The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory

Notes

Notes Notes to the Introduction 1. I invoke the nationalistic popular meaning of the terms “America” and “American” as connotative shorthand for “democracy” and “equality,” the presumed foundational markers for the United States as an “imagined community.” 2. For a reading of Bourke’s “The American Congo” as an exemplar of U.S. imperial designs, see José David Saldívar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 161–68. Saldívar follows José E. Limón’s important analysis of Bourke and “The American Congo” in Limón’s Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 21–42. I am indebted to the important and pioneering work of these scholars even if the readings of the texts they have brought to critical attention differ from my own. 3. I am referring to publicly rendered forms of symbolic representation facilitated by print culture, as well as topological spaces that define a citizen’s place in an emerging and expansive nineteenth-century America. As Benedict Anderson has noted, “print-capitalism” allows a seemingly disparate citizenry to think of themselves as a coherent nation (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism [London: Verso, 1991], 67–82). 4. The title of this book registers the singular Latino body as an enabling fiction of identity for strategic political gain insofar as individuals in democratic systems are most influential in groups. This “enabling fiction” can therefore never encapsulate the diversity of class, ethnic, gender, linguistic, and racial realities lived in the United States by the people it seeks to render politically and culturally visible through rhetorical expediency. It can, however, help move debates surrounding the Latino body politic toward theorizations of the plural collectivity it should be understood to be if it were unconstrained by the limits imposed by national forms of subjection and the specter of ahistoricity that I engage in this book. 5. R. Philip Buckley offers a critique of the phenomenological notion of crisis in Husserl, Heidegger, and the Crisis of Philosophical Responsibility (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1992). He observes how Heidegger mediates the “messianic tone or oracular pronouncements” inherent in Husserl’s notion of crises by asserting a crisis ’s relational response to what it invariably signals: forgetfulness and memory’s concomitant, fragmented attempts at recovery (269). 6. I borrow the term “cultural citizenship” from Renato Rosaldo, who uses it to describe both the legal category of U.S. citizenship and the forms of engagement and cultural reciprocity sustained by subaltern subjects who are not citizens but 175 still live and work in the United States whether they are “documented” or “undocumented .” See Renato Rosaldo, “Cultural Citizenship, Inequality, and Multiculturalism ,” in Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights, ed. William V. Flores and Rina Benmayor (Boston: Beacon, 1997), 27–38. 7. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). 8. Habermas’s analysis of the public sphere, born of reiterations of the Enlightenment project’s well-known ideals regarding justice, equity, and representation, has been subjected to considerable critical scrutiny. For a feminist critique, see Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 1–32; for a critique of race and the public sphere, see the essays in Black Public Sphere Collective, The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 9. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993). In the opening interview with Ellen Rooney, Spivak states that “[i]n a personalist culture, even among people in the humanities, who are generally wordsmiths, it’s the idea of a strategy that has been forgotten. The strategic has been taken as a point of self-differentiation,” that is, an overdetermined generalization , rather than as a possible site of potentiated power for subaltern subjects (5). 10. Lauren Gail Berlant, in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), notes how the “National Symbolic” is the archive of “official texts” (the flag, Uncle Sam, Mount Rushmore, the Pledge of Allegiance) that create “a national ‘public’ that constantly renounces political knowledge where it exceeds intimate mythic...