Unsettling Race, Coloniality, and Caste

Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera, Martinez's Parrot in the Oven, and Roy's the God of Small Things

Bibliographic Data

ID2163986
AuthorsJosé David Saldívar (corresponding author)
Year2007
Volume21
Issue2-3
Pages339-367
Publication date2007-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCultural Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0950-2386 • E-ISSN: 1466-4348
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/09502380601162563
OpenAlexW2045432813
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited13

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The concept of the coloniality of power was theorized by the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano. He argues that modern regimes of power are characterized by what he terms 'coloniality', which, as distinct from colonialism, is not simply defined by a formal redomination between empire and colony but primarily defined by global and national/cultural hierarchies (gendered, racialized, and sexualized) that are articulated differentially in time and space. See Quijano's (Citation1992, Citation2000). See also Mignolo (Citation2000), Lao-Montes (Citation2001), and Grosfoguel (2002). 2. For a discussion of the twinned logics of US empire (as a spatial territory) and as the cultures of US new imperialism (as a deterritorialized logic of capitalism), see Harvey (Citation2003). 3. See Althusser (Citation1971) and Butler (Citation1997). 4. See The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse (1990). 5. Deleuze & Guattari (1986). 6. See my 'Foreword' (2001), (2000a and b, 1996). 7. The postpositivist realism the Reclaiming Identity scholars defend emerges from within the philosophy of science, and is informed by the work of Charles Sanders Pierce, W.V.O. Quine, and Hilary Putnam, among others. I have profited from Putnam's autobiographical essay on the philosophy of science entitled 'A Half Century of Philosophy, Viewed From Within' (Citation1997). 8. Mohanty hypothesizes in Literary Theory and the Claims of History: 'instead of conceiving identities as self-evidently based on the authentic experiences of members of a cultural or social group, ... or as all equally unreal to the extent that they lay any claim to the real experiences of real people because experience is a radically mystifying term, ... we need to explore the possibility of a theoretical understanding of social and cultural identity in terms of objective social location. To do so, we need a cognitivist conception of experience ...' (1997, p. 216). 9. Brown (Citation1995). 10. As I have suggested above, the coloniality of power functions to organize cross-genealogical dialogues and theoretical developments around issues central to the futures of minority studies: identity, subjectification, power regimes, espistemology, and transformative politics. Among the scholars engaged in those dialogues are Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Agustín Lao-Montes, Ramón Grosfoguel, Enrique Dussel, Catherine Walsh, and Freya Schiwy. 11. For far-reaching studies of the emerging problems in the intellectual and institutional organization of academic thinking, see Walllerstein et al. (Citation1996) and Mignolo (Citation2000). While the Wallersteinian Gulbenkian Commission's report is a highly analytical narrative of the social sciences over the past 100 years, and gracefully uses world system theory, chaos and dynamical complexity theory, contingent universalism, and a timely call for ethnoracial and gender diversity in the academy to overturn Max Weber's worn out call for a 'disenchantment with the world', Mignolo's study of the historical humanities in the modern world colonial system can be read as an exemplary corrective to the Gulbenkian Commission's call for universalizing the social sciences. Mignolo argues that the Gulbenkian Commission's position on universalism ends up subalternizing others. Briefly, the issue for Mignolo is not how to universalize the social sciences or the historical humanities, but how to better locate the 'colonial difference'embedded in our academic cultures of scholarship. Mignolo inists that we need to think in terms of local US Latino/a and global border knowledge (gnosis) rather than in terms of the disciplines. 12. For an understanding of how nineteenth-century America was obsessed about vernacular varieties of English, see Jones (Citation1999). 13. Nepantla is a word used by a Nahuatl-speaking people in the sixteenth century to define their own socio-cultural situation in the face of the Spanish conquest. As Walter Mignolo suggests, the word, nepantla, was recorded by Diego Durán, a Dominican missionary who was writing an ethnographic history of the Nahuatl speakers from the Valley of Mexico. When Durán asked one of his informants what he thought about the difficult situation that had been created for them by the Spanish invasion, the informant is reported to have responded 'estamos nepantla', ('we are Nepantla'), that is, 'we are in-between'. Personal correspondence with the author, 15 January 1998. My emphasis on nepantla throughout the essay is meant to function as a reminder of the 'colonial difference' implicit in US Latino/a Studies, a translational and transnational memory that all cultural difference has to be seen in the context of power and of the relations of subalternity and domination. 14. Gloria Anzaldúa writes in 'Border Arte: Nepantla, El lugar de la Frontera', that border art 'depicts both the soul of the artist and the soul of the pueblo. It deals with who tells the stories and what stories and histories are told. I call this form of visual narrative autohistorias. This form goes beyond the traditional self-portrait or autobiography, in telling the writer/artist's personal story, it also includes the artist's cultural history' (p. 113). In a conversation with me at the University of California, Santa Cruz, on 17 October 1990, Anzaldúa described the form of Borderlands/La Frontera with the homegrown neologism, autohistoriteoría. 15. Anzaldúa's imaginative work has had the great fortune of having been treated by superb feminist and postcolonial critics. In addition to Mignolo, Saldívar-Hull, Sandoval,Yarbro- Bejarano, and Chabram-Dernesesian's work, readers can track an emerging debate in Chicana/o Studies between psychoanalytic and deconstructive work such as Norma Alarcon's and post-postivist realist work such as Paula Moya's. For Alarcón, Anzaldúa's 'lesbo-erotic' text not only 'recodifies the multiple names of Woman' and recuperates 'a new mestiza consciousness', but also resituates Coatlicue through the author's own 'nonconscious memory' (p. 50). Briefly, for Alarcón, Anzaldúa represents 'the non-(pre)-oedipal mother' in Borderlands/La Frontera and in the process 'gives birth to herself as inscriber/speaker of/for mestiza consciousness' (p. 50). More recently, Paula Moya in Learning from Experience, has responded to Alarcón's and Chela Sandoval's reading of Anzaldúa by suggesting that in Alarcón's and Sandoval's proto-poststructuralist approaches to Chicana feminism in general and Anzaldúa's work in particular, they have 'run the risk of theorizing ... identity in terms of ambiguity and fragmentation so that the 'Chicana' becomes, in effect, a figure for marginality and contradiction in the postmodern world. I would argue that the term 'Chicana' should not denote a principle of abstract oppositionality' (p. 129). In contradistinction to Alarcón's and Sandoval's readings, Moya calls for a post-positivist realist approach to Anzaldúa's work based on issues of identity and experience. Thus envisaged, Anzaldúa's new mestiza consciousness for Moya can be interpreted as a form of 'epistemic privilege', that is, 'a special advantage with respect to possessing or acquiring knowledge about how fundamental aspects of our society ... operate to sustain matrices of power' (p. 188, fn. 36). While this is not the place to respond to this debate in Chicano/a Studies, I would like to note that Anzaldúa's work engages us with another 'take' on the 'post', that is, what we might call, the 'post-human'. Throughout Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa asks an urgent question: how do we go about breaking down the barriers we pose between the human and the animal? In contradistinction to Weber and Descartes, Anzaldúa calls for a 'reenchantment with the world'. Specifically, her 'alien' allegory builds on passages such as the following one in her autohistoriateoría: 'I tremble before the animal, the alien, sub-or suprahuman, the one that has something in common with the wind and the trees, ... that possesses a demon determination and ruthlessness beyond the human' (p. 72, my emphasis). 16. I would like to thank my Berkeley colleague, Gautam Premnath for allowing me to read his superb dissertation entitled 'Arguments with Nationalism in the Fiction of the Indian Diaspora', which he completed at Brown University in 2003. I am especially indebted to Premnath's powerful suggestion that Arhundhati Roy politically declares herself and her characters to be 'mobile republics' in order to get at the fundamental failure of the Indian republic to come into its own. I read Premnath's work after I had completed the writing of this last section of the essay, and after I had formulated my arguments that Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things fundamentally critiques postcolonial coloniality and nationalism through her dystopian deconstruction of kinship in Kerala and alternatively uses the erotic as a utopian form of political and cultural critique. 17. Here in this last section, it should become clear that I am in substantial agreement with Satya P. Mohanty that our identities are not mere social constructions and hence 'spurious', nor fixed unchanging essences in a brutalizing world. I agree, further, with Mohanty that 'we have the capacity to examine our social identities, considering them in light of our best understanding of other social facts and our other social relationships' (1997, p. 201). My reading of Roy's The God of Small Things is indebted to what I take to be Mohanty's significant reformulation of experience and identity dispersed throughout his Literary Theory and the Claims of History (1997). 18. I read Roy's critique of the bourgeois nation in The God of Small Things as echoing Ranajit Guha's description of the South Asian Subaltern Group's project. In his essay, 'On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India' (1988), Guha defines the problematic of their project as 'the study of [the] historical failure of the nation to come into its own, a failure due to the inadequacy of the bourgeoisie as well as of the working class to lead it to a decisive victory over colonialism and a bourgeois-democratic revolution of either the classic nineteenth-century type under the hegemony of the bourgeoisie or a more modern type under the hegemony of workers and peasants, that is a "new democracy"', p. 43. 19. I refer, of course, to the term Orlando Patterson in Slavery and Social Death (Citation1982) gives to the status of being a living being radically deprived of all rights. 20. See Dominick LaCapra's 'Representing the Holocaust: Reflections on the Historians' Debate' (1992). 21. My reading of kinship and positionality has profited from Judith Butler's Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000

Aesthetics · Capitalism · Caste · Colonialism · Context (archaeology) · Empire · Epistemology · Identity (music) · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · Anthropology · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Gender Studies · History · Law · Marxism and Critical Theory · Philosophy · Political theory and Gramsci

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub