Nigger Peasants from France: Missing Translations of American Anxieties on Race and the Nation

Abstract

Nigger Peasants from France: Missing Translations of American Anxieties on Race and the Nation Michelle M. Wright (bio) Introduction: Race, Nation and Nationalism In Crossfires: Nationalism, Racism and Gender in Europe, the majority of the contributing authors, whether writing on women and ethnicity in contemporary Russia, gender and the history of ethnic hatred in Yugoslavia, or a comparison between black and white British youth and their understanding of nationality, underscore the ways in which many Europeans directly link nationalism with right-wing extremism. In her article “Young People: Nationalism, Racism and Gender,” Ann Phoenix relates the results of a questionnaire put to both black and white British youth. The following paragraph gave me pause: The ambiguity caused by the recognition that national status involves inclusions and exclusions also had an impact on young white people. Some felt unable to claim Englishness because they perceive that the symbols of Englishness have been hijacked by the extreme Right. This raises the issue of whether positive features of nationalism (if one accepts that there are some) can be maintained when symbols of Englishness/Britishness are perceived to be predicated on racism. For many of the young people we interviewed, the Union Jack has been ‘vacated’ because its symbolism is seen to have been appropriated by far Right groups. (Nationalism 41) What struck me about this paragraph is how these teenagers—and, it seems, even the author—understand nationalism as the domain of the “far Right,” and even suggest that this appropriation may be as old as the formation of nationalist discourse itself. I do not believe this is the case in the United States. When depicted abroad (name any country!), the American flag most often stands in as a reminder of American military aggression and the exploitative nature of a global capitalist machine. At home, however, it is not the American flag but the flag of the Civil War’s Confederate army, the “stars and bars,” that is far more broadly recognized as symbolic of right-wing [End Page 831] extremism and racism. In Germany, those sensitive to the atrocities of the Nazi past are extremely alert to the ways in which appeals to nationalism are used. Some go so far as to say that any and all nationalist sentiment on the part of a German party should be outlawed. It is also true that French nationalism is widely recognized amongst the Anti-Semites and anti-Anti-Semites alike as antagonistic to Jews, if not all other non-white peoples. Again, in the United States, it is not the nationalist discourse, but what is perceived as the regionalist discourse of the “red-neck Southerner” that is hostile to non-whites, specifically African Americans. American commentators, military personnel and legislators argue that if the American discourse on nationalism is hostile to anything or anyone, it is hostile to ideologies (i.e., communism, socialism, anarchism) rather than specific peoples. Implicit in this contention is that America’s role as the “world’s oldest democracy” ensures that our particular brand of nationalism is incapable of acting out against specific peoples; that is only for nations with an extreme right-wing or left-wing history. Outside of postcolonial studies (and in this case I include minority studies), the idea that the American discourse on the nation might in fact be inherently hostile to a people is still very much a foreign concept. This paper looks at a crucial moment in American history: the mid-19th century, when America was by all accounts on the brink of civil war and the debate over slavery had hit yet another one of its furious, divisive peaks. These two questions, over the future state of this nascent nation and the future of America’s blacks, were in fact intimately tied to one another. Considered together within the larger theoretical and/or historical context of the national discourse, they echo America’s immediate “post-Colonial” history and presage much of its immediate future, specifically with regard to non-whites as an actual threat to the nation. In order to demonstrate and explore how race and the nation were two sides of the same coin, I use the trope of translation, both figuratively...