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Nationalist Myth-Making, Cultural Identity, and Nation Building: African Minorities in the U.S. and Latin America

Shadrack Wanjala Nasong’o, Department of International Studies, Rhodes College, Tennessee
nasongos@rhodes.edu

The most shocking thing about Hurricane Katrina that hit the U.S. Gulf Coast in September 2005 is that it brought America’s shocking poverty bubbling to the surface. This is because most people in Mississippi and New Orleans who stayed back were too poor to leave. Statistics from the 2000 census show that close to 40 per cent of the New Orleans population, which is overwhelmingly black, lived in poverty, with 27 percent having no access to a vehicle. This reality constitutes a major contradiction of the nationalist construction of the U.S. as an egalitarian society wherein virtually all citizens belong to the middle class and are afforded the opportunity to realize and live “the American dream.” Similarly, in Latin American nationalist myth of mestizaje, historians, philosophers, writers, and anthropologists have consistently claimed that the issue of race does not exist in Latin America; that all ethnic groups have blended together in a harmonious and indistinguishable new entity called the Mestizo. However, realities on the ground belie this nationalist myth. People of African descent are so marginalized that in Colombia, for instance, they are not counted in national censuses! The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the process of nationalist myth making in the U.S. and Latin America from a comparative perspective with a view to analyzing the impact and implications of this dominant-group elite project on ethnic and racial minorities with particular focus on people of African descent. The main thesis of the paper is that the conception of nations as egalitarian communities characterized by deep horizontal comradeship, camouflage the realities of glaring inequalities and ruthless exploitation in order to promote collective loyalty, especially of dominant groups, to the nationalist project.

Abstract

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Africa Conference 2006: Movements, Migrations and Displacements in Africa
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