The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies

7. The Death of Francis Scott Key and Other Dirges

Music and the New American Studies

September, 1964, 150 years to the month after Francis Scott Key composed his famous poem, “The Defense of Fort McHenry”, while witnessing the bombardment of Fort McHenry from a British Man-of-War, I reclined at my ease on one of the grassy embankments separating the outer fortifications from the inner Fort McHenry on Baltimore Harbor. Three months shy of my nineteenth year, I was killing time before the Fall Semester began at Johns Hopkins, where I would begin my sophomore year. A naive Californian in Baltimore, ignorant of history and yet determined to major in that discipline, I rationalized my idleness as “study”. Not quite the Grand Tour, my little tourism in Baltimore followed the high-cultural path my parents and teachers had beaten for me. Visit museums, look at paintings, read the “best that has been thought and written”, become a leader in “. . . Hey, you! What are you doing there?” I was hustled to the Commandant’s Office—Fort McHenry was still administered in those days by a quasi-military command—and brought immediately to the Commandant himself.

Gaping and dawdling, dreaming of the misty grandeur of an American past about which I knew very little and such knowledge a passel of schoolboy’s clichés, I had missed the official closing of the Fort and been caught “after hours”, like some burglar trapped in the central vault by the Bank of England’s time lock or a cat burglar cornered by searchlights on the parapet of the Monte Carlo Casino. What they feared even then in the innocent early 1960s must have been some sort of “terrorist” act, which in those days went by the more modest names of “vandalism” and “vagrancy”, each with its imperial heritage. Somehow, I talked my way out of my tight spot, avoiding arrest with a quick rhetorical flourish. I don’t quite know what I said, but somehow it worked. All I know is that from that day forward I hated Francis Scott Key.

Behind the patriotic sentiments of Key’s lyrics and his venerated captivity on board that British naval ship, the familiar song that would become our National Anthem directly derives from our global ambitions in the early years of the nation. Michael Oren notes that the lyrics of “The Star Spangled Banner” were first “composed for [William] Bainbridge and [Stephen] Decatur in 1805 and set to an old English drinking tune”, in response to Bainbridge’s and Decatur’s roles in America’s Barbary Wars. The anthem that celebrates our defense of the young nation against the British originated in response to our naval victories over North African leaders, whose “‘turbaned heads bowed’ to the ‘brow of the brave’ and ‘the star-spangled flag or our nation.’” [180] Although Francis Scott Key would revise the lyrics “after the Battle of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812”, the echo remains of the Barbary Wars, arguably the U.S. nation’s first adventure in foreign warfare. As Oren argues, America’s involvement in the Middle East has a history that stretches from the Revolution to our contemporary military occupation of Iraq (Oren, 596). Although Oren’s purpose is to show that on balance this history displays America’s “beneficence” more than its “avarice” toward the Middle East, he also demonstrates our consistent imperial designs on the region as part of our larger imperial ambitions for global power (Oren, 603). The origins of Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner” in the celebration of American victory over the Barbary states is by no means the exception in the cultural history of U.S. patriotism: patriotism functions culturally by way of constructing enemies, thus working out an imperial logic.

It should not be necessary to criticize the rhetoric of patriotism, but it is a sign of our desperate times that American patriotism must be challenged and replaced with something that will bond our affections and our thoughts in less deadly ways. During the George W. Bush Administration’s pursuit of its “war on terror” in utter disregard of public opinion, signs emerged of a “new” expatriotism of intellectuals intent on reaffirming the promise of U.S. democracy by criticizing the Bush Administration’s imperial “democracy”. [181] What the Bush Administration accomplished has lasting results, as well as deep historical roots. It is clear that President Obama has chosen not to abandon the use of patriotic rhetoric that reinforces American Exceptionalism, despite the broad international support for his presidency. His foreign policies in the continuing occupation of Iraq, the ongoing war in Afghanistan, and political instability in Pakistan depend upon his repeated affirmation of U.S. moral superiority and the relevance of U.S. democracy and capitalism to the far corners of the globe.

I still respect our customary intellectual means to criticize social and political practices in conflict with our understanding of justice, equality, and humane behavior, and these include scholarly discourses of the most sophisticated kind, high-cultural work in which imaginative solutions are considered and worked through, popular cultural resistance to inequitable social norms, and everyday political practices from legal to performative activism. We have long known, of course, that none of these activities will in itself be sufficient to bring about social and political change, but each requires the complement of other practices and all of them depend upon propitious, contingent historical circumstances. The Berlin Wall did not fall, the Marcoses did not flee, Havel did not suddenly rise to popular power, slavery did not end, and women did not win the vote merely because people acted courageously and in concert. History happened, too, often well beyond such human agencies.

I do not want to mystify (or even capitalize) “H”istory in this regard. What exceeds our active reach and we call for want of a better term “history”—paradoxically, I think, because we are referring to everything that is in fact not historical—may refer in part to what occurs beyond our rational powers at the affective level of individual responses, multiplied vastly, to social and political conditions that eventually become unbearable and must be overcome. American popular disgust with the Vietnam War developed in this manner, I think, aided significantly but not comprehensively by a vigorous and multifaceted anti-war movement in the U.S. and around the world. Emotional transformation is crucial in bringing about necessary social and political changes, because it affects the truculently unconverted and unconvinced, those citizens who otherwise find every provocation from activists to bind them more firmly to their own positions and the reasons they have given for discrimination, war, genocide.

Most American Studies scholars, whatever their specific disciplines, are students of literature and know how its rhetoric works both rationally and affectively to shape readers into what Étienne Balibar has termed “citizen-subjects”. And, of course, music is a crucial part of American Studies, but I think it has remained until quite recently marginalized as a “specialization”, not enjoying the centrality we have reserved for historical and literary texts as agents of social and political change. This chapter is thus an effort to re-conceive popular music as central to the new American Studies and to political activism, in short as an integral part of the cultural politics of the new American Studies.

U.S. popular music can employ emotionally appealing lyrics and music for extremely effective ideological purposes. The Congressional adoption in 1931 of Francis Scott Key’s “The Star Spangled Banner” as the National Anthem is itself an excellent illustration of this ideological purpose. Music is a crucial component of U.S. nationalism. For this very reason, the use of popular music for the purposes of challenging U.S. nationalism and patriotism ought to be a crucial part of any activist agenda, especially in those historical periods when the distribution and reproduction of music makes it one of the fastest communicative media. The hegemonic and counter-hegemonic functions of music are well known both within and outside scholarly discussions, and it is this very political malleability that poses a third part of this thesis: because critical music often relies on familiar musical melodies and motifs, it is especially susceptible to conservative re-functioning. Bruce Springsteen’s famous “Born in the U.S.A.” was intended to criticize the collusion of U.S. domestic and foreign policies during the Vietnam War to exploit American workers and colonial subalterns. With the greatest ease, of course, President Ronald Reagan turned “Born in the U.S.A.” from an ironic commentary on U.S. citizenship into a patriotic theme song for his re-election campaign.

Since the First Gulf War, conservative political interests in the United States have co-opted “American patriotism” for their own purposes, relegating the traditional role of the self-conscious, skeptical, and questioning citizen to the social and political margins and sometimes into effective exile. “Support our troops” was a popular slogan in the First Gulf War, which in the invasion and occupation of Iraq has become a nearly hysterical mantra to silence dissent and control a large but still minority anti-war movement in the United States. Displayed proudly on the windows of cars and trucks, the doors of businesses, even on T-shirts and jackets and dresses, the twisted “ribbon” used first to represent the solidarity of those people committed to fighting the pandemic of HIV/AIDS, then adopted as the symbol of those contributing to the fight against breast and other cancers, is now the national symbol for those who “support our troops” in Iraq.

The twisted ribbon as a sticker or decal derives in part from the “yellow ribbons” tied around trees during the Iran Hostage Crisis in 1980–1981 in both the Carter and Reagan Administrations to show support for the release of the 52 Americans held hostage by students in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. When those hostages were finally released by the Iranian government on January 21, 1981, Tony Orlando and Dawn’s 1973 popular hit, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree”, was played as a joyous homecoming theme. During the First Gulf War in 1991, the George H. W. Bush Administration urged Americans to “display” yellow ribbons outside their homes to “support the troops” by expressing our desires to “welcome them home”, combining thereby the original populist and ostensibly anti-war sentiments in the Iran Hostage Crisis to “bring the hostages safely home” with the tacit conservative criticism of how veterans returning from the Vietnam War had been mistreated by anti-war demonstrators. [182]

Tony Orlando and Dawn’s song was based on an actual incident on board a southern bus heading for Miami, Florida. One of the passengers told the driver that he had just been released from prison, where he had served three years for passing bad checks. While in prison, the man wrote his wife to tell her she did not have to wait for him to serve his sentence, but if she was still interested she should let him know by tying a yellow ribbon around the only oak tree in the city square of White Oak, Georgia. When the bus passed through town, the driver slowed down and to the convict’s tearful relief the wife had tied a yellow ribbon around the town’s central oak tree. The driver phoned this story to the wire services, which spread it all over the country. Songwriters Irwin Levine and L. Russell Brown read it in the newspaper, then composed their million-selling song, which was released by Bell Records in February 1973 and by the week of April 23, 1973, was the number one popular song in the United States.

Although Saigon did not fall to the North Vietnamese and the U.S. did not hastily evacuate military and diplomatic personnel until 1975, 1973 is the year of the negotiated peace accords between the U.S. and North Vietnam. Tony Orlando and Dawn’s popular song certainly owes its success not only to its reliance on the conventions of country pop music, a hybrid musical genre of growing popularity in the early 1970s, but to the optimism in the United States that the Vietnam War was finally over and at that date had been concluded “honorably”. The prisoner returning home to his devoted wife was a figure for the POW, many of whom like today’s Senator John McCain, had been tortured in the “Hanoi Hilton” in explicit violation of the protections of prisoners-of-war guaranteed by the Geneva Convention. Of course, insofar as the Vietnam War remained to the very end an “undeclared war”, claims to violations of the Geneva Convention’s protections of combat troops could not be legally maintained.

In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the “yellow ribbon” originally representing public relief at the end of an unpopular war and personal hopes for family members to come home safely, has come to represent an unequivocal patriotic zeal that substitutes “troops” metonymically for “our foreign policies”. The “yellow ribbon” has now taken on numerous different color combinations, the most popular of which is the red, white, and blue ribbon arranged to combine the American flag with the ribbon’s multiple connotations.

We know from Benedict Anderson that patriotism is an elaborate fiction sustained by countless cultural and symbolic acts, but we still find ourselves “stirred” and “moved” as flags wave, anthems play, and footballers score points. [183] It is still difficult to understand how such patriotism motivates individuals to die for a foreign policy toward a distant and relatively powerless nation—Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan—posing no immediate threat to those individuals before they enter combat. How is it possible that large numbers of people from many different backgrounds, most of whom will never meet each other or, if they did, would find they have nothing in common, will embrace and sing together as “their” flag is displayed and “anthem” is played? Although this is the typical “patriotic scene of instruction”, it is rarely performed with much enthusiasm or even consensus. In a televised broadcast on Memorial Day (2006), President George W. Bush praised the sacrifices of the military in a speech at Arlington National Cemetery, and he was joined by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others in singing the National Anthem. Like some distracted fan at a sporting event, Rumsfeld clearly had difficulty with the lyrics, lip-synching at times and others remaining silent. “Patriotism” is thus not performed simply as the repetition of certain symbolic acts, like the singing of the National Anthem or the recitation of the “Pledge of Allegiance”. Patriotism depends on a much wider culture industry, whose products are generically and temporally diverse. Without “new” productions, patriotism would simply fail. Much of its vitality depends, then, on a ceaseless re-functioning of older cultural myths adapted to new circumstances.

Since the First Gulf War, patriotic rhetoric has relied on the substitution of military personnel, often individualized or collectively represented through fictive individuals, for embattled political leaders and institutions. In the County-and-Western hit, “Arlington”, Trace Adkins sings in the voice of a dead veteran of the Second Gulf War, who has recently been buried at National Arlington Cemetery, “a thousand stones” away from his “grandad”, who died fighting in World War II. [184]

The veteran’s reward for service to his country is “this plot of land […] for a job well done”, just below “a big white house sits on a hill just up the road”. The “white house” is, of course, the Custis-Lee Mansion, the original estate on which National Arlington Cemetery was built when Brigadier General Montgomery C. Meigs appropriated the house and established a cemetery for the Union war dead on June 15, 1864. But Adkins’s “white house” also refers to the Executive branch of the government, thus aligning the dead veteran’s sacrifice and patriotism with unquestioning support of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy in the Middle East. Adkins’s lyrics pun on the veteran’s “hometown” and his ultimate coming “home” to Arlington National Cemetery, glossing the “big white house […] on a hill” as the proper destination for “the chosen ones” who have made such a sacrifice. The cemetery is “this peaceful piece of property”, which is “sacred ground” where the young man can “rest in peace”. Playing on the promises of the Bush Administration to protect Americans against “terrorism” and guarantee their “homeland security”, Adkins suggests that such policies represent a national consensus: “We’re thankful for those thankful for the things we’ve done,/We can rest in peace, ‘cause we are the chosen ones,/We made it to Arlington, yea dust to dust,/Don’t cry for us, we made it to Arlington”. Of course, the Biblical reference links the Bush Administration’s foreign policies with the civil religion, just as allusions to the “city” (in this case, “a white house”) on “a hill” and the “chosen ones” recall the Puritan doctrine of supralapsarian Election.

Some neo-conservatives have attempted to equate “civic virtue” and “good citizenship” with “patriotism”, effectively “rationalizing” patriotism (that is, giving it the aura of “reason”). In Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, Samuel Huntington complains that “elements of America’s business and intellectual elites [identify] more with the world as a whole and [define] themselves as ‘global citizens’ […]”. [185] Huntington takes a populist stance in the book, lumping liberal academic and multinational corporate “elites” together in an improbable conspiracy to denationalize the United States with immigrants, who in their refusal to accept the American consensus end up working out the “cosmopolitan” agenda of their allies in the university and corporations. Fixing on immigrants with legal or de facto dual citizenship and tagging them “ampersands”, Huntington fuels the recent rage against undocumented workers in the United States by insisting: “Previous immigrants maintained an ethnic identity as a subcomponent of their American national identity. Ampersands, in contrast, have two national identities. They eat their cake and have it too, combining the opportunity, wealth, and liberty of America with the culture, language, family ties, traditions, and social networks of their birth country”. [186] What links together these unlikely forces is finally their unpatriotic, anti-national, and perversely destructive impulses. We are saved only by the grass-roots Americans who constitute what Huntington terms the nation’s “‘patriotic public”, which is “foremost among peoples in their patriotism and their commitment to their country”. [187] As rational or historically accurate argument, Who Are We? makes no more sense than the shifting symbolism of those “yellow ribbons”, but in both cases a vague rhetoric of “patriotism” as necessary “consensus” holds both symbolically in place.

Samuel Huntington is a frequent target of liberal criticism, of course, because his arguments rely so centrally on neo-conservative rhetoric, especially by linking “values”, “faith”, and “nationalism”. Yet even more sophisticated and less obviously politically interested criticism has been directed in recent years at the new “cosmopolitanism” or what Robbins and Cheah have positively formulated as “cosmopolitics”. [188] The new “world or global literatures”, “post-nationalist” and “transnational” cultural and political projects, “traveling theory”, and “postcolonial theory” have been criticized for their totalizing impulses, their impracticality, and their tacit acceptance of (or at least failure to distinguish themselves from) unilateral, first-world globalization. Although Alan Wolfe’s notorious review of the so-called “Anti-American Studies” in The New Republic is an extreme example of this tendency, there are many more “reasonable” arguments against the “internationalizing” of American Studies, especially if this requires us to study comparatively the polylingual, ethnically diverse communities of the Western Hemisphere and their pertinent rims or “contact zones”.

In Cosmopolitanism, Kwame Anthony Appiah argues eloquently for the transnational ethics of the cosmopolitan, who takes “seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance. People are different, the cosmopolitan knows, and there is much to learn from our differences”. [189] Appiah’s approach respects human differences, including those established by national boundaries and customs, but in doing so tries to develop an ethics that is not restricted to nation-specific knowledge and morality. As Appiah acknowledges, it is difficult for us to acknowledge the cosmopolitan ideal “that we have obligations to strangers”, but even the smallest “nation” is composed primarily of strangers. [190] What allows us to identify with “fellow Americans” (or Swiss or Ugandans) whom we do not know personally and not make the same connection with other human beings? The problem is in part the result of nation-specific knowledge, especially in the disciplines associated with culture and history. Whatever critical and educational purposes these disciplines may serve in the interpretation of the nation, they have done considerable work toward the legitimation of nations as discrete “objects” of study. [191]

Cultural, economic, and political globalization makes patriotism and nationalism appear increasingly naive and irrational. At the same time that U.S. popular music reinforces sentimental patriotism in work like Trace Adkins’ “Arlington”, it also calls attention to an ineluctable global awareness critical of the provincialism of the nation. The cross-over Folk-Country musician Steve Earle explains in the liner notes for his disc, The Revolution Starts Now, that he felt a special urgency when composing this album to “weigh in” on “the most important presidential election in our lifetime”, the 2004 Presidential election that would occur seven months after the album’s release in May 2004. [192] The Country-and-Western melodies sound much like those employed by Adkins in patriotic songs, like “Arlington”, but Earle’s message is distinctly radical—in the spirit of what he terms the “radical [U.S.] revolution”—and global in perspective. The music lyrics in “Home to Houston” recall countless Country songs celebrating the hard work of truckers, but Earle’s driver is making the run from Basra to Baghdad “with a bulletproof screen on the hood of my truck/And a Bradley on my backdoor”. The trucker’s refrain—“God get me back to Houston alive/and I won’t drive a truck anymore”—repudiates the conventional celebration of the trucker’s hard but honorable life, as well as the freedom of the open road. [193]

Earle’s trucker may want to get back to Houston as quickly as possible, recognizing his mistake in participating in a war so far from home, but Earle makes it clear that one lesson of the Second Gulf War is that working people share common bonds that reach beyond national borders. In “Rich Man’s War”, Earle argues that U.S. grunts, like Bobby, are fooled by patriotism—“Bobby had an eagle and a flag tattooed on his arm/Red white and blue to the bone when he landed in Kandahar”—in order to fight “a rich man’s war”, leaving at home “a stack of overdue bills” while “the finance company took his car”. In the same song, the Palestinian “Ali”, “the second son of a second son,/Grew up in Gaza throwing bottles and rocks when the tanks would come/Ain’t nothin’ else to do around here just a game children play/Somethin’ ‘bout livin’ in fear all your life makes you hard that way”.

Both Bobby and Ali answer the same call of “rich men”, who manipulate their workers as if they were children. When Ali gets “the call”, he “Wrapped himself in death and praised Allah/A fat man in a new Mercedes drove him to the door/Just another poor boy off to fight a rich man’s war”. [194]

Customarily represented as religious fanatics in the U.S. media, Palestinian suicide-bombers are identified by Earle as sharing a transnational cause with U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Cheah, Robbins, Appiah, and Earle are working out a new cosmopolitanism that should guide our efforts to “internationalize” American Studies. The curious hybrid term “international American Studies”, which in its very name appears to combine incompatible categories of world and nation, offers us an excellent opportunity to offer a sustained criticism of nationalism and its emotional complement “patriotism” from perspectives both transnational and “rational”. The first task in this work is, then, profoundly theoretical: how can we disarticulate “reason” and “knowledge” from specific national or state interests? Denationalizing knowledge complements the work of decolonizing knowledge advocated by the postcolonial theorist Walter Mignolo, especially if we understand the historical relationship between the nation-state and colonial expansion. [195] And can we do so in ways that will escape the totalizing universals of the past, especially noticeable in the Enlightenment heritage of modernity? In my concluding remarks, I want to suggest that popular music offers one possibility of moving in these directions beyond the nation, beyond universal reason, and against neo-imperialist versions of globalization.

Liberalism within the nation-state is no longer a possible alternative to a “neo-liberal ideology” that is profoundly conservative in its politics and yet rhetorically liberal. The ease with which a well-intentioned intellectual or artist can be captured by such neo-liberal rhetoric is exemplified by Richard Rorty’s Saving Our Country and by Neil Young’s recent album, Living with War. Young’s long career is an interesting mixture of his Canadian backgrounds, musically documented in Prairie Wind, the album (and documentary film) released just prior to Living with War, his countercultural identification with the anti-Vietnam War generation when he was part of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, who performed memorably at Woodstock, and his appeal to libertarian political positions in the Country Folk songs he produced in the late 1970s and through the 1980s, after leaving the instrumental Blue Grass group to become an independent composer and performer. Often referred to as libertarian “anthems”, songs like “Long May She Run” tap into the individualist, anti-government values of political conservatives while his continuing critiques of U.S. imperialism, such as “Pocahontas” and “Powder Finger”, even the feminist sentiments of “A Man Needs a Maid” (Harvest) appeal to various elements of the New Left.

Although Young often turns to his rural Canadian roots to explain his criticism of U.S. policies, he also resembles New Left intellectuals who often insisted on liberal “nationalism” as an alternative to the corrupt “patriotic propaganda” of the government. Young concludes Living with War with a brief and deliberately fractured verse of “America the Beautiful”, having criticized the U.S. for its reliance on religion (“After the Garden”), consumerism (“The Restless Consumer”), and militarism (“Shock and Awe”). But Young tries to work through U.S. ideology by offering alternative national values, including the pacifism in “Living with War”, which uses lyrics from “The Star Spangled Banner” in conjunction with the pacifist values of many anti-war demonstrators: “I take a holy vow/To never kill again/Try to remember Peace/The rocket’s red glare/Bombs bursting in air/Give proof through the night/That our flag is still there”. [196]

Like Bill Clinton trying to counter the “family values” rhetoric of George H. W. Bush’s campaign, Young tries to offer an alternative set of “family values” in “Families” as he tacitly calls for the troops to come home: “I’m goin’ back to the USA/I just got my ticket today/I can’t wait to see you again in the/USA”. In “Flags of Freedom”, patriotism cuts both ways, the American flag flying ostensibly in the parade on “the day our younger son/is going off to war”, but also “blowin’ in the wind” are “the flags of freedom flyin’” that Young identifies with “Bob Dylan singin’ in 1963”, presumably Dylan’s composition for Peter, Paul, and Mary’s hit from that year, “Blowin’ in the Wind”, which celebrated not only the heroism of the Civil Rights Movement but also the beginnings of the anti-war movement. Young’s album focuses on such noble tasks as “Let’s Impeach the President” and “Lookin’ for a Leader”, but both are integral to the U.S. nationalist agenda of the album. Of course, this is not the only reason Living with War bombed on its release. In a hurry to release an album critical of the war, Young relies on melodies, especially those with driving downbeats, long equated with his musical style and somewhat clichéd as a result. We might add to such criticism, which was prevalent in the popular reviews of the album, that those same musical motifs have been associated with so many conflicting political positions in his music as to muddle their musical import.

Steve Earle’s efforts to transnationalize the otherwise deeply patriotic styles of Country music might find their political, even musical, allies in the long history of music by U.S. ethnic minorities intent on getting a “hearing” from audiences deeply resistant to their values, even identities. From W. E. B. Du Bois’s pioneering work on African-American “Sorrow Songs” in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), arguably the first scholarly treatment of the cultural, social, and political significance of African-American spirituals to Americo Paredes’ work on Mexican-American corridos, there is a long tradition of popular minority music whose central purpose has been to challenge the geopolitical and cultural boundaries of the United States and citizenship. Du Bois rediscovers the international meaning of his “grandfather’s grandmother”’s “heathen melody”, which she sang “to the child between her knees” somewhere “in the valleys of the Hudson and Housatonic”. [197] As Du Bois points out, for “two hundred years” the song “travelled down to us and we sing it to our children, knowing as little as our fathers what its words may mean, but knowing well the meaning of its music” (Du Bois, 207). By “music”, Du Bois clearly means not just the melody, even though the notes are transcribed in his text, but also the spirit of rebellion which the African words—“Do bana coba, gene me, gene me!”—express for the diasporic African American under slavery or racial discrimination in North America (207). The foreignness of the language to the African-American child’s ear is for Du Bois itself a sign of the transnational alliance that challenges the bondage of the U.S. nation and the textual literacy of the EuroAmerican tradition from which the slave was specifically excluded.

“Nuestro Himno”, aired first on Hispanic radio stations on April 28, 2006 to anticipate the May Day demonstrations against HR 4437 and the general anti-immigration temper in the U.S., draws on the traditions of the Mexican corridos to challenge U.S. imperial domination in the “borderlands”, but what Ariel Dorfman terms “the Star-Spanglish Banner” also suggests that “la frontera” is now in the midst of the U.S. nation, not just at its geopolitical edges. [198] As Dorfman points out, politicians as different as “the conservative Lamar Alexander and the liberal Edward M. Kennedy […] declared that ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ should be sung exclusively in English”, as did Charles Key, “great-great-grandson of Francis Scott Key”, who “‘finds the Spanish version unpatriotic and is adamant that it should be sung only in English’” (Dorfman).

Dorfman reminds us that in the 1860s, more than 70 years before “The Star-Spangled Banner” was made the national anthem, there were Yiddish and Latin translations of the song (Dorfman). There was also a German translation in 1861, and it has been translated into French by Cajuns. “The website of the U.S. State Department also has been providing multiple Spanish versions of the anthem”. [199] Giacomo Puccini uses musical motifs from “The Star-Spangled Banner” to identify B. F. Pinkerton, the U.S. Navy Lieutenant who betrays Madame Butterfly in the opera (1904), even structuring the duet between Pinkerton and Sharpless (U.S. Consul at Nagasaki) in Act II in terms of the song’s music. The American opera historian Gustave Kobbé felt compelled to comment in 1919 that “the use of the Star Spangled Banner motif as a personal theme for Pinkerton always has had a disagreeable effect upon me, and from now on should be objected to by all Americans”. [200] The Earl of Harewood, who revised Kobbé’s reference text in the 1970s, notes that Puccini’s use of the anthem’s music never had the “disagreeable effect” on American audiences and “seems now to cause no comment after some seventy years of repeated hearings” (1181).

But Puccini’s early twentieth-century Italian libretto and the previous translations hardly pose the same threat to U.S. nationalism and patriotism as “Nuestro Himno”, which complements the symbolic power of the many Mexican, Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, and other Latin American national flags displayed in the May 1, 2006 and 2007 pro-immigration demonstrations across the U.S. Conceived by British music executive Adam Kidron, performed by Haitian-American singer Wyclef Jean, Cuban-American rapper Pitbull, and Puerto Rican singers Carlos Once and Olga Tañón, “Nuestro Himno” is a genuinely transnational work that calls attention to the increasingly limited horizons of the nation-state for understanding and governing our economic, political, cultural, and human relations. “Nuestro Himno” departs strategically from the original English.

The second verse stanza claims U.S. equality for non-English singers, insisting “Sus estrellas, sus franjas, la libertad, somos iguales./Somos hermanos, es nuestro himno” (“Its stars, its stripes, liberty, we are equal./We are brothers, it is our anthem”), and casting the original anti-colonial struggle against Great Britain as a new revolution against U.S. economic imperialism: “En el fiero combate, en señal de victoria,/fulgor de lucha . . . (Mi gente sigue luchando.)/. . . al paso de la libertad (!Ya es tiempo de romper las cadenas!)” (“In the fierce combat, as a sign of victory,/The brilliance of battle . . . (My people keep fighting.)/. . . in step with freedom, (Now is the time to break the chains!)”. [201]

“Nuestro Himno” draws on traditions of polylingual U.S. culture, the challenges to assimilationship norms of the borderland corridos, and the more general oral traditions through which minoritized peoples have often communicated and built political and cultural solidarity. Dorfman claims that “Nuestro Himno” has provoked such extreme responses because it has “inadvertently announced something many Americans have dreaded for years: that their country is on its way to becoming a bilingual nation” (Dorfman). The reality of multilingual America has, however, long been accepted, even if begrudgingly, by most Americans, and previous English-Only movements have failed primarily because of their impracticality. What threatens many Americans in “Nuestro Himno” is the reality that the fiction of the U.S. national border can no longer be maintained, in part as a consequence of our own need for economic and now political globalization and in part as the result of new political formations, ranging from such formal organizations as the European Union to emerging alliances among migrant workers to the indefinite threats of “global terrorists”.

Adam Kidron produced “Nuestro Himno” to demonstrate international solidarity with Hispanic immigrants to the United States, and the song is featured on the album Somos Americanos, a part of whose proceeds were donated to the National Capital Immigration Coalition in Washington, D. C. (Wikipedia). Kidron’s activism within the U.S. originates outside its geopolitical borders, as does the labor of 12 million undocumented laborers working inside the U.S. Under slavery, African Americans were not citizens; until well into the twentieth century, native Americans were not citizens; under the Chinese Exclusion Acts, Chinese Americans were not citizens. The U.S. has maintained its national identity thanks to the labor of countless people who have not been entitled to citizenship.

Popular music freely crosses borders in car radios, iPODs, CD players, traveling bands, and pedestrians, with or without documents, singing along to their favorite tunes. Lyrics signify, of course, as I have argued in this essay, but they also depend on their beats and melodies, so that a “foreign” lyric, like Du Bois’s ancestral “Do bana coba”, can still signify, even when the specific words may not be understood. People listen privately to music, but they also dance to it, swaying to its rhythms with others who know or at least know how to fake the appropriate steps. Music can bind us to flags and wars, of course, as military personnel listen to their iPODs while racing into battle, but music can also take us apart, move us across borders, and link us with surprising communities with little more than the twist of a dial or that wonder of technology, a human voice. Mobile, inexpensive, adaptive, and politically possible, popular music is one means of creating the transnational coalitions that will take us beyond the prison-house of the nation.