-fragmented nation. Urging academic dialogue that incorporates the pre-modern and modern, this article examines the construction of oppositional identity and explores how such narratives reveal collective fears amongst populations threatened by the destabilization of pre-established hierarchies.

Epilogue

The epilogue briefly traces the intertwined histories of the Baratillo and the neighborhood of Tepito in the twentieth century. Like many other decisions regarding the Baratillo, its move to Tepito was supposed to be temporary. Yet the market remained, and over the decades it grew into a sprawling marketplace for second hand, stolen, contraband, and pirated goods that consumed the neighborhood. By the middle of the century, Mexico City newspapers rarely referred to the Baratillo by name; instead, they used the same disparaging language that observers had traditionally employed to describe the Baratillo for the neighborhood itself. Today, Tepito is the most famous barrio in Mexico, with a distinctive oppositional identity that is inextricably tied to its role as the epicenter of Mexico City’s black market.

Secular but not Superficial: An Overlooked Nonreligious/Nonspiritual Identity

Since Durkheim’s characterization of the sacred and profane as “antagonistic rivals,” the strict dichotomy has been framed in such a way that “being religious” evokes images of a life filled with profound meaning and value, while “being secular” evokes images of a meaningless, self-centered, superficial life, often characterized by materialistic consumerism and the cold, heartless environment of corporate greed. Consequently, to identify as “neither religious nor spiritual” runs the risk of being stigmatized as superficial, untrustworthy, and immoral. Conflicts and confusions encountered in the process of negotiating a nonreligious/nonspiritual identity, caused by the ambiguous nature of religious language, were explored through qualitative interviews with 14 ex-ministers and 1 atheist minister—individuals for whom supernaturalist religion had formed the central core of identity, but who have deconverted and no longer hold supernatural beliefs. The cognitive linguistics approach of Frame Semantics was applied to the process of “oppositional identity work” to examine why certain identity labels are avoided or embraced due to considerations of the cognitive frames evoked by those labels.Through the constant comparative method of grounded theory, a host of useful theoretical concepts emerged from the data. Several impediments to the construction of a “secular but not superficial” identity were identified, and a framework of new theoretical concepts developed to make sense of them: sense disparity, frame disparity, identity misfire, foiled identity, sense conflation, and conflated frames. Several consequences arising from these impediments were explored: (1) consequences of sense conflation and conflated frames for the study of religion; (2) consequences of conflated frames for religious terminology; and (3) consequences of the negation of conflated frames for those who identify as not religious, not spiritual, or not Christian. Additionally, four types of oppositional identity work were identified and analyzed: (1) avoidance identity work, (2) dissonant identity work, (3) adaptive identity work, and (4) alternative identity work. Finally, the concept of conflated frames was applied to suggest a new interpretation of the classic Weberian disenchantment narrative.

Disjunctive: Social Injustice, Black Identity, and the Normality of Black People

In the discourse on Black identity, the point of departure is typically psychopathology, as revealed by empirical studies on oppositional identity or theorizing about the negative effects of slavery. This chapter reviews historical and psychological research on Black identity and Black self-esteem, presenting a counter-narrative that positions Black folks as ordinary and normal to a degree not previously appreciated. Although Black people are constantly ensnarled in a multitude of Faustian dilemmas, research demonstrates they are able to maintain their sanity and have accumulated an astonishing record of compromise, acculturation, religiosity, patience, and adjustment. Explicating this disjunctive is the focus of the chapter.