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  • Making Democracy Surreal: Political Race and the Miner’s Canary
  • José David Saldívar (bio)
The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy, Lani GuinierGerald Torres. Harvard University Press, 2002.

Some of my initial critical thoughts on Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres’s The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (2002) were first cobbled together in a graduate seminar on cultural studies and social structure that I co-taught a few years ago with the sociologist, Michael Omi. In our seminar’s discussion of The Miner’s Canary, I confessed that as an undergraduate literature major I had collaborated on an experimental Spanglished literary journal with Gerald Torres, who was then completing his law degree. Preparing this review has stirred up memories of my discussions with Gerald about approaching the problems of Chicano/a multiculture and mestizaje from a different angle,1 about “bare life” and the structuring of law and violence,2 and about our divergent readings of our favorite imaginative writers of the time from the Global South,3 especially Gabriel García Márquez and Toni Morrison.4 My Berkeley transdiciplinary graduate students, hearing again the elusive soundings Gerald and I heard many years ago down the mean streets of New Haven about Chicano/a multiculture, tended to dislike my literary (figural) reading of this legal and activist book, especially my claims concerning Torres’s dystopian melancholic take on mestizaje and his utopian faith in magical realism.5 In the difference between my reading and theirs, I now see that Guinier and Torres’s book still interests me deeply for reasons I will discuss below. [End Page 609]

In their engaging text, Lani Guinier, a Professor of Law at Harvard University, and Gerald Torres, a Professor of Law at the University of Texas at Austin, demonstrate the enormous complexity of what they call “political race” in the US today. Exploring the relationships among race, class, law, and nation as they have evolved over the past 100 years in the US, they highlight racist attitudes that transcend the left/right political divide. Moreover, they challenge current, mainline sociological and crunchy critical race theory’s approaches to race, raciology, and racism, as well as to the ethnic absolutism and bias of American legal studies.

Let me also highlight that The Miner’s Canary enters our political debates about “political race” at a particularly stark moment for progressive scholars and activists. Given the political defeats in California, Texas, Michigan, and the rest of the country of affirmative action policy, and given the ascendancy of the new network-power empire building of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, Guinier and Torres imaginatively respond to our neoliberal epoch with an avowedly “aspirational project” rooted and routed in a field-imaginary from the global South (lo real maravil-loso) that they suggest can destabilize the limits of the real in the global North.

As Guinier and Torres see it, their aspirational project has crossed into the global North from the global South because US law and legal strategies have not been effective means to pursue social justice in this country. “[L]egal institutions,” they argue from within the belly of the beast, “construct a form of social solidarity that . . . inhibits the development of robust democratic counterweights to the agglomeration of private power” (36). More specifically, Guinier and Torres seek to deconstruct and critique the ascendancy of color-blindness in the US with evidence of the continued salience of race color-consciousness. They want to resuscitate race color-consciousness in a legal and political environment that endeavors to embalm it as a matter of normative and hegemonic principle.6

Thus envisaged, The Miner’s Canary is a timely, robustly provocative exercise in contestación (contestation), one that is compelling and persuasive in its breadth, depth, and cross-disciplinarity. I intend to use contestación as an interlingual pun that draws on both the Spanish and English meanings of the word. As I see it, to contest is to answer but also to dispute, to provide alternative paradigms or explanations. The subject of contestation here is “political race”; more narrowly, what is being contested in The Miner’s Canary is...

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