Here, that is to say far below, is the abstract for one of the papers I gave when I was supposed to be working on Vallejo. I did not actually write it, but spoke from this abstract itself and a two-page handout of quotations. I could do this because I have excellent presentation skills. I would have written it, but I was supposed to be working on Vallejo. This is one of the abstracts that is out of date now, although the ideas have become standard concepts in basic courses.
→ The ideas in it which still interest me are the simultaneous evocation and elision of difference — one exalts the other so as to erase them, or erases them only to find they have reappeared elsewhere or in a slightly different form — and the fact that people do still talk about Spain and Latin America’s racial and cultural tolerance. Perhaps I am simply too accustomed to the fact(s) that categories like blanco and negro are not literal, and that one can change races.
The Discourse of Hispanism and the Elision of Difference
Abstract
This presentation would be a critique of Hispanocentrism in the discourse of Spanish-American literature and culture. I would argue that the discourse of Hispanism (including the important pan-Hispanic movement of the turn of the twentieth century), while counterhegemonic internationally in the context of the 19th and 20th century neocolonialism, is repressive within Spanish America. The presentation would be based on the nineteenth century (Independence period) political speeches, cultural debates, and literary texts which inform contemporary notions of Hispanic identity, but it would refer as well to contemporary writers (e.g. Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Lydia Vega) and political and cultural activists (e.g. Rigoberta Menchú) whose work replicates and/or contests these cultural myths.
Critics such as Edmundo O’ Gorman (1961) and Rolena Adorno (1993) argue that because of Spain’s putative racial and cultural tolerance, the history of Spain’s (former) colonies lies outside the quintessential colonial experience. José Piedra (1987, 1993), on the other hand, has shown that this racial and cultural tolerance is actually an elision of cultural difference, and that Hispanism, first formulated as an imperialist discourse in the era of the Christian Reconquest, originally participated in the repressive dimension of cultural nationalism.
The goal of my presentation would be to unravel and throw into relief some the discursive strategies that enable this elision of cultural difference. One of these was the theory of cultural mestizaje (miscegenation). Romantic theories of cultural origins and originality made the positing of an essential “Americanness” an attractive tool for the creation of national consensus. Paradoxically, however, the internalization of the colonialist construction of America as “barbaric” made for highly ambivalent attitudes on the part of Spanish American intellectuals towards the very America whose integrity they wished to defend. Indeed, the writers who first framed the debates on national culture were largely members of white elites who sought to “civilize” the former colonies through the further imposition of European cultural forms. A common resolution to this impasse was the invocation of a cultural and political union directed by these urban elites but symbolized in terms of indigenous and subaltern peoples and cultures. Thus the discourse of Hispanism continued, in increasingly subtle and complex ways, to invoke and exalt racial and cultural difference so as, ultimately, to iron them out, to elide them.
Works Cited
Adorno, Rolena. “Reconsidering Colonial Discourse for Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spanish America.” Latin American Research Review 28:3 (1993): 135-45.
O’Gorman, Edmundo. The Invention of America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961.
Piedra, José. “The Black Stud’s Spanish Birth.” Callaloo 16:4 (1993): 820-46.
—. “Literary Whiteness and the Afro-Hispanic Difference.” New Literary History 18:2 (1987): 303-32.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 