The underground protest of the café concert

Abstract

The ontological assertion of identity supposes a discursive/ symbolic (and sometimes also physical) struggle between enunciators of history –in this case, the artists of the café concert and those who opposed such process of alternative constitution of identity–. The direct coercion of the agents of power over these challenging spectacles reduced one of these terms, since the identity was thought from an essentialist/ totalizing conception and there was no space for a questioning discourse. In the café-concert, the concept of identity was dismantled. This deconstruction of the concept can be analyzed, as Arfuch (2005: 24) does, considering the substitution of the questions “how are we” or “where do we come from” for the questions “how do we use the resources of language, history and culture in the process of becoming more than being, how do we represent ourselves, how are we represented or how could we represent ourselves in the future”. This stagings questioned the representativeness of those who acted in the sphere of power and deconstructed their symbolic world; the consequence was the passage from the discursive struggle to phys