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UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 7th Annual International Postgraduate Conference

Inclusion Exclusion

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Saturday 18 February 10:00 – 11:30: Panel H1: Identity and Nation

Eva Šlesingerová (Masaryk University, Brno): ‘"The other Czechs?": ethnic "otherness" and the liminal spaces of Czech nationhood’

Even after the "Velvet revolution" (1989) and the EU enlargement (2004), the Czech Republic is still assumed to be an ethnically homogenous society. Despite the fact that the situation is changing, despite the wide range of statistics about the number of ethnically defined minorities, the representation of the "typical Czechs" or the answer to question "Who belongs to Czechs?" is still, within the everyday’s discourse and public discourse related to the hegemonic images of somebody who is "white and Czech-speaking", simply who is of the Czech "origin". This means that the inclusion to the Czech nation’s core-group (Jeffrey Alexander) has been constructed around the concept of primordial nationhood, which seems to be a natural one.

The main points of my paper are the following: how does the Czech "core group" construct the liminality of social identities between the "sameness" and "difference"? Does it concern cultural racialisation, ethnicisation? How can we explore the construction of the symbolic borders associated with various types of "Others", such as foreigners? How is the otherness represented in various discourses: popular, scientific and political?

The paper is focused on analysis of the culture of specific liminal spaces (Victor Turner, Homi Bhabha) where different identity is defined as ethnic. Liminal in this sense means hybridity, a question of transgression of the symbolic borderline between different cultures. When and under which circumstances does the representation of the "otherness" - specific body, customs, habits, accent – become cultural code of inclusion or exclusion? Which consequences have brought the use of words and images connected with concepts of "origin", "alterity", imagination of the body, etc.? How are subjects formed ‘in-between’, or in excess of, the sum of the ‘parts’ of difference (usually intoned as race/ethnicity, etc.)?

Taking advantage of critical cultural theory, this paper examines the ‘narrative of difference’ in the production of knowledge in various materials and documents. Of particular interest is the issue of the way the recent transformation of the Czech Republic has interrogated current notions of citizenship and national identity.

The analysis of chosen texts and other, mostly visual materials, demands an interpretative approach, a discourse analysis. Within this kind of analysis it is possible to investigate the mutual role of various kinds of constitution of a text (a visual one in case of photographs) in specific socio-historic conditions of transformation of society and the special role of power/knowledge concept of Michel Foucault and critical discourse analysis (Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak, etc.).