-
Introduction: Putting the World Back Into Postcolonial and Latino Borderland Literature
- University of Texas Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Introduction PU T T I NG T H E WOR L D BAC K I N TO PO STCOL ON I A L A N D L AT I NO BOR DE R L A N D LI T E R AT U R E As a Chicano teen far from homelands (Mexico and California ) growing up in a 1980s London stretched large with all walks of life I found myself irresistibly drawn to literature. With the guidance of a gracious librarian and an Afro-Caribbean British-identifying English teacher, I indulged in the inexhaustible splendors, merriment, and knowledge served up by the likes of Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Max Frisch, Hanif Kureishi, Elena Garro, Juan Goytisolo, and Salman Rushdie, among many others. I was living and going to school in a part of London filling to the brim with peoples from the Caribbean, Pakistan, India, and Africa. I was living in a time when many “postcolonial ” authors were fast becoming visible in their creative reimagining of such a metropolitan space. This was my introduction to the world of literature—and to “world literature.” At this stage, such readings were absolutely self-interested and self-absorbed, drawn to the narratives because of a strong identification with the characters and their settings. I was filled with questions about my various experiences of dislocation (Mexico City to Sacramento to London), and many of these authors seemed to imagine characters and worlds that did not so much provide answers as provide some kind of tellurian foothold. At this point, too, after returning again and again to certain authors I began to wonder what it was about them—and not others—that had me going back for more. It surely was not that their novels and short stories captivated me because they mirrored my personal experience and that of my classmates and friends while schooling ourselves in the racially mixed inner-city London. After all, how much more different could García Márquez’s Macondo be from Frisch’s Zurich or Kureishi’s South London? And yet I loved them all. It was only once I set foot on the University of California Berkeley 2 A User’s Guide to Postcolonial and Latino Borderland Fiction campus as an undergraduate that I began to more formally seek answers to questions such as: Why my attraction—along with so many others’—to narrative fiction generally? How did my favorite authors reframe and make interesting experiences and people and environments anchored one way or another to the real world but at the same time patently not duplicating “real life”? In which way (ontologically, epistemologically , functionally) was this fiction I loved to read different from reality? What might fictional narrative and reality have in common—if anything? What can fictional narrative in the form of literature do (and not do) in the real world? Did these questions already have an answer? If so, where? In this period and more so later, in graduate school, I identified the focus of study that would further allow me to teach and research soidentified Latino borderland and South Asian postcolonial literature and film as they engage with other literary and filmic traditions. In my first book, Postethnic Narrative Criticism (2003), I critique the “locational” theories that conflate narrative fiction—and cultural artifacts in general— with reality outside the text, choosing as my site of critical analysis the storytelling mode known as magical realism. In my second book, to a certain extent a theoretical sequel, titled Brown on Brown: Chicano Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity (2005), I build on and complicate this argument by investigating the ways in which race and outlawed sexuality have been theorized in postcolonial and ethnic queer theory. Herein I will share with you a third installment in this unofficial trilogy: A User’s Guide to Postcolonial and Latino Borderland Fiction. The premise of A User’s Guide to Postcolonial and Latino Borderland Fiction shares much with those of my other works: that the study of ethnicidentified narrative fiction (novels, short stories, and comic books, in this volume) must acknowledge its active engagement with world narrative fictional genres, storytelling modes, and techniques. Such study must acknowledge as well the contextual and pragmatic dimensions of this fiction—the existence of real-life authors and artists doing the creating and real-life readers and viewers doing the engaging—and acknowledge that while author and reader, artist and viewer are as unique as the full and...