The Calculus of the Ethnic Novel: Response to Pérez-Torres

Subaltern Studies in/of the Américas should bring to the forum the diversity of colonial and imperial expansions in the past five hundred years, and the postmodern and postcolonial as a complementary critique of modernity; it should also contribute to erasing the borders between cultures of scholarship in the North and cultures to be studied in the South.

Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs

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Cyrus Patell suggested in a recent American Literary History essay-review, on the new, comparative American studies, that this inter-American work may have a crucial role to play in developing what he terms a "cosmopolitanism that will expose and defeat imperialism wherever it exists, a cosmopolitanism that can reject the old, Bad History and begin to write anew" (182). Parts of my essay may be read as a response to Patell's remarks, but I have a more limited focus. How do we go about "defeating" the cultures of US imperialism in our literary histories, and how do we at the same time encourage a critical discussion of some of the New Historicism's inheritances, including the legacies of consensus, Gramscian Marxism, hegemony, and the like? That is why Patell's call for such a discussion in American Literary History is timely. To facilitate a focused comparative discussion, and for reasons of familiarity, I will stick in my opening comments to the emergent critical work of the South Asian and the Latin American subaltern studies groups. But I hope that the arguments I develop in the essay around Amy Kaplan's reading of Theodore Roosevelt's The Rough Riders (1900) and my own explorations of Esteban Montejo and Miguel Barnet's novela testimonial, Biografía de un cimarrón (1980), Américo Paredes's short story, "The Hammon and the Beans" (written around 1939), and George Mariscal's Aztlán and Viet Nam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War (1999) will have a more general import for helping us begin to develop an (inter-) American subaltern studies.

My essay uses the examples and epistemic experiences of the South Asian and Latin American subaltern studies groups because their rigorous work, I think, can help us situate the question of subaltern history and literary history within a broader postcolonial critique of modernity and of history itself. Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it this way: "Writing subaltern history, documenting resistance to oppression and exploitation, must be part of a larger effort to make the world more just. To wrench subaltern studies away from the keen sense of social justice that gave rise to the project would be to violate the spirit that gives the project its sense of commitment and intellectual energy" ("Time" 35).

Whether we like it or not, the production of South Asian and Latin American subaltern studies is transnational. Their editorships are from North America, Australia, India, Mexico, Cuba, and the Americas. Lately, important links have been formed between Ranajit Guha and Chakrabarty's South Asian group and John Beverley, Illeana Rodriguez, and Walter Mignolo's Latin American group, and one can visualize a similar forging of links with scholars in Chicano/a studies, US Latino/a studies, ethnic studies, African-American studies, Native American studies, and women's studies in the US. Perhaps it is this very linking that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak may have had in mind when she proposed that in "the struggles against internal colonialism" African Americans, Chicanos/as, and Native Americans are "postcolonials in the United States" (188).

Can the South Asian subaltern studies group's imperative to themselves--to "think through the specificities of Indian history"--help us in the US think through the specificities of our nation and make that archive central to our work? Can the conceptualization of "the nation and its fragments," to use Partha Chatterjee's phrase, help us continue critiquing US nationalism and its nationalist historiography? As Chakrabarty explains, "If the old nationalism imagined the nation as a...