NATION

There has been for many many years now an attempt to unseat the United States of America as a solid nation.  The fight has gotten tougher in the last 20 years and especially in the last 10 years.  There is an attempt to give us the final knock-out blow, in the name of “decentering.” Decentering is the very thing that has happened to the identity. The self, as in the works of Heidergger and Derrida, has been destroyed and deconstructed. The notion of “nation”, we must note, has been slapped around by progressivism for a few decades now and this is evident in so many places, but particularly in the work of Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak entitled Who Sings the Nation-State. David Laguardia writes a wonderful and challenging review of Butler’s and Spivak’s work and points to the way in which Butler uses a rendition of the American national anthem, as it was sung by immigrants, to demonstrate the mocking of the American nation. Laguardia writes about what he (sic) considers a “brilliant analysis of undocumented Latin-American immigrants to the United States who began singing the US national anthem in Spanish as a performative mode of declaring precisely the kind of belonging/not belonging within a very nationalist state” (351) The reference to performative is a way in which Butler has taken an idea, “performativity”, and fleshed it out to designate a kind of bringing things into being by force of performance by individuals, such as in protests. This kind of move by Butler has become in the last several decades all the rage of academics and political movers and shakers through the use of theory to make an impression on the minds of many people. As Laguardia writes “The conscious and deliberate critique of power that Butler carries out in the first of half of this book is hence an important continuation of a theoretical tradition that we as concerned citizens cannot allow to die”(349) Believe it, Leftist have not allowed any decrying of the power of the United States go unnoticed over the years and this is an example that the 21st century theorists have used and continue to press forward. It is no wonder though because the eloquence of a “performative” movement or moment is a precious thing for the theorist.  Performativity marches through the streets of the cities in a cosmopolitan way. The city, as Augustine was very aware, is the place where so many evils can arise and the performers creating there are multiplied and “they” lick “their” chops at the opportunity to pounce on the dreams of America and distort those into what it means by dreaming and dreamers. As one dreams for a better life in America, the Left is busy tearing down, through performative acts, the very shell that is lingering to be dreamt about.    

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