coldhearted scientist وداد

These questions–raised by Medina, on whether you really can just take from a culture what you want and leave the rest, and by me [following others], on the distance between giving voice to the subaltern subject [that may be you, although the subaltern cannot speak] and creating a new, liberated subject–lead back to issues of nation and class, not to the more ebullient terrain of transnationalism or cosmopolitan hybridity.

See Aijaz Ahmad. We are glad to talk about hybridization because it isn’t taking up arms. Anzaldúa reaches out to white people and ignores bridges to other minorities (Medina), and doesn’t deal with Mexican side of the border, but does appropriate gods from central Mexico. Still, what is interesting, and what makes her struggle difficult, is the bridging of this chasm between the subaltern and the liberated subject (and I had in my notes, her work to contain anger).

Everything seems to make sense from the white/academic point of view. Anzaldúa stopped saying mestiza and started saying nepantlera because of these problems; is that a better term or just a more effective evasion?

ALSO: Anzaldúa’s choices of Latin American points of reference–pre-Columbian deities and canonical authors like José Vasconcelos and Octavio Paz–are interesting, since they are canonical/conservative, not “minority” references. There are actual minority cultural and literary traditions, both current and older, that might be the things to reach out to or compare one’s own project to, if that project were subaltern–right?

Axé.

Every footnote could become part of a new paper, and perhaps should. I cut from one footnote:

Scholars like Peter Wade note that mestizaje as ideology has worked as a uniting force in some communities, but Bolivia is now a plurinational state and Ecuador’s most recent constitution gives indigenous peoples their own cultural rights. There is also interesting bibliography on hybrid subjects opting out of the mestizo concensus. Two sophisticated but brief studies which may also serve as advanced introductions to the problem are Piedra (a literary perspective) and Ribeiro (a perspective from the social sciences).

And: my sentence “In contexts where the liminal or hybrid subject is a not a figure of multiple oppression but one of conciliation, the assignation of primary revolutionary work to them actually functions to obscure subaltern representation,” could have a footnote. Several scholars already have responses to what I say here: Anzaldúa is marginal in the United States. But that is my point: she’s not universal, then, and if your defense of the mestiza as necessarily revolutionary is that she is in the United States, then you’re being ethnocentric.

Axé.