Identity and Community
Identity and community are interlinked in too many ways to count. The ideas of who we are and what we are are intrinsically linked to who we see and what we experience. As Jane Batkin (2017, p. 2) puts it:
We shape and create our identity by explaining to someone else who we are. As such, what has happened to us needs to be used to tell a community why we react the way we do, and why we act the way we do. Within the research I have been engaging with, the conflict between who we are and how we communicate it to others is a main issue to be addressed. To have a trauma is to be unable to express one's hurts adequately, perhaps. Can one's trauma become an identity? Can the explanation of the trauma then let people recreate their lost identity? However, as my main concept in the film states, a trauma is something that lingers, something that does not simply disappear by communication. It is something that keeps its influence on one's identity no matter how long ago the original event occurred.
My best friends come from countries where individuality has not always been the norm. Both Russia (or rather, the USSR) and China build on collectivism as opposed to individualism. How does a community like that deal with its traumas? The disasters (whether man-made or 'natural') that befall these countries are either suppressed or glorified within the culture. The country bonds together or it is forced to forget. In an earlier post I wrote about the collective trauma of 9/11 on the Western world. The way this trauma is dealt with is individual as well as collective. The identity of certain people is connected to the events that reach far beyond themselves. However, what is one's identity in such situations when it is connected to the collective? The idea of being connected to the collective community called 'Russia' or 'China' leads to a different expectation of the individual.
The connection of identity to performance and the connection of identity to trauma leads to the idea of the performance of grief/trauma. The idea that a trauma is only valid when it is seen to be traumatic by others. This is one of the things that happens on 9/11 where those not directly impacted are performing grief toward the wider world. When you feel a victim of a trauma that is not yours, how much of that is coming from the community and how much of it is coming from the individual? Kear and Steinberg (1999, p. 6) state:
Batkin, J. (2017) Identity in Animation. London: Routledge.
Kear, A & Steinberg, D, L. (1999) Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the Perdormance of Grief. London: Routledge.
Identity is a way of inferring meanings from the world and from other selves. It is interactive, it can be performative and is always fluid. It attaches itself to culture and nationhood, to place and past, to self and other. Its malleability means that it is often problematic to define, just as animation is; there is a refusal to be fixed that resonates through identity theory and permeates the animated world. Identity politics ... refers to the bringing together of characters who have a shared identity, as well as those marginalized for their 'difference'.The way we explain the self and the other is linked to ideas surrounding personal biography , a topic brought up by Jim multiple times within my feedback. We explain who we are through explaining our experiences of the world. As such, the world we inhabit, thus our community has a gigantic influence on how we explain things and how we experience them in the first place. The questions posed by ourselves to ourselves are things like: "Who are we, really? Are we the people we think we are? Or is what others see us as our real self?”
We shape and create our identity by explaining to someone else who we are. As such, what has happened to us needs to be used to tell a community why we react the way we do, and why we act the way we do. Within the research I have been engaging with, the conflict between who we are and how we communicate it to others is a main issue to be addressed. To have a trauma is to be unable to express one's hurts adequately, perhaps. Can one's trauma become an identity? Can the explanation of the trauma then let people recreate their lost identity? However, as my main concept in the film states, a trauma is something that lingers, something that does not simply disappear by communication. It is something that keeps its influence on one's identity no matter how long ago the original event occurred.
My best friends come from countries where individuality has not always been the norm. Both Russia (or rather, the USSR) and China build on collectivism as opposed to individualism. How does a community like that deal with its traumas? The disasters (whether man-made or 'natural') that befall these countries are either suppressed or glorified within the culture. The country bonds together or it is forced to forget. In an earlier post I wrote about the collective trauma of 9/11 on the Western world. The way this trauma is dealt with is individual as well as collective. The identity of certain people is connected to the events that reach far beyond themselves. However, what is one's identity in such situations when it is connected to the collective? The idea of being connected to the collective community called 'Russia' or 'China' leads to a different expectation of the individual.
The connection of identity to performance and the connection of identity to trauma leads to the idea of the performance of grief/trauma. The idea that a trauma is only valid when it is seen to be traumatic by others. This is one of the things that happens on 9/11 where those not directly impacted are performing grief toward the wider world. When you feel a victim of a trauma that is not yours, how much of that is coming from the community and how much of it is coming from the individual? Kear and Steinberg (1999, p. 6) state:
The public performance of grief brings about the community it appears to represent precisely by invoking the ghosts of the past...The orchestrated and ordered display of grief can be seen as an attempt to compensate for and contain the the loss of the other... Mourning appears to be just such an instance where the loss of the individual appears to parallel (and play out) a universal tragedy of loss.As such, can my piece, despite its incredibly individualistic nature be seen as a performance of grief? Or is it a way for me as an individual to connect to my community? I am hoping the latter and as such will be working towards a piece that will hopefully not feel self-indulgent in any way.
Batkin, J. (2017) Identity in Animation. London: Routledge.
Kear, A & Steinberg, D, L. (1999) Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the Perdormance of Grief. London: Routledge.
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