The Construction of Identities: Power Relations in Naomi Wallace’s In the Heart of America

Ammar Abduh  Aqeeli

doi:10.25159/1753-5387/13800

Authors

Ammar Abduh Aqeeli Jazan University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25159/1753-5387/13800

Keywords:

identity, power, gender, ideology, Palestine

Abstract

This article explores how Naomi Wallace’s In the Heart of America demonstrates the interconnectedness of xenophobia, racism and other forms of discrimination in American life and politics. Through the critiques offered by Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, this article investigates the relationships between ideological state apparatuses, production of power and the construction of social identities. The subjugated characters in the play attempt to resist, negotiate and accommodate normative or regulative discursive processes that impose fixed identities upon them. Wallace’s play demonstrates that resistance constitutes power, which can be either weak, submissive, creative, and/or productive. Raising awareness of the possibilities of resistance to subjectifying power is what In the Heart of America yearns to do.

Metrics

Metrics Loading ...

References

Althusser, Louis. 1984. Essays on Ideology. New York, NY: Verso.

Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40 (4): 519–31. https://doi.org/10.2307/3207893. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/3207893

During, Simon. 1992. Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing. London: Routledge.

El-Sawy, Amany Mahmoud. 2012. “Naomi Wallace’s In the Heart of America: The Portrait of a Woman’s Body as an Ideological Text.” Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 16: 43–56. https://revistascientificas.us.es/index.php/ESTUDIOS_NORTEAMERICANOS/article/view/4665.

Fiol-Matta, Licia. 2013. “‘Race Woman’: Reproducing the Nation in Gabriela Mistral.” In Foucault and Latin America: Appropriations and Deployments of Discursive Analysis, edited by Trigo Beningo, 247–62. New York, NY: Routledge.

Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York, NY: Penguin.

Foucault, Michel. 1979. “Powers and Strategies: An Interview with Michel Foucault by the Revoltes Logiques Collective.” In Power, Truth, Strategy: Michel Foucault, edited by Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton, 49–58. Los Angeles, CA: Feral Publications.

Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. New York, NY: Pantheon.

Foucault, Michel. 2006. “21 November 1973.” In Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–1974, edited by Jacques Lagrange, Arnold Davidson and Graham Burchell, 39–62. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gates, Henry Louis. 1993. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kerr, Kathy. 2006. “Race, Nation and Ethnicity.” In Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide, edited by Patricia Waugh, 362–84. London: Oxford University Press.

Medalle, Rovie Herrera. 2018. “Two Decades Fighting Inhuman Natures: Naomi Wallace’s In The Heart of America (1994).” Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 22: 145–63. https://doi.org/10.12795/REN.2018.i22.07. DOI: https://doi.org/10.12795/REN.2018.i22.07

Norat, Gisela. 2002. Marginalities: Diamela Eltit and the Subversion of Mainstream Literature in Chile. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press.

Ryan, Caitlin. 2016. Bodies, Power and Resistance in the Middle East: Experiences of Subjectification in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. New York, NY: Routledge.

Unwin, Stephen. 2014. The Complete Brecht Toolkit. London: Nick Hern Books.

Wallace, Naomi. 2001. In the Heart of America and Other Plays. New York, NY: Theatre Communications Group. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781636700748.00000034. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781636700748.00000034