Constitutive visions: Indigeneity, visual culture, and the rhetorics of Ecuadorian national identity

This dissertation investigates the rhetorical force of visual culture, examining how visual artifacts work alongside more traditional rhetorical materials in the constitution and circulation of national identity. The project takes Ecuadorian art and national identity as its focus and traces a history of inclusion and exclusion in which images of indigenous people play key roles in shaping a lasting idea of the nation. Grounded in the notion that rhetoric shapes culture, the dissertation examines the elasticity and persistence of visual commonplaces (topoi) in images of national identity. It argues that artifacts of visual culture gain their particular rhetorical impact by contributing to the production, manipulation, circulation, and redaction of such resilient topoi of the nation.My study of Ecuador argues that the resilience of certain topoi across changing contexts serves a conflicted and paradoxical function that marginalizes indigenous people by making them central and erases them by highlighting their visibility. Chapter one, "Constituting a National Public," introduces the notion of constitutive rhetoric and traces how that Burkean idea of rhetoric's frame-making, public-convening force illuminates the history of Ecuadorian national constitution. Arguing that invocations of indigeneity have played key roles in the constitution of Ecuadorian national identity from the period of the early republic through the current era, this chapter maps the force of such invocations by placing their persistence in artifacts of visual culture in conversation with contemporary changes in Ecuador's national Constitution. Most particularly, the chapter examines how successive Ecuadorian Constitutions and the accumulation of artifacts that Burke calls "constitutions-behind-the-Constitution" have naturalized the exclusion of indigenous people from active citizenship by creating a common sense distinction between citizenship and national identity. Images of indigenous people were key to establishing the latter, a move that allowed actual indigenous people to be elided from direct participation in the nation-state.Chapter two, "Geography is History," takes on one of the most persistent and versatile of these topoi: the symbolic linkage of indigenous people with the land. It traces the commonplace elision of indigeneity and landscape, examining it in light of indigenous people's efforts to contest white-mestizo dominance of the national territory. The chapter suggests that the common sense connection between indigeneity and land has been key to processes of national definition and contestation, working consistently, if sometimes contradictorily, to authorize white-mestizo understandings of national territory and justify the perception of indigenous people as passive national subjects.Chapter three, "Beasts of Burden," engages another powerful topos of indigeneity, the image of the indigenous laborer. It examines how visions of indigenous labor helped build the nation, both figuratively and literally. The chapter engages letters and petitions from indigenous and non-indigenous Ecuadorians attempting to contest, alter, and benefit from conscriptions for public works labor. Tracing connections among those petitions and contemporary artistic depictions of indigenous workers, this chapter demonstrates how images of indigeneity helped develop a sustained narrative of nation building out of a history of conflicting and often failed projects of infrastructure construction.Chapter four, "Performing Indigeneity," considers how indigeneity itself serves as a powerful topos in the constitution of Ecuadorian national publics. The chapter pays particular attention to an increasing emphasis on indigeneity as a corporeal matter over the course of the twentieth century. The chapter uses petitions, "customs and habits" paintings, newspaper articles, and photographs to argue that indigeneity has served as an embodiable topos for establishing legitimacy and authenticity in political contexts. It traces how non-indigenous actors have taken on a performed indigenous subjectivity in their efforts to establish a claim to social place even while marginalizing actual indigenous participation. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...