Counter-Chronicling and Alternative Mapping in Memoria del fuego and Almanac of the Dead

Abstract

Recent definitions of nationalism amount to a charge that Eurocentric narratives of economic development and hierarchical racial classification accrue around the very idea of nation. At the same time, descriptions of late twentieth-century global restructuring suggest that nation-states are less determining of lived realities than we might have been lead to believe. Both these claims raise questions about using nationalism as an anti-colonial or antiimperial strategy for liberation: can one invent a nation and a national history without replicating the European model and its problematic consequences? Is nationalism useful in the face of what some call the imperial power of global corporations? (Bamet and Cavanagh 13-18). Yet the deployment of anti-colonial and anti-imperial nationalism in some cases constitutes a strategy of survival. U.S. American Indian communities' usage of the word nations to refer to political and kinship systems modified by colonial encounters (and not easily translated into English) and to assert sovereignty over reservation territory is a strategic dismantling of the cultural symbols of U.S. nationalism and state control. Indigenous movements in other parts of the Americas are sometimes similar in this regard, though not necessarily linked to reservation systems. African American or black nationalism and terms such as Queer Nation point to historic moments in which inventing some sort of nationalism is necessary for survival in the face of no territorial sovereignty at all. As an exploration of the dilemma of whether to deploy the strategy of nationalism, this paper offers a comparison of two recent publications that re-write the history of the Western hemi