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3 Speaking for Others Problems of Representation in the Writing of Julia Alvarez The rise of ethnic literary studies, including Latino/a studies, is predicated, it would seem, on the given that groups must be allowed to speak for themselves, to represent themselves. And at face value, this seems an absolutely indisputable claim. Nevertheless, it hides some pressing difficulties—for example, those invoked by the two senses of “representing.” As outlined by Gayatri Spivak in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” “representation” has two quite distinct senses: “representation as ‘speaking for,’ as in politics, and representation as ‘re-presentation ,’ as in art or philosophy” (275). Spivak insists that the two meanings must be considered separately when discussing the dynamics of speaking for a particular group, for “[t]he complicity [of these separate meanings] can only be appreciated if they are not conflated by a sleight of word” (277). The “complicity” Spivak wants to highlight, by emphasizing the separate meanings of “to represent,” lies in the assumption that a “representative” of a particular group can accurately and successfully “re-present” (reproduce) the needs, desires, and interests of the entire group. To conflate the two meanings of “represent” (what Spivak calls “proxy” and “portrait” [276]) is to assume as a given that any representative of a group can fully, faithfully re-present the group to others; thus the serious problems or risks of re-presentation go unexplored when a representative (someone positioned to “speak for” the group) is doing the re-presenting. Writers are often called on to “represent” their ethnic groups in the slippery sense about which Spivak warns: that of colliding both meanings of “represent .” It is not simply that an ethnic writer is viewed as a “representative” of a particular culture (in the simple sense of speaking from within that culture to a larger audience that lies, in part, outside of it), but that she is assumed to be representative of that culture. Take, for example, the comment by a writer for New York Magazine, printed as a selling point on the 1983 Signet paperback cover of Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, which proclaims Morrison to be “the D. H. Lawrence of the black psyche.” Every time we invoke phrases such as “the black psyche” or “the Latino/a experience,” we reveal the presumption that this experience is fairly singular, homogeneous, and “knowable” by any representa- 74 On Latinidad tive, who can therefore “speak for” the group. Thus we are led to what Trinh T. Minh-ha has called the “automatic and arbitrary endowment of an insider with legitimized knowledge about her cultural heritage and environment”: “An insider can speak with authority about her own culture, and she’s referred to as the source of authority in this matter” (374). Representatives of a group, then, are assumed to have the “authority” to re-present the group accurately. The converse, of course, is that if you are not a “representative” (recognized proxy) of a particular group, then you cannot re-present it. I have already discussed the deeply problematic assumption that a Latina/o from one national-origin group could in any sense be said to be “representative ” of Latinos/as from another group—hence the fundamental problem with Latino/a panethnicity. Yet critics have often made such assumptions in practice . Roberto González Echevarría begins his essay on Julia Alvarez’s second novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, by establishing what he sees as “the central concern of Hispanic writers in this country [the United States]”: “the pains and pleasures of growing up in a culture and a language outside the mainstream .” Based on this judgment of central experience for a (presumed) group, González Echevarría privileges Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban and Julia Alvarez’s first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents; these novels are by recognized representatives of the Hispanic “group” who re-present that group accurately (according to González Echevarría) by writing about (his version of) U.S. Latino/a experience. In such an analysis, a Cuban American text and a Dominican American text are rendered fairly interchangeable, since both represent what has been designated as the essential Hispanic experience (linguistic and cultural marginality). But the problem of representation arises in much more subtle and even unpredictable forms, as well. For instance, while González Echevarría seems not to have a problem placing Cuban Americans and Dominican Americans in the same group, he is apparently much more...

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