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March 30, 2007
I was interested in this review by Ayse Deniz Temiz of Ali Behdad's A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States (Duke University Press, 2005) in Borderlands after being pounded by the anti-immigration discourse on Fox News.
Temiz says that the the core argument around which Behdad's analysis is structured is the following:
pro-immigration policies and multi-culturalist discourses in the US have been historically associated with economic-political conjunctures that demanded an inflow of migrant labor; moreover the particular type of labor that is in demand at a given time has had a determining effect on which specific idiom of multi-culturalism will prevail--ranging from a discourse on selective immigration providing for the nation's need for professionals, through the nation's hospitality toward the politically persecuted (during the cold war), to the need for mass unskilled labor for "jobs Americans won't do". While it is important to notice the co-determination between the cultural and the economic-political planes, this is not to suggest that the pro-immigration discourse alternates with the nativist sentiment from one period to another as a result of economic dictates. Behdad opposes this cyclical view, arguing instead that the relation between the discursive and the economic-political instances is more complicated, and that the anti-immigration discourses do not disappear but exist alongside pro-migrant pluralism even at periods when an influx of migrant labor is the economically expedient policy.
The co-existence of the contradictory pro and anti-immigration discourses within the Republican Party is what is suppressed (forgotten?) by Fox News, as it deploys the anti-immigration discourss in its mobilization in the current public debate on migration in the US.
Behdad uses Freud’s concept of a particular mode of negation—“disavowal”, which results in what he calls a “splitting of the ego”, to explain what is suppressed or forgotten. Disavowa means rejecting the reality of a perception on account of its potentially traumatic associations. Disavowal, as opposed to negation, is a narcissistic expedient whereby the individual seeks to avoid acknowledging absences or shortcomings of key parental figures (castration of the mother, death of the father). It is a mechanisms to leave the responsibility of thinking what is for them unthinkable, of integrating what they cannot integrate, up to others. This occurs primarily through the mechanism of projective identification, which requires considerable psychic expenditure on the part of that other person, often within a very painful experiential realm.
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