The Question of Cultural Bilingualism

I consider the summit in Tucson in May of 2002 an outright success. All panels I attended combined papers on colonial Latin American texts with papers on similar colonial North American materials to achieve a degree of integration rarely seen in Western hemispheric literary studies. Rather than take this occasion to explain how much and what I learned, which was both ample and rewarding, I want to focus on a fascinating problem that revealed itself precisely because the summit was so successful. The problem, in my opinion, distinguishes Western hemispheric literary studies from both traditional European literary studies and the emergent field of Inter-Asian Studies. Simply put, despite our eagerness to understand and embrace difference, a lack of cultural bilingualism plagues our pedagogy and blocks significant advances in scholarship in the literatures of the colonial era.

Bilingualism in the traditional sense posed no problem at the Tucson Summit. Most Spanish speakers spoke in English and some English speakers spoke or at least understood some Spanish. To explain what I mean by cultural bilingualism, let me compare our recent meeting in Tucson to the Comparative Literature division meetings at the MLA, where it is not uncommon to find scholars delivering papers on British and German Romanticism, for example, or on Shakespeare and Lope de Vega. Even if a paper on such a Comparative Literature panel did not address the way poetry or drama works in two or more cultures during roughly the same historical period, that paper would have to acknowledge the degree to which such literary works carried on cultural conversations with one another. In contrast, scholars who work on the literatures of colonial South America are not nearly so likely to read those materials for what they either say or imply about the colonial cultures of North America. Nor do their Anglo American counterparts find it necessary to scan their primary materials for clues as to how they regarded New World Spanish or Portuguese cultures. Yet, in most every other respects, the geographical border between North and South has proved to be fairly porous.

If both linguistic hybridity and the permeability of the geographical border were apparent at the Tucson summit, then so was the stubborn impermeability of the cultural divide between North and South. Even as each side learned a great deal about the other, conference participants diligently reproduced the differences between the two, each respecting the autonomy of the other's area of scholarship in a manner that drove home the separateness of their respective histories, bodies of primary material, and methodologies. This tradition of separate spheres should call to mind a phase of scholarship in women's studies, which made a point of establishing distinct archives, texts, and research procedures in order to put that field on the disciplinary map. In the quest for equal academic importance, women's history and literature found it necessary to have its own separate domain. In those disciplines where feminist scholarship has been most successful, however, this separation has served as a base from which to transform dialectically the entire field, so that it is now all but unnecessary to have a separate curricular category for women in English literary studies. French theory worked its way into the humanistic disciplines by a somewhat similar process. Assuming that we want to take advantage of the divide between North and South American Colonial Studies to work toward a more hybridized or bicultural understanding of colonial literatures, the question is how.

Anthropology tells us there is usually one of two reasons for such a cultural divide as the one that seemed so pronounced at the recent summit. Both reasons point to strategies by which a culture maintains its identity as such:

1. a. "Inalienable possessions": Annette B.Weiner developed this concept in her analysis of potlatch economics. To modern Western culture, she observed, the practice of potlatch looked simply foolish. By entering a competition to throw the most lavish feast or give the most extravagant gifts, donor cultures appear to be impoverishing themselves for years to come. In fact,Weiner argues, the point of competition is not to see who can spend...