Is American Dream a Potent Symbol of Transracial Space?

Date

2022-11-18

Author

Doğan, Buket

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Is the American Dream a Potent Symbol of Transracial Space? For the general audience, the American dream might resonate with so many images and visions representing a dreamland for underachievers from many different places in the world and in America itself. One of the well-known figures responding to this overarching narrative is Arnold Schwarzenegger who is regarded as “a walking model of the American Dream” for Andrew Sullivan (“Don’t Underestimate the Smart Tactics of Arnie”; The Times, 10 August, 2003). As an immigrant, moving to America and even holding an office power have been a transformative experience. For another public person Martin Luther King, America, which should be defined by its land and people from Abraham Lincoln’s eyes, and the American dream; then, should have the prospects to embrace any person living in this land. King puts his belief in the uniting and transformational power of the dream into words in the open. Yet still another figure who was quite active in Civil Rights Movement, Malcolm X, defies the American dream being a grand narrative and expresses his furious disbelief in its welcoming power for Black people in the country; thus, it can be contented that American dream as a totalizing discourse seems to put some in an invidious position. So, the question to raise at this point might be about while the American dream provides some with social and economic mobility, yet for some others, it does not. From a post-structural viewpoint, as grand narratives de facto create binaries, in light of this paper, the American dream will be analyzed from a Derridean perspective to understand how in the axis of binary oppositions it consolidates the already existing legs; like white/black. Derrida reverses the traditionally ordered pairs like European/Eastern or presence/absence; while the first term is viewed as primary and original, the second one is derivative in the Western epistemology. However, for Derrida, this priority is not intact and can easily be reversed as both the primary and the secondary terms are dependent on each other while bearing the traces of one another. In the backcloth of the poststructuralist way of looking at the issue, this paper will study how conventionally associated polarities in the configuration of the American dream are indeed mutually interrelated and how they exist with the presence and absence of each other in the public speeches of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X. Keywords: American Dream, Deconstructive reading, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X.

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https://hdl.handle.net/11511/107328

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Department of Foreign Language Education, Conference / Seminar