Elusive Culture: Schooling, Race, and Identity in Global Times / Edition 1

by Daniel A. Yon, Stuart Hall

Overview

"At one point I thought of myself as a Black person and that limits me because as a Black person there are things that I am suppose[d] to be. So I had to shed that. I am not just Black. I am a woman, and that limits me as well. [But,]…if I think that I am limited then I don't dare risk anything or try to do anything. So 'bust' being Black and 'bust' being a woman…." — Margaret, a student at Maple Heights

Elusive Culture is a fascinating ethnographic study of youth engaged in a passionate quest for identity in global times. It explores questions of identity and culture at a Toronto high school, a space wherein teachers and students alike shift and slide in relation to the policies and practices of anti-racism, multiculturalism, and the competing discourses of identity. Drawing on personal observations, conversations with students and teachers, experimental work in drama, use of video, and student writings, Yon develops a complex view of identity and culture, one attuned to the ambivalent and contradictory processes of everyday life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780791444825
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	02/10/2000
Series:	SUNY series, Identities in the Classroom
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Daniel A. Yon is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at York University in Toronto.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

1
Mapping the Field

2
The Discursive Space of Schooling

3
Portraits of Identity

4
Talk of Race and Identity

5
Gendering Race and Racializing Gender

6
Toward an Understanding of Elusive Culture

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

"Elusive Culture brushes provocatively against the grain of most ethnographic texts, refusing to work out—and work out of—a rigid set of binary oppositions and gesturing instead toward the evocative intersection of spatial practices, ambivalence, routed-ness, and subjectivity.

"Employing the concepts of difference, globalization, diaspora, and identity in an attempt to understand how subjectivity is constructed out of the concrete social practices of everyday lived experience, Yon is able to draw important attention to the specificity of racism and racist subjectivities that have eluded many critical ethnographers. Elusive Culture is a major contribution to the literature on critical ethnography." — Peter McLaren, author of Life in Schools and Schooling as a Ritual Performance

"This is a wonderful work that has compassion and passion toward youth, as well as, at times, adult disbelief." — Victoria I. Muñoz, author of Where "Something Catches": Work, Love, and Identity in Youth

From the Publisher

Yon (anthropology, York U., Toronto) examines a local high school as a space within which teachers and students shift and slide in relation to the policies and practices of anti-racism, multiculturalism, and the competing discourses of identity. He draws on personal observation, conversation with students and teachers, experimental work in drama, the use of video, and student writing to develop a complex view of identity and culture attuned to the ambivalent and contradictory processes of everyday life. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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