Identities Journal Blog
  • Home
  • About
    • About Identities
    • Identities Collection
    • Latest Articles
    • Special Issues
    • Open Access Articles
    • Most Read Articles
    • Most Cited Articles
  • Identities Blog
    • Blog Collection
    • About Our Blog
    • Blog Categories >
      • Anti-racism
      • Culture
      • Decoloniality
      • Ethnicity
      • Migration
      • Race
      • Commentaries
      • COVID-19 Blog Series
      • COVID-19 Symposium
      • More Blogs
    • Blog Series >
      • COVID-19 Blog Collection
      • Call for COVID-19 Commentaries
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events >
      • Fireside Chat with Prof Nicola Rollock
    • Past Events >
      • Race and Class
      • W. E. B. Du Bois and his Strange Synthesis of Spirituality and Sociology
      • Decolonizing Politics Symposium
      • The Subject of Decolonization: Literary Critical Insights
  • Contact
    • Subscribe for Updates
  • Home
  • About
    • About Identities
    • Identities Collection
    • Latest Articles
    • Special Issues
    • Open Access Articles
    • Most Read Articles
    • Most Cited Articles
  • Identities Blog
    • Blog Collection
    • About Our Blog
    • Blog Categories >
      • Anti-racism
      • Culture
      • Decoloniality
      • Ethnicity
      • Migration
      • Race
      • Commentaries
      • COVID-19 Blog Series
      • COVID-19 Symposium
      • More Blogs
    • Blog Series >
      • COVID-19 Blog Collection
      • Call for COVID-19 Commentaries
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events >
      • Fireside Chat with Prof Nicola Rollock
    • Past Events >
      • Race and Class
      • W. E. B. Du Bois and his Strange Synthesis of Spirituality and Sociology
      • Decolonizing Politics Symposium
      • The Subject of Decolonization: Literary Critical Insights
  • Contact
    • Subscribe for Updates

Ethnic community in the time of urban branding

9/10/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
Haymarket/Chinatown is a precinct located in the southern end of Sydney’s Central Business District. The precinct has become part of the City of Villages initiative, promoted by the City of Sydney administration to inject dynamism in the local economy based on the belief that the city is made up of diverse marketable areas, each endowed with a unique identity. Unlike the other precincts in the Inner Sydney area, the point of differentiation chosen for Haymarket/Chinatown is ‘ethnicity’ ⁠— more precisely, an ambiguous multi-Asianness within which images of Chinese communitarian identity occasionally emerge to confer a sense of authenticity to the ethnic place brand. 

In my Identities article, ‘Ethnic community in the time of urban branding’, I observe how these simplified images of ‘groupist’ (Brubaker 2002) Chinese identity emerge from the brand management strategy for the Haymarket/Chinatown precinct despite the diversity of the local business and resident community. I frame these instances as tensions inherent in the process of place branding, which is characterised by the need to essentialise for marketing purposes while grappling with increasing levels of cultural complexity of the most populous Australian city. ​
In order to highlight the redundancy of these simplified understandings of ethnic identity, data retrieved via longitudinal ethnographic observation of public events and participation in many activities in the precinct are used to analyse the ‘community’ as a provisional construct. The display of ‘authentic’ Chinese culture in Haymarket/Chinatown by a local Chinese community organisation becomes the focus of my Identities article, with its performative strategies of affiliation and identification nested under the main categories of convergence and alignment.

The first term refers to the backstage operations that contribute to the packaging of a wide range of elements related to Chinese culture into a consistent set of performances, symbols and activities proposed to the outsiders’ scrutiny. I look, for instance, at the organisation of a series of events and workshops characterised by an essentialised Chineseness and at the interchangeable strategic uses of Mandarin, Cantonese and English, depending on the various contexts in which the ‘community’ needs to be presented despite the cultural heterogeneity of its membership.

The second helps to show that this type of consensual ethnicity is also premised upon the ways in which the ‘community’ is made to work in conjunction with the operations of external stakeholders, whose interests intersect with the application of the place brand for the precinct. The collaborations between the community organisation and a local shopping centre become exemplary in this context: the latter provides the internal workings of the former a stage onto which perform authentic communitarian Chineseness during moments of intensified branding. 

This analysis aims to destabilise the idea of ‘ethnic community’ as a given, and it taps into the anti-essentialist critique of ‘community’ as an organising principle of collective forms of identification; the aim here is to show the plasticity of this term, echoing Baumann’s idea that the discourse about ethnic minorities as communities ‘is conceptually simple, enjoys a communicative monopoly, offers enormous flexibility of application, encompasses great ideological plasticity, and is serviceable for established institutional purposes’ (Baumann 1996: 30).

Place branding operates in this context as an analytical filter to show that the ‘community’ is not a group of individuals defined by a shared, unchanging ‘ethnic culture’, but a malleable construction held together as a process of composition, and an active agent that partakes in a sophisticated process of value production based on the engineered association of culture and place.

References:
Baumann, G. 1996. Contesting culture: discourses of identity in multi-ethnic London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brubaker, R. 2002. Ethnicity without groups. European Journal of Sociology 43: 163–189.

​Blog post by Andrea Del Bono, Western Sydney University, Australia
Read the full article: Del Bono, Andrea. Ethnic community in the time of urban branding. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2019.1629191  ​
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.


    Blog Categories

    All
    Activism
    Anti-racism
    Asylum Seekers
    Belonging
    Black Lives Matter
    Blackness
    Borders
    Boundary Work
    Cities
    Citizenship
    Colonialism
    Commentaries
    Conflict
    Cosmopolitanism
    Covid-19
    Cultural Memory
    Culture
    Decoloniality
    Diaspora
    Discrimination
    Displacement
    Diversity
    Ethnic Boundaries
    Ethnic Identity
    Ethnicity
    Exile
    Far Right
    Gender
    Global South
    Identity
    Immigration
    Indigenous
    Integration
    Intersectionality
    Islamophobia
    Justice
    Kinship
    Marginalisation
    Migration
    Multiculturalism
    National Identity
    Nationalism
    Nationhood
    Nativism
    Othering
    Policing
    Populism
    Postcolonial
    Race
    Racial Identity
    Racialisation
    Racism
    Radicalism
    Refugees
    Religion
    Resistance
    State Racism
    Stereotyping
    Stigmatisation
    Subjectivity
    Transnationalism
    Victimhood
    Whiteness


    Blog Collection

    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019

Explore Identities at tandfonline.com/GIDE