Constitutive Visions

De quién es la patria? (To whom does the fatherland belong?) is a question that has always underlain nation-building projects, and it is the core issue that rhetorician Christa Olson interrogates in her study of indigeneity and the creation of national identities in postindependence Ecuador. Olson maintains that all national identities and all nationalisms are at their base rhetorical. Rhetorical statements emerge not only through the political and intellectual creations of government officials and the dominant culture but also through common actions and interactions in daily life. In order to understand the creation of national identities, Olson examines both the official and private realms and both mundane and extraordinary discourses. In analyzing the rhetoric of these discourses, Olson challenges an assumption that “everyday” and “elite” are opposing concepts, “as if elites did not have an everyday and subalterns never stepped outside of the ordinary” (p. 13). That seemingly logical but little-recognized observation is representative of the powerfully compelling arguments that Olson forwards in this innovative and fascinating monograph.As a rhetorician, Olson roots her analysis in the work of literary and rhetorical theorists such as Kenneth Burke who turn to constitutions to understand how language serves as a means of symbolic action. Olson applies Burke's interpretations of constitutive rhetoric in the United States to Ecuador's long and rich tradition of writing and rewriting constitutions in order to understand shifting and contradictory notions of the nation. Olson focuses primarily on the period from 1857 to 1947. She starts with the formal abolition of Indigenous tribute in 1857 because it represents “the moment when Ecuador, by law, recognized itself as incorporating rather than coexisting with its indigenous population” (p. 17). The year 1947 provides a convenient termination point because in that year a coup d'état removed President José María Velasco Ibarra from power and at the same time concluded a period of intense political activity and instability. The book ends with reflections on Ecuador's most recent 2007–2008 constituent assembly, and in fact the entire book can be read through debates over popular and national sovereignties as expressed through the continuing tensions between intention and reality in the current constitution.As part of Olson's innovative pairing of the mundane with the extraordinary, she parallels constitutional debates with a rich analysis of Ecuador's visual culture. In particular, she examines how both texts and paintings reflect intellectual notions of indigenismo and mestizaje, as well as how and where those constructions underscore or contradict actual lived realities. Olson expertly intersects what otherwise would be divergent literatures on rhetoric, constitutional theory, visual studies, and literary analysis in order to deepen our understanding of the roles of subalterns in the creation of a nation-state.Through an analysis of both constitutional debates and texts, as well as visual representations of Indigenous worlds, Olson illustrates how powerful an identification with national identities can be in constituting both popular and national sovereignty. Both popular sovereignty—when people demand a say in government structures—as well as government officials' exercise of authority—a form of national sovereignty—shape and define the roles and actions of Indigenous peoples in society. In analyzing the rhetorical bases of competing claims of national identity and notions of sovereignty, Olson argues for the porous and negotiated nature of belonging to what we have long understood to be little more than invented traditions. More importantly, those fragmentary but powerful creations of national identity are fundamentally defined through the rhetorical practice of sovereignty.Key to Olson's work is the ongoing tension between the declarations of sovereignty in the constitutional tradition and a representation of ideals of national identification as expressed in intellectual traditions and reflected in visual culture and other artistic creations. Her innovative application of the theoretical language of constitutive rhetoric to the exercise of both national and popular sovereignty challenges our understandings of the creation of national identities. As such, this important new work significantly advances our understanding of theories of citizenship and national formation

Aesthetics · Elite · Epistemology · Fatherland · Identity (music) · Linguistics · National identity · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Sociology · Vision · Anthropology · Historical Studies in Latin America · Law · Philosophy · Politics and Society in Latin America