New World babies as articulations of cultural difference

Note: This is heading in the direction of a preface or introduction to the book project. The image below is its starting place, at any rate. Would reading this make you want to read more? Comments welcome and encouraged.

Detail from a panel of Diego Rivera’s mural at the Palacio Nacional, Mexico City. Click to enlarge. Photograph by the Mrs.

In a panel filled with figures, most appearing in full or partial profile, all going about the business of colonizing/being colonized, this infant, suspended in a plain rebozo from its mother’s back, its skin slightly lighter than its mother’s, slightly darker than that of the soldier I assume is its father, gazes fixedly at something just above and beyond the viewer’s left shoulder. It is difficult to say what accounted for my standing in front of this image for some minutes when my wife and I visited the palacio (Mexico’s national capitol building) back in October: whether it’s that the baby is the only figure in the panel’s foreground looking in the viewer’s direction yet not quite returning the viewer’s gaze; or the color of its eyes–two tiny stones of aquamarine in a sea of reds and browns and yellows. Or both.

Though I did not have this image in mind when I worked on my dissertation, in a sense it is precisely because of what we see in it that I chose that dissertation’s subject: an attempt to discuss historical and fictional narratives of consensual miscegenation as tropes of New World culture more generally. It is not merely that individual mestizos, métis, and mulattoes are, to borrow Joel Williamson’s phrase, new people; it is that the culture that has emerged in this hemisphere is also, I argue, something demonstrably different from the European, African and indigenous cultures that contributed to its creation. Analogous to the baby’s not quite gazing directly at the viewer, New World culture is simultaneously familiar and strange–and, moreover, not one fully explained by most mainstream critical theories of culture.

As an example of what I mean by that last statement, here is a passage from the introduction to Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture, coincidentally published in the year I defended my dissertation:

The move away from the singularities of ‘class’ or ‘gender’ as primary conceptual and organizational categories, has resulted in an awareness of the subject positions–of race, gender, generation, institutional location, geopolitical locale, sexual orientation–that inhabit any claim to identity in the modern world. What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood–singular or communal–that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining society itself.

It is in the emergence of the intersticies–the overlap and displacement of domains of difference–that the intersubjective and collective experience of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated. How are subjects formed ‘in-between’, or in excess of, the sum of the ‘parts’ of difference (usually intoned as race/class/gender. etc.)? How do strategies or representation or empowerment come to be formulated in the competing claims of communities where, despite shared histories of deprivation and discrimination, the exchange of values, meanings and priorities may not always be collaborative and dialogical, but may be profoundly antagonistic, conflictual and even incommensurable? (1-2, emphasis mine)

Readers of Bhabha will recognize in this passage an implicit articulating of the concerns at stake in his concept of hybridity, an idea that has great resonance–and potential pitfalls–for the citizens of the Western Hemisphere¹, and one I am largely sympathetic with. But, the bolded passage strikes me, a citizen of this hemisphere and someone who attempts to understand and write about its culture, as not quite speaking to our cultural condition. I would argue that it is precisely in “those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural difference”–phenomena that Bhabha calls on critics to examine so as to be “theoretically innovative and politically crucial”–that we find the New World’s “narratives of original and initial subjectivities”: the very sorts of texts Bhabha argues we “need to think beyond.” To put this in terms of the baby in Rivera’s mural, Bhabha’s stance is that we already know where babies come from. I contend that, in this hemisphere, we’re still trying to figure out how to articulate where this particular baby comes from–and what those origins tell us about ourselves as a culture.

That articulation is complicated by the fact that the culture of this hemisphere emerged in historical time–October 12, 1492, was a Friday–yet all cultures that we know of attempt in some way to escape the gravity of that history. The thesis of Richard Poirier’s classic book A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature is precisely that that struggle is American literature’s implicit subject:

That writing exists not to be clarified but as a kind of drama of the search for clarity, that symbols, myths, and summaries are themselves only stabs in the dark, are among the presuppositions of this book. The great works of American literature are alive with the effort to stabilize certain feelings and attitudes that have, as it were, no place at all except where a writer’s style can give them one. And the attempt to do so occurs, especially in works of the [19th] century, within the context of inhospitable styles and structures. Language is never “free”; its forms are never “new,” and it is slightly unfaithful to those who proclaim the possibilities of “freedom” or “newness.”

American literature is a struggle with already-existing literary, social, and historical organizations for power over environment and over language itself[.](xxi)

The tension inherent in the struggle Poirier describes here is embodied in that very familiar term “New World.” That tension never gets resolved; hence, as Poirier notes, the writer’s attempts to explain, to account for, to make sense of, without never quite getting there. That tension is at the essence of the greatest novels of this side of the globe. So also is it present in the mythologies and even pathologies that have arisen around the historical narratives about Pocahontas, the Virgin of Guadalupe (which I’ve written about here) and La Malinche (which I’ve posted on here), Cabeza de Vaca, and the narratives of any number of other historical figures, some of which will be discussed in this project.

In an introductory chapter on Columbus, I will go on at some length about the idea of the New World as a heterotopic space, not to be confused with the space called the Americas. I will follow that with an extended reading of Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses and Amado’s Tent of Miracles, in which I will try to call our attention to some features common to each text–in effect, a sort of poetics or rhetoric of these heterotopic spaces. Those features will become the subjects of the chapters that follow it, in which I will discuss a range of visual, literary and historical texts from throughout the Americas as illustrative of those themes. Foucault says that heterotopias are disturbing “because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ’syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also the less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and opposite one another) to ‘hold together.’² Since we are given only glimpses of these spaces but cannot enter them, my goal in these pages will be to the more modest one of trying to articulate why these spaces are so disturbing. If we cannot get the baby to look at us directly, perhaps we can begin to get at why we can’t.

By way of closing, I need to acknowledge and respond to something I know to be problematic for some readers. My discussing consensual miscegenation as a trope of this hemisphere’s culture of necessity requires me to address a subject so painful for many that even the word itself is anathema to them. Furthermore, discussing only narratives of consensual miscegenation may appear to some a deliberate skirting of the all-too-familiar (and painful) primal scene of miscegenation: the plantation rape scene, the conquistador’s forcible taking of an indigenous woman–or, even more egregious, an implicit rehabilitation of the Conquest and the Plantation. It is absolutely true that there is an American Narrative of racial admixture inseparable from the legacy of slavery and prejudice and bigotry and rape that began with Columbus’ arrival in this hemisphere and that, most unfortunately, has yet to reach a conclusion. It is also absolutely true that, running almost exactly contemporaneously with that more-familiar narrative but relatively less-examined, is another narrative of race relations, a New World Narrative of consensual racial admixture, one in which the people involved seek, in various ways and with varying degrees of success, to remove themselves from History, to not be ruled. Without at all denying or attempting to mitigate that former narrative’s power and horror or our need to understand and condemn its vestiges in today’s culture, my aim is to find a way to talk about that second American Narrative. That second narrative, as I will call it later, is the encounter with the Encounter: a wrestling with, an act of resistance to, a resounding No to the wreckage of lives and social orders caused by the first. But its No is not simply opposition. It is an attempt to build something different and new out of that wreckage.

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¹Joshua Lund’s The Impure Imagination: Toward a Critical Hybridity in Latin American Writing is a thorough critique of both those resonances and those pitfalls within a Latin American intellectual and literary context.

²Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970; New York: Vintage, 1973), xviii.