(Untitled)

[un_canard]

You know it's serious business when you take out the graph paper to outline your final project for a class...on Brazilian music...

It's just easier for me to work with stuff that connects in a non-linear way (like cultural identity and subject formation) in a physical medium that allows for non-linearity. Hence graph paper.

I was toying with the idea

Comments

[catchintwilight]

Ok, this is reminding me of the 1984 Olympics, which was, I believe, before you were born.... I had this same thought by creating a national identity that attempts to ignore race issues and say everything is fine, the constructors of this social identity are actually perpetuating race (and other) issues by ignoring the complexity of their own culture and all the different ethnic, regional, occupational, and other social identities around them.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1291&dat=19830517&id=xTMQAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1IwDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5801,5226528... )

[un_canard]

That was my point to Wibbelsman too: that national unity is a myth, as is this "racial democracy" crap they talk about in Brazil. Governmentality is supposed to be the point at which a national identity supersedes all other identities, and I'll buy that in some cases, but the meaning of that national identity isn't uniform and that's where the fracturing takes place. Because the people of the nation aren't uniform, their ideas about what it means to be Brazilian or American aren't uniform. And for the State to come out and say "All Americans dress like cowboys," that's just making things difficult for the people who see that and say "I don't dress like a cowboy. Does that make me un-American?" So, in a way, it marginalizes people and creates dissent by taking away multi-vocality. Projected identities silence people who are supposed to be part of this concept of national unity, and the voice is probably the most important factor in identity construction. It's not "I think, therefore I am;" it's "I speak, therefore I am."