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The decline of the West

What constitutes the pervasive cultural assumptions known to us as "America?" Since the American hemisphere actually encompasses a variety of national identities, can it make sense to speak of a unified "American" identity? Can a place for marginalized identities be established within the cultural mainstream? Comparative American Identities maps out a dynamic terrain of "New World" cultural identities, questions and problems. The essays attempt to locate "America" as a cultural and historical site of plurality and division, a discursive space of multiple differences which becomes, paradoxically, the ground for a new notion of American unity.

Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text.

Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity

The Nuer is one of the most recognized masterpiece of scientific ethnographies. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou uses the genre of ethnographyto make a documentary narration of the countryside life of the Southern France in the fourteen century, based on documents under the local inquisition. By a close reading and comparison of The Nuerand Montaillou, the author of this paper shows the modes of authority and representation, and reveals the problems of power and rhetorics in the anthropological discursive practices which have been taken for granted for a long time. Moreover, differentiating among the ethnographer, narrator of the text, and fieldworker is important for imploring the mutual impacts between power and knowledge.

From the Door of His Tent: The Fieldworker and the Inquisitor

The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature

(2001) Re‐membering the body: Body politics in Toni Morrison's the bluest eye Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory: Vol 12, No 2, pp 189-203

Re‐membering the body: Body politics in Toni Morrison's the bluest eye

When the term gained currency in the 1960s, the dominant image of postmodernism in both academic discourses and in the popular imagination was one of elitist "art pour art." Theoretical discussions tended to focus on formal and linguistic experimentation, and studies as diverse as those by Brian McHale and Ihab Hassan identified a list of techniques, including pastiche, briccolage, appropriation, and misappropriation as defining features of postmodernism. Works that presented extreme formalist experimentation, such as those by Raymond Federman and Marvin Cohen, were celebrated as high postmodern achievements, while works by women or multicultural artists were conspicuously absent in discussions of metafiction, surfiction, or the narcissistic novel.(1) However, at least since the early 1980s, critics have questioned such aesthetic postmodernism by investigating intersections between postmodernism and multiculturalism. Following Andreas Huyssen's statement that "women and minority artists ... added a whole new dimension to the criticism of high modernism and alternative forms of culture" (250), Chicano critics such as Rafael Perez-Torres and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano have sought to relate the experimentalism of Chicana texts to their social, cultural, and historical contexts and have viewed Chicana cultural productions as instances of discursive resistance against dominant ideologies. Norma Alarcon, for instance, has indicated that Chicano works engage in textual politics or "revisionary dialogue" with older forms of representation (99). Similarly, Perez-Torres describes Chicana texts as counterdiscursive, as "writ[ing] through and against, not in place of, dominant and dominating discourses" (34). As a result, in Alarcon's words, "a variety of discourses can be negated, supplemented, modified, and repeated" (99). Unlike early critics, who focus on formal experimentation in their postmodernism criticism, I suggest that postmodernism is a cultural politics that exposes the constructed nature of literary and social conventions. By focusing on Ana Castillo's novel So Far From God (1993) and Sandra Cisneros's short story "Little Miracles, Kept Promises" (1991), I will demonstrate how these authors use an aesthetics of appropriation and pastiche to stage a dialogue between Mexican and Anglo-American traditions. Both incorporate and deconstruct narratives that derive from diverse cultures: Castillo's novel incorporates the family saga and the telenovela (Mexican soap operas), and Cisneros's work makes use of the short story and Mexican-American oral tradition, specifically that of the declamadores. These techniques capture the experiences of Mexican-Americans as a constant process of negotiating two cultures while simultaneously countering eurocentric notions in prose fiction. Their works show that discontinuities in Mexican-American experience motivate experimentation and ground their fiction in historical and material reality. Barbara Kingsolver's 1993 review of Ana Castillo's So Far From God draws attention to this generic hybridization when she characterizes the novel as "the offspring of a union between One Hundred Years of Solitude and `General Hospital'" (1). Castillo's third novel is an outrageous tale about an untraditional Mexican-American family in the New Mexico town of Tome. The story moves in circular fashion from the death and magical resurrection of one of the daughters to her repeated death and resurrection at the end. Kingsolver's description foregrounds Castillo's combination of elements from both "high" and "low" cultures; the novel is a web of intertextual references, blending American literary and popular culture with Mexican-American folklore. Castillo draws on a variety of genres, including the family saga, the telenovela, myth (Pueblo, Apache, and Aztec), cuentos (oral stories), magic realism, comedy, tragedy, folkloric elements such as remedios and recipes, and religious narratives.(2) Such blending of forms highlights issues of representation and of the representability of Mexican-American experience in the novel form. …

Gritos Desde la Frontera: Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and Postmodernism

Early twentieth-century fascination with non-Western cultures and primitive art, well documented in the moderns’ turn to Africa and Oceania,1 also led Anglo-American writers to produce works inflected by their experiences of traveling in Mexico. Mexico, in the writings of Graham Greene, D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, and Malcolm Lowry, became the site of the bourgeois subject’s escape from Western civilization and its neoromantic quest for restoration. Williams’s poem “The Desert Music,” for example, traces the speaker’s search for rejuvenation south of the border, while his essay “Destruction of Tenochtitlan” idealizes the ancient Aztec capital and its inhabitants. Lawrence’s novel The Plumed Serpent (1926) features Irish protagonist Kate’s encounters with the mysteries of Mexico and stages the return of the God Quetzalcoatl, while his short story “The Woman Who Ran Away” depicts a woman’s first-hand experience with human sacrifice at the hands of the descendants of the Aztecs. In his travels, Crane sought to discover a primitive Mexico and to write a poetic drama of Cortés and Moctezuma. Critics such as Douglas Veitch, Ronald G. Walker, and Benjamin Keen have linked these writers’ use of primitivist tropes to their lament of the bankruptcy of Western civilization and their quest for cultural renewal.2 In Keen’s view, Lawrence’s novel presents the height of “artistic recoil against modern industrial society and its alienations” (Keen 553). In the process,

Writing Mexico: Travel and Intercultural Encounter in Contemporary American Literature

Pat Mora is a poet, essayist, and author of numerous children's books, most recently of The Night the Moon Fell (2000), a picture book that retells a Mayan myth, and of a memoir entitled House of Houses (1997), which chronicles her experiences of growing up on the Texas-Mexico border Her writing has won many critical awards and prestigious fellowships, including a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and the Premio Aztlan Literature Award She also received a Kellogg National Leadership Fellowship to study ways of preserving cultures She is a native of El Paso and received her BA and MA in English from the University of Texas at El Paso, where she was an administrator and director of the Centennial Museum As a consultant to the WK Kellogg Foundation, she worked on US-Mexico youth exchanges Mora has taught English at all levels and has held a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at the University of New Mexico She currently lives in the Northern Kentucky area and Santa Fe, New Mexico In this interview, conducted in March of 2001, Mora discusses her love of language, her on-going concern with literacy, her depictions of internal and external spaces, and her interest in constructing wholeness As she explains in her collection of essays, Nepantla (1993), the poet is a modern-day curandera, or healer; as such she intervenes by building bridges, initiating dialogues, and fostering communication This book contains one of the most provocative descriptions of the writer's task Mora writes, The Chicana writer seeks to heal cultural wounds of historical neglect by providing opportunities to remember the past, to share and ease bitterness, to describe what has been viewed as unworthy of description, to cure by incantations and rhythms, by listening with her entire being and responding She then gathers the tales and myths, weaves them together, and, if lucky, casts spells (131) NS: Why did you become a writer, or when did you become aware that you could write? PM: I've always joked that I became a writer when I saw the age of forty coming at me There's a lot of truth to that I had thought about writing, I would say, when I graduated from eighth grade My parents gave me a typewriter, and they gave me this very pretty stationery I clearly remember that they had a party for me, and after people left, I sat there and wrote all of this rhyming, religious poetry, which, when I thought back on it after writing Aunt Carmen's Book of Practical Saints, was an interesting circle I am not a good journal keeper unless I'm out of the country, but I would write myself notes when my children were little, and it's been of interest to me that the few scraps I kept are related to the genres that I write in I would say, "this would make a good poem," or "this would make a good essay," or "this would make a good children's book" So I think the interest was there The love of language is really the main reason that I am a writer I love reading It's one of the great forces that has shaped me At a certain point I thought, "Gosh, my life is soon going to be half over, and I want writing to be part of it" I used to love to cook (I still do, but I don't cook as often) So I put on the outside of the kitchen cabinet this quote from Cervantes, "By the Street of By and By you arrive at the House of Never," as a way to put pressure on myself so that I couldn't just keep saying, "Well, one day I'll do it" I began by taking tiny bits of time, by saying, "I will spend an hour on the weekend" It was also at a time in my life when I was going through a divorce I think those two things came together EMJ: Apart from poetry, you've written a memoir and a collection of essays, Nepantla PM: With the essays I thought about whether they could be useful Many of them were based on speeches, and I had just thought: "well, could they be useful if they were written down, either for people working with Latino students, people interested in youth"--the use is very important for me …

Elisabeth Mermann-Jozwiak

Papers

Re‐membering the body: Body politics in Toni Morrison's the bluest eye

Gritos Desde la Frontera: Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and Postmodernism

Writing Mexico: Travel and Intercultural Encounter in Contemporary American Literature

Interview with Pat Mora

Conversations with Mexican American Writers: Languages and Literatures in the Borderlands