자유의 다의성과 이중적 정체성 만들기 －19세기 말 20세기 초 시카고 폴란드 이민자 공동체의 자유관을 중심으로－

초록

Since the founding of the United States, liberty has been regarded as both a universal value and a key American creed to construct an exceptional civic community. However, liberty has always been a contested word. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,“Americanists” and “nativists” considered liberty an ethnic trait and made it a source of racial superiority and grounds of restriction concerning immigration. Yet, Poles appropriated the term, which had been used to build Anglo-Saxon and American identities, and promoted cultural homogeneity by transforming it as the grounds of loyalty to their mother country and cultural diversity. In so doing, these immigrants and their descendents used the term to articulate their Polish identity and reconcile it with the American identity. In this dynamic cultural process, the term liberty had dual roles. A history of liberty tells us that native-born Americans cannot control the meaning of liberty. Therefore, the key American creed promotes not only cultural unity but also diversity. Accordingly, in the transnational world, preserving a civic community which is based on this American creed will be a formidable task.

키워드