On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Postcolonial Theory

for Pan-American Study

Karem, Jeff, 1973-
CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 1, Number 3, Winter
2001, pp. 87-116 (Article)
Published by Michigan State University Press
DOI: 10.1353/ncr.2003.0064
For additional information about this article
Access Provided by Cornell University at 10/02/10 9:39PM GMT
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ncr/summary/v001/1.3karem.html
87
On the Advantages and
Disadvantages of Postcolonial
Theory for Pan-American Study
J E F F K A R E M
Cleveland State University
I N T R O D U C T I O N
Beginning in the :ooos, a number of scholars have attempted to ground the
nascent eld of pan-American studies in postcolonial theory. Drawing upon
the works of Homi Bhabha and Edward Said in particular, pan-American
postcolonialists have elaborated an interdependent relationship of colonizer
and colonized within the Americas. Jos David Saldvars The Dialectics of
Our America (:oo:) and Border Matters (:oo), for example, posit an impe-
rial/subaltern dialectic for apprehending American literatures. Amritjit
Singh and Peter Schmidt, editors of a new collection entitled Postcolonial
Theory and the United States (zooo), have argued for the value of using a
postcolonial model in the Americas to understand power relations not only
between nations but also within themnot just the lines dividing one coun-
try from another, but also the ways in which difference is deployed across
societies and cultures to mark distinctions of power.
1
A brief exploration of
the paradigms erected by these accounts forms the point of departure for
my inquiry into the advantages and disadvantages of postcolonialism for
pan-American study.
The attractions of postcolonial models for the pan-Americanist are
numerous. First of all, the methodology ts pan-American study into a larger
and now widely disseminated theoretical agenda, which, as internally com-
plex as it may be, bears a group of terms and concepts that facilitate pro-
fessional communication.
2
Second, as Singh and Schmidt point out, the
imperial/subaltern axis provides a model for understanding power gradients
both internal to and external to a national literature and culture, thus bring-
ing together both local and global lenses of literary analysis. Third, and more
importantly, pan-American postcolonial models ground the possibility of a
necessary connection between North and South American literary texts on
common discourses of empire and subalternity. Saldvar argues in Border
Matters, for example, that certain cultures, such as the borderlands, cannot
be reduced to any nationally based tradition.
3
I argue in this essay, however, that the advantages of applying postcolo-
nial theory to the American hemisphere are overshadowed by the limita-
tions it imposes on the eld. First, the postulate that authors works are best
understood according to their subject position in the colonizer/colonized
dialectic has produced a very narrow brand of comparativism, one that typ-
ically compares colonialist writing to colonialist writing, and resistance
writing to resistance writing. This comparative structure obscures the fact
that American authors are often inuenced by and respond to writers from
very different subject positions, signifying across the very borders of class,
culture, and ethnicity that ground these postcolonial models. Second, post-
colonial study of the Americas has often minimized important differences
among writers occupying ostensibly similar subject positions, collapsing
their varied writings into two basic camps: literature of oppression and lit-
erature of resistance. Third, the resolute binarism promoted by pan-
American postcolonialism risks further ghettoization of minority
discourses, and, most disturbingly, may reify the very borders that postcolo-
nial pan-Americanists aim to bridge. Said himself has cautioned against
reifying borders in cultural studies, for all cultures are involved in one
another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordi-
narily differentiated, and unmonolithic.
4
The binarism animating pan-American postcolonial study may be due,
On t he Adv a nt a g e s a nd Di s a dv a nt a g e s of Pot c ol oni a l The or y 88
in part, to a fear that comparative study without such a rigid lens will lead
to a disingenuous unication that collapses vital cultural differences.
Saldvar, for example, positions his work as opposed to the assimilative rhet-
oric of consensus that has circulated in American studies for the better
part of the twentieth century (Border Matters, :o). David Palumbo-Liu, in his
reections on the institutionalization of North American multicultural
study, warns that the incorpora[tion] of minority discourses into the liberal
paradigm [such as a common core of human values] . . . erase[s] the com-
plex material specicities of these texts.
5
Publication lines such as
Ballantines Many CulturesOne World series, whose very title suggests a
blithely ahistorical image of global unity, demonstrate that there is ample
evidence for such concerns. I will suggest, however, that pan-American post-
colonialist models have a similarly ahistorical effect that erases the mate-
rial specicities of these texts. One would do well to recall Homi Bhabhas
caution that cultural studies must move beyond narratives of originary sub-
jectivities in favor of the in-between spaces . . . that initiate new signs of
identity.
6
In implementing a strict postcolonial paradigm in the American
hemisphere, critics like Saldvar have jettisoned the old originary subjectiv-
ities (canonical/noncanonical; North American/South American), only to
establish newly restrictive ones (imperial/subaltern; oppressor/oppressed).
At the broadest level, my paper is situated as a cautionary tale of the lim-
its of postcolonial theory as it is and might be applied to pan-American lit-
eratures. After investigating the structure of the postcolonial dialectics
promulgated in pan-American studies in the :ooos, I turn to a set of case
studies of American authors, aiming to provide comparative accounts that
are differentiating as well as synthetic. I consider how the subversive narra-
tive work attributed to Gabriel Garca Mrquez, a model for many pan-
Americanist examinations of resistance discourse, can also be found in the
work of the archetypal colonialist writer Jorge Luis Borges, the villain of
many postcolonial considerations of the hemisphere. Turning to North
America, I compare two writers often placed alongside Garca Mrquez, bor-
derland authors Toms Rivera and Rolando Hinojosa, investigating the sub-
tle distinctions in cultural work that set them apart not only from Garca
Mrquez, but also from one another. I then offer a discussion of how
J e f f Kar e m 89
Hinojosas work can be fruitfully compared to the novels of a writer of an
entirely different regional and ethnic tradition, William Faulkner. As I move
toward a conclusion, I argue that comparisons between minority and major-
ity writers, between oppressors and oppressed, need not be hierarchical or
assimilative. Indeed, such an analytic lens may be the best way to address
the promiscuous interactions in the literature of the Americas, to promote
an appreciation of the dialogue and disagreements that transcend the very
binaries postcolonial scholars have been using to constitute the eld.
T H E P O S T C O L O N I A L D I A L E C T I C
At the core of most pan-American applications of postcolonial theory is the
goal of exploring binary oppositions that inhere in the operation of power
and culture, such as the colonizer and the colonized, the oppressor and the
oppressed. Dialectical and dialogic models of literary exchange are indis-
pensable for such criticism, as they aid in tracing the lines of convergence
and divergence along these binaries. Saldvar deploys a dialectical model in
his criticism to argue for a pan-American tradition of colonialist and anti-
colonialist writing, words of oppression and words of resistance. His goals
are to promote a worlding of United States literature, to locate counter-
traditions (Border Matters, xii, :z) and to chart . . . an array of oppositional
critical and creative processes that aim to articulate a new, trans-geograph-
ical conception of American cultureone more responsive to the hemi-
spheres geographical ties and political crosscurrents than to narrow
national ideologies.
7
Singh and Schmidt suggest that postcolonial analysis
of the Americas reveals a link between external and internal borders that
complement structures of difference. Thus, international modes of domina-
tion (e.g., imperialism) can be placed in context with intranational hege-
monic institutions ( Jim Crow, the Indian Reservation system). In these
postcolonial models, minority writers striving to nd a cultural voice in the
United States nd Latin American brethren in leftist writers like Gabriel
Garca Mrquez or indigenous intellectuals like Rigoberta Menchu.
Politically conservative aesthetes from North America like Wallace Stevens
nd their antipodal parallel in the allegedly escapist ction of rightists like
On t he Adv a nt a g e s a nd Di s a dv a nt a g e s of Pot c ol oni a l The or y 90
Jorge Luis Borges. For Saldvar, political division forms the basis for a foun-
dational schism in pan-American literature: the writings of Our America
those of the indigenous, the oppressed, the downtrodden, the subaltern
versus the culture of an America that is, by implication, theirsmeaning
the imperialist, the capitalist, the cultural elite.
A number of theoretical problems undermine the coherency of Saldvars
model, particularly the capacious vagueness of the their placed in opposi-
tion to our. In addition, the titles of imperialist and subaltern developed
in subcontinental theory do not neatly map onto the American cultural
eld. Because the margin and the center are often present within the same
national space in the Americas, the distribution of power lacks the geo-
graphical clarity of the classic British colonial model. As Singh and Schmidt
have noted, in the United States (and I would say the same is true of most
Latin American countries), empire and home are almost coterminous
(). The convergence of diverse cultures in the Americas (indigenous peo-
ples, European imperialists, African descendants of the Middle Passage,
United States neocolonialists) has produced overlapping layers of oppres-
sion and resistance traceable to multiple geographical and cultural sources.
In order to clarify the different oppositions collapsed into the us/them
and subaltern/imperial distinctions, it will be helpful to consider the varied
range of cultural forces toward which resistance intellectuals have opposed
themselves. It is Mart who, in Nuestra Amrica (:8o:), rst articulates the
sense of Our America on which Saldvar bases his vision. Mart situates
indigenous sources as the most valuable wellspring of art in the Americas:
Literature is simply the expression, form, and reection of the vital spirit
and natural setting of the people who create it. How, then, could our indige-
nous literature run counter to this universal law, and lack the beauty, har-
mony, and color of the American scene?
8
Mart praises the native literatures
of America (Pueblo tales, Aztec legends, and so forth), defending them
against the charge that they lack the aesthetic and cultural value of
European counterparts. Like Simn Blivar, Mart conceives of himself as a
colonial subject seeking independence from European traditions. The binary
opposition implied here is a transatlantic one, a distinction between indige-
nous American principles and foreign, European ones. In the same essay
J e f f Kar e m 91
Mart also works to complicate that very sense of binarism, however. In par-
allel to his organicist vision of literature, Mart suggests that one can draw
upon native power by an act of imaginative participation:
What does it matter that we come of fathers of Moorish blood and fair skin?
One may descend from fathers of Valencia and mothers of the Canary
Islands, yet one feels the blood of Tamanaco and Paracamoni run hot
through ones veins and regards as ones own the blood of the heroic, naked
warriors which stained the craggy ground of Mount Calvary where they met
the armored Spanish soldiers hand to hand! (zoz)
Mart explicitly advocates what Benedict Anderson would later term an
imagined community.
9
As capacious as his vision of resistance may seem at
rst glance, it anticipates many of the problems that would later arise in
accounts like Saldvars, as it depends upon a crucial historical elision of
power relations. Marts championing of the indigenous is predicated, quite
literally, on the violence of his European ancestors. It is only because the
armored Spanish soldiers slew the heroic, naked warriors and spilled
their blood that Mart is able imaginatively to join the indigenous, to feel
their blood run hot through [his] veins. It may not matter to Mart and his
fellow European descendants that they come from fathers of Moorish blood
and fair skin, but it certainly did matter to the Tamanaco and Paracomi,
who were conquered by those newcomers from Valencia and the Canary
Islands. In this respect, the resistant community forged by Mart is a usurpa-
tion, an appropriation of these tribes as a cultural concept that can only
occur because of their destruction as a cultural fact.
More than half a century after Marts death, Roberto Fernndez Retamar
takes up the banner of our America versus El Occidente (the West) dur-
ing the Cold War. Using marxist tools, Retamar describes the deliberate
underdevelopment and exploitation of Latin America, as well as the colo-
nialists construction of history, to justify and exculpate himself. For
Retamar, the latest and most pernicious means of domination is the attempt
to bring Latin American nations under the false aegis of Western liberal
democracy, especially as it is promoted by the United States:
On t he Adv a nt a g e s a nd Di s a dv a nt a g e s of Pot c ol oni a l The or y 92
The endeavor to include ourselves in the free worldthe hilarious name
that capitalist countries today apply to themselves and bestow in passing on
their oppressed colonies and neo-coloniesis a modern version of the nine-
teenth century attempt by Creole exploiting classes to subject us to a sup-
posed civilization; and this latter, in its turn, is a repetition of the designs
of European conquistadors.
10
Because both Mart and Retamar call for solidarity among Latin Americans,
particularly the indigenses, it is tempting to read them as a cohesive adver-
sarial force, one voice united against a common enemy. Saldvar does so,
interpreting Mart and Retamar as each contributing to a voice that stands
against United States domination, writing against the U.S. ruling center
(Our America, :). But do these oppositional writings add up to a voice
directed exclusively against the U.S. center? Is the enemy opposed by these
writers best encapsulated by the United States? It would certainly be con-
venient for the pan-Americanist for it to be so, as all the relevant cultural
forces could then be understood as part of the same hemisphere. But the vec-
tors of cultural opposition do not wholly resolve into a North/South
dichotomy. Saldvar is surely right to argue that scholars need to move beyond
the linear East and West global mappings (Border Matters, o) that have
dominated American thought since Turners frontier thesis, but why replace
one monolithic polarity with another one? In order to establish a founda-
tional North/South binary axis, one must elide three termsthe West,
Europe, and the United Statesinto one cultural unit. Even for Saldvars
comparison of Mart and Retamar, such a category is insufcient: the former
opposes European America; the latter the West, not necessarily equivalent
terms in their own right, and certainly not the United States exclusively.
The crudeness of Saldvars elision belies the sophistication with which
Latin American resistance writers have treated these terms. In Caliban,
Retamar joins Marts defense of Our America against theirs, but he
historicizes this dialectic, carefully considering how different referents
have attached themselves to these pronouns ours and theirs over time. In
contrast to Mart, writers such as Paul Groussac and Jos Enrique Rod
conceived of the opposition as a struggle between Old World culture and
J e f f Kar e m 93
Philistine yankeeism, with Latin America as the ally, not the enemy, of
Europe (Retamar, :o::). Unlike Mart, Retamar acknowledges the exploita-
tive nature of all European imperialism, and he also considers how the black
legend that Spanish and Portuguese colonization was uniquely destructive
(spread by competing imperial powers) led many Latin Americans to reject
their Iberian heritage and embrace other European models, notably England
and France (6). These authors competing accounts do not negate the
force of a United StatesLatin American opposition, but they do point to the
multiple directions of cultural interaction that must be considered in describ-
ing Latin American resistance writing and its targets.
But there is another problem. The West, the European, and the North
American are also in Latin America. Beyond the complex array of indige-
nous cultures, European-descended Latin Americans, whether putatively
sangre pura, mestizo, or mulatto, form a crucial component of Latin
American cultureone that cannot simply be expurgated for the recovery
of a pure indigenous tradition. Indeed, Retamars mention of nineteenth-
century Creole civilizing efforts (via such texts as Domingo Sarmientos
Civilization and Barabarism[:868]), reveals the cultural imperialism at work
within Latin America. Retamar captures the hybridity of our America in his
apt recasting of Marts title as our mestizo America (:). Anti-Western and
anti-European writers must direct their efforts inward as well as outward.
Retamar addresses this issue in his discussion of Latin American Ariels
siding with Prospero. The problem is that there is not necessarily just one
overarching North American Prospero in the hemisphere, but many differ-
ent Prospero-types to which an Ariel may dedicate his allegiance. North
American capitalism is certainly an important one of them, but wielders of
power may oppress their people on behalf of many other allegiances: to
Europe, to France, to England, to Spain, to Marxism. Hegemony and resist-
ance are not as unidirectional in their sources and force as a North/South
opposition would lead one to believe.
A refusal to reckon with the multiplicity of American allegiances results
in some of the most unfortunate limitations of pan-American postcolonial
analysis. Saldvars comparison in Border Matters of Mara Ruiz Burton and
John Gregory Bourke, for example, is strikingly neglectful of how the double
On t he Adv a nt a g e s a nd Di s a dv a nt a g e s of Pot c ol oni a l The or y 94
occupancy of these authors subject positions complicates an imperial/sub-
altern model. Bourke, an explorer, veteran, and author of ethnographic arti-
cles about the Border, such as The American Congo (:8o:), emerges as the
quintessential Anglo colonizer in Saldvars reading of Border history. But
Bourke, as an Irish Catholic in the late nineteenth-century United States,
actually occupied a much more complex cultural space, belonging both to
the center (relative to the Mexican Border) and to the margin (relative to the
Anglo-Protestant tradition). Saldvar alludes to Jos Limns exploration of
this issue in Dancing with the Devil, but dismisses it with the comment that
he intends to focus exclusively on Bourke as a tool of U.S. imperialism
(:6:). It is undeniable that Bourke was an agent of U.S. imperialism, but why
avoid other aspects of his identity that inuenced his writing? Why not con-
sider the Irish Catholic cultural position that shaped Bourkes colonial dis-
coursean identication of such strength, in fact, that, it caused an entire
battalion of U.S. soldiers to defect to the Mexican side in the Mexican-
American War?
Similarly vexing questions arise in Saldvars handling of Ruiz de Burton.
Saldvar reads her novel The Squatter and the Don (:88) as an Ur-text of
Border subaltern literature, aimed at bringing the hegemonic historiogra-
phy of the United States to a crisis (:68, :o). Ruiz de Burton thus joins the
ranks of other resistance writers of the Border in Saldvars study, such as
Amrico Paredes, Arturo Islas, and Gloria Anzalda. While it is undeniable
that Ruiz de Burton writes against Anglo expansionism into California,
indeed against Gilded Age capitalism itself, the kind of resistance she poses
is radically different from that of the late twentieth-century writers cited
elsewhere in Saldvars Border studies. In particular, Ruiz de Burtons posi-
tion as a subaltern vis--vis Anglo hegemonic expansion is complicated by
her own imperial position. She writes not on behalf of la raza or any other
populist construct, but in defense of the feudal plantation system of Mexico
that dates back to the Spanish conquest. The Don and his family are the
natives of California,
11
as Ruiz de Burton claims, only in the sense that they
colonized the land before the Anglos.
It is not my point that the Don and his family deserve to be usurped, nor
that they are not victims of Anglo expansion, but that they occupy a subject
J e f f Kar e m 95
position that partakes of both sides of the imperial/subaltern dialectic.
Indeed, one might say that Ruiz de Burtons novel traces the transformation
of an imperial class into a subaltern class. Much of the sentimental pathos
of the story, in fact, is traceable to that loss, embodied in the titles class dis-
tinction between an enlightened, Spanish-descended elite (The Don), who
is losing ground to a lowbrow Anglo newcomer (the Squatter). In this
respect, Ruiz de Burton may have less in common with the progressive
resistance writers cited elsewhere in Saldvar, and more in common with
other defenders of civilization against Yankee capitalism, such as her
Argentinian contemporary Domingo Sarmiento, or the twentieth-century
agrarians from the United Statess South.
The complex subject positions of Bourke and Ruiz de Burton remind us
that the categories of subaltern and imperialist, particularly in the American
hemisphere, are not mutually exclusive, but often overlaid. Saldvar and other
pan-American postcolonialists may turn a blind eye to the interpenetration
of these categories for fear of compromising the consistency of their binaries,
but I would argue that the aim of pan-American study should not be to reify
the conclusions of theories developed to explain other cultural elds, but to
search for its own explanatory models. When one considers Bourke and Ruiz
de Burton alongside Mart, Retamar, and Sarmiento, one nds that an inter-
penetration of subaltern and imperialist identities seems characteristic of,
rather than an exception to, many American subject positions. Rather than
sorting these conicted subjects into a binary system, the pan-Americanist
ought to examine the way that subjectivities and the operations of power in
the Americas are often overlapping and overdetermined. Indeed, the preva-
lence of such palimpsestic formations offers one of the best justications for
studying the hemispheres cultures and literatures comparatively.
L A T I N A M E R I C A N P R O G E N I T O R S : T H E C U L T U R A L
W O R K O F G A R C A M R Q U E Z A N D B O R G E S
A fruitful area of comparison for pan-Americanists, especially postcolonial-
ists, has been the tracing of connections between Latin American engag
intellectuals and North American minority writers involved in analogous
On t he Adv a nt a g e s a nd Di s a dv a nt a g e s of Pot c ol oni a l The or y 96
projects of resistance. Garca Mrquez, in particular, has served as a com-
mon model for comparisons with borderland writers. Both Saldvar and Lois
Parkinson Zamora situate the works of Garca Mrquez as critiques of his-
tory, explorations of how historical narratives are constructed by those in
power to serve their own ends.
12
Jorge Luis Borges has served as a negative
foil for comparative projects, a writer whose conservative politics and
abstract ctions render him, at best, escapist, and at worst, colonialist. I
would argue, however, that this division vastly oversimplies the aesthetic
and cultural work of each writer. Although the ction of Garca Mrquez
does question dominant narratives circulating in his cultural context, his
ction does not stop thereit poses challenges to the reader deeper than
mere expos. Indeed, the self-reective dimension of his ctionsuch as the
conclusion to One Hundred Years of Solitudechallenges the dialectic of
progressive resistance cherished by pan-American postcolonialists. Borgess
ction, although lacking in direct political implications, can be read as
resistant in its destabilizing of narrative conventions. Stories such as Las
ruinas circulares (The Circular Ruins) expose the frailty of master narra-
tives, performing an unmasking very like the cultural work that critics have
celebrated in the works of Garca Mrquez.
The Banana Company massacre in Garca Mrquezs One Hundred Years
of Solitude and the subsequent cover-up provide a valuable illustration of the
fabrication of ofcial history. In a dramatic example of Andersons asser-
tion of the centrality of forgetting in establishing community and nation,
the Banana Company impels that process by expunging the records of its
deeds, allowing itself to stand blameless as the ruling agent of Macondo. Jos
Arcadio Segundo, in one of the many dimensions of solitude in the novel,
is the only surviving person in Macondo who observed the massacre. After
wading through a train of corpses and returning to Macondo, he questions
a fellow villager and is told, There havent been any dead here. Since the
time of your uncle, the colonel, nothing has happened in Macondo. The
ofcial history, presented in an extraordinary proclamation, declares that
the workers had left the station and had returned home in peaceful
groups.
13
In a prescient comment, Jos views the episode as some kind of
farce, which is an apt description of the falsied narrative disseminated by
J e f f Kar e m 97
the Company and the government (z8:8:). On the basis of such moments
in the works of Garca Mrquez, Saldvar concludes that the core cultural
work of the author is to expose how truth-bearing documents from ofcial
sources are narrative constructions on the order of myths (Our America, ::).
To treat this subversion of ofcial history, however, as either the sum of
the book or even its climax is to perform a serious reduction of the com-
plexities of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Banana Company episode ts
into a larger texture of history and solitude that cannot simply be encapsu-
lated by the binary categories of oppressors and liberators. Joss knowledge
of the truth fails as a weapon of resistance. By the time Aureliano is born,
Jos has become the village idiot, mad in the eyes of the town, though he
is in truth the most lucid, according to the narrator. People treat him as if
he were possessed of a hallucinated version of the Banana Companys his-
tory, because it was radically opposed to the false one that historians had
created and consecrated in the schoolbooks (:z:zz).
Little Aureliano, however, takes in Jos Arcadios wisdom, even surpris-
ing his elders at dinner with his unorthodox vision of town history. Jos also
teaches him the basic principles of deciphering Melquadess parchments.
Equipped with alternative narratives and skillful interpretative tools,
Aureliano stands as the character best equipped to serve as a liberating revi-
sionist, to piece together the orts, scraps, and fragments of Macondos his-
tory back into a recuperative whole. But he does not do soat least not in
a way that touches on the social world. Aureliano isolates himself from the
community, nailing himself into his room in order to work on Melquadess
scripts. As the novel rushes to a close, Aureliano reviews the family history
and discovers the description of his own circumstance of reading the scripts,
realizing that his reading, his life, and the towns existence are coterminous:
Before reaching the nal line, however, he had already understood that he
would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or
mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of
men at the precise moment Aureliano Babilonia would nish deciphering
the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable
since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one
On t he Adv a nt a g e s a nd Di s a dv a nt a g e s of Pot c ol oni a l The or y 98
hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.
(:8z8:)
I will not pretend to do justice to this magnicent closing passage in my
brief interpretation, but one might ask to what extent apocalypse can use-
fully be t into a dialectic of resistance. This end of history is not a scene
of regeneration, and even more disturbingly, Garca Mrquez does not offer
the possibility of a second opportunity. Indeed, if the subversion of ofcial
discourse takes place in isolation (as the village idiot or locked in a room)
and the moment of discovery is also the moment of annihilation, what is the
prognosis for that resistance? The kind of resistance posed by this closing
scene is as much metacritical as it is political, questioning the efcacy of not
just the oppressors narrative constructions, but of narrative itself. In terms
of literary genealogy and historical context, the shape of such a self-devour-
ing conclusion has less kinship with resistance writing in Latin America and
more with experimental forms circulating in Europe in the :o6os, particu-
larly le nouveau roman. The closed circuit of history posited at the end of
One Hundred Years of Solitude places its characters not in the progressive
dialectics upheld by writers like Retamar and Mart, but in a realm of fam-
ily and historical curse akin to Faulkners Yoknapatawpha. My point is not
that Garca Mrquez fails by not offering a more concretely activist conclu-
sion, but that it has complex sources and implications that elude a binariz-
ing postcolonial model such as Saldvars.
14
The cultural work of Borgess ction also fails to t into a neatly dichoto-
mous model of oppressors and resistors discourse. The canonical bugbear
haunting leftist critics of Latin American literature, Borges has come under
criticism from varied sources for either his overt political conservatism or
his ctions apparent apoliticism. Retamar gives a lengthy account of his
crimes against the left, including his notable support of the Bay of Pigs inva-
sion (zo). Saldvar too locates Borges as a colonialist authorrender[ing]
Latin American radicalism safe for the so-called Free World (::). What is
most striking in both authors criticism is a common hesitancy to enter
Borgess text. When one turns to Borgess self-reective ctions, one nds
sophisticated metanarrative speculation that seems close to, rather than
J e f f Kar e m 99
distant from, the cultural work postcolonial critics celebrate in the works of
Garca Mrquez.
Borgess The Circular Ruins, for example, can be read as subverting the
security of master narratives. The mage in the story is set up for his fall at
the end by his depiction as a supremely condent creator, so in control of
his imaginative discourse that he succeeds in bringing his images to life, and
even pities them for their fragile egos: He feared lest his son should medi-
tate on this abnormal privilege [his existence] and by some means nd out
that he was a mere simulacrum. Not to be a man, to be a projection of
another mans dreamswhat an incomparable humiliation, what mad-
ness!
15
The mages discovery at the end of the story that he is a similarly
dependent entitywith relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood
that he was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him (::)is an
instance of superb dramatic irony. This moment converts the story into a
demonstration of the frailty of ones self-conceptionboth conception as
understanding of oneself and conception as the production of that self.
Like Erik Lonrott in Death and the Compass, the pure thinker ensnared
by his own reason at the end of the story,
16
the mage is confronted by the
inadequacies of the Weltanschauung with which he began his narrative. Self-
undermining discoveries abound in Borges, and they suggest, at a bare min-
imum, that narratives of origin and self-justication are not nearly as reliable
as one expects. If, for postcolonial pan-Americanists, the strength of writers
like Garca Mrquez is their ability to question narratives and histories,
surely it must be acknowledged that Borgess The Circular Ruins effects a
similar questioning, although devoid of overt political content. Zamora aptly
expresses this dimension of Borgess ction as its creative decentering of
historical process.
17
It may not be possible to make a case for Borges as a
truly committed resistance writer, but there are subversive aspects of his
work that elude the stark divisions of binarizing postcolonial models. Put
another way, one might say that a postcolonial discourse of us and them
in the Americas is not well prepared to address texts that do not strictly sup-
port or resist domination, but perform subtler kinds of cultural and aes-
thetic work.
On t he Adv a nt a g e s a nd Di s a dv a nt a g e s of Pot c ol oni a l The or y 100
F R O M C O L O M B I A T O L A F R O N T E R A :
P A N - A M E R I C A N I S T B O R D E R C R O S S I N G S
Tejano writers like Rolando Hinojosa and Toms Rivera often emerge as
North American parallels for Garca Mrquez in pan-American comparisons
because they too are engaged in the process of revisiting history in their
work, often with a goal of revising Anglo narratives. Prima facie, such com-
parisons can be quite persuasive. Though these three writers operate in dif-
ferent geographical and cultural contexts, there is a common strain of
political subversion in their works. They question the authority of history
and other ofcial discourses, revealing their contingency, constructed-ness,
and subservience to political power. They also direct much of their resistant
energy against similar targetssuch as the class and racial constructions of
a European-descended elite. Problems begin to emerge, however, almost as
soon as one begins to make specic comparisons of the works of Garca
Mrquez to those of frontera writers like Hinojosa and Rivera. Through my
miniature readings of selected aspects of these authors works, I will suggest
that drawing a neat analogy between them occludes more than it illumi-
nates, and forestalls deeper consideration of the crucial differences in their
cultural and aesthetic work.
In one respect, the cultural work of Hinojosa and Rivera is much more
obvious than that of either Borges or Garca Mrquez, as their works have
direct targets: the oppressors history, such as the racist texts written by
Texas historian Walter Prescott Webb. Critics have largely understood Rivera
and Hinojosas ction as part of the larger movements of Chicano solidarity
which began to emerge most strongly in the mid-:o6os: Csar Chvezs
founding of the farm workers union, Chicano grassroots struggles against
land seizures, and the establishment of Chicano publishing houses and
media like Quinto Sol Publications in :o6. Because of their thematic con-
nections to these larger movements of solidarity, Hinojosa and Riveras
works form an especially apt subject for a dialectical model of resistance lit-
erature and oppressors literature. Indeed, critics of all stripes have read
these authors works as counter-discourses that serve to bring Chicanos
together and to debunk Anglo history.
18
J e f f Kar e m 101
Riveras . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, in its fragmented series
of stories and portraits, skillfully elaborates an alternative perspective on the
life of Chicano migrant workers. The story When We Arrive, for example,
presents scraps of conversation that emerge from workers sitting by the road
waiting for their bus to be repaired. Bits of information emerge from the
voicesfrom complaints about the present to hopes for the future: This is
the last fuckin year I come out here. . . . Ill go look for a job in Minneapolis.
Ill be damned if I go back to Texas; If things go well this year, maybe well
buy us a car so we wont have to travel this way, like cattle.
19
The ever-mul-
tiplying, separating voices in this story convey an urgent sense that there is
no stable underpinning for these voices or these people. This sentiment is
captured in the brilliantly self-reective conclusion of one of the voices in
the story: When we arrive, when we arrive, the real truth is that Im tired of
arriving. Arriving and leaving, its the same thing. . . . I really should say when
we dont arrive because thats the real truth. We never arrive (::). The idea
of never arriving seems applicable not only to the condition of migrancy
faced by these dislocated workers, but also to the refusal of the narrative
voices in the text to converge in any one place. In this light, the fragmentary
nature of Riveras text can place the reader in an analogous position of
migrancy, leaving her to wonder when, how, or even if, these elusive strands
will arrive at a resolution.
In fact, the different lines do resolve, to some degree, at the end of the
text, but only with the intervention of a protagonist who can draw the voices
of the community together. In the concluding story, Under the House, the
young boy who has been the connecting thread in many of the stories hides
under his house to gain time for introspection, much as Aureliano isolated
himself in his room to contemplate the family parchments. There, the boy
can reconsider the actions of those around him without being disturbed: no
one to bother me here. I can think in peace (::8). What follows from this
thinking is a stream of reections on the preceding episodes that concludes
with the wish, I would like to see all of the people together (::). The
protagonist has already made a powerful step toward this goal in his own
monologue, for in it he draws upon, recapitulates, and expands the voices
from the community present in all of the preceding stories. The boy becomes
On t he Adv a nt a g e s a nd Di s a dv a nt a g e s of Pot c ol oni a l The or y 102
conscious of his newfound power, and makes a reection applicable to the
cultural work attributed to Riveras own authorial enterprise: He had made
a new discovery. To discover and rediscover and piece things together. This
to this, that to that, all with all. That was it. That was everything (:z).
With the closing gesture of seeing all the people together, Rivera takes
a step toward posing a resistant voice on behalf of migrant Chicanos, a voice
to stand against Anglo domination. His text does so, however, in a much
more complex fashion than a postcolonial dialectical model would lead one
to believe. Rather than resting on a stable sense of us and them, . . . And
the Earth Did Not Devour Him depicts the evolution of a sense of usa
vision of community not as a fait accompli, not as a kind of grounding folk
matrix, as Teresa McKenna has argued,
20
but rather as a work-in-progress.
Indeed, Rivera has commented that his art was occasioned by a desire to ll
the lack of such a collective sense of identity, to establish community
where there was not one before.
21
The sophisticated paradox sustained by
Riveras text is that the wholeness of that communitythe us to stand
against themis dependent on the I of the collection, the imagination
of an individual protagonist, one who effects that imaginative unity, in fact,
by isolating himself from the very community he constructs. Rather than a
curse, solitude is a tool for Rivers narrator. By its conclusion, Riveras text
may have established a harmonization of identities, as Hector Caldern
argues,
22
but that harmony is deeply dependent on dissonancethe artists
separation from his people in order to perceive a unity that they themselves
do not grasp. This interdependence suggests the presence of another dialec-
tic wholly obscured by a division of American culture into imperial and sub-
altern: the evolving relationships within those categories themselves,
particularly between dissenting individuals and their communities. Even in
the midst of this suggested harmony at the close of the collection, there is
still a sense that much work remains to be done, as a note of discord haunts
the conclusionthe neighbors interpret the boys imaginative process as
insanity, and spread rumors that he is losing his mind (:z).
Rolando Hinojosas depictions of Rio Grande culture and history in his
Belken County series form an apt eld of comparison for Riveras works, but
not for the points of similarity one might expect. Historical and cultural
J e f f Kar e m 103
context would seem to make Rivera and Hinojosa ideally parallel gures:
both are tejanos; both began their careers in the :oos; both deploy tech-
niques of fragmentation in their ction; both are committed to presenting
uncompromising portraits of Border life, to showing things as they are, as
one of Hinojosas narrators explains.
23
Because of these general similarities,
it seems quite natural to group them as analogous in their cultural and aes-
thetic work, and many critics have indeed done so, grouping them, along
with gures like Garca Mrquez, as resistant writers of our America.
24
As
soon as one begins to compare Rivera and Hinojosas ctions and cultural
contexts closely, however, one perceives that they are engaged in very differ-
ent aesthetic and political enterprises. Whereas Rivera is concerned with the
lives of migrants and explores a kind of intranational Chicano diaspora,
Hinojosas ction is rooted rmly in one place, the Valley, whose people are
not roving or scattered, but possess a deep history and local culture that pre-
date Anglo incursion. Hinojosa and Rivera also differ in their use of frag-
mentation, though both eschew the expansive ctional shapes employed by
Latin American Boom authors like Garca Mrquez, Carlos Fuentes, or
Mario Vargas-Llosa. Riveras ction, in its compressed, regular, and episodic
form, draws upon the narrative minimalism of the Mexican author Juan
Rulfo. Hinojosas choice to set all his ction in one county shows a marked
Faulknerian inuence, but his penchant for narrative collage and pastiche
also puts him in the company of other North American experimentalists of
the 1970s, such as Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme (a fellow Texan as
well). All of these subtle distinctions and interconnections run the risk of
being obscured by binarizing postcolonial models that hasten to separate
American literatures into categories of oppressor and oppressed.
Hinojosas work is especially valuable for pan-Americanists because his
Belken County novels argue that there is a centuries-old cultural connection
across the Valley, even if Anglos have tried to minimize it. The narrator of
The Valley suggests that the Texas Mexicansor mexicanosand the
Mexico Mexicansthe nacionalesnot only think alike more often than
not, but they are also blood-related as they have and had been for one hun-
dred years before the Americans had that war between themselves in the
1860s; the rivers a jurisdictional barrier but thats about it (8). By framing
On t he Adv a nt a g e s a nd Di s a dv a nt a g e s of Pot c ol oni a l The or y 104
the discussion in reference to the United Statess most divisive event, satiri-
cally summarized as that war between themselves in the 1860s, Hinojosas
narrator posits an ironic juxtaposition in which the Border is revealed to be
a place of union, and the United States a fractured body. That Border cul-
ture was ourishing one hundred years before the United States Civil War
illustrates the historical depths of the mexicano attachment to the region.
As Hinojosa explains in his essay The Sense of Place: the north bank
Mexicans couldnt, to repeat a popular phrase, go back to where they came
from. The Borderers were there and had been before the interlopers.
25
The
Valley is not, however, simply a forgotten province of Mexico in Hinojosas
work, but a unique cultural space of its own. Indeed, Amrico Paredes, one
the rst scholars of borderland culture, noted that Borderers felt a sense of
cultural singularity and used terms meaning outsider to refer both to
Anglos from the North (gringos) and Mexicans from the South
(fuereos).
26
The Borderers liminal position between two nations provides
an ideal example of why one needs to reach beyond national canons in order
to understand the cultures and literatures of the Americas.
Power relations in Hinojosas milieu also fail to t neatly into a post-
colonial model. Hinojosa presents a kind of Chicano counter-history by
referring to atrocities and crimes perpetrated by Anglos, particularly the
Texas Rangers,
27
but his cultural and aesthetic work is more than mere
reportage. Thus to conclude, as have some critics, that Hinojosas greatest
achievement is counter-discourse, his revelation that the white suprema-
cist farm society did not implant itself peacefully, is to underrate drastically
the aims of Hinojosas work.
28
An expos of the secrets of Border history is
less a point of arrival and more a point of departure for Hinojosa. He devotes
considerable space in his ction to considering cultural interactions that
have occurred since the Valleys early history, transforming it over time into
a profoundly hybrid space. Most of Hinojosas characters, both Anglo and
Chicano, are bicultural and bilingual, and many pass easily between both
communities. The narrator of Dear Rafe, for example, offers an apology for
the mixture of languages in his narrative, which may offend linguistic
purists: Final caveat: Belken mexicanos, aside from their northern Mexican
Spanish language, speak English, by and large; the Belken County Anglo
J e f f Kar e m 105
Texans, aside from their predominant Midwestern American English, also
speak Spanish, by and large. Proximity creates psychological bonds and
proximity also breeds children, as weve been told (Dear Rafe, 8).
One of the effects of these proximate bonds is that one cannot rely
upon ethnic distinctions to divide Borderers into categories of imperialist
and subaltern. There are a number of Anglos in Hinojosas ction, such as
Catarino Caldwell, who made himself into a mexicano years ago
29
by learn-
ing the Spanish language and Chicano cultural practices. The Buenrostro
family nds its most recent nemesis not in the greedy Anglo, but in the
grasping Leguizamns. Although the Leguizamns have an alliance with
Anglo interests, that relationship is incidental to their primary goal of
expansion. The order of interests is crucial because it reveals how Hinojosa
accounts for familial strategies in the Valley. The Leguizamns do not extort
their fellow mexicanos because of a newfound loyalty to Anglo imperialism;
rather, they turn to Anglo resources in order to aid their own imperial proj-
ect, to exploit more effectively the mexicano subaltern community of which
they had already been taking advantage. Consequently, it would be a mistake
to label them simply Ariels. The Leguizamns have not assimilated or
accepted Anglo mythology, but are a Prospero (and prosperous) in their
own right, forming whatever alliances are expedient to gain the land they
desire: The history of this family or clan is well known: They were latecom-
ers to the Valley and sensing which way the wind was blowing, they made
themselves into old Mexicans; later on they passed themselves off as
Spaniards and, nally, as red-white-and-blue patriots (Claros Varones de
Belken, 44). Cultural identity for the Leguizamns is not a matter of ethnic
heritage or political loyalty, but of strategic performance. Turning to the
terms deployed in Saldvars postcolonial dialect, one might say that in
Hinojosas Valley, the us and them are so permeable and power relations
so intertwined that only a naf would try to navigate the Valley exclusively
along a Chicano/Anglo axis. The characters who do so in Hinojosas ction
are invariably dupes, fools devoting loyalty to masters who will betray them
as soon as it suits their interests. As Jehu advises his cousin in Dear Rafe,
Money is bilingual, kid (::).
On t he Adv a nt a g e s a nd Di s a dv a nt a g e s of Pot c ol oni a l The or y 106
R E S I S T I N G B I N A R I E S A N D C R O S S I N G
B O U N D A R I E S : T H E F R A I L T I E S O F
D I A L E C T I C I N T H E A M E R I C A S
One of the outstanding qualities of Hinojosas ction is its commitment to
bilingualism and biculturalism, its insistence on exploring Valley culture
from the perspectives of both Chicanos and Anglos, whether they are
oppressors or oppressed. This breadth of cultural engagement is rare in the
ction of the Americas and even scarcer in its criticism. Postcolonial mod-
els of us/them and canonical/noncanonical present a dialectic that
demands examination of both sides, but few critics are willing to explore
both faces of that opposition. Saldvars criticism, for example, focuses
almost exclusively on resistance literature, without much careful considera-
tion for the discourses that such writing is resisting. Even if ones political
commitments lie solely with the literature of the oppressed, there are com-
pelling reasons why one should examine the traditions to which the dis-
senters of our America respond, especially because resistance writing often
employs a complex array of appropriations, transformations, and rejections
of the oppressors discourse. As Retamar explains, Right now as we are dis-
cussing, as I am discussing with the colonizers, how else can I do it except
in one of their languages, which is now also our language, and with so many
of their conceptual tools, which are now also our conceptual tools ().
Considering oppositional texts without a discussion of their canonical
rivals/counterparts also risks further ghettoization of minority writers, as it
separates them into an exclusively marginal context. If pan-American
postcolonialists like Saldvar want to expand the American canon (Our
America, xii) to encompass Chicano and Latin American works, they ought
to explore these works afnities with non-Latino/a-canonical texts, in addi-
tion to considering their own interconnections. Hinojosa, in particular, is an
excellent case study in how lines of inuence defy the binarism of current
pan-American postcolonial models. Hinojosa mentions in a :o8 interview,
with some chagrin, that he had never read Cien aos de soledad, nor any
of the authors ction, only his journalism. Hinojosa cited Faulkner, in fact,
as his greatest inuence: Eventually, I fell into Faulkner. Anyone who writes
J e f f Kar e m 107
is going to have to read Faulkner. After studying Faulkners techniques, says
Hinojosa, I saw what I wanted to do later on.
30
Advocates of borderland cultural studies may fear that an analysis of
Hinojosa and Faulkner together will obscure the originality of the Belken
County project, validating the borderland writer only insofar as he can be
understood as Faulkners disciple. I will suggest with a series of brief com-
parisons, however, that Hinojosas project succeeds on terms very different
from Faulkners. A comparison of the two reveals that Hinojosa has
expanded upon and transformed Faulknerian topoi, demonstrating some of
the blind spots of the majority writer in the process. Like Faulkner, Hinojosa
is deeply invested in considering how people relate to their land and region,
but the different cultural context leads him to priorities very different from
Faulkners. Formally, Hinojosa shows an interest in narrative process and
polyphony similar to Faulkners, but he approaches these techniques with a
greater awareness of what may be at stake, culturally and politically, in such
representations.
In exploring his regions history, Hinojosa perceives the people, rather
than the land, as the grounding principle for his milieu. This conclusion
marks a signicant difference from Faulkners regional perspective, particu-
larly as articulated in Go Down, Moses. In this novel, Ike McCaslins answer
to his troubled family history of ownership is to assert the transcendent
power of land, arguing that, ultimately, it belonged to no man. It belonged
to all and ought to be held mutual and intact in the communal anonymity
of brotherhood.
31
For Faulkner, losing or renouncing ownership is a neces-
sary expiation; Ike McCaslin declares, The woods and elds he ravages and
the game he devastates will be the consequence and signature of his crime
and guilt, and his punishment (::z). Prima facie, it is highly unlikely that
any borderland writer could endorse such a mystical vision of land owner-
ship. To claim that it belonged to all would be to abrogate the claims of the
original settlers, and would y in the face of the history of expropriation,
legal maneuvering, and gunghts over land that followed the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo. For Hinojosa, renunciation of land rights in favor of a
mystical sense of natural union would amount to a wishful ahistoricism that
would hand over more power to interlopers like the Leguizmons and
Klail-Blanchard-Cooke (KBC) cartel.
On t he Adv a nt a g e s a nd Di s a dv a nt a g e s of Pot c ol oni a l The or y 108
Although Hinojosas characters hesitate to give up their land, sometimes
ghting to the death to defend it, there is a larger sense that the land is not
the alpha and omega of their existence. In contrast to the KBC clans slo-
ganIts the land,
32
which guides their plans for gaining power in the
regionits the people that are important to most of Hinojosas characters.
In Rites and Witnesses Hinojosa relates a story of land conict between the
Texas Rangers and the Buenrostros to illustrate this point. After the Rangers
murder three ranch hands in an attempt to terrorize the Buenrostros into
surrendering a piece of valued Rio Grande property, the family opts not to
seek vengeance. Rather than fall into a feud, the Buenrostros choose to
dynamite the river to change its course, so that their particular piece of land
would not t the Rangers interestsforcing them to nd riverfront prop-
erty elsewhere. This choice reduces the value of the Buenrostros land, but it
also helps preserve family members lives while keeping the overall farm
intact. Esteban Echevarra, an old friend of the family, explains that the rev-
elation of different value systems proved the greatest victory in the conict:
What the Buenrostros did was to show the Rangers that it wasnt the land;
it was the people that mattered (:::).
Apropos of this populist spirit, Hinojosa has commented that his stories
are held together . . . by what the people who populate the stories say and
how they say them, how they look at the world out and the world in.
33
The
polyphonic form of his ction reects his interest in privileging people and
their voices. Voices of the Barrio, from Estampas del Valle, for example,
presents a wide array of scraps of conversation from the communitygos-
sip, intimacies, future plansas night falls. None of the discussions is
brought to any conclusion by the end of the story; all the strands are left
unnished, but it becomes clear that such closure is not important to the
narrative. At the end of the tale, the narrator tells the reader that what mat-
ters are the voices themselves, not their resolution: What does count, as
always, are the people.
34
The authorial comments prefacing the volume
describe a connection between people and polyphony as a structural princi-
ple of the volume, troping the text to follow as a series of tenaciously self-
determining entities: These sketches are like Mencho Saldaas disheveled
hair: short, long, and smeared with that human grease that joins and sepa-
rates it without anyones permission (:).
J e f f Kar e m 109
In this statement it is as if Hinojosa were trying to play upon Judiths
reections about strings in Absalom, Absalom!: the strings are all in one
anothers way like ve or six people all trying to make a rug on the same
loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug.
35
Recognizing the differences that emerge from these different accounts of
narrative strands may be one of the best ways to understand how Hinojosa
revises Faulkner and differs from Rivera. In the works of all three authors the
absence of unifying narrative principles gives rise to a play of voices, but a
different attitude toward this play emerges in each case. Whereas Judith
and the Compsons betray frustration about the lack of centeringit just
does not explain (8o) is Mr. Compsons disappointed refrainand Riveras
characters are trapped in their fragmented perspectives waiting to arrive,
Hinojosas polyphony is not anxious, but joyous.
But even as Hinojosa celebrates the voices of the Border, he shows a sen-
sitive awareness of how they are implicated in larger questions of power and
control in the Valley. The different accounts of the murder of Ernesto Tmez
in Estampas del Valle, for example, vary according to the cultural position of
the speaker. As with the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen in Absalom,
Absalom!, the story is never fully accounted for: it is told and retold from var-
ied perspectives, represented in the text by a series of conicting deposi-
tions and newspaper clippings. The oral testimonials of the Chicanos
involved reveal the complex history of rivalry, friendships, and offenses that
accumulated over the years to produce this quarrel. These depositions stand
in marked contrast to the authoritative accounts of the episode written in
the English newspaper Klail-City Enterprise-News, which oversimplify and
misread the quarrel. The anonymous Anglo reporter cannot manage to spell
Ernestos name correctly and claims, wrongly, that the quarrel was over the
affection of one of the hostesses at the tavern (Estampas, :o:). Hinojosa
achieves a brilliant comment on the limitations of so-called objective
accounts by juxtaposing the limited Anglo newspaper accounts with the
complex testimony of the Chicanos. At the same time, Hinojosas ordering of
the different narratives reveals his awareness of the power that ofcial
accounts bear. The newspaper articles introduce and conclude this section
of the text: Anglos have the rst and last word on the incident.
On t he Adv a nt a g e s a nd Di s a dv a nt a g e s of Pot c ol oni a l The or y 110
C A N W E A F F O R D T O B E C O M P A R A T I V E ?
C A N W E A F F O R D N O T T O B E ?
The fact that oppressors so often do have the last word may account for
the hesitancy of pan-American postcolonialists to examine both sides of the
dialectics they positus and them, imperialist and subaltern. As I sug-
gested in my introduction, Saldvar and others may eschew studies that
transgress ethnic and class lines out of fear that comparative studies will
assimilate the voices of resistance into the mainstream. I have striven in my
readings to avoid such enforced consensus building, to reveal the way that
cross-cultural comparisons can highlight difference, even as they demon-
strate previously unexplored connections. I have also tried to demonstrate
the danger of assimilative gestures within particular area studies: writers
with crucial differences, such as Rivera and Hinojosa, are often collapsed
into the same camp for the sake of theoretical convenience.
Another risk of focusing strictly on traditions of resistance writing in the
Americas is that such a move marginalizes these discourses by isolating
them from other relevant literary traditions. Without a stronger account of
the interdependence of imperial and subaltern discourses in this hemi-
sphere, postcolonial models offer little justication for the value of a pan-
American eld in general, offering instead a fractious array of separate
Americas that have nothing to say to one another. Such an isolating ges-
ture may have professional value within the academyyou teach your area
study and Ill teach minebut it is not at all responsive to the complexities
of history. Both artists and cultural production are notoriously promiscuous,
feeling no obligation to follow the traditions identied by scholars. Hinojosa
looked not primarily to other Border writers but to Faulkner as an inspira-
tion for Belken County. Garca Mrquez, whose Macondo also bears many
debts to Yoknapatawpha, has exerted an inuence far beyond Latin
American and Latino writers, from John Barth to Toni Morrison. As Vera
Kutzinski astutely reminds us in her comparative study, Against the
American Grain, literary afnities are elective afnities, and To dene a
literary canon according to the nationality or presumed genealogy of authors
is to confuse political and biological issues with literary ones.
36
J e f f Kar e m 111
The fact that comparative study is perceived as risky, as destabilizing of
the conventional borders by which we study cultural production, may pro-
vide some of the best justication for doing it. Comparison can serve as an
anodyne for the tendency, inevitable in the academic profession, to reify or
naturalize intellectual distinctions that are themselves contingent con-
structions. Edward Said warns in Travelling Theory of the risks of loyalty
to theoretical models: theoretical closure, like social convention or cultural
dogma, is anathema to critical consciousness, which loses its profession
when it loses its active sense of an open world in which its faculties must be
exercised.
37
Comparison is an invaluable tool for resisting dogma, for
answering Bhabhas call for an examination of in-between spaces elided by
master narratives.
Nor should multiplicity eliminate the possibility of locating traditions
and trends. Whenever one brings two texts together for comparison, there
is always a narrative implicit in that very critical act. In selecting and exam-
ining texts, the pan-Americanist, like all scholars of literature, develops a
species of what Benedict Anderson has termed an imagined community.
Imagined need not mean false or fabricatedit can be creative or
pragmatic, and indeed, as Anderson is careful to point out, it is the basis of
all communities, as there is no true community against which to measure
the invention (6). Something similar holds true for the community of lit-
eratures. Acknowledging the creative and imaginative component of devel-
oping a literary eld, without a disingenuous sense of totality, may be an act
of fundamental critical honesty. The pan-Americanist is working toward
Van Wyck Brooks usable past, which he calls the task of all vital criti-
cism.
38
I do not pretend to have such a past available for presentation in this
conclusion, nor do I believe that there is one past for the critic to locate.
A pan-American comparativist agenda that is mindful of difference can
also aid in liberating the study of American literature from more narrow
agendas, such as the maintenance of a national canon. Indeed, as Said has
noted, too often the modern history of literary study has been bound up
with the development of cultural nationalism.
39
Paul Gilroy has argued that
the liberating potential of cultural and literary criticism lies not in
its reication of absolute difference, but in its demonstrations of cultural
On t he Adv a nt a g e s a nd Di s a dv a nt a g e s of Pot c ol oni a l The or y 112
connection or contamination that dees the categories established by
hegemonic discourses. Gilroy observes, where racist, nationalist, or ethni-
cally absolutist discourses orchestrate political relationships so that these
identities appear to be mutually exclusive, occupying the space between
them or trying to demonstrate their continuity has been viewed as a
provocative and even oppositional act of political insubordination.
40
One of the key values of pan-American study is that the juxtaposition of
texts and cultures in a new comparative context can bring to light previously
suppressed connections, points of comparison, or elements of difference
among the boundaries of cultural productions in the American hemisphere.
Singh and Schmidt themselves argue that scholars ought to cross and ques-
tion the borders constantly being erected in culture and cultural studies
(:). The pan-American scholar ought to respect, in Lyotards words, the
justice of the multiplicity, instead of imposing new master narratives.
41
At the same time, scholars must take care not to acknowledge multiplicity
merely to banish it from their purview or to claim an intellectual monopoly
on one sector of literary production. History has demonstrated all too well
that the ghetto, literary or otherwise, is no place in which to ourish, and
that hideous injustices have concealed themselves under the banner of sep-
arate but equal.

N O T E S
1. Amritjit Singh, and Peter Schmidt, preface to Postcolonial Theory and the United States
(Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000), vii.
2. I prefer not to enter the tenebrous realm of speculative anecdotes, but one can imagine
the nods of recognition (and sighs of relief, perhaps) when the pan-Americanist explains
that she will be using Gramscis concept of hegemony in her paper to establish the
pan-American literary connection. It is important to consider how the application of
easily recognized theoretical concepts adds to the persuasiveness of enterprises such as
pan-American postcolonialism, but such importations carry with them their own brand
of limitations. As Said powerfully argues in Travelling Theory, once an idea gains cur-
J e f f Kar e m 113
rency because it is clearly effective and powerful, there is every likelihood that during its
peregrinations it will be reduced, codied, and institutionalized. Edward Said, The
World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 239. Saids
ideas in this essay will be instructive as this paper moves toward conclusion.
3. Jos David Saldvar, Border Matters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 12.
Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically by page number.
4. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), xxv.
5. David Palumbo-Liu, introduction to The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and
Interventions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 2.
6. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 1.
7. Jos David Saldvar, The Dialectics of Our America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
1991), xi. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically by page num-
ber.
8. Jos Mart, On Art and Literature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982), 202.
Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically by page number.
9. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso Press, 1983).
Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically by page number.
10. Roberto Fernndez Retamar, Caliban, in Caliban and Other Essays (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 36. Subsequent references to this text will be cited
parenthetically by page number.
11. Mara Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don (Houston: Arte Pblico Press,
1992), 174.
12. See Lois Parkinson Zamora, The Usable Past (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 645; see Saldvar, Our America, 46.
13. Gabriel Garci Mrquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (New York: Avon Books, 1970),
2856. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically by page number.
14. Indeed, it is revealing that most cultural critical readings of One Hundred Years of
Solitude exclude consideration of the novels conclusion.
15. Jorge Luis Borges, The Circular Ruins, in Ficciones (New York: Grove Press, 1962), 62.
Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically by page number.
16. Jorge Luis Borges, Death and the Compass, in Ficciones, 129.
17. Zamora, 39.
18. See Saldvar, Dialectics 4951. See also Erlinda Gonzales-Berry, Estampas del Valle:
From Costumbrismo to Self-Reective Literature, in Contemporary Chicano Fiction: A
On t he Adv a nt a g e s a nd Di s a dv a nt a g e s of Pot c ol oni a l The or y 114
Critical Survey, ed. Vernon E. Lattin (Binghamton, N.Y.: Bilingual Press, 1986), 153; and
Ramn Saldvar, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1990), 141.
19. Tmas Rivera, . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (Houston: Arte Publico Press,
1987), 143. Subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically by page num-
ber.
20. Teresa McKenna, Migrant Song (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 95.
21. Toms Rivera, Chicano Literature: The Establishment of Community, in A Decade of
Chicano Literature (19701979) (Santa Barbara: Editorial La Causa, 1982), 910.
22. Hctor Caldern, Rereading Riveras Y no se trag la tierra, in Criticism in the
Borderlands (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 112.
23. Rolando Hinojosa, Claros Varones de Belken/Fair Gentleman of Belken County, bilingual
ed., trans. Julia Cruz (Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Press, 1986), 12. Subsequent references to
this text will be cited parenthetically by page number.
24. Jos David Saldvar, Ramon Saldvar, and Hector Caldern have all placed Hinojosas and
Riveras works in almost exact parallel, situating each as providing frontera counter-dis-
course.
25. Rolando Hinojosa, The Texas-Mexico Border: This Writers Sense of Place, in Open
Spaces, City Places: Contemporary Writers on the Changing Southwest, ed. Judy Nolte
Temple (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), 98.
26. Amrico Paredes, With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1958), 13.
27. Hinojosa includes multiple examples of extrajudicial executions in The Valley (Ypsilanti,
Mich.: Bilingual Press, 1983)such as Deputy Van Meerss assassination of Ambrosio
Mora on Main Street (44) and the Rangers murder of three unarmed ranch hands on the
Buenrostro farm (111) (performed to apply pressure to the owner to sell the property)
to argue that the Rangers were a far from heroic force. These episodes form particularly
evocative pieces of counter-history, as they echo two actual historical events on the
Border: the Rangerss killing of three ranchers at the Flores farm in 1915 and the shoot-
ing of Alfredo Cerda on Brownsvilles Main Street in 1902. For a more historical account
of these events see Paredes, With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero,
279. The narrator of The Valley concludes that Life is fairly cheap in Flora [a town in
Belken CountyHinojosas version of Flores], and if youre a Texas mexicano, its even
cheaper than that (44).
J e f f Kar e m 115
28. Jos David Saldvar, Chicano Narratives as Cultural Critique, in Criticism in the
Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology, ed. Hctor Caldern
and Jos David Saldvar (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 1778.
29. Rolando Hinojosa, Becky and Her Friends (Houston: Arte Pblico Press, 1989), 20.
30. Our Southwest: An Interview with Rolando Hinojosa, Jos David Saldvar, The Rolando
Hinojosa Reader (Houston: Arte Pblico Press, 1985) 1856. This interview itself pro-
vides a fascinating case study of an instance in which an interviewer/critic is not receiv-
ing the answers he had hoped for from his interviewee. Saldvar, for example, asks
Hinojosa to elaborate on the relationship between Garca Mrquezs work and his own,
and when Hinojosa admits that there is little direct inuence, but discusses Faulkner
instead, Saldvar shuts down the line of questioning with the abrupt comment, Enough
anxiety of inuence. It is as if Saldvar does not want to hear about inuences that occur
outside of a Latin American-Chicano literary exchange.
31. William Faulkner, Go Down Moses (New York: Vintage Books, 1990): 246, 337. Subsequent
references to this text will be cited parenthetically by page number.
32. Rolando Hinojosa, Rites and Witnesses (Houston: Arte Pblico Press, 1989) 52.
33. Hinojosa, The Texas-Mexico Border: This Writers Sense of Place, 21.
34. Rolando Hinojosa, Estampas del valle y otras obras, Bilingual edition, trans. Gustavo
Valadez and Jos Reyna (San Francisco: Quinto Sol Press, 1973), 88. Subsequent refer-
ences to this text will be cited parenthetically by page number.
35. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage Books, 1990) 101. Subsequent
references to this text will be cited parenthetically by page number.
36. Vera Kutzinski, Against the American Grain: Myth and History in William Carlos
Williams, Jay Wright, and Nicolas Guillen (Batlimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1987) 14.
37. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 242.
38. Van Wyck Brooks, On Creating a Usable Past, Van Wyck Brooks: The Early Years, Claire
Sprague, ed. (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1968) 223.
39. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 316.
40. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1993) 1.
41. Jean Francois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thbaud, Just Gaming (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1989) 100.
On t he Adv a nt a g e s a nd Di s a dv a nt a g e s of Pot c ol oni a l The or y 116