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Panelist Hetty ter Haar |
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 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. |