ABSTRACT
This chapter is nominally about the construction of ethnic selves and narratives, offering an analysis of ways of portraying and narrating culturally different life histories of visible minority groups in mainstream, White-dominated cultures. It presents an alternative story, a narrative of growing up ethnic in postmodern culture. The chapter discusses the categorisations of ethnic and cultural groups as descriptions of residual and emergent cultural affiliations defined in relation to White-dominant societies and institutions, and specific political economies. The processes of marginalisation typically involve racialising practices – the discursive and institutional practices whereby people of visible difference are ascribed as an inferior, exterior and negative other, with curtailed or limited access to economic, political and human rights. The chapter utilizes the term ethnic narratives to describe those works of postcolonial writers and by marginalised minorities that attempt to provide accounts of their life-trajectories and of the intergenerational dynamics of identity, political agency and desire.
