Identity and the Arts in Diaspora Communities

Abstract

The multiple dimensions and contradictions that accompany the intersections of identity and the arts in diaspora communities could hardly be more striking than in the political debate and action that accompany the current US American struggle over immigration. As increasing numbers of immigrant workers, families, and other collectives self-identify themselves as communities by participating in mass demonstrations and strikes, new symbols of identity emerge from the diverse aesthetic repertories and practices that unify immigrants locally and connect them to places of origin globally. The struggle for an American identity that includes rather than excludes is made audible and visible through the sounds and images that reveal a historical hybridity identifiable through a dizzying thesaurus of names: immigration and ethnicity, multiculturalism and diversity, minorities both social and racial, heritage and homeland, diaspora and diaspora communities. The stakes in the struggle for identity are enormous, and it is hardly surprising that music and the arts are called into play to articulate and mobilize the struggle of those denied a permanent sense of place. Take the case of the American national anthem, ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, which has become a text for wresting new American identities from the old. In spring 2006, as immigrants and those who welcome their presence in the United States projected their identities onto the public sphere, a collective of musicians, performers, and political activists cobbled together a version of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ in Spanish that wantonly mixed aesthetics, styles, and performers. Broadcast by the countless forms of media that immigrant and diaspora communities command, this version, constituted from various cover versions, performatively realized selfness from many parts, thus aesthetically supplanting the otherness of fragments that seemingly should not belong together. Claims that the national anthem could only be sung in English, advanced by President George W. Bush and conservative defenders of the homeland, rang hollow precisely because they ignored the chorus of millions who had mixed symbols and metaphors. With music the displaced and the dispersed had seized the moment. The new anthem, renamed ‘Our Hymn’, became a vehicle for renaming and rechannelling the struggle of immigration. Illegal immigrants and aliens had asserted their right to determine their own identity through music and, accordingly, their right to perform that identity in diaspora communities.