Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

82 reframing latin america
are not Indian or Asian, but they are not Europeans and they are not Frogs
either and on and on. The Other. It is a fantastic moment in Fanon’s Black
Skin, White Masks when he talks of how the gaze of the Other fi xes him
in an identity. He knows what it is to be Black when the white child pulls
the hand of her mother and says “Look momma, a Black man.” And he says
“I was fi xed in that gaze.” That is the gaze of Otherness. And there is no
identity that is without the dialogic relationship to the Other. The Other
is not outside, but also inside the Self, the identity. So identity is a process,
identity is split. Identity is not a fi xed point but an ambivalent point. Identity
is also the relationship of the Other to oneself.
Difference(s) [. . .]
So the notion that identity is outside representation—that there are our
selves and then the language in which we describe ourselves—is untenable.
Identity is within discourse, within representation. It is constituted in
part by representation. Identity is a narrative of the self; it’s the story we
tell about the self in order to know who we are. We impose a structure
on it. The most important effect of this reconceptualization of identity is
the surreptitious return of difference. Identity is a game that ought to be
played against difference. But now we have to think about identity in relation
to difference. There are differences between the ways in which genders
are socially and psychically constructed. But there is no fi xity to those
oppositions. It is a relational opposition, it is a relation of difference. So
we’re then in the difficult conceptual area of trying to think identity and
difference.
The Thatcher Project
So, how can one think about identity in this new context? [. . .] When I fi rst
started to write about Thatcherism in the early 70s, I thought it was largely
an economic and political project. It is only more recently that I understood
how profoundly it is rooted in a certain exclusive and essentialist conception
of Englishness. Thatcherism is in defense of a certain defi nition of Englishness.
England didn’t go to the Falklands War inadvertently. It went because
there was something there about the connection of the great imperial
past, of the empire, of the lion whose tail cannot be tweaked, of the little
country that stood up to the great dictator. It’s a way of mythically living
all the great moments of the English past again. Well, it happens that
this time it had to be in the South Atlantic, miles away from anything—