Session 3: Identity Constructions

3rd Global Conference

Tuesday 10th November – Thursday 12th November 2009
Salzburg, Austria

America, Americanness and Puritanism: The Writing of a Puritan National Identity through U.S. Foreign Policy Practices
Erica Simone Almeida Resende
University of Sao Paulo, Brazil

Focusing on the role of discourses and power in socially constructing reality, identities and interests, this paper will attempt to problematize the relationship between culture and foreign policy by arguing that foreign policy constitutes a cultural system of meanings and representations that strives to write a national identity based on a specific ideology, in a never-ending attempt to stabilize and fix meanings in order to discursively impose and naturalize dominant structures of power. Looking into the U.S. “War on Terror”, we argue that the articulation of U.S. foreign policy in the aftermath of 9/11 was made possible by a discourse on “Americanness” capable of rendering reality once again intelligible after 9/11. It is a discourse of Americans about America and Americans, which, through imaginary formations, creates realities, subjects, actions, and relationships, and regulates what can be thought, said, understood, and conceived from a specific position in a particular moment in time. We will argue that said discourse on “Americanness” is made possible by a specific cultural formation made up of meanings and representations which are markedly Puritan. By employing methods of discourse analysis, we will show how said discourse is (re)produced through practices of U.S. foreign policy such as the “War on Terror”, which emulates the dominant structures, vocabularies, meanings, narratives, symbols and representations of the typical Puritan political sermons of the 1600’s Colonial America: the “jeremiads”. Despite claims of separation between state and religion, we believe that the United States of America, through its practices of foreign policy, constructs its national identity as ideologically Puritan, thus blurring the lines between politics and religion, public and private, nation and creed.

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Puerto Rico: Art and Identity Policies
Dialitza Colón Pérez
Department of Philosophy, Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain

In the context of representing and meaning identity, culture and political art in Puerto Rico can assert a poignant reflection on the subject. This paper will examine works and artistic practices that expose the mechanisms of power and point to events and nationalistic discourses that, probably and paradoxically, support the colonial condition, contributing to rethink Puerto Rican art and cultural identity.

I will present the cultural forms that do not answer to the typical political structures and dominant practices that have been constructed around the idea of “Puerto Ricaness.” Re-vindicating the place of the Diaspora as a counter field and determinant in the reaffirmation of identity and as a politically relevant space outside the island’s hegemonic structures. In order to do that, a brief critical analysis of usual notions of art and Puerto Rican culture, agencies and traditional works, will be necessary to see what meaning and utility can have to preserve these models in the presence of evident symptoms of cultural revitalization, result of the migratory processes, the colonial condition vis à vis the USA, the access to the information and new discussions on interculturalism and hybridity.

I’ll analyze three contemporary artists who, by some means or another, have attended to these discussions and who better approach these topics, and in their artistic practices foment a renovation of social and cultural discourses. I’m not trying to construct an antagonist canon of practices nor regulate what must be or for what must serve Puerto Rican political art, but to underline those works that cope with dissonances and elements inherent to a very complex cultural process, inside and outside the Island. These processes point to possible spaces of reflection and social evolution that can facilitate the reconstruction of a wider cultural and public sphere and provoke new ways of narrating Puerto Rican art and identity.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)