Latino/a literary studies has long been working at the very boundaries of identity. Writers such as Arturo Islas in the 1970s and 80s described being pigeonholed by publishers, encouraged to revise their texts to be more digestibly Latino, more full of families and good food and pleasant sprinklings of Spanish, less concerned with existential rumination on identity politics. Since that time, publishers and writers, authors and theorists have been grappling with the slipperiness of what it means to be Latina or Latino, always careful not to fall into stereotype, but always conscious that the experience of being Latina or Latino in the U.S. is a particular one -- and that to acknowledge those particularities has powerful possibilities for political mobilization, affiliations, and identifications.
Claudia Milian’s piece thus bears the weight of this long-standing struggle to understand the complexity of experience. Her proposal that Latinities offers “a conceptual framework that plots other subjectivities and localities that have yet to be charted within and beyond” older, more bounded configurations makes Latinities a powerful tool for entering texts that deal in ambiguity, that are in some way “vying for our attention,” in some way indicate “a multiphasic something” beginning to emerge (2–3). It is this emphasis on the emergent that resists bounding that makes Milian versatile. She theorizes ethnoracial existence as always emergent, in-flux, and not static or easily relegated to the realm of stable “identification.” If what she calls ethnoracial “identities-in-the-making” cannot be tied to any “precise categorical beginning[s], or end[s]”, Milian’s argument forces our attention away from identity and the notions of stasis and stability that it often subsumes (3). Instead, Milian finds value in change, flux, and transition not merely as paths between opposed points or states but as modes of being or experience in and of themselves. In geometric terms, Milian values the vector over the point.
What happens, then, when we think of identifications as vectors? What happens when we toss aside the assumption that Claire’s historiographical-archival work in “Ghosts, Cowboys” is an attempt to locate some sense of self or some web of affiliation? For indeed, Claire’s work achieves the opposite: it is profoundly delocalizing and distributive in its affiliations and genealogies, not only in their networked quality, but also in their fragility. They seem to verge simultaneously on totality and collapse. We can easily read as though each displaced, tangential history Claire produces is an attempt to find “the” true or real past, but this assumes a kind of coherence and locatability that both Milian and Watkins call into question. What Claire calls “the inadequate weight of the past” need not be rendered “adequate” to become a vehicle for meaning and affiliation (177). Rather, Claire’s narratives build multiple and shifting affiliations out of multiple and shifting historical inadequacies. The text is an exercise in both self-making and self-negating as complementary processes of subject-formation.
The work Claire does may not fall strictly under the rubric of ‘Latinities,’ but the impulse she shares with Milian -- towards not who but how, the attention to the complex social dynamics that form the subject, rather than the singular, detached individual -- seems to herald what Raymond Williams has called the emergent: “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship [that] are continually being created” (123). That the emergent is often invisible to those who search for it -- and even to those engaged in it -- requires that we continually redirect and reattune our critical gaze. Perhaps Watkins is working somewhere in the same project as both Milian and Saskia Sassen by tracing a process of denationalization which captures “something that remains connected to the ‘national’ as constructed historically, and is indeed profoundly imbricated with it but is so on historically new terms of engagement” (Sassen 229, qtd. in Milian 5). In this sense, then, “Ghosts, Cowboys” is as much a story of nation-building as it is about one branch of the legacy of the Manson family, as it is about one house at 315 Lake Street.
Williams, Raymond. “Dominant, Residual, Emergent.” Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. pgs 121-135.
Aaron Bendetti
Jenny Colmenero
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6 comments:
Hi Jenny and Aaron,
This collaboration seems to have been really fruitful, because I think this is an awesome post. I thought the connection that you drew between "pigeonholed" Latino/a writers and Milian's writing was really fantastic. You helped create a context for me to see not only where she was writing from but what she was writing against. I feel like I can understand her better, having been given that information.I was also really intrigued by your description of both self-making and self-negation as processes of subject formation. That's a fascinating concept to have drawn from Watkins and from Milian. Did you see any moments of this in Their Eyes Were Watching God? I find it interesting that you chose to work with only one text and I'm wondering if this choice was predicated by Watkins' text being more appropriate to your argument, or was it due to the word count restriction? I'm wondering, I guess, could you have made the same argument that you make here if you had chosen to write about TEWWG? or if you had chosen to write about both TEWWG and Ghosts, Cownboys in conjunction with each other?
Thanks for such an insightful look at both Milian and Watkins! Well done indeed.
Dear Jenny and Aaron,
I think you both do a great job here jumping headfirst into the problematic "slipperiness" of Latino/a identity in contemporary theory. Politics, interrelationships, and personal identities are categories that are undoubtedly problematic for many people (especially those peoples with longstanding histories of subjugation within the U.S.). I agree that Milian's text is versatile, but wonder how you might apply her argument to Asian-American or Native-American authors/peoples, racial categories that are strikingly absent in her analysis. Also, since she explicitly appropriates perennial theories from scholars of blackness/African-American identity, I'm wondering how her argument is particularly novel.
The idea of change/flux is where I find your discussion to be the most fruitful. We often envision states of being (identity, experiences, geographic location) to be stable. Milian fantastically dissolves this notion. I have recently been considering thinking about identity categories as continuums (what you call vectors, which, by definition contain both magnitude and direction), not static binaries (e.g., self/other, white/black, etc.).
Milian is interested in answering the "who," the "how," and the "what," -- but it seems that you find a shifting fluidity of meaning to address the "when," which I find extremely productive.
Cheers,
Zach
i think it's interesting and productive thinking identities in terms of vectors, but i wonder how vectors (as defined by zach above) would work themselves out in confronting/navigating networks/webs/etc..
what i mean is, does a vector, in its linearity, end up assuming a teleology? how does a web, a mesh (which essentially does away with the line, a progression, a forward momentum) 'align' itself with thinking a vector: a movement which implies a specified or unspecified arrival 'somewhere'? what would this 'somewhere' look like? 'postracial'? 'postnational'?
and as you end with "nation-building," how is this concept different from "identity-formation"? in what ways is it not a mode of 'fixing' a thing into place?
i suppose we're just playing with the difference(s) between "being" and "becoming." it's a fun game :)
I really like the idea of pulling in the Williams chapter (mostly because I loved that reading!), but I’m curious what, exactly, is “emergent” in “Ghosts, Cowboys.” Is it some different mode of affinity, like that between Claire and Razor Blade Baby? Or are you suggesting it’s a different mode of selfhood, a different way of considering a “self” in relation to one’s personal histories and genealogies? As you guys point out, it’s really difficult to identify emergent social forms as such because they are only emergent to the extent that their form isn’t set and easily recognizable—yet I wonder if you could be a bit more specific about which relations or affects look like “emergent” ways of being?
I really like your use of the word "fragility" in this post to describe the way that networks and "vectors" work to create identities. I think that the term nicely captures the tenuousness that thinking about identity not as a category, but as a process, brings about. I think that the word "fragile" might even account for some of how Milian's intro itself works: we noted in class that it seems rather defensive at times in how it sets up her view of Latino/a studies. Maybe the nature of this kind of study and its "framework" is inherently fragile yet, perhaps, worth pursuing for just that reason.
I really like this post! Great integration of the Williams piece. I was happy to see that difficult (but fascinating!) work in play here. You noted the difficulty of identifying the emergent while your actually experiencing it and the sort of constant critical readjustments that this requires. His notions of the dominant, residual and emergent actually work really well with identity the project that Millian undertakes in her book. Nice work.
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