Postnationalism in Chicana/o Literature and Culture

CONCLUSION

CONC LUSION The postnational was an adjustment phase, a period of immense progress and growth. Despite the different political elements and issues with the advancement of capitalism, it has not diminished the need for Chicanas/os’ scholarly and creative work. On the contrary, the “postnationality ” framing of this book is a way to account for the previous nationalist aspects of the Chicana/o movement that occurred as a result of the advancement of global capital disruptions. Chicanas/os’ traversal of the national, global, and transnational fields of study affords an initial examination and even more study. Such intense movements of people and commerce at the border have all but eliminated the need for geographical boundaries, and the sudden shift from a nationalistic mode suggests changing social conditions. From an anecdotal standpoint, back in the 1980s imagining different, complex circumstances outside the realm of labor, class struggles, or resistance was inconceivable. Now the sense of the global and transnational is necessary, and the only true way that Chicanas/os have been able to develop a different strategy was to appeal to a heterogeneous arrangement of the social and political spheres. In this book, however, I have aimed to explain Chicana/o cultural nationalism’s shift in perspective, assessing it as a philosophical and rhetorical composition that came to rely upon national codings. The formation of Chicana/o cultural production initially marked an exchange between Mexico and the United States to a limited extent but also encouraged U.S. national “minorities” to teach others about Mexican and Chicano cultures. Postnationality has been configured as a series of sentiments, dispositions that are vital for situating the direction in Chicana/o transnational culture and its emergence. One of the successes of the changes is the way Chicana/o cultural interpretations have grown. For one, the intense focus on defining the authentic experience of Chicana/o political and class sub- 184 Postnationalism in Chicana/o Literature and Culture jectivity has shifted to include cultural as well as social means of representation . My original formulation for this book was oriented toward the structuring of nationalism as a subjugated knowledge such that despite its expediency in capitalism, the sense of participation in the discourse of globalism was lacking. Emerging into a global era has not been easy; anticolonial resistance movements have struggled to reorganize the historical experience of conquest and colonization, while many theorists view the liberation struggles of U.S. minorities as fundamentally tied to global anti-imperialist resistance . But because the ideology of nationalism appeals to the dispossessed, a framework for reinterpreting the experience of racial, ethnic, cultural domination within the United States has to be present in the discourse. Modified and reasserted as cultural nationalism, “Chicanismo” became a guiding principle to affirm cultural identity and organize collectively the historically persistent denial of social, political, and economic equality within U.S. society. But the question of how to make history and culture, when the sense of time and place no longer have the same significance as it did in the past, still remains to be answered. In one of the few moments when Michel Foucault writes about identity in The Archeology of Knowledge (1972), he wanders into a historical discussion about the nature of identity. Ironically, as Foucault rarely discusses the place of identity, this particular passage seems to confront the same critical dilemmas in “minority” scholarship today. Foucault describes this tension between the genealogist and the historian in this way: The historian offers this confused and anonymous European, who no longer knows himself or what name he should adopt, the possibility of alternative identities, more individualized and substantial than his own. But the man with historical sense will see this substitution is simply a disguise. . . . The new historian, the genealogist, will know what to make of this masquerade. He will not be too serious to enjoy it; on the contrary, he will push the masquerade to its limit and prepare the great carnival of time where masks are constantly appearing . (Foucault 2004, 83) The masks in this “carnival of time” characterize a performance of historical identities. Two views are posited: those of the historian and the genealogist . The former’s serious demeanor offers this figurative “lost European” an identity “more individualized than his own.” The latter, “the man with Conclusion 185 historical sense,” the genealogist, is able to witness the carnival...