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Towards a Dialogical Theory of Cultural Liminality. Contemporary Writing and Cultural Identity in Mexico Lauro Zavala UAMXochimilco, Mexico City This essay contributes to the current discussion of otherness from a non-European point of view and to the study of cultural identity in general. It is part of a larger ongoing project of reading Bakhtinian concepts such as doublevoicedness, carnivalization and heteroglossia to create a dialogical theory of cultural liminality. By liminality I mean the paradoxical and potentially productive condition of being situated between two locations. These locations may be physical locations, languages, literary genres, cultural traditions , or stages of development. The concept of liminality erases hierarchical separations. This paper concentrates on cultural liminality, as it is expressed in literary discourse. I will refer to the contemporary debate about cultural identity in Mexico as it is expressed in some recent literary works and the essays of critical social scientists in Mexico. This debate exemplifies a growing need to create a dialogical theory of liminality in literary criticism and contemporary Cultural Studies. What is said here about Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 1, 1997 10 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Mexican cultural debates could be applied, in general terms, to the debates over cultural identity in most contemporary cultures, including most European, Chicano, Spanish American and many other cultural and linguistic communities. They are symptoms of a growing tendency towards international multiculturalism and different types of cultural liminality. Bakhtin and Liminality For Mikhail Bakhtin, parody is "a dialogically engaged understanding of a living heteroglossia" (308). In accordance with his ideas I am convinced that metafiction and parody are signs of historical, geographical, linguistic, and cultural liminality in the contemporary world. Their presence is symptomatic of the historical tendency toward the hybridization of cultures, literary genres and languages. All of this is an indirect consequence of multiculturalism. Heteroglossia is a specific kind of double-voiced speech. In parody, heteroglossia expresses two simultaneous intentions: the characters' or narrator's (directly ), and the author's (indirectly) (Bakhtin 324). Comic, ironic and parodie writing are forms of hybrid construction , and they lend themselves very well to the expression of liminal, hybrid, transitional and paradoxical historical conditions, as they are expressed by the writers who use them. All these writing strategies express the cultural need for new languages not yet created, especially those of emerging communities. These multiple communities, with their multiple voices, express the need to distance themselves from the tradition inherited from their predecessors while encoding that preceding discourse in an ironical, double-voiced way. Liminal cultures, because of their self-conscious historical condition , tend to make carnivalistic use of traditions and of traditional boundaries, be it in geographical terms, in historical, cultural, or political terms, or in strictly linguistic or literary terms. The comic style also questions the boundaries of separate discursive fields. Style is grounded on the diversity of types of speech, not on the unity of a normative shared language (Bakhtin 308). Therefore, parodie and self-conscious writing, as a kind of extreme stylization and polyphonic writing, is a result of the existence of different styles and voices in a cultural context. The liminal nature of contemporary multiculturalism gives way to complex strategies of writing, such as "islands of scattered direct speech and purely authorial speech, washed by heteroglot waves from Lauro Zavala 11 all sides" (Bakhtin 307). This is the case in most contemporary Chicano writing, the product of a liminal, borderland community. This cultural community, very close to the Mexican tradition, is also very similar to othet liminal communities around the world. Europe provides an interesting example of liminality because of its increasingly multicultural profile. Humor and Irony A few comments about a general theory of humor forming a liminal theory of culture are in order, since irony is the main feature of the literature written on the borders and in zones of cultural uncertainty . According to Jorge Portilla and other Mexican phenomenologists of the late 50s, humor is a gesture of freedom, whereas irony is an act of simultaneous destruction and recreation, of simultaneous uncertainty and complicity, of simultaneous ambiguity and commitment (1966). While certain kinds of humor (not laughter) may sometimes appear as a...

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