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

136 reframing latin america
the real truth of how people should organize themselves politically. But
from a semiotic perspective, modernist nationalism is hardly different from
its monarchist predecessor. Modern nations may no longer rely on kingly
bloodlines to construct the illusion of national essence and cohesion, but
they do rely on an admittedly abstract notion of ancestry. Nationalists believe
that citizens share essences typically defi ned as intrinsic traits, such
as integrity, goodness, bravery, treachery, evil, cowardice, etc., that began
with the founding fathers and were passed down through the blood to future
generations.
Two excerpts on this national issue, one hermeneutic, the other semiotic,
are included in this chapter. The hermeneutic offering is by Arthur
de Gobineau (1817–1882), a French diplomat and novelist who is regarded
as one of the most prominent theorists of race and national identities in
nineteenth-century Western civilization. His fame rests largely on his theory
of degeneration. In 1854, Gobineau published The Inequality of Human
Races, in which he attempts to prove the existence of a racial hierarchy. He
does so by promoting a theory of degeneration in which race is collapsed into
nation and both are inherited through bloodlines. According to Gobineau,
degeneration is a nation’s loss of “characteristic virtues” that eventually
leads to the downfall of a society. This loss of character and value is a direct
effect, he believes, of racial mixing. When a people occupies a foreign land
and miscegenation results, the blood of the conquering race is tainted and
weakened by foreign blood, which will dilute the nation’s character and its
innate power to conquer. His essentialist view is explicitly rooted in the
belief that a nation’s identity—its unique qualities and characteristics—is
defi ned solely by the blood of its people, who have an inborn affinity with
their own kind and a “secret repulsion from the crossing of blood.” 1 Therefore,
a nation’s intrinsic value cannot be changed by circumstances, only by
altering the blood.
In a contradictory moment in his argument, Gobineau asserts that if a nation
is to take advantage of its innate power, it must conquer. This inevitably
leads to racial mixing, which he has already theorized as the weakening of
the nation and the cause of its eventual degeneration. Not all nations, however,
have been endowed by nature with an ability to improve themselves by
claiming new lands. Not surprisingly, Gobineau believes the “pure-blooded
yellow and black races,” two racialized groups with a long history of being
persecuted, are inherently weak and incapable of conquest, while the white
races were born to it. This ability to conquer is seen as the destiny of powerful
nations, and it is also creates what Gobineau calls a “real nation.” In
other words, conquest is both the origin and destination of nations.