Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics

Six: Compromised Narratives along the Border: The Mason-Dixon Line, Resistance, and Hegemony

SIX Compromised Narratives along the Border: The Mason­Dixon Line, Resistance, and Hegemony RussCastronovo There is, perhaps, no line, real or imaginary, on the surface of the earth— not excepting even the equator and the equinoctial — whose name has been oftener in men's mouths during the last fifty years. JOHN LATROBE, The History of Mason and Dixons Line, 1855 Although literary critics, writers, and intellectuals have emphasized the diversity and newness emerging along the "border" zones of literal geopo­ litical boundaries as well the more figurative limits of subjectivity, ac­ counts of the people and texts who inhabit these liminal spaces tend to coalesce into a single, undifferentiated narrative line. Commentators who treat the distinct experiences of nationality, alternative permutations of sexuality, racial marginalization, and varying degrees of political op­ pression that appear in such works as Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera or Americo Paredes's With His Pistol in His Hand nonetheless tell similar stories when they describe how such texts perform within the tricky ambiguities that mark borders. The stories latent in this criti­ cism, for the most part, contribute to a narrative, teleologically success­ ful and consistent, that reads like a story of classic heroism: a text over­ comes the impediments of being marginal to two or more cultures, and indeed subversively benefits from these limitations and prejudices to undermine the oppressive structures that in the first place differenti­ ated and hierarchized Texas and Mexico, heterosexuality and homosex­ uality, Spanish and English—whatever the particular geography of the border in question may be. This critical account usually concludes opti­ 195 196 Russ Castronovo mistically as the text that challenges division and separation provides a glimpse of a region infused with new understandings of nationality (or nonnationality), gender, and identity in which subjects are not forced to choose between sexualities,languages, or political geographiesin order to live in the world. Critical accounts often narrativize the conflicts emerging along and between cultural boundaries by representing border writing as a discur­ sive strategy capable of deconstructing ossified structures like patriarchy or the nation. I want to explore, however, a different strain in this nar­ rative, one that examines the interstices between border and nation to suggest that the border involves more than tactics that undermine the inviolate sovereignty of the nation, for negotiations along the border also have the unintended counterpurpose of solidifying and extending racial and national boundaries. "No once­for­all victories are obtained," reminds Stuart Hall in his comments on resistancewithin popular cul­ ture, because culture is a shifting terrain — a "battlefield,"as he puts it— where the attainment of autonomy is too often only a temporary phe­ nomenon (1981, 233). Not only does the border push up against and disturb the nation, but in a strategic turnabout, the nation also em­ ploys the border to imagine the limits beyond which it might expand, to scout horizons for future settlement, to prepare the first line of attack. As a site of contested cultural production, the border offers a shifting ground ripe for articulations of oppositional consciousness; however, this uncertain terrain is laden with "traps," according to Abdul JanMo­ hamed, that suture homogeneity and confirm hierarchical structures (103). Border crossers are not the only ones who find advantage in the liminality at the margins of culture. The nation regulates this space as well, except that in this case such boundaries figure as occasions to imag­ ine, often aggressively, fixed and unrelenting standards of citizenship and belonging. The epigraph that heads this essay resounds with these unpredictable moments of national consolidation that appear within narratives of bor­ der crossing. Latrobe offers The History of Mason and Dixon's Line to re­ mind his audience that this implied boundary line did not always im­ ply national disintegration. He invokes the border to posit a history of homogenity; he expounds upon the border to recall a nation not of di­ Compromised Narrativesalong the Border 197 vided loyalties, but of singular purpose. Even as Latrobe acknowledges the severe ideological and institutional differences emanating from this imaginary line running between Maryland and Pennsylvania, his prose also figures the Mason­Dixon line as an exemplar of American excep­ tionalism that surpasses all other history being lived and experienced anywhere else "on the surface of the earth" (5). The unsettling of the United States occurring between North and South prompts a retreat into an imperial language that allows the 233­mile...