WHAT IS (AN) AMERICAN?

COSER Y CANTAR (DOLORES PRIDA, 1981)

 Influence of discursive formations (ideological positions) within culture > ‘Americanness’.

 Discourses constitute reality; promote meanings, representations, stories; position subjects; construct sense
of right and wrong, normal and abnormal; important or not worthy of attention; form concepts about identity
and about what the world means.
 Dominant discourses: more status, power and social significance.
 Master-narratives: grand stories told by dominant groups to legitimate and justify their actions and policies.
• Totalizing effect: claim to speak for all and explain all
• Selection and exclusion
 Postmodern thinking: distrust of grand narratives:
• Male, white, heterosexual stories and versions of history (dominant regime of representation or
dominant ideological culture)> Define American ‘national identity’.
 Re-vision as a process of renewal:
 “Re-vision –the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new
critical direction” (Adrienne Rich. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision”, 1972)
 Dethroning of versions and myths of American culture and simplified story of nation’s past /
hegemonic.
 Mikhail Bakhtin (The Dialogic Imagination, 1981)
 Things don’t exist ‘in themselves’, but only in their relations.
 Heteroglossia: basic condition of human communication = simultaneous presence of competing
languages and their social, historical, psychological, and physical conditions of utterance.
o The existence of two or more voices within a text, esp. conflicting discourses within a
linguistic activity as between the narrative voice and the characters in a novel; blending of
world views through language; different forms of language can exist in a text.
o Texts = interactions of distinct perspectives or ideologies, borne by the different characters
= Not closed, but plural, with an endless play of signifiers which can never be finally nailed
down to a single centre, essence or meaning.
o The self cannot tolerate fixity: what it ‘is’ is undefinable. A person cannot be fully revealed to
or known in the world because of constant change and ‘unfinalisability’.
 Dialogism: multiplicity of perspectives and voices. Language is dialogical, interacting self and other
in a constant process of intermingling of diverse points of view
o There is no single meaning to be found in the world, but a vast multitude of contesting
meanings.
o Social world = made up of multiple voices, perspectives, and subjective ‘worlds’. To exist is
to engage in dialogue, and dialogue must not come to an end. Dialogue does not occur
between fixed positions or subjects. People are also transformed through dialogue, fusing
with parts of the other’s discourse. Dialogue can produce a decisive reply which produces
actual changes. Authentic human life is an open-ended dialogue. The world thus merges into
 an open-ended, multi-voiced, dialogical whole (Andrew Robinson. In Theory Bakhtin:
Dialogism, Polyphony and Heteroglossia.
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=wm#inbox/14120f4f7942e26).
 Culture: “open-ended, creative dialogue of subcultures, of insiders and outsiders, of diverse factions” (James
Clifford. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art , 1998).
 Identity = Constant shifting territory > renewal > movement > passage = becoming American identities =
plural
 Difference, diversity / fixity, stasis
 Definitions are only provisional and “subject to new analyses, new questions and new understandings if we
are to unlock some of the narrow terms of the discourses in which we are inscribed. In other words, at each
new arrival at a definition, we begin a new analysis, a new departure, a new interrogation of meaning, new
contradictions” (Carole Boyce-Davies. Black Women Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject, 1994).
 Cultural hybridity (understood as the result of an ongoing process of transculturation): constructions,
negotiations, re-appropriations of identity as well as of new cultural synthesis.
 Ethnocentrism
 Cultural globalisation