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We all have stories to share, to build, to pass around, to inherit, and to create. This story - the one I piece together now - is about a Thai-/Bengali-/Muslim-/American-/Feminist looking for home, looking to manage the tension and conflict of wanting to belong to her family and to her feminist community. This thesis focuses on the seemingly conflicting obligations to kinship on the one hand and to feminist practice on the other, a conflict where being a good scholar or activist is directly in opposition to being a good Asian daughter. In order to understand how and why these communities appear at odds with one another, I examine how the material spaces and psychological realities inhabited by specific hyphenated, fragmented subjects are represented (and misrepresented) in both popular culture and practical politics, arguing against images of the hybrid body that bracket its lived tensions. I argue that fantasies of home as an unconditional site of belonging and comfort distract us from the multiple communities to which hyphenated subjects must move between. Hyphenated Asian-/American bodies often find ourselves torn between nativism and assimilationism - having to neutralize, forsake, or discard parts of our identities. Thus, I reduce complicated, difficult ideas of being to the size of a thimble, to a question of loyalty between my Asian-/American history and my American-/feminist future, between my familial background and the issues that have become foregrounded for me during college, between the home from which I originate and the new home to which I wish to belong. To move with fluidity, I must - in collaboration with others - invent new stories of identity and belonging.

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The research problem of this thesis is to explore the effects of top-down, bureaucratic definitions of belonging and social identity on urban social relations. More specifically, the thesis analyses the ways in which the nativist categorisations of indigeneity in Kano and autochtonie in Amsterdam can help to understand the tensions between ethnic groups in these two cities. Methodologically, the study is designed as a least-similar, comparative exploration and uses mixed qualitative and quantitative methods in its case studies of Kano and Amsterdam. Theoretically, this study uses identity cleavages and identification as the mediators between policy categories and social relations. It combines social-psychological, historical, and institutional theories to link bureaucratic nativism to ethnic identities and, finally, to conflictual (or ‘destructive’) interethnic relations. The resulting theoretical argument of the thesis is that nativist policy categorisations are likely conducive to antagonism, avoidance, and conflict between groups defined as ‘natives’ and ‘settlers’. The central finding of the thesis is that both in Kano and in Amsterdam, indigeneity and autochtonie have entrenched a primordial and competitive (or ‘exclusionary’) notion of ethnic identities and have thus been conducive to interethnic antagonism, avoidance, and conflict. Introduced at a time of rapid immigration, social change, and persistent horizontal inequalities, the two top-down policy categories came to redefine urban belonging in Kano and Amsterdam. As a result, previously apolitical ethnic boundaries between ‘natives’ and ‘settlers’ became politicised, connected to exclusionary definitions of religion and class, and ranked on the basis of their claim to a primordial ‘native’ status - that is, their status as historical ‘first-comers’ in their place of residence. The categorisation and group positioning effects of nativism have, therefore, intensified the urban struggle to belong in Kano and Amsterdam. At the same time, however, the thesis underlines that ethnic conflict in Kano and Amsterdam is limited, partly because nativist forms of belonging are continuously challenged by, for example, inclusive multiculturalism in Kano and urban citizenship in Amsterdam.

Dans ce travail, nous proposons d’interroger la notion d’innéité des facultés de l’esprit, dans l’histoire de la philosophie et dans le débat contemporain. Nous commençons par montrer que toute hypothèse concernant l’innéité des facultés de l’esprit – qu’elle soit innéiste ou empiriste – pose un problème explicatif que nous nommons le « problème de la tautologie ». C’est en dévoilant les présupposés épistémologiques de chaque hypothèse que nous révélons la présence de ce problème au sein du débat classique sur les idées innées, mais aussi au cœur du débat contemporain amorcé par les travaux en linguistique de Noam Chomsky. L’identification d’une faculté innée spécifique ou d’une capacité générale semble toujours découler de choix métaphysiques ou épistémologiques a priori. En ce sens elle n’est jamais justifiée de façon satisfaisante. C’est pourquoi, une position intermédiaire (constructiviste) apparaît plus convaincante. En outre, l’analyse des différentes définitions de l’innéité souligne la nécessité de renoncer non pas à la notion même d’innéité certains philosophes contemporains le pensent, mais à l’attribution d’un contenu a priori à l’innéité. Nous pensons que l’innéité est un terme épistémique auquel il est seulement possible d’attribuer de façon a priori un statut formel. L’innéité doit donc être redéfinie comme une condition du développement. Le terme condition permet en effet, d’une part, de souligner le statut épistémique de l’innéité qui est un terme relatif à une explication, celle du développement ; d’autre part, d’insister sur le fait que l’innéité n’est pas dénuée de consistance ontologique. Le développement cognitif n’aurait tout simplement pas lieu sans elle. Nous défendons ainsi l’idée qu’il est possible de minimiser le « problème de la tautologie » par une redéfinition de la notion d’innéité et par l’élaboration d’une méthodologie propre à établir l’innéité de certaines facultés de l’esprit sans la présupposer et qui prend en compte le développement cognitif. Pour finir, nous appliquons la méthodologie proposée à l’exemple de la faculté de langage et nous essayons de défendre une hypothèse précise concernant son innéité. / In this work, we examine the notion of innateness of faculties of mind, in the history of philosophy as well as in the contemporary debate. Firstly, we show that any hypothesis on innateness of faculties of mind – whether innatist or empiricist – raises an explanatory problem that we called “the tautology problem”. Identifying epistemological presuppositions of each hypothesis leads us to reveal the presence of this problem within both the classical debate on innate ideas and the contemporary debate on innate mind structure initiated by Chomsky’s linguistic work. Assumptions on domain-specific innate faculty or general capacity always seem to follow from a priori metaphysical or epistemological options. If so, they are not satisfactory justified. The constructivist position appears to be an intermediary relevant way, with conditions to be defined. Furthermore, analysis of different definitions of innateness reveals the necessity to renounce to attribute an a priori content to innateness (and not to renounce to the concept of innateness as some contemporary philosophers argue). We think that innateness is an epistemic term to which it is only possible to attribute a priori a formal status. We claim then that innateness must be redefined as condition of development because the term condition underlines on the one side the epistemic status of innateness, which is an explanatory-dependent term; on the other side its propensity to have an ontological plausibility: cognitive development does not occur without something innate. Thus, we advance that it is possible to minimize “the tautology problem” by redefining innateness and by elaborating a methodology capable of establishing innateness of some faculties of mind without presupposing, taking into account cognitive development. To conclude, we apply the advanced methodology to the example of the faculty of language and try to defend an assumption about its innateness.

In the nineteenth century, theatre and newspapers were the dominant expressions of popular culture in the northeastern United States, and together formed a crucial discursive node in the ongoing negotiation of American national identity. Focusing on the five decades between 1820 and 1870, during which touring stars from Great Britain enjoyed their most lucrative years of popularity on United States stages, this dissertation examines three instances in which English performers entered into this nationalizing forum and became flashpoints for journalists seeking to define the nature and bounds of American citizenship and culture. In 1821, Edmund Kean’s refusal to perform in Boston caused a scandal that revealed a widespread fixation among social elites with delineating the ethnic and economic limits of citizenship in a republican nation. In 1849, an ongoing rivalry between the English tragedian William Charles Macready and his American competitor Edwin Forrest culminated in the deadly Astor Place riot. By configuring the actors as champions in a struggle between bourgeois authority and working-class populism, the New York press inserted these local events into international patterns of economic conflict and revolutionary violence. Nearly twenty years later, the arrival of the Lydia Thompson Burlesque Troupe in 1868 drew rhetoric that reflected the popular press’ growing preoccupation with gender, particularly the question of woman suffrage and the preservation of the United States’ international reputation as a powerfully masculine nation in the wake of the Civil War. Three distinct cultural currents pervade each of these case studies: the new nation’s anxieties about its former colonizer’s cultural influence, competing political and cultural ideologies within the United States, and the changing perspectives and agendas of the ascendant popular press. Exploring the points where these forces intersect, this dissertation aims to contribute to an understanding of how popular culture helped shape an emerging sense of American national identity. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that in the mid-nineteenth century northeastern United States, popular theatre, newspapers, and audiences all contributed to a single media formation in which controversial English performers became a rhetorical antipode against which “American” identity could be defined. / text

Ce travail participe aux recherches contemporaines qui s'attachent à améliorer notre compréhension de ce que nous appelons les « objets d'expérience », et en particulier des objets ordinaires. Il s'arrête sur une dimension qui leur apparaît propre, leur permanence, c'est-à-dire leur continuité spatio-temporelle, telle que nous pouvons la constater et en faire usage dans l'expérience perceptive ou le discours, et leur identité intersubjective – en dépit des différentes visées qu'autrui et moi pouvons avoir sur eux. L'objet est pluriel, son identité, qui n'est pas simplement logique, manque de critères nets, mais cela ne peut remettre en question son existence, comme le voudraient les éliminativistes que nous affrontons. Mais les universalistes, les intellectualistes et tous les idéalistes sémantiques qui, à l'inverse, voient des objets partout, par notre seul pouvoir de les penser, confondent objet réel et objet de pensée. Nous défendons un réalisme contextualiste de l'objet ordinaire qui en précise l'existence dans les contextes où il fait sens d'en parler, et d'abord le contexte perceptif, puisqu'il semble définitoire des normes d'objectification et d'objectivation les plus courantes dans nos pratiques identificatoires, réidentificatoires et catégorisantes, de s'inscrire au sein de la perception et de l'action. Ce sont des processus plus ou moins simples cognitivement et plus ou moins répandus éthologiquement qui sont enjeu selon les cas. Cette pluralité implique d'en explorer les terrains, en particulier dans le plus jeune âge lorsque beaucoup des normes réglant notre saisie cognitive du réel sont en formation. C'est pourquoi notre investigation choisit rapidement de se faire philosophie de la connaissance afin de comprendre la genèse des objets ordinaires dont nous parlons, plutôt que d'essayer de dresser de façon abstraite une liste exhaustive de leurs critères d'identité. Nous défendons que la permanence de l'objet peut être comprise à trois niveaux, perceptif, social et logicolinguistique. Le bébé atteint ces niveaux d'objectivité par des concepts naturels (concepts affordantiels et modules innés, qui ont une inscription corporelle et un développement social), des concepts expérientiels (prototypiques et essentialisants, aidés par nos activités humaines de socialisation et d'attention partagée, qu'on trouve aussi dans le monde animal), et des concepts lexicaux, hérités de notre langue. C'est l'occasion de remettre en cause l'opposition trop facile entre l'inné et l'acquis, ou le nativisme et le constructivisme. À chacun de ces niveaux, il y a des raisons d'utiliser, en un sens non mentaliste mais naturaliste et fonctionnaliste, la notion de représentation, pour comprendre ce qui fait la transcendance de ces objets distaux, traités à partir des stimuli proximaux mais différents d'eux. On peut user d'un discours réaliste à leur sujet, sans présupposer que celui-ci se fonde sur des capacités cognitives rationnelles propositionnelles, synthétiques, inférentielles ou judicatives de haut niveau et nécessairement spécifiques à l'humain, mais sans céder non plus aux oppositions classiques entre réalisme indirect et réalisme direct, ou conceptualisme et non-conceptualisme. De même, on défendra, au-delà des débats entre continuisme et discontinuisme sur l'humain et l'animal, un émergentisme qui pense à la fois la continuité des espèces et leurs différences chaque fois propres dans leur rapport aux objets de leur environnement, tels qu'ils sont visés dans des normes naturelles et sociales. / The understanding of the ordinary objects of our daily experience implies a definition of spatiotemporal and intersubjective levels of permanence. This is due to the fact that these objects, whose existence we defend against eliminativism and mereological nihilism, can be said to endure or perdure, at least in our experiences and our discourses about them. This existence in time and space and between subjects of experience cannot be defined by mere logical features. That is why we choose a contextualist approach of objects, and study perceptual situations where identifications and categorizations occur, especially at the early stages of objectification and objectivation which babies are able to achieve. The newborn and the young child indeed need to gain object permanence, a phenomenon first described by Gestalt psychologists like Michotte and Piaget's school of developmental psychology, and which has been even more accurately studied by cognitive psychologists such as Elizabeth Spelke, Dominique Baillargeon, Susan Carey or Susan Gelman. We defend the thesis that three types of object permanence can be distinguished (perceptual, social and logical-linguistic). Object transcendence can be described as an emergent feature of these stages. Babies acquire these levels of objectivity through normal and universal phases of development, even though different cultural environments can influence rhythms of maturation and the intentional behaviors relating to objects, which children develop. To access ordinary objects, infants need natural concepts (affordantial concepts and innate modular abilities - quite common among animals -, which are embodied and developed through social stimulations), experiential concepts (prototypical and essentialist tendencies, stimulated by joint attention and social phenomena that also occur in the animal world), and inherited lexical concepts. Nativism and constructivism work together and a realist, naturalist and emergentist approach of our cognitions of objects and their representations (understood only as a functional ability to register distal objects from proximal stimuli) enables us to overcome classical oppositions between direct and indirect realism, conceptualism and anti-conceptualism, as well as the continuity-thesis and the discontinuity-thesis between human and non-human beings.