‘We are still in the desert’: Diaspora and the (de)territorialization of identity in discursive representations of the US soldier

Abstract

This paper examines the territorial organization of the US military through the lens of diaspora studies in order to explore how the dynamism of identity is implicated by the constant movement between divergent social and material territories. We contend that military identity is subjected to diasporic intersections, which are moments where identity is tethered to multiple geographies simultaneously. Through an analysis of widely circulated Western war films and narratives produced by military personnel we highlight two prominent diasporic intersections in the US military: regulation of the body and occupational identity connected to labor practices. After discussing the utility of diaspora theory for analyzing military organization, we explore the construction of diasporic intersections in micro and macro discourses, and conclude by presenting avenues for future research.

Keywords:

• diaspora
• territory
• organization
• military
• identity

Notes

^†Both authors contributed equally to this article.

We recognize that locating the diasporic tension at the disjuncture between the ‘home’ and the ‘battlefield’ privileges a certain type of military overseas experience oriented toward combat. As United Nations peacekeeping operations illustrate, the intensity and involvement with conflict is certainly not uniform for all soldiers. While not all soldiering experience is focused on combat, this is the type of military experience most salient to the texts we analyze in this essay and public culture writ large.

New Yorker magazine film critic David Denby (2008) explores the rich history of the ‘coming-home-from-the-war’ story in his review of the film Stop-Loss directed by Kimberly Peirce (2008). He suggests movies depicting the challenges facing the returning soldier and their families were not released until after the fighting had concluded in order to maximize patriotic sentiment. Yet these films are now commonly featured despite the fact that the War on Terror has not concluded. Furthermore, although Denby identifies Stop-Loss as an example of the ‘coming-home-from-the-war’ genre and notices several similarities between Stop-Loss and previous war films, we only briefly mention the movie in this analysis due to its poor reception on the part of both critics and audiences.

A culturally resonant example, which highlights the historical continuity and repetition of many aspects of soldier identity, is Rudyard Kipling's 1890 poem ‘Tommy’. Much like the films and narratives used in this essay, Kipling's poem eloquently captures the mobility, desire for belonging, and often contentious relationship between military personnel and the public. A testament to the poem's timelessness is that it ‘remains one of the most quoted, or parodied, of Kipling's poems in the press’ (Ayers 2012). Although it would certainly be valuable to trace reoccurring features in representations of soldier identity over time, a diachronic analysis is beyond the scope of this essay.

The Feinstein International Center is a globally recognized foundation dedicated to providing research on ‘the politics and policy of aiding the vulnerable, on protection and rights in crisis situations, and on the restoration of lives and livelihoods’ (FIC 2012). Their 2007 report, The U.S. Citizen-Soldier and the Global War on Terror: The National Guard Experience, is based on interviews with nearly 100 soldiers and relies heavily on ‘the troops’ own words’ to present a ‘composite picture of the impact of the Global War on Terror on those who have fought it’ (Minear 2007, 3). The report begins with four extended narratives which provide ‘a sense of the range of experiences and the thoughtfulness and diversity of the views of the soldiers engaged in the conflicts’ (3). The authors chose these oral histories based on their observation that the experiences of the four soldiers ‘surface throughout the body of the report, where their reflections are, to one extent or another, echoed by the comments of scores of others from the ranks’ (4). We elected to focus on these texts because of their depth, diversity, and reflection over the differences between military and civilian life. In terms of biographical information on the narrative subjects, Lt. Col. Perry served as a US Army Reserve in Afghanistan. His narrative included in the report is from his autobiographical account of his time in the military, entitled In Country (Perry 2006). Mark Warnecke was a member of the Army since 1975. His involvement in Operation Iraqi Freedom came as part of the New York National Guard. His interview was conducted by a local Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Saugerties, New York and is a part of the Veterans History Project of the Library of Congress. Specialist Abbie Picket was a member of the Wisconsin National Guard and served 15 months in Iraq. Her transcribed interview in the Feinstein report was initially a part of a documentary entitled After the Fog. Finally, Sergeant Benjamin J. Flanders was a member of the New Hampshire National Guard and served in Iraq in 2004 and 2005. This interview was conducted by the author of the Feinstein report, Larry Minear.

The terms ‘organizational identity’, ‘institutional identity regulation’, and ‘occupational identity’ are distinct concepts in the organization and management literature. While each refers to the ‘ongoing efforts to address the question, ‘who am I?’ and – by implication – ‘how should I act?’ (Alvesson, Ashcraft, and Thomas 2008, 6), they focus on decidedly different components of this process of identity construction. Organizational identity refers to the means by which the organization rhetorically and symbolically presents itself to the public, clients, and workers (Aust 2004). For example, the production of public advertisements focusing on foreign aid is one strategy that the military uses to construct positive perceptions of the organization. Of course, it is important to note that organizational identity cannot be disconnected from the subjectivities and actions of individual participants. As Wicks (2002, 310) writes, ‘The social contexts in which identity formation occurs contain a set of power relations embedded in discourses and institutionalized organizational practices, shaping how people come to define themselves as people …’ Whereas organizational identity can be regarded as the outcome of this process, institutional identity regulation refers to the processes by which the organization engages in these practices by creating norms, rules, and discourses that delimit an individual's sense of self. For us, it is the means by which these processes act on the body that become fundamental to military institutional identity regulation. Finally, occupational identity can be referred to as a ‘set of central, distinctive, and enduring characteristics that typify a line of work … accomplished within a variety of discourses generated by occupational insiders and outsiders’ (Tracy and Scott 2006, 7). Worker identities, then, including that of the soldier, are subject to both institutional rules and regulations that shape how individuals sees themselves, but also macro-discursive assumptions about the occupation, or what it means to work as a ‘waitress’, ‘police officer’, or ‘soldier’.

A note on method: we turned our attention to the films and interviews not out of an attempt to understand the objective meaning of the texts, but to use the texts to function as theoretical examples. This essay is an attempt to provoke intellectual consideration of one element of the social and discursive practices related to the construction of military occupational identity. That said, we would like to make a quick comment on our process of analyzing the texts and their diasporic themes. Since the critical and ideological turn of the 1980s and 1990s, the understanding of criticism within the field of rhetorical and communication studies has largely adopted the perspective that ‘criticism is a performance’ insofar as ‘the critic as inventor becomes arguer or advocate for an interpretation of…collected fragments’ of discourse (McKerrow 1989, 131). Working alongside McGee's (1990) assertion that the critic does not just analyze a pre-given text, but rather produces the text from the collections of discursive fragments in contemporary culture, we selected four films and four oral narratives from National Guard soldiers which permit a particular argument about the discourse and its rhetorical function. During a brainstorming session over separate projects related to military identity and the spatial politics of mobility, it soon became apparent that some of the most interesting things to say about the subjects resided precisely in their intersection. After selecting our texts, we watched the movies together, discussing and considering examples, and generated two particularly salient themes (the strength and weakness of the body and the experience of laboring). We then decided it was necessary to highlight the presence of these themes and the diasporic discourse in micro-discursive moments as well, leading us to turn attention to the personal narratives gathered by the Feinstein International Center. While other interpretations of these texts are certainly possible and welcomed, we believe we have highlighted sufficient evidence that these are present and important themes, which provoke important theoretical questions for organization scholars.