Swoosh identity: recontextualizations in Haiti and Romania

Abstract

Since its creation in 1971 in the USA, the Nike swoosh has rapidly become a widely recognized and worshiped symbol of achievement, of the American dream of success and mobility, and it has constantly been part of a process of commodity-mediated identity co-construction. In small markets such as Haiti and Romania that are on the fringes of the wider global market, the swoosh symbol is freely appropriated and recontextualized by the local ‘flawed consumers’, who lack the financial means to participate in the identity-for-purchase ritual that the corporation thrives on. Instead, the swoosh - domesticated, through mechanical or manual reproductions - takes on a hybrid of local and global values. The avatars of the swoosh that we examine in this article are found at Romanian and Haitian cultural crossroads, and illustrate the dialectic of identity/community membership construction, and processes of geosemiotics. The identity of the sign undergoes metamorphoses and meaning crossfertilizations, thus undermining corporate hegemony and allowing the sign's local producers and users to symbolically transcend the local dimension and to join a u-topic community of affluent consumers.