On Nationality

Posted by Barnaby Alive on May 17, 2012 · 1 Comment 

To me, one of the high point of NYU the conference with Argentine film maker Edgardo Cozarinsky was the first question he asked to the audience: “How do I sound when I speak English?” he said. The whole floor was puzzled. “British” “German” “Russian” shouted the crowd, but no answers seemed to satisfy the eminent scholar. I immediately thought to myself that he was expecting a certain reply, and that he was disappointed by what he got instead. Maybe that was a subtlety that only a foreigner that has been emerged into another culture for long enough can understand, but I was relating to him and his story of displacement. As they say, it takes one to tell one. However our life are very different: the man had to escape the military regime, and came back to a different Argentina. An Argentina that did not speak the same Spanish, as he explained, he felt like a stranger in his own land. Of course, nationality is a mere social construction, and the traumas of years of dictatorship had probably changed the culture and perhaps semantics of Argentina. Still, I remained with an uncomfortable feeling after that first question.
The conference went on, and Cozarinsky talked more about his life, and his exile to France. He repeatedly punctuated his sentences with French words, and French intonations. That was it, a blatant case of bleu-blanc-rouge fever; the right answer to the question above: the man wanted to be identified as French. Nothing wrong with that you might say, and no, in my opinion there is nothing wrong with identifying with another nationality. I have done it before, and I will certainly do it again in the future. What I think is wrong is the construction of a discourse where nationality are ranked on an absolutely subjective hierarchical ladder, and where being French for an academic is so much better than being from any other nationality. Why? Because in my opinion, this rationale gives grounds to another one, more viscous, more discriminatory and more excluding that we can see everyday in the media.
In January 2011, the international media thoroughly covered the tragic shooting that took place in Tucson, Arizona. The 6 victims were glorified and grieved over by the entire nation through special reports and editions on television. In contrast, the 3,000 non-combatant civilians killed in Afghanistan by American drones were barely mentioned in the press, only described as a “necessary collateral damage”. The intensity of the media’s reaction to the event in Tucson compared to the lack of concern for the deaths in Afghanistan shows the role of media in the allocation of appropriate or inappropriate grief over the loss victims by creating mediatic visibility or invisibility, coverage or silence, of an event. And we know that for most people, what happens on TV is a fact. By choosing silence or exposure, the media is orchestrating the our attention to such a degree that we are not able to recognize what has been lost and we are inhibited to witness what is going on in the world. We become alienated to a point where we forget that we are a part of the world we evolves in, we tend forget that nationality has not concrete meaning, and we become less to challenge the social order.
To me, it was close to revolting to see that a subversive man would subscribe to such an exploiting ideology, but perhaps was it only my interpretation of an event that teased my own sensibilities.

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