Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
44
parks’;
1
in other words, stages for performances and spectacles produced by locals in order
to represent their social and cultural reality in front of outsiders and tourists. Heterotopias,
like ethnic theme parks, are more than mere representations of reality, and contribute to
determining what the viewer should consider as ‘real’ of the locality (Krase 2012). They
represent dynamic processes in which people engage to promote social change, by employing
and transforming heterotopic symbols and characteristics that make spaces somewhat
ambivalent into new boundaries and meanings (Lefebvre 1991, Hetherington 1997). The
interpretations of these meanings can be multiple, different and at times contradictory among
local inhabitants, ordinary people and institutions (Gotham 2005).
Here, I interpret the buraku as heterotopia in a double sense. On the one hand, I
describe how the issue has been historically associated with ambivalent meanings (dirtiness,
isolation, disorder, smell) in commonplace discourses. On the other hand, borrowing
Hetherington's definition of heterotopia, I describe buraku practices as ‘the sites in which all
things displaced, marginal, rejected or ambivalent are engaged, and this engagement becomes
the bases of an alternative mode of ordering’ (Hetherington 1996a: 159)
.
I illustrate the
interplay between the taking-on and re-positioning of categorizing principles through
interconnection between social roles and experiences.
2
I examine these social fields of
buraku activism not as mere counter-hegemonic spaces existing apart from the ‘non-buraku’,
but as alternative modes of ordering and reconfigurating the issue by adopting, blurring and
transforming the boundaries between the two dimensions. I discuss the strategic ways in
which the buraku practices adopt the marker of difference, blur the boundaries with the
‘other’, and preserve features of both the buraku and the non-buraku to build new
experiences. Heterotopias, in this sense, can be defined as the processes resulting from
1
‘Ethnic theme parks’ are sites for ethnic emporia such as exotic food stores, restaurants,
merchandise and souvenir shops (e.g. Little Italies, Chinatowns), and represent part of the urban
consumption economy (Krase 2012).
2
I use the expression ‘taking-on’ rather than ‘resisting’ to describe buraku practices, following Sara
Ahmed’s (1999) interpretation of Franz Fanon’s argument concerning the ‘white gaze’ of the black
body: taking on external categorizations in this sense means appropriating the external gaze and, in
Fanon’s words, letting the ‘black body’ be ‘sealed into that crushing objecthood’ (Fanon 1986: 109).
The transformation of external and common categorizations for the buraku occurs by first accepting
and appropriating the symbols and characteristics of marginalization, rather than resisting them, and
then repositioning these on new standards.
