The Sandinistas, the Subject, and a Contingent Strategic Nationalism

But when a hero dies he doesn't die: For that hero is reborn in a Nation.

He had them entombed in the national pantheon with magnificent pomp and all on the same level because a nation without heroes is a house without doors.

In recent years, the concept of “nation” has come under attack in US academic discussions, giving way to more fluid spatial and epistemological designations such as “borderland.” Gloria Anzaldúa, for example, argues for a border culture of the atravesados, “those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the ‘normal’” (3) and destabilize the rigid definitions of borders. A destabilization of boundaries, whether in terms of the subject or of a country, challenges the exclusionary tendencies that are part of traditional forms of nation formation. Anzaldua is among many critics who have disrupted national models of literary and cultural study and helped bring into the discussion new voices from different communities around the world.1 While academia should continue to collapse disciplinary borders and engage transnational issues, political realities also demand a continuing engagement with the desire for national unity.2 As a unifying political category, the idea of nation continues to capture the imagination of many groups around the world.

If anything, the end of the Cold War has prompted a heightened desire for founding nation-states and an increased use of the “nation” banner to form coalitions. Longings for nation have manifested themselves in many different scenarios, from the horrors of Bosnia to the sometimes comical tactics of the group Queer Nation, which challenges a homogeneous concept of sexuality and the belief that the United States is made up solely of heterosexual couples. Among the former republics of the Soviet Union, the desire for independence has prompted in some cases peaceful, if problematic, transitions to nation-states. And in th