Remaking the Nation

Identity and Politics in Latin America

Sarah Radcliffe, Dr Sallie Westwood, Sallie Westwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134805594
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Remaking the Nation presents new ways of thinking about the nation, nationalism and national identities.
Drawing links between popular culture and indigenous movements, issues of 'race' and gender, and ideologies of national identity, the authors draw on their work in Latin America to illustrate their retheorisation of the politics of nationalism.
This engaging exploration of contemporary politics in a postmodern, post new-world-order uncovers a map of future political organisation, a world of pluri-nations and ethnicised identities in the ever-changing struggle for democracy.

1
IMAGINING THE NATION

Rethinking national identities

This is a book about nations and national identities in the late twentieth century. It is organized around four major themes: the imagining of the nation; the embodying of the nation; living in the nation; and placing the nation. Through thinking about the nation in these ways, we arrive at a reconceptualization of the nation and its everyday ramifications.

IMAGINING THE NATION

Broadly speaking, we can recognize three main models for Latin American nationhood, undertaken by civilian or military regimes: intellectual proposals, military projects and political projects. Within the intellectual proposals have been several radical alternatives, elaborated conceptually rather than in practice, including the Latin American communist ideas, Haya de la Torre’s ideas, and finally Mariátegui’s notions. In the 1920s and 1930s, the communist idea influenced many Latin American intellectuals, persuading them of a need for separate indigenous nations with their own rights, for example the Andean Quechua and Aymara. While such proposals would appear to be anachronistic today, their programmes have not been forgotten entirely; in our interviews with élites in Ecuador, one elderly man suggested (wrongly) that the contemporary Ecuadorean indigenous movement was a strategy to realize the 1930s communist proposals. Emerging at the same time as the communist proposals were other projects, such as those of Victor Haya de la Torre and José Carlos Mariátegui. A Peruvian political thinker, Haya de la Torre proposed a populist alliance between the working class and the national bourgeoisie, disregarding the significant peasant and more indigenous sector, especially in the Andes. Another Peruvian writer, Mariátegui, proposed integrating indigenous groups into national society to make one nation by overcoming social, ethnic and economic divisions (Rowe and Schelling 1991).

Military or authoritarian projects for nationhood have different rationales and proponents in Latin America. Important politically since the Independence wars of the early nineteenth century, the region’s armed forces have often felt justified in intervening in society to carry out measures aimed at security, development and nation-building (Rouquié 1987). Drawing upon a rationale which highlights the political and social stability that military regimes provide, projects involving the armed forces have been highly diverse, at times oriented towards the forced homogenization of the citizenry (by eliminating people whose political or ethnic affiliations appear to challenge the realization of nationhood, such as in 1970s Argentina and 1980s Guatemala). In other countries, the armed forces have often been characterized by their separation from civilian society, creating and maintaining their own institutions (schools, colleges, housing), their own economic interests (companies, banks) and their own social networks. While conscription into the military provides for some a route into politicized nationhood, its importance is reduced by patchy takeup, and the large gulf between professional military personnel and conscripts.

The political projects for nationhood—the third major group—have been generated by both military and civilian regimes in recent Latin American history, such as under the military junta in Peru between 1968 and 1975, or Argentina under the peronistas (followers of the Peróns). Utilizing corporatist measures in an attempt to mobilize citizens from the top down’, the Velasco regime in Peru attempted to create a less socially and ethnically divided country. Whether under its authoritarian or corporatist guises, populism has been perhaps the most widely known of the political projects for nationhood, referring to the articulation of ‘the people’ into political regimes, with Peronism in Argentina perhaps the best known case well illustrating its force and persistence. Gathering up diverse groups into an imagined national community around the ideas of el pueblo (the people) and lo popular (the people’s cultural and social resources), populism has had numerous and varied adherents throughout twentieth-century Latin American history (Laclau 1977). The persistance of populism and the existence of numerous other models for nation-building do not mean that the ‘huge ideological work’ of national identity is already done or ready-made. Rather, the process of defining the ‘people’ in a particular nation is a long-term one (Greenfield 1992), and often conflictual, demanding ideological work to create homogeneity within the nation and distinction from what is outside the nation.

We are not Europeans, we are not Indians, but a middle group between the indigenous and the Spanish, Americans by birth and Europeans by right.

(Simón Bolívar, Independence leader in the early nineteenth century, quoted in Brading 1991)

Analysing the processes of nation-building, Latin American histories point to several key features which distinguish the region from other post-colonial countries. With its early colonization and early independence, Latin American countries have a long history of post-coloniality and nation-building projects, marking differences in timing and context in comparison with Europe, Asia and Africa. The history of Latin America—contrasted with the longer history of indigenous Abya Yala (Platt 1992)—erupted violently with the arrival of Spanish and later Portuguese conquerors from 1492 onwards. Nineteenthcentury anti-colonial struggles were heralded by the indigenous uprisings of Tupac Amaru and Tupac Katari in the late eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth century, the ‘creole pioneers’ of nation-building based their search for nationhood on the notion of a common people, a community united in its political independence from Spain and Portugal. Latin American nations thus have a long history, comparable to many European states.

While independence leaders ‘imagined’ all Peruvians or Mexicans as equal citizens, in practice social and ethnic divisions gave widely differing experiences for whites, blacks and indians under the creole nationalisms between 1770 and 1830 (Brading 1991). From the colonial period, the Americas provided labour and capital for European capitalist development, and indigenous and black labour had ties with Iberia, Italy and the Low Countries (Blaut 1987). Colonial relations brought peninsular Spaniards into the region, just as capitalist relations brought Asian and European populations after independence. When black slavery was abolished from the mid-nineteenth century, other labouring populations (Japanese, Chinese and southern European) were drawn into economic circuits and labour markets, providing the basis for peripheral supply of primary goods to the metropoles.

However, sustaining the imagined communities of these newly developing nations is the result of complex relationships between representations, subjects, the media and identity. Anderson (1991) was the first writer to highlight the importance of the ‘emergence of print capitalism’ for the creation and consolidation of national identities. By making available—through newspapers and novels—a knowledge of shared or known activities, he argued, there emerged a sense of an ‘imagined community’ of the nation among an increasingly literate population.¹ The coming-into-being of the nation as ‘cultural signification’ (Bhabha 1990a) in the early days of nationhood, such as among the creole pioneers, was certainly linked with print capitalism (Anderson 1991; Brading 1991; cf. Colley 1986 on Britain).

In certain circumstances, literature provides images and knowledge of a national history and geography, a ‘gallery of representations’ (Poole 1992:16). After independence, allegorical novels were explicitly expected to fill the ‘gaps’ in national histories, creating imaginary linkages across regional, economic and ethnic lines. In the nineteenth century, a widely circulated literature of manners or costumbrismo offered the possibility of mutual comprehension to different social strata, even if it did not make them into a horizontal community of equals. Such ‘national romances’ were to provide local narratives, ‘writing América’ rather than Latin America-as-seen-by-Europe (Sommer 1991:10).

The representations on offer in novels, newspapers and other media come to be read and experienced as ‘commonsense’ and thus gain hegemony, creating what is experienced as an adequate and unalienated representation of subjects’ lives. Subjects can thereby abstract certain images from their own lives which then ‘stand in’ for the nation;

images are then projected onto the generalizing screen of the ‘national imaginary’ as fetishes of the nation which stand in for the thing itself.

(Bowman 1994:142)

However, as the type and number of media channels (radio, television, film and so on) proliferate in late capitalism, so too do the means by which imagined communities can be created and contested (cf. Schlesinger 1987). In Mexico after the national revolution in 1910–17, film—and not writing—was the medium through which national identity was articulated and consolidated (King 1990). The new media can at times be used by the state in the propagation of official nationalism, as in the case of the use of television by the Brazilian authoritarian military regime between 1964 and the mid-1980s (Rowe and Schelling 1991). Increasing international control and circulation of information and images complicate any idea of a bounded national community with its own communicative networks and specific cultural forms. In Latin America, the reception of information from ‘international’ Western news agencies has concerned some Latin Americans about the ways in which they are re-presented to themselves (Mattelart 1979). However, even without Western media, the ironies and contradictions of (non) national media can be seen. For example, in the Amazonian Oriente region of Ecuador, many people cannot receive national television broadcasts, although reception of Peruvian programmes is good. Viewers feel guilty watching ‘another’ television, feeling that their national affiliation is being questioned.

Moreover, with the presence of large functionally illiterate or semi-literate populations in much of the developing south, the emphasis on written forms of culture and other ‘high’ cultural artefacts is, perhaps misguidedly, focusing attention on the preserve of a literate minority. Pointing to the use of oral transmission of narratives and iconography in Latin American popular nationalisms, Rowe and Schelling argue that ‘the weakness of Anderson’s scheme lies precisely in its omission of the role of popular culture’ (Rowe and Schelling 1991:25). Among one indigenous group in Colombia for example, indigenous identity and difference is represented visually in the form of a flag which incorporates male and female symbols as well as national references. Romances of identity can thus incorporate and utilize non-narrative forms (Rappaport 1992). The widespread use of national calendars, holidays, festivals and uniforms all link into the non-narrative but highly visual ‘liturgies’ of nationalisms (Mosse 1975).

While Simón Bolívar, a famous independence leader in the 1820s, could claim that ‘we are Americans by birth’ the debate about the origins of Latin American subjects has continued to shape nationalist discourses until today. The exact nature of interaction between indigenous and Hispanic legacies is an enduring question in discourses about identity, making the name and the nature of the region highly contested and political (e.g. Platt 1993; Mallon 1995; Thurner 1995). The 500 years of resistance campaign of the early 1990s was one specific outcome of this politics. Challenging the prevailing interpretations of the conquest as worthy of celebration—on the quincentenary of European arrival in the Americas in 1992—the campaign united subaltern indigenous and black views on colonialism and post-colonialism. Drawing attention to the suppression and disappearance of indigenous cultures, enslavement of black populations, and removal of political and personal rights, the campaign revealed the numerous contradictions and divisions within the post-colonial project (History Workshop Journal 1992; Race and Class 1992).

The existence of multi-ethnic, multi-diasporic nations raises particular issues in the analysis of national identity. In societies or cultures shaped by the experiences of colonialism, mass migration from abroad or the co-existence of various ethnic groups—characteristics that include the great majority of present nations—the question of simultaneous yet different versions of national identity is of great significance. In colonized societies, especially in the south, the imagining of the nation took place in the context of the colonizers’ representations of the national community. In this sense, colonized nations had to imagine difference and alternative national identities from the start (Chatterjee 1993:5). Given the early independence and long post-coloniality of Latin American nations, the formulation of national identity lies in the diversity of responses to, and uses of, the modern forms of the nation.

Latin American writers emphasize their countries’ socio-economic diversity and the difficulty of forming a national community from such heterogeneity. The work involved in national self-definition is not, according to these writers, a task for abstract economic forces but for specific institutions and groups, within the context of the state (which develops citizenship, claims autonomy from other states and the right to use force in a sovereign territory). Attempting to define themselves as independent states with specific cultural and historical inheritances, Latin Americans have carried out the ‘huge ideological work to be done daily’ (Hall 1991:26) to determine what they are and are not, and how to imagine a national community. To imagine nations, socio-economic elites have been identified as potential nation-builders, despite their often contradictory identifications. For many elites, Latin American culture and nationhood are lacking (lacking the most desirable Western forms), rather than a solid basis for national pride. In what Yúdice et al. call a ‘sublation’ of centre and periphery, Latin American elites tend to denigrate the local and value the West (Yúdice et al. 1992:4; cf. Hall 1991:28). Such ambivalent elites are located in contradictory class positions, finding their identities in the interstices of the world’s economic centres and peripheries. Although this rightly highlights the easy cosmopolitanism of Latin American elites and their disdain for local cultures, Latin American history reveals that elites have often attempted to direct cultural forms, in order to consolidate their power.

What we are moving towards then is an understanding of the ‘Imagined community’ (Anderson 1991) of the nation which refuses to take on board either a state-or elite-centred notion of the nation-building project, but which on the other hand—as we argue in the following section—does not attribute purity or salvation to the popular cultures of the continent. Rather, the struggles over defining nation and identity through which different groups and institutions (whether cross-class, elite or popular) express their collective subjectivity and political projects, are seen as constitutive—and constituting—the very nature of the national imagined community.

EMBODYING THE NATION

For good reasons, the analysis of national identity and nation-ness has often focused on the state. As a modern regime of power, the state utilizes a series of ‘mechanisms of normalization’, that come to rest on the body and through which power relations are produced and channelled (Foucault 1977; Chatterjee 1993). Individual subjects are then constituted in and through the relations of state power and the discourses (including nationalism) produced by it. For example, the eugenics debates of republican Latin America during the nineteenth century normalized relations of reproduction and ‘race’. The production of national cultures is a huge task, and the state through its institutions and discourses is a major producer. The state generates processes which foster an identification between subjectivity and nation.

Although the modern regime of power has attempted to dismantle and reorganize the identification of subjects within the context of the nation-state, other imagined communities and cross-cutting identities persist. In colonial and post-colonial India, Chatterjee points to the existence of these ‘fuzzy’ communities in popular political discourses, in which legitimacy and political representation have quite distinct meanings to those attributed them by the state (Chatterjee 1993:224; cf. Gupta and Ferguson 1992:17). In the Latin American context, definitions of democracy and participation have distinct (and in themselves diverse) meanings in the many social movements which developed in the region during the 1980s among women, barrio dwellers, indigenous groups, peasants and many others. The social movements represent (ed) not so much the persistence of previous political categories (as in the Indian case), but new ways of doing politics which challenged state-centred political systems (Escobar and Alvarez 1992; Slater 1985; see also Chapter 6 in this book).

This would suggest an approach which emphasizes the multi-dimensionality, agency and self-consciousness of subjects (Reynolds 1994; Cohen 1994), in addition to the practices through which national identity is created and reproduced. There are ‘multiple sites in which subject positions [are] produced, and…these positions might themselves be contradictory’ (Henriquez et al. 1984: 203). In other words, the correspondence of nation and people is constantly overlain by other subjectivities (Bondi 1993:96; Laclau 1994; Keith and Pile 1993). Overall, the structures of expectations of subaltern and non-state groups with respect to the nation are surprisingly under-researched and under-theorized. National identities are expected to arise from ceremonies and practices which draw citizens into the national sphere. Individuals acquire consciousness of a national identity at the same time as they acquire the national language, an education and other cultural resources. As the nation is ‘embodied’ in education, secular rituals such as elections, the media and cultural institutions, ‘the nation is thus a component in each individual’s self-and other-awareness’ (Poole 1992:16; cf. Billig 1995). In order for the nation to become hegemonic in the identities of subjects, elite/official versions of nationalism containing certain histories, images and representations must be shared across class or ethnic lines, in order for an imagined community to be created with ‘shared self-awareness’. As nations’ content and form are closely tied to specific elites (Balibar 1990), the heroes chosen for state worship and the ‘cultic rites’ of nationalism vary (Mosse 1975) and cross class lines. Nationalized versions of histories and geographies are widesp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Introduction
• 1. Imagining the Nation: Rethinking national identities
• 2. ‘Race’, State and Nation
• 3. Ecuador: Making the nation
• 4. Creating Belonging: Cultural formations, identities and correlative imaginaries
• 5. Nationalized Places?: The geographies of identity
• 6. Gender and National Identities: Masculinities, femininities and power
• 7. Remaking the Nation: Democracy and belonging
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index