(Changed from Perspectives: USA)

Friday, October 30th 1:30 – 3:00

Session Room: Loft 2

1) Catherine Frost, McMaster University
Called to the Flag: Ireland's 1916 Proclamation of the Republic as Poetic Founding Speech

The American Declaration suggests we can found a state in speech using ‘we the people’ formulations.  But this presents a paradox: How can ‘the people’ exercise authority via an act that establishes their authority? Theories inspired by the Declaration suggest modern foundings use confusion to obscure these conceptual tensions and facilitate a performative that falls in line with international expectations. While influential, I argue not all founding speech follows this model. Because it was associated with a secretive and abortive revolution the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic exposes the novelty of founding in particularly stark terms. Rather than speaking for, or as, a people the document issues a call on a population that has intimate, emotive and poetic elements.  While some ambiguity persists, by displacing authority from origin to response this view shifts the central dynamic of founding from original confusion to extended interpretation, and shows how subjectivity can focus interpretive efforts through sacrifice and death.

2) Carlos Figueroa, Ithaca College
Bridge Narratives and Spatial Citizenship at the U.S. Mexico Border

The events of September 11, 2001 that took place in New York City, Washington, D.C. and Shanksville, PA changed the ways in which national and state governments perceived and later managed the expansive U.S. southern border.  At the same time, the public discourses and policy debates over immigration, political membership and more importantly the notion and practice of citizenship were re-framed at all levels.  As a result, these two policy areas (national security and immigration) were conflated under the new & bi-partisan supported narrative of waging a “war on terrorism.”  Not surprisingly, these shifts and the corporate media discourses that fueled them also shaped how ordinary citizens and local government officials interpreted and understood everyday life at the US southern border.  I explore these perceptual shifts and associated policy controversies through a close reading of public texts and lived spaces (urban bridges).  I focus on understanding the lived experiences of border peoples (those Hispanic-Americans and Mexican Nationals) who make their living in and around the ‘international’ bridges connecting Brownsville, Texas (USA) and Matamoros, Tamaulipas (Mexico).  Through various focus group and individual interviews, and drawing from Ivan Illich (1985) on changing perceptions of living spaces, John B. Jackson (1994) regarding impact of time, place and movements on social environments, and Irene Bloemraad (2006) on the politics belonging, becoming, and being a citizen, I show that border peoples (within fluid borderlands) often construct, and reconstruct spatial citizenship within and through the negotiation of bridge technological/urban spaces in order to maintain a semblance of civic community despite -- and often in light of -- the real and/or perceived violence at the southern US border.

3) Kristen Lavelle, University of Wisconsin, Whitewater.

Managing either stigmatized or idealized identities requires emotion work (Fields, Copp, and Kleinman 2006). Indeed, emotion work is often undertaken by individuals and groups in order to reconcile conflicts between their tarnished and valued identities (Schwalbe and Mason-Schrock 1996). "People try to fashion and then maintain identities that make them feel good, or at least better, about themselves, individually and collectively, even if they do no succeed in the end" (Fields, Copp, and Kleinman 2006:166).

This paper analyzes recent in-depth interviews with 44 elder, white, U.S. southerners to demonstrate how they construct a "moral identity" (Katz 1975). All participants were members of the oldest living generation of white southerners (60-90 years old), and were asked to discuss how they experienced and remembered the racial past, including the Jim Crow/legal segregation era (through the 1950s-60s), in which principles of white supremacy shaped laws and customs, and the African American Civil Rights Movement (1960s-70s), in which black American activism dismantled legalized discrimination. This paper outlines specific maneuvers participants utilized in the construction of a moral identity, including marking select other whites as racially prejudiced, critiquing African Americans and black culture, and backpedaling from implications of a racist self and family.