Revisiting the Colonial Question in Latin America 9783964566072

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
REVISITING THE COLONIAL QUESTION IN LATIN AMERICA
NOTES ON PRIMITIVE IMPERIAL ACCUMULATION. GINÉS DE SEPÚLVEDA, LAS CASAS, FERNÁNDEZ DE OVIEDO
FORGOTTEN COLONIAL SUBJECTS
SPANISH WOMEN IN FIRST NEW CHRONICLE AND GOOD GOVERNMENT: THE INTERSECTIONS OF CULTURE AND GENDER
THE "INDIAN TUMULT" OF 1692 IN THE FOLDS OF BAROQUE CELEBRATIONS. HISTORIOGRAPHY, POPULAR SUBVERSION, AND CREOLE AGENCY IN COLONIAL MEXICO
"WE'RE OUT THERE TAKING CARE OF FREEDOM": SLAVE RESISTANCE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRAZIL*
HYBRIDITY, GENRE, RACE
BETWEEN PROSPERO AND CALIBAN: COLONIALISM, POSTCOLONIALISM, AND INTER-IDENTITY
COUNTERING CALIBAN. FERNÁNDEZ RETAMAR AND THE POSTCOLONIAL DEBATE
RECONFIGURATIONS OF EMPIRE IN A WORLD-HEGEMONIC TRANSITION: THE 1898 SPANISH-CUBAN-AMERICAN-FILIPINO WAR
THE RETROACTION OF THE POSTCOLONIAL: THE ANSWER OF THE REAL AND THE CARIBBEAN AS THING (AN ESSAY ON CRITICAL FICTION)
ON FEMINISMS AND POSTCOLONIALISMS: REFLECTIONS SOUTH OF THE RIO GRANDE
POSTCOLONIAL REPRESENTATIONS OF THE NEW WORLD (B)ORDER
NOTE ON THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

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Revisiting the Colonial Question in Latin America Mabel Morana and Carlos A. Jauregui, editors

Revisiting the Colonial Question in Latin America Mabel Morana and Carlos A. Jauregui, editors

Iberoamericana . Vervuert . 2008

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de

© Iberoamericana, 2008 Amor de Dios, 1 - E-28014 Madrid Tel.: +34 91 429 35 22 - Fax: +34 91 429 53 97 info @ iberoamericanalibros .com www.ibero-americana.net © Vervuert, 2008 Elisabethenstr. 3-9 - D-60594 Frankfurt am Main Tel.: +49 69 597 46 17 - Fax: +49 69 597 87 43 info @ iberoamericanalibros .com www.ibero-americana.net ISBN 978-84-8489-323-3 (Iberoamericana) ISBN 978-3-86527-370-3 (Vervuert) Depósito Legal: S. 979-2008 Diseño de cubierta: Carlos Zamora

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ISO 9706 Printed in Spain

CONTENTS

Introduction Revisiting the Colonial Question in Latin America Mabel Moraña and Carlos A. Jáuregui

7

Notes on Primitive Imperial Accumulation. Ginés de Sepúlveda, Las Casas, Fernández de Oviedo Alberto Moreiras

15

Forgotten Colonial Subjects Lucia Helena Costigan

39

Spanish Women in First New Chronicle and Good Government: The Intersections of Culture and Gender Raquel Chang-Rodríguez

59

The "Indian Tumult" of 1692 in the Folds of Baroque Celebrations. Historiography, Popular Subversion, and Creole Agency in Colonial México Mabel Moraña

79

"We're Out There Taking Care of Freedom" : Slave Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Brazil Joào José Reis

95

Hybridity, Genre, Race Joshua Lund Between Prospero and Caliban: Colonialism, and Inter-identity Boaventura de Sousa Santos

113 Postcolonialism,

Countering Caliban. Fernández Retamar and the Postcolonial Nadia Lie

139 Debate 185

6

Reconfigurations of Empire in a World-Hegemonic Transition: The 1898 Spanish-Cuban-American-Filipino War Agustín Laó-Montes

209

The Retroaction of the Postcolonial: The Answer of the Real and the Caribbean as Thing. (An Essay on Critical Fiction) Iris M. Zavala

241

On Feminisms and Postcolonialisms: Reflections South of the Rio Grande R. Aída Hernández Castillo

257

Postcolonial Representations of the New World (B)order Silvia Nagy-Zekmi

281

Note on the Editors and Contributors

293

REVISITING THE COLONIAL QUESTION IN LATIN AMERICA

The challenge of fully comprehending the extent and implications of coloniality at the economic, political and social levels has constituted, over the centuries, one of the most complex and compelling tasks undertaken by peoples living in Latin America in the aftermath of European colonization. For academics and intellectuals working on this region, the utilization of critical and theoretical paradigms created by schools of thought in the centers of world capitalism has constituted a particularly polemic practice. As it has been argued on many occasions, most of the conceptual and even ideological models provided by European philosophy for the understanding of imperial domination often transpired, in one way or another, the privileged location of thinkers whose ideas developed in cultures that had themselves not been foreign to the practice of imperial expansion. It was at those locations where the civilizing mission of colonizers was defined and refined, over and over again, for a variety of historical and geo-cultural scenarios. It was also at those centers where the technologies of racial classification and the myth of modernity, which nurture the ideology of Occidentalism, were elaborated, in order to legitimize, propel, and even glamorize imperialism. At the same time, it cannot be denied that it has been in the realm of those cultures where many philosophical and political positions opposing transnational expansion and subjugation of dominated peoples were formulated as well by thinkers who, working against the grain, opposed the practice and discursive foundations of "historic" and modern colonialism. A vast body of work has been, in fact, produced, from many fronts, in order to analyze, from a variety of disciplinary and ideological angles, the colonial machinery: its economic and political intricacies, its ability to produce and disseminate a web of discourses, regulations, and aesthetic devices aimed at representing the dominating Self and the colonial Other, its devastating economic, cultural and ecological bearings, and its ethical and political significance. Nevertheless, outside the limits of the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian fields of study, Spanish and Portuguese colonization, as well as those implemented by other European nations in the Caribbean region, has not received much attention in central debates. In recent decades, following the fall of state socialism and the end of the Cold War, and parallel to the strengthening of US hegemony in the context of the new world (dis)Order, the discussion of topics such as modernity and colonization has renewed, to a great extent, its critical and theoretical foun-

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dations. New positions, which incorporated reflections on the processes of decolonization that took place during the first decades of the 20th-century, refurbished the discussion on colonial subjectivity, slavery, indigenous and AfroAmerican resistance, the consolidation of national states, implementation of modernization, and the formation of collective identities after the Emancipation, shedding new light on the conflicts and projects that traversed societies and cultures heavily impacted by territorial conquest and imperial settlement, and by the everlasting effects of foreign domination and economic dependency. Even within this context of renovated debates and innovative critical approaches, and in spite of the ample focus of postcolonial theories, Latin America was almost systematically excluded from comparative analyses and, when mentioned, often reduced to a series of references and clichés relating to the aesthetics of magical realism, or to a limited corpus of canonical authors whose works are supposedly representative of Latin America's exotic imaginaries and struggling marginality. Thus, from the perspective of the ideologically charged field of Latinamericanism, at least two things were missing in modern and postmodern exchanges on colonialism. First, the full consideration of Latin America's colonial history as a key element for the study of a phenomenon that impacted this region at a much earlier time and with a much wider scope than many of the areas traditionally used as "case studies" in comparative analyses of this kind. Secondly, the inclusion in the debate of the critical, theoretical, and testimonial voices of those who suffered and/or reflected upon colonialism and coloniality in Latin America. Well aware of the magnitude and importance of these tasks, which can only be undertaken through collective and comparative work, and as a contribution to on-going debates on postcolonialism, modernity, decolonization, and globality, this book has gathered a series of studies that attempt to define the "colonial question" from a variety of ideological, philosophical, and critical perspectives, taking into consideration the long durée of Latin American coloniality. It constitutes, then, an attempt to articulate some of the problems relating to both the imposition of colonial structures in the region since the "discovery" to the emancipation, and to the perpetuation and reinvention of colonial structures in modern times. Revisiting the Colonial Question in Latin America offers a combination of theoretical reflections and critical approaches on topics such as the role of historical accounts, cultural practices, and symbolic representation (literary writing, oral narratives, visual images, and artifacts) through which some of the parameters of colonized epistemologies become apparent to the European Other. Some studies explore the role of legal, religious, and literary discourses in the depiction and regulation of cultural difference. Others elaborate on the production of stories or historical accounts in which popular beliefs intersect with

Revisiting the Colonial Question in Latin America

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political events, or on the role of experience and power in the representation of gender relations in colonial and postcolonial settings. Many of the articles included in this book are particularly concerned with the pertinence or inadequacy of postcolonial theory for the study of Latin American history and for the analysis of the region's specific articulation to the ideology of Occidentalism. The connection between (post)modernity and (post)colonialism is proposed, in several articles as the axis, around which the practices of domination and resistance need to be understood in order to approach the "colonial question" —and the question of coloniality— in a productive and innovative manner. As a "floating signifier" that traverses the project of this book, the "colonial question" suggests the need to (re)define some basic temporal and special parameters. Temporally, it calls for the elaboration of periodizations that can shed light on specific historical conditions that allow for the contextualization and comparison of colonial scenarios and processes of decolonization around the world. At the same time, historical analyses provide the necessary foundation for the identification of differentiated stages in the imposition and consolidation of imperial domination, and for the study of emancipations that mark the conclusion of formal —"historical"— colonialisms and the inauguration of national projects and new forms of dependency in contemporary times. Spatially, the "colonial question" involves the reflection on a variety of cultural scenarios located in a wide array of historical and geographical settings. This diversity calls for comparative, trans-disciplinary approaches aimed at the recognition of diverse models of imperial domination as well as of specific implementations of colonial control in very different regions and historical moments. Both historically and geographically, the processes of conquest, colonization and emancipation of Latin American territories incorporate very specific and particular variables to the study of colonial encounters and, more generally, of modern coloniality. The early origins and ample duration of Peninsular domination in transatlantic domains, as well as the devastating effects of imperial control on pre-Hispanic societies have no parallel in the history of colonialism. As it is well known, the impact of the "discovery" of the New World in European imaginaries triggered the emergence of Modernity and, with it, catapulted a series of economic, political, cultural, and scientific transformations that initiated a new era in the history of Western civilization. The human cost of imperial domination due to war, illnesses, and the exploitation of indigenous peoples and African slaves also reached unimaginable levels in territories that suffered Spanish and Portuguese colonization. But the "colonial question" is not limited to the recognition of these facts. It also encompasses the analysis of the impact these conditions had on the colonizers' Weltanschauung, and of the particular ways in which imperial domination was materially and symbolically perpetuated and reproduced over the centuries.

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Thematically, the approach to the colonial question entails the study of collective subjectivities, the devices that preserve the memory of traditions, lost cultures and subaltern epistemologies. It also includes the ways in which social hierarchies, racial categorizations, and gender divisions intersect throughout the development of social practices and discourses of resistance and liberation. At the same time, the topic calls for the analysis of the complex negotiations of power and authority that characterized Creole societies in colonial times, as well as "emancipated" social formations after the wars of Independence. Finally, when we move from "historical" colonialism to coloniality (understood as the perpetuation of colonial structures throughout modernity) the "colonial question" involves the exploration of the multiple and often concealed reappearances and reconfigurations of Empire in contemporary times. * *

*

The editors of this book hope that revisiting the "colonial question" will be a step forward in the understanding of diverse models of imperial domination and of the variety of ways in which resistance and emancipation are conceived in Latin America. The articles collected here respond in different manners to the problems posed by the colonial question and by the coloniality "in question." Alberto Moreiras essay addresses the Spanish imperial reason analyzing its function as an ideological construct aimed at justifying colonial exploitation. He elaborates upon the function of imperial Reason as both a justification and as a critique of the unthinkable primitive imperial accumulation. Moreiras argues that historically, imperial reason continued to exist "by presenting itself as always already its own critique." Beyond their differences and disputes what Fernández de Oviedo, Ginés de Sepúlveda, and Las Casas had in common was that they were "organic thinkers of the Spanish Empire." Both Lucia Helena Costigan and Raquel Chang-Rodriguez explore forgotten colonial subjectivities and their representations in different colonial con(texts). Costigan is interested in de-centered colonial voices in Brazil, such as those of writers of African and Jewish origin, absent from the canon, due to the convenient and incorrect assumption of the scarcity or inexistence of written texts produced by them. Costigan focuses on the colonial discourse of writers of Jewish origin, using as an example the case of Bento Teixeira, a Portuguese New Christian who lived in Brazil during the second part of the 16th century. The Jewish and crypto-Jewish experience in the New World offers a new perspective on the colonial question at play in the writings of these diasporic and imperial subjects.

Revisiting the Colonial Question in Latin America

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Raquel Chang-Rodriguez examines a neglected aspect in the study of the New Chronicle by Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala: the representation of Spanish women in his writing. Her study underscores the important presence of Spanish women in the First New Chronicle analyzing the ways in which the author articulates the image of women in his narrative and in his version of colonial society. The "colonial question" analyzed in this essay focuses on the relationship between culture, ethnicity, and gender, as represented in one of the most important documents of what is today considered colonial literature. Mabel Moraña's study revisits the topic of popular insurgency and its multiple colonial facets by examining both the significance of documents pertaining to historical archives and the multifarious interpretations elaborated around the famous Indian tumult of 1692 in Mexico City. The essay sheds light on the kaleidoscopic nature of the "Indian tumult" and on the ways in which the indigenous rebellion challenged the unstable balance of Creole society. It also elaborates on the impact these events had on the literary protocols traditionally used at the time to document particular events that threatened the order of colonial society and jeopardized the solidity of the lettered city. The article contributes to both the study of Carlos de Sigiienza y Góngora, author of the chronicle focused in this study, and of the paradoxical role of letrados in colonial society. The article offered by Brazilian historian Joao José Reis concentrates on the subject of slavery in Brazil during the 19th century. Being the last country in the hemisphere to abolish slavery (in 1888), the history of Brazil was impacted by this regime of human exploitation. Reis' analysis elaborates upon the discourse that prompted the recognition of slaves as historical subjects. His article studies both social actions and discourses relating to the abolitionist movement. According to Reis, the attack on slavery was produced at the intersection of "secular macro-politics," "day-to-day micro-politics," and "mysterious celestial politics": "A good part of slave politics was played out" —Reis indicates— "on a field of power erected between everyday reality and the other world." Joshua Lund's essay proposes a discussion of hybridity —which Lund considers "the generic mark of Latin American cultural production"— with the goal of reconnecting it with "Eurocentrically-articulated theories of race." Rather than analyzing hybridity as part of a broader discussion of national politics or subject formation, Lund's article rethinks hybridity in terms of biopolitics in order to explore the articulation between subjects, bodies, and the State. For him, "[t]he relationship between cultural mixing and racial marking is intimate, indeed inextricable." With a thorough review of Latin American authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Gilberto Freyre, Antonio Candido, José Vasconcelos, Néstor García Canclini, Aníbal Quijano and Roberto Schwarz, and "central" intellectuals such as Jacques Derrida, Homi Bhabha, and others, the article problematizes the strict-

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Mabel Moraña and Carlos A. Jáuregui

ly cultural uses of the concept and suggests a new reading of the national question, particularly at the levels of identity formation and cultural production. Boaventura de Sousa Santos's article focuses on a large colonial cultural map: a "vast, multi-secular contact-zone involving the Portuguese people and other peoples of America, Asia, and Africa." He maintains that since the 17th century, when Portugal became a mediating country in the modern capitalist world system, a colonial condition has basically persisted until today. De Sousa Santos argues that this semi-peripheral condition has reproduced itself until quite recently on the basis of a double colonial system, as Portuguese colonies were subjected to a "double colonization": that of Portugal and, indirectly, the colonization of the British Empire that placed Portugal also in a position of colonial dependency. The end of the Portuguese colonial system "did not determine the end of the colonialism of power, either in the colonies or in the former colonial power." In addressing the topic of cultural and racial hybridity, Nadia Lie offers a rereading of Calibán "not so much as a 'postcolonial text,' but rather as a document that can be analyzed by means of 'postcolonial reading strategies.'" Fernández Retamar's essay, considered by Fredric Jameson "the Latin American equivalent of Said's Orientalism," has been the target of multiple rewritings and interpretations. Lie's article reviews the contexts that surrounded the production of the text, the Padilla affair, the connections between Fernández Retamar' essay and other Latin American authors of the 19th and 20"1 centuries (Rodó, Sarmiento, et al), and analyzes the impact that the "dialectics of Caliban" has had on reflections regarding Latin America's cultural identity and neocolonial condition. Agustín Laó-Montes' contribution also refers to the Caribbean region, particularly to the "great divide" between the two Americas, which takes place after the Spanish-Cuban-American- Philippines War of 1898; the (neo)colonial and imperial war that defined Latin America's geopolitical and cultural imaginary for more than a century. This event constitutes a key moment in the development of hemispheric imperial struggles. Laó-Montes analyzes the significance of the conflict as a strategic extension of imperial frontiers, as a step in the plan towards "civilizing the Tropics," and as a way of consolidating American Occidentalism, a project that has had enormous consequences for Latin America. The article focuses also on José Martí's and José Enrique Rodó's opposing positions with respect to the ideology of Eurocentrism. For historical reasons, the "colonial question" has a traumatic centrality in the Caribbean. Iris Zavala's article engages the "simultaneity of heterogeneities" in the Caribbean (heterogeneity being, as heteroglossia, "a surplus of signification"), where the distinction between colonialism, neocolonialism, and postcolonialism tends to disappear. From the perspective of Lacanian theories the critic explores what she calls "the fantasies of postcolonialism" in the Antilles ("a totality with different identities"), where "some islands can be simultaneously colo-

Revisiting the Colonial Question in Latin America

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nial or neocolonial and, at the same time, share the dilemmas and enigmas of a postcolonial subject." For Zavala, postcoloniality is not understood in reference to a certain temporality (it is neither a chronology nor a linear concept) but as a dialectical structure (a "logical time") where the moments of seeing, understanding, and concluding, produce subjectivities that belong to different collectivities at a time. Zavala disbelieves of the applicability of master discourses to the Caribbean region. Again, postcolonialism appears as a "floating signifier." Caribbeanness is then, the scenario in which society performs the fantasy of an unreachable homogeneity; a colonial fantasy that must be put in question. Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo examines the theoretical production of postcolonial feminists taking into consideration "the political and cultural realities that women live South of the Rio Grande." Some of the foci of Hernández Castillo's exploration are "Border identities," as described by Gloria Anzaldúa, as well as the particular contributions of feminism to the understanding of social and cultural problems affecting populations living in the Mexican border. The article elaborates upon the contributions of postcolonial feminisms to Latin American feminisms stressing the reaction against the implications of universalism and cultural essentialism, and the need to recognize that local struggles are inserted in global processes of capitalist domination. Finally, Silvia Nagy-Zekmi also traverses the theoretical field of Border Studies by introducing the discussion of topics such as heterogeneity, transculturation, diaspora, exile, migration, and the like, in order to challenge "the binary classification deployed in the construction of the Other" with the theoretical tools provided by postcolonial theory. Her article focuses on an analysis of the "disjuncture between the nation state and the location of (its) culture." In other words, she disassembles the traditional connection between nation and culture, and introduces the concepts of border, and "conciencia mestiza" (as used by Gloria Anzaldúa, Norma Alarcón, José David Saldívar, and others) for the study of hybrid subjectivities, in which Latin American and North American components meet and intermix. This allows her to go beyond the traditional notion of "cultural resistance" into the less traditional field of displacement, in-betweenness, and transnational identities. This collection of essays is aimed at illuminating the "colonial question" from a variety of cultural, theoretical, and ideological angles that would allow the reader to perceive the continuities as well as the substantial variations that imperial domination has assumed over the centuries in the Latin American region. History, as revealed by these studies, constitutes the inescapable axis around which the perpetuation of imperial control and the strategies of resistance and emancipation should be analyzed. Concurrently, regional —geo-political— specificities and cultural particularisms pose an unavoidable challenge in the study of the "colonial question": they incorporate factors into the equation that evoke locality, dai-

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Mabel Morana and Carlos A. Jâuregui

ly life, collective imaginaries, and political and ideological contradictions, that evidence the uniqueness of the social formations which suffered the effects of imperial expansion. Hopefully, this book will offer new avenues for the exploration of these issues, exposing the reader to the complexities of the topic and to innovative approaches for its critical examination. Mabel Morana and Carlos A. Jâuregui

NOTES ON PRIMITIVE IMPERIAL ACCUMULATION. GINÉS DE SEPÚLVEDA, LAS CASAS, FERNÁNDEZ DE OVIEDO Alberto Moreiras

Thus in the zeal of the ordinary seeing of sense perception, we overlook what holds good and serves under visible things and between them and our vision, the closest of all, namely brightness and its own proper transparency, through which the impatience of our seeing hurries and must hurry. To experience the closest is the most difficult. In the course of our dealings and occupations it is passed over precisely as the easiest. Because the closest is the most familiar it needs no special appropriation. We do not think about it. So it remains what is least worthy of thought. The closest appears therefore as if it were nothing. We see first, strictly speaking, never the closest but always that which is next closest. The obtrusiveness and imperativeness of the next closest drives the closest and its closeness out of the domain of experience.

Heidegger, Parmenides

Antonio Gramsci's schematic comparison of the history of the intellectual classes in the New World can still provide us, in a certain sense, with one of the basic parameters from which to attempt a materialist-subalternist account of cultural history in Latin America.1 Towards the end of "The Intellectuals," in the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci remarks that, in the case of the United States, "one can note... the absence to a considerable degree of traditional intellectuals, and consequently a different equilibrium among the intellectuals in general... The necessity of an equilibrium is determined, not by the need to fuse together the organic intellectuals with the traditional, but by the need to fuse together in a single national crucible with a unitary culture the different forms of culture imported by immigrants of differing national origins" (20). And then: In considering the question of the intellectuals in Central and South America, one should, I think, bear in mind certain fundamental conditions. No vast category of traditional intellectuals exists in Central or South America either, but the question does not present itself in the same terms as with the United States. What in fact we find at the root of 1 1 am very grateful to Brett Levinson, Abdul Mustapha, and Ross Prinzo for their generous readings of the first draft of this essay.

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Alberto Moreiras

development of these countries are the patterns of Spanish and Portuguese civilization of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, characterized by the effects of the Counter Reformation and by military parasitism. The change-resistant crystallisations which survive to this day in these countries are the clergy and a military caste, two categories of traditional intellectuals fossilized in a form inherited from the European mother country (21-22). No doubt the situation, which is already drastically simplified in Gramsci's account, has changed since the 1930's, and it would no longer be remotely possible to sustain the same things in the same words today: the notion of a "unitary culture" in the United States has been forcefully contested in recent decades, in both its genealogical and teleological dimensions, whereas at the same time that very change, which promotes the birth of a new class of organic intellectuals, retrospectively creates at least one traditional intellectual class—namely, the class composed of those who were formerly, according to Gramsci, non-traditional intellectuals; simultaneously, in Latin America, traditional intellectuals can no longer be restrictively associated with the clergy and the military. The category has now come to include many other elements, such as party intellectuals of the national-populist period insofar as they residually survive today, and the various breeds of academic intellectuals. On the other hand, a wide spectrum of new organic intellectuals have made their appearance, ranging from those associated with the new neoliberal regimes, including many institutional intellectuals, to those whose project cannot be disentangled from the popular and democratic struggles for recognition, that is, the hegemonic struggles, undertaken by many specific sectors of the Latin American populations in the last thirty years. But, if Gramsci's "central question" is to remain operative for cultural history as such ("the central point of the question remains the distinction between intellectuals as an organic category of every fundamental social group and intellectuals as a traditional category" [15]), perhaps his remarks on the fundamental divide between North America on the one hand, and Central and South America on the other, can continue to be productive. According to Gramsci, then, and this is what I wish to retain, the colonial and postcolonial history of the South in the New World is centrally determined (up to the first half of the twentieth century) by the ideological preponderance of traditional intellectuals evolving as such (since Francisco Xavier Clavigero is no Gerónimo Mendieta, and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento is no Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo), but whose roots are nevertheless, in ways that would have to be specified every time, in the different modalities of Iberian imperial reason; whereas the colonial and postcolonial history of the North suffers a different determination, in that the first Anglo-Saxon colonial elite arrived on the New England shores as "defeated but not humiliated or laid low" "protagonists of the political and religious struggles in England" (20), that is, as organic intellectuals of an emerging social class that would find

Notes on Primitive Imperial Accumulation

17

no substantial counterpart in the Spanish Empire during its constitutive period. The Spanish imperial bureaucracy and its ecclesiastical counterpart mark the cultural history of Latin America in ways that cannot be simply extrapolated to the American colonies of the British Empire. But it is perhaps because they mark the cultural history of Latin America that they also mark the history of modernity in ways that the dominant understanding of Empire can hardly fathom. Under that hypothesis it becomes the task of the Latin Americanist scholarplaced as such, by the way, at the crucible of the traditional/organic distinction, except that the organicity must be found in his or her complex connection with university discourse, and therefore in his or her position vis-a-vis the ideological contradictions of the reproduction of global capital—to understand Iberian imperial reason itself, insofar as its coordinates would continue to influence the present. It seems necessary to go beyond traditional understandings of Spanish imperial reason as a mere ideological cover for the extraction of precious minerals or, alternatively, as the territorial extension of national Catholic unification on the model of the Inquisition—or both. If the Spanish Inquisition could be described by one of its most eminent historians, Henry Charles Lea, as "a power... within the state superior to the state itself' (XX), perhaps such a definition can be productively applied to the assemblage of forces ruling over the enterprise of the Conquest and Control of the New World. What such power could be, in its specifically Spanish dimension, is still a world-historical enigma. But no understanding of the imperial and colonial dimensions of the world-system, as it has evolved from the fifteenth century to the present time, can take place through its disavowal. Spain's political conjuncture in the early moments of colonization did not produce a Machiavelli, that is, someone able to theorize the sheer possibility of imperial accumulation with any degree of fluency, as Machiavelli theorized the conditions under which the Italian national state could be constituted. Our job, which history has now turned infinite, could be defined as follows: to theorize a retrospective Spanish Machiavelli —a "determinate absence" indeed, like Machiavelli's own Prince was. Under what conditions can such a task be contemplated? Let me model my proposal on the following lengthy passage from Louis Althusser's "Machiavelli's Solitude:" We are all familiar with Part VIII of the first volume of Capital in which Marx tackles so-called "original accumulation" (usually translated as "primitive accumulation"). In this original accumulation, the ideologists of capitalism told the edifying story of the rise of capital just as the philosophers of natural law told the story of the rise of the state. In the beginning there was an independent worker who worked so enthusiastically, intelligently and economically that he was able to save and then exchange. Seeing a poorer passer-by, he helped him by feeding him in exchange for his labour, a

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Alberto Moreiras generosity which found its reward in that it enabled him to increase his acquisitions and goods. Hence the accumulation of capital: by labour, thrift and generosity. We know how Marx replied: with a story of pillage, theft, exaction, of the violent dispossession of the English peasantry, expelled from their lands, their farms destroyed so as to force them on to the streets, with a quite different story and one far more gripping than the moralizing platitudes of the ideologists of capitalism. I would argue that, mutatis mutandis, Machiavelli responds rather in the same way to the edifying discourse maintained by the philosophers of natural law about the history of the state. I would go so far as to suggest that Machiavelli is perhaps one of the few witnesses to what I shall call primitive political accumulation, one of the few theoreticians of the beginnings of the national state. Instead of saying that the state is born of law and nature, he tells us how a state has to be bom if it is to last and to be strong enough to become the state of a nation. He does not speak the language of the law, he speaks the language of the armed force indispensable to the constitution of any state, he speaks the language of the necessary cruelty of the beginnings of the state, he speaks the language of a politics without religion that has to make use of religion at all costs, of a politics that has to be moral but has to be able not to be moral, of a politics that has to reject hatred but inspire fear, he speaks the language of the struggle between classes, and as for rights, laws and morality, he puts them in their proper, subordinate place. When we read him, however informed we may be about the violences of history, something in him grips us: a man who, even before all the ideologists blocked out reality with their stories, was capable not of living or tolerating, but of thinking the violence of the birth throes of the state. (Machiavelli 124-25)

Would it be possible to imagine a materialist thinking of primitive imperial accumulation at the beginning of the modern world-system? If it was possible for both Althusser and Gramsci to consider Machiavelli an organic intellectual of the national-populist unification of Italy, the question for our organic thinker of primitive imperial accumulation would have to do with the possibility of thinking the violence of the birth of empire in spite of the ideological blockages imposed by the theoreticians of the Spanish state. Bartolomé de las Casas would be considered by many to be a good candidate: somebody who came close to understanding that foundational violence while he was obsessively trying to prevent it. But Las Casas can also be understood as the Utopian thinker of the Christian state following the Gramscian determination of the traditional intellectual: Since [the] various categories of traditional intellectuals experience through an esprit de corps their uninterrupted historical continuity and their special qualification, they thus put themselves forward as autonomous and independent of the dominant social group. This self-assessment is not without consequences in the ideological and political field... The whole of idealist philosophy can easily be connected with this posi-

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tion assumed by the social complex of intellectuals and can be defined as the expression of that social Utopia by which the intellectuals think of themselves as "independent," autonomous, endowed with a character of their own, etc. (Gramsci 7-8) The objection against the current presentation of Las Casas as a thinker of liberation is an objection against equivocating "the intrinsic nature of intellectual activities" with "the ensemble of the system of relations in which these activities... have their place within the general complex of social relations" (8). Las Casas wanted to avoid the destruction of the imperial territories and their native inhabitants for the sake of a more perfect territorialization. Primitive accumulation was shown by him to be an insane and indeed criminal machine. But his reasons were still at the service of empire, insofar as he was a staunch believer in the legitimacy of the Spanish conquest. Is it, however, possible to have empire without primitive accumulation? Primitive accumulation is not so much what the Spaniards did, as what enabled the Spaniards to do as they did. Primitive accumulation is an unthinkable. In Karl Marx's terms, We have seen how money is transformed into capital; how surplus-value is made through capital, and how more capital is made from surplus-value. But the accumulation of capital presupposes surplus-value; surplus-value presupposes capitalist production; capitalist production presupposes the availability of considerable masses of capital and labour-power in the hands of commodity producers. The whole movement, therefore, seems to turn around in a never-ending circle, which we can only get out of by assuming a primitive accumulation... which precedes capitalist accumulation; an accumulation which is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its point of departure. This primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology. (874) Primitive accumulation, as the origin without an origin of capitalism, is also the origin without an origin of imperial territorialization. It is never explained by them, but it is necessary to account for them. Primitive accumulation breaks the principle of sufficient reason in political economy, Marx seems to say—and therefore grounds it: The capital-relation presupposes a complete separation between the workers and the ownership of the conditions for the realization of their labour. As soon as capitalist production stands on its own feet, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a constantly extending scale. The process, therefore, which creates the capital-relation can be nothing other than the process which divorces the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his own labour; it is a process which operates two transfer-

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Outside history, it grounds history. It is an ongoing phenomenon: no capitalism without primitive accumulation. It is placed between no-separation and complete separation, and it achieves or realizes neither. Complete separation: naked life. No-separation: naked life as well. In between, the rift of primitive accumulation: history's double. It blooms because it blooms. Ongoing expropriation: "The only thing that interests us is the secret discovered in the New World by the political economy of the Old World, and loudly proclaimed by it: that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property as well, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of the private property which rests on the labour of the individual himself; in other words, the expropriation of the worker" (940). If the expropriation of the worker has always already started and is never totally achieved, there is still a history to it: there is a history to expropriation and separation, although primitive accumulation itself grounds history after capitalism—it may even provide the grounds of the historicity of capital itself. The imperial territorialization of the New World, in its early Spanish moment, constitutes something like a breaking into history of history's very unthinkable. How can an organic thinker of empire think this constitutive violence of expropriation and maintain himself in it? "An idealist philosopher is like a man who knows in advance both where the train he is climbing onto is coming from and where it is going: what is its station of departure and its station of destination (or again, for a letter, its final destination). The materialist, on the contrary, is a man who takes the train in motion (the course of the world, the course of history, the course of life) but without knowing where the train is coming from or where it is going. He climbs onto a train of whatever companions he is factually surrounded with, of whatever the conversations and ideas of these companions and of whatever language marked by their social milieu (as the prophets of the Bible) they speak" (Althusser, "Only" 13). A train that moves, or a man who travels: they still have time ahead. Time has not been expropriated. The materialist thinker is yet far from naked life. Only Nietzsche seems to have gone far enough into complete separation: The identity of the duction of sense which would survive it as its once and for all. There

self with "one's own body" remains inseparable from a prowould form the irreversible course of a human life: that sense ownmost accomplishment. From which the eternity of sense is in Nietzsche a first notion of fatality that implicates this ir-

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reversible course in so far as the self would not be able to extricate itself from it. Its first imperative seems to be, at first sight, this love of fatum. But a new version of fatality develops from the experience of the Eternal Return, which announces itself as a rupture of the irreversible once andfor alt the fatality of the Vicious circle, which suppresses, precisely, goal and sense, since beginnings and ends find themselves confused into one another. (Klossowski 55-56) If primitive accumulation can be understood by Marx as the necessary outside of the vicious circle of the capital-relation, complete separation, at the other end of the spectrum, is the collapse of the outside/inside distinction in the final indétermination of total expropriation. Can an organic thinker of empire think this? And live in such a thought? But the organic thinker of empire, when empire is still undecided, when only the necessity of primitive imperial accumulation obtains, does not think expropriation's final indétermination: he only thinks how to make it thinkable. What is an organic thinker? For Gramsci: "Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields" (5). And: "The problem of creating a new stratum of intellectuals consists therefore in the critical elaboration of the intellectual activity that exists in everyone at a certain degree of development, modifying its relationship with the muscular-nervous effort towards a new equilibrium, and ensuring that the muscular-nervous effort itself, in so far as it is an element of a general practical activity, which is perpetually innovating the physical and social world, becomes the foundation of a new and integral conception of the world" (9). But, we could say, the muscular-nervous effort is turned into intellectual activity, into "a new and integral conception of the world," when there is as yet no full organicity: when the organic intellectual is still, residually, under the ideological sway of the traditional class. Could we detect, in this description, a moment of full organicity? A purely materialist moment of the new knowledge of the self? We could resume Klossowski's account: "From this moment on, it is no longer the body as a property of the self, but the body as the site of drives, of their encounter: a product of the drives, the body becomes fortuitous-, it is not more irreversible than reversible, since there is no history but the history of the drives" (56). The muscular-nervous effort becomes a sign of itself. Without that, we are equivocating "the intrinsic nature of intellectual activities" with "the ensemble of the system of relations" which gives them place: a fall into idealist philosophy? But what is true in times of tendentially accomplished separation may not obtain when separation has only always already started. What is true for full-blown capitalism is not yet true for primitive imperial accumulation.

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What is the particular muscular-nervous effort of empire? Primitive accumulation? For Heidegger, it is the territorialization of reason itself: The basic comportment of the Romans toward beings in general is governed by the rule of the imperium. Imperium says im-parare, to establish, to make arrangements: prae-cipere, to occupy something in advance, and by this occupation to hold command over it, and so to have the occupied as territory. Imperium is commandment, command. The Roman law, ius—iubeo, I command —is rooted in the same essential domain of the imperial, command, and obedience... To be superior is part and parcel of domination. And to be superior is only possible through constantly remaining in the higher position by way of a constant surmounting of others... The great and most inner core of the essence of essential domination consists in this, that the dominated are not kept down, nor simply despised, but, rather, that they themselves are permitted, within the territory of the command, to offer their services for the continuation of the domination.

(44-45) Differential inclusion, in a manner strikingly similar to the one defined by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, is imperial rule. In his Democrates alter Sepúlveda justifies the endeavor of Conquest on something like an early version of the Kantian categorical imperative: "treat the other as you would like to be treated," "operate in war in such a way that your behavior can become a model of universal behavior:" "todo lo que queréis que los hombres hagan con vosotros, hacedlo vosotros con ellos" ("everything you would want men to do unto you, do it unto them") (63). Sepúlveda's reasoning is entirely contained in the norm that what is superior has a right of domination over what is inferior—and that right equals obligation. The domination of the inferior by the superior is the only way in which the inferior can tendentially shed its inferiority. Thus, domination is an ethical act: "y todo esto por decreto y ley divina y natural que manda que lo más perfecto y poderoso domine sobre lo imperfecto y desigual" ("And all of this by natural and divine decree and law, that commands that the more perfect and powerful holds dominium over the imperfect and unequal") (83) . War is just because it is better, universally, to be Christian than not, and since there is no way short of war to make the New World natives abandon their nefarious and idolatrous practices, which are essentially false and fallen practices, then war is necessary. For Heidegger the consolidation of Roman imperial ratio (itself understood as the domination of the verum over thefalsum: "The essence of truth as Veritas and rectitudo passes over into the ratio of man... The imperial springs forth from the essence of truth as correctness in the sense of the directive self-adjusting guarantee of the security of domination" [50]) comes to be no longer the imperium of the state but the imperium of the Church, the sacerdotium. The 'imperial' here emerges in the form of the curial of the curia of the Roman pope. His

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domination is likewise grounded in command. The character of command here resides in the essence of ecclesiastical dogma. Therefore this dogma takes into account equally the 'true' of the 'orthodox believers' as well as the 'false' of the 'heretics' and the 'unfaithful.' The Spanish Inquisition is a form of the Roman curial imperium. By way of Roman civilization, both the imperial/civil and the imperial/ecclesiastical, the Greek pseudos became for us in the Occident the 'false.' Correspondingly, the true assumed the character of the non-false. The essential realm of the imperial fallere determines the not-false as well as the falsum. The not-false, said in Roman fashion, is the verum. (46)

Perhaps these relatively neglected Heideggerian remarks can help us see the significance of Gramsci's words on the intellectual classes in Latin America: "The change-resistant crystallisations which survive to this day in these countries are the clergy and a military caste, two categories of traditional intellectuals fossilised in a form inherited from the European mother country." Perhaps we can also understand that those two intellectual categories became traditional with time, but were not always already so: the clergy and the military/imperial caste were the organic intellectuals of Spanish imperial reason, indeed, of the European imperium in its first nervomuscular effort toward planetary expansion: in modernity. And, if Heidegger's determination of the metaphysical essence of truth as Roman verum is correct (in the translation from pseudos to falsum, says Heidegger, "a transformation takes place in the essential ground of the historicity of... history" [45]), if verum is the not-false, the not-fallen, and the not-failed, then, on the one hand, Enrique Dussel is right that the Spanish ego conquiro must take historical and ontological priority over the Cartesian cogito as the first determination of the subject of modernity (Dussel 68); and, on the other hand, that the South Asian subalternists are also right in emblematizing the notion of historic failure as the single most important operational device for an understanding of subaltern history. A word on the former, and then on the latter: If conquiro means that I take possession of the land in such a way that I enable that which is fallen to participate in its own domination—if conquiro is always already imperial according to the Heideggerian determination—, then differential inclusion is the fundamental device of imperial domination: expropriation is always a privative setting-into-place within imperial truth. Before imperial truth can become the truth of the cogito, before the privative setting-into-place of the not-truthful can be redefined as the calculating operation of res cogitans, the world must be laid ready for seamless appropriation. Conquiro is the necessary tropology of cogito insofar as no cogito is possible without a territorialization that sustains it in its very difference from itself. An organic thinker of Spanish imperial accumulation will dwell in the difference between conquiro and cogito, in its intervening tropology.

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In Ranajit Guha's 1982 quasi-manifesto, "On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India," "the study of the historic failure of the nation to come to its own" is said to constitute "the central problematic" of subalternist historiography (7). But "failure" was used by the Indian subalternists as a mobilizing notion that would enable them to confront what Dipesh Chakrabarty, in his 1992 essay "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History. Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?," calls the "two everyday symptoms of the subalternity of non-Western, third-world histories" (264). These two symptoms correspond of course to one and the same malaise, a "theoretical condition" derived from the expansion and transformation of European capitalism into a world system. From Marx's explanation, quoted by Chakrabarty, of how and why the coming of the capitalist mode of production into European and then world history made history "for the first time theoretically knowable" (266), there develops the need for non-European social formations to understand themselves in relation to the history of capital and its cultural logics. Because the impact of capitalist expansion never made itself felt only at the level of the material base, but was always embodied through social, political, and cultural agencies of power, its superstructural implications for the production of what Charles Taylor called "alternative modernities" transcend the possibilities of what he refers to as "creative assimilation" (Taylorpassim), or Fernando Ortiz, Angel Rama, and others would call "transculturation." There is no denying these latter phenomena, which refer to non-European social formations's capacity to react productively to capitalist colonization. But it needs to be recognized that such a capacity was not unlimited. The subalternist notion of historic failure points to the identification and study of undigestible blockages in non-European transculturation, and purports to find in them a critical possibility for the operational release of modes of cultural-historical interpretation that counter the necessarily teleological bent of "historical transition" or mode of production narratives. For even if we accept that mode of production narratives do not have to be teleological when applied to metropolitan societies—they can be framed, for instance, under Althusser's aleatory materialism, where history is said to be a process without a subject and without a goal—, they turn into structural teleologies when applied to nonmetropolitan histories: There is... this double bind through which the subject of "Indian" history articulates itself. On the one hand, it is both the subject and the object of modernity because it stands for an assumed unity called the "Indian people" that is always split into two— a modernizing elite and a yet-to-be-modernized peasantry. As such a split subject, however, it speaks from within a metanarrative that celebrates the nation-state; and of this metanarrative the theoretical subject can only be a hyperreal "Europe," a "Europe" constructed by the tales that both imperialism and nationalism have told the colonized.

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The mode of self-representation that the "Indian" can adopt here is what Homi Bhabha has justly called "mimetic." Indian history, even in the most dedicated socialist or nationalist hands, remains a mimicry of a certain "modern" subject of "European" history and is bound to represent a sad figure of lack and failure. The transition narrative will alway remain "grievously incomplete." (284)

This predicament is then instrumental in the production of the two symptoms of historiographic subalternity Chakrabarty referred to. They are: "Third-world historians feel a need to refer to works in European history; historians of Europe do not feel any need to reciprocate." And: "We find [their] theories, in spite of their inherent ignorance of 'us,' eminently useful in understanding our societies. What enabled the modern European sages to develop such clairvoyance with regard to societies of which they were empirically ignorant?" (264-65). The answer to the latter question is of course capitalism, which sets the stage for a time lag in economic and social development and simultaneously sets the standard from which development must be judged, whether in terms of similarity or in terms of difference. "As long as one operates within the discourse of 'history' produced at the institutional site of the university [understood by Chakrabarty as an ideological State apparatus within the world system], it is not possible simply to walk out of the deep collusion between 'history' and the modernizing narrative(s) of citizenship, bourgeois public and private, and the nationstate" (285). As a consequence, "a third-world historian is condemned to knowing 'Europe' as the original home of the 'modern,' whereas the 'European' historian does not share a comparable predicament with regard to the pasts of the majority of humankind" (286). But the full operationalization of the concept of historic failure has to do with its becoming explicitly what Gayatri Spivak names "cognitive failure" on the part of the historian (6). As a counterpart to the necessary failure of the nonmetropolitan social formation to come into its own, since an originary expropriation of history has always already taken place within modernity at the hands of imperial capitalism, the historian's attempt to retrieve the outside of expropriation cannot meet with success. Indeed, success is failure and failure is success, in a situation in which both of them cannot be other than what Spivak calls "theoretical fictions" (7). Failure is operational and productive, however, to the extent that "it acknowledges that the arena of the subaltern's persistent emergence into hegemony must always and by definition remain heterogeneous to the efforts of the disciplinary historian. The historian must persist in his efforts in this awareness, that the subaltern is necessarily the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic" (Spivak 16). For Chakrabarty, subalternity as theoretical production contests the double bind of the nonmetropolitan split subject by simultaneously investigating history and the impossibility of history, thus not simply

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dismantling Eurocentric narratives, but also calling for a dismantling of the historiographic apparatus itself: the project... must realize within itself its own impossibility... a history that deliberately makes visible, within the very structure of its narrative forms, its own repressive strategies and practices, the part it plays in collusion with the narratives of citizenships in assimilating to the projects of the modern state all other possibilities of human solidarity... a history that will attempt the impossible: to look towards its own death by tracing that which resists and escapes the best human effort at translation across cultural and other semiotic systems, so that the world may once again be imagined as radically heterogeneous. (290)

A history of the falsum: subaltern history, against the verum of the thinker of empire, a reverse tropology of the fallen. Without it, there is no abandoning imperial reason. In his Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias Las Casas asks Prince Philip to bring to an end the savage extraction of capital from the Indies on the basis of the need to preserve the integrity of the imperial dominium. It is a question, says Las Casas, of avoiding destruction, since destruction will damage the empire. Las Casas understood the ongoing historical process as precisely the wrong kind of primitive accumulation: much better to christianize the Indians, to show a Christian attitude towards the Indians, and that way they will be persuaded to cooperate. No doubt Las Casas' politics met with eventual success, and the massacres stopped or diminished. Primitive accumulation, from the initial to the second phase of the Conquest, went from being understood as the brutal and indiscriminate extraction of gold, silver, pearls, and precious stones to the perception that the very Indians being wasted in the mining endeavors could become profitable labor. The separation of the producer from the means of production went from outright murderous abuse to the kind of tributary slavery disguised as mitas, repartimientos, and other kinds of labor exploitation. "The starting-point of the development that gave rise both to the wage-labourer and to the capitalist was the enslavement of the worker. The advance made consisted in a change in the form of this servitude, in the transformation of feudal exploitation into capitalist exploitation" (Marx 875). It is Immanuel Wallerstein's contribution to have established that capitalist exploitation in the periphery of the world-system continues to use servile labor for a long time after the center has adopted wage labour as the primary mechanism in the capital-relation (see Wallerstein 66-129). The moment when the New World natives were led to admit that a Lascasian politics, or what comes to the same, the politics given force of law in the 154243 Leyes nuevas and other royal measures, were no doubt absolutely better than the practices of the cruel tyrants Alvarado or Pedrarias Dávila—that is the mo-

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ment when Spanish imperial reason starts to become hegemonic reason: reasonable reason, post-terror reason. Reason after terror, but reason based upon terror: without the original terror primitive accumulation would never have gone into its second stage. Las Casas would never have converted a single native. The imperium as the realm of the verum could never have commenced. Can we understand the history of the modern colonial conflict as a history of the diverse and complex relations between primitive accumulation and hegemony processes? From the necessary but impossible thought of primitive accumulation as the ground of ground, the history of colonial conflict cannot be understood as the history of a hegemony formation; rather, the history of every process of hegemony is always already the history of a forgetting: hegemony is always the forgetting of primitive accumulation, the original sin of political economy. Primitive accumulation as the material being of beings. And then what about the state, every state, in so far as every state is necessarily founded upon colonial territorialization, territorial reason, imperial reason; in so far as every state reproduces itself through internal colonialism?: an ongoing colonialism which we can perhaps identify as the politico-cultural translation of primitive accumulation in its myriad varieties. Undoing the translation is tropology in reverse, and it is always necessarily allegorical in that it refers to the unthinkable of terror as originary expropriation. For Giovanni Arrighi "whereas dominance [is] conceived of as resting primarily on coercion, hegemony [is] understood as the additional power that accrues to a dominant group by virtue of its capacity to place all the issues around which conflict rages on a 'universal' plane" (28). Arrighi talks about Spain's political dominance in the sixteenth century as a necessary failure of hegemony insofar as the power of Spain was put at the service of saving "what could be saved of the disintegrating medieval system of rule" in a context in which "the quantum leap in the European power struggle since the middle of the fifteenth century had taken the disintegration of the medieval system beyond the point of no return" (41). The rise of Dutch hegemony is already a forgetting of Spanish rule—"the Dutch capitalist oligarchy thus came to be perceived as the champion not just of independence from the central authorities of the medieval system of rule but also of a general interest in peace which the latter were no longer able to serve" (45). In the same way that the Dutch capitalist reason was always already, and first of all, a critique of Spanish imperial reason, English hegemony arises against the Dutch through a newly forgetful combination of territorialist and capitalist drives that will receive the name of free-trade imperialism; and the United States will later repeat the historical process of critical forgetting by projecting its own imperial reason through anti-imperialist and nationalist traits on a world scale. But this series of forgettings brings along a paradoxical structure of returns:

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Alberto Moreiras Just as the expansion and supersession of the Westphalia system under British hegemony were based on strategies and structures of world-scale rule and accumulation which were more like those of Imperial Spain in the sixteenth century than those of Dutch hegemony, so the expansion and supersession of that same system under US hegemony has involved a "regression" towards strategies and structures of world-scale rule and accumulation which resemble more closely those of Dutch than those of British hegemony. (70)

And what now, as US hegemony seems to have given way to a new form of imperial reason, that of the transnational corporations, which threatens to bring to an end "capitalist history as embedded in the rise and expansion of the modern inter-state system" (76)? For Arrighi, "it is as if the modern system of rule, having expanded spatially and functionally as far as it could, has nowhere to go but 'forward' towards an entirely new system of rule or 'backward' towards early modern or even pre-modern forms of state- and war-making" (79). Or rather: both. "The system seems to be moving 'forward' and 'backward' at the same time. This double movement has always been a major feature of the modern world system. In our scheme of things, 'old regimes' do not just persist... rather, they are repeatedly resurrected as soon as the hegemony that has superseded them is in its turn superseded by a new hegemony" (79). It is perhaps then the time for a partial resurrection of imperial reason in its Spanish avatar. Will it be following its originary mode, as a new drive for primitive imperial accumulation? If every hegemony is always a forgetting, what kind of hegemony obtains as the forgetting of forgetting itself? Michael Hardt defines the present regime of rule, which he terms, following Gilles Deleuze, "the global society of control," as characterized by two features: the withering of civil society, "which... refers to the decline of the mediatory functions of the social institutions," and "the passage from imperialisms... to Empire" (140). If the mediatory functions of the social institutions wither, it is not because their ideological function has vanished: rather, it is because the latter has intensified to the point of constituting itself as tendentially total interpellation. And if Empire has assumed absolute immanence, it is not because a new possibility of transcendence has opened up: "Any attempt to remain Other to Empire will be futile. It feeds on alterity, relativizing it and managing it" (148). Differential inclusion, which is for Hardt the very operationalization of control as rule; and total interpellation, in the absolute negation of an outside of empire, were indeed tendential features of the Spanish regime of rule in its early times of planetary expansion. The constitutive outside of modern imperial reason is a principle of insurgency that can only be understood negatively, that is, as whatever has not yet been subjected to the "directive self-adjusting guarantee of the security of domination," and

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hence as what remains subjectible. Only what is merely subjectible, that is, what is not yet redeemed from its fallenness and incorporated into the principle of command, only what has not yet been exhaustively determined by subjection as such, retains a power of insurgency. To reduce it is no doubt the structural function of the notorious Requerimiento, apparently prepared by the jurist Juan López de Palacios Rubios to be used by the Castilian compañías as a sufficient reason for their endeavors (see the brilliant commentary in Seed 69-99). Whatever is not yet subjected must be subjected, and that is a good enough reason. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo gives us a version of such a principle in his narrative concerning the royal letter that Captain Francisco de Barrionuevo reads to the rebellious cacique Enriquillo during the final capitulation conversations. Unless Enriquillo submits, Fernández de Oviedo tells us that the letter said, "la guerra no se os hará, como hasta aquí se os ha fecho, en el tiempo pasado; ni os podréis esconder, aunque fuéssedes un corí o un pequeño gusano, de debaxo de la tierra; porque la gente de Su Magestad es mucha, y el poder real suyo el mayor que hay en el mundo. Y entraros han por tantas partes, que de lo mas hondo y escondido os sacarán" ("war will not be made to you as it has been made up to now in times past; neither will you be able to hide, even if you were a cori or a little worm from under the earth; because Your Majesty's people are numerous, and the royal power that is His is the greatest power in the world. And they will come at you from so many parts that they will take you out from the deepest and most concealed [place]") (Historia 1.148). Enrique is given a simple choice: either he chooses submission or he chooses death. For Enrique, submission equals life: "dad infinitos loores a JesuChripsto por las mer§edes que os ha§e, si hi£iéredes lo que Su Magestad os manda, é yo en real nombre os requiero; porque si amáredes vuestra vida é la de los vuestros, amareis su real servicio é la paz, librareis vuestra ánima é las de muchos, é daréis seguridad á vuestra persona é á las de todos aquellos que os siguen" ("give infinite praise to Jesus Christ for the mercies he bestows upon you if you do as His Majesty says and as I demand from you in His name; for if you love your life and the life of your people, you will love His royal service and peace, you will free your soul and the souls of many, and you will attain security for your person and for all of those who follow you") (Historia 1: 148). Submission equals life. Whatever obtains outside it is always already marked by death and remains as such illegible. Who was Enrique before submission? For us, the embodiment of a principle of insurgency that we can only understand negatively: as a disavowal of imperial reason. Imperial accumulation finds in the Requerimiento its verbal expression. After the Requerimiento takes place, after there is subjection to it, no transculturation, no syncretism, no hybridization, no resistance are historically possible that are not always already sanctioned by an imperial reason that accommodates them, draws a site for them, and thus at the same time destroys them, by absorbing them into a tamed interiority.

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What, however, withdraws at the moment of submission? And what remains of that withdrawal? Perhaps simply the empty site of a parahegemonic dimension that makes itself present in and through the operationalization of hegemonic logic itself: not as its outside or externality, but in an estimate relationship to it. The parahegemonic dimension is insurgency in retreat—it recedes before hegemony. It is, in Spivak's words, "the absolute [but shifting] limit of the place where history is narrativized into [hegemonic] logic." Parahegemony: the retreating instance whose wake makes hegemony both possible, as persuasion, and impossible, as always already based on sheer imperial domination. "A mí me han mordido" ("I have been bitten"), says Fernández de Oviedo in the chapter he devotes to Central American vampires in Sumario de la natural historia de las Indias (113). The sentence is no doubt bloodcurdling given what we know today about the vampiric functions of primitive accumulation (see Kraniauskas for two fascinating analyses in the Latin American context). If Sumario is, as it could be argued, an address to the Emperor Charles aiming, among other things, to warn him tenuously of the dangers in the modality of primitive accumulation the Spaniards had been practicing in the New World during the first phase of the Conquest, then the chapter on vampires has a sinister ironic function. The Captain's narrative can be understood as a synecdoche of the totality of the work if we allow that Sumario is entirely invested in the promotion of a new relationship to the conquered land and the consolidation of a colonial process based upon expoliatory devices alternative to the ones that were initially carried out. Fernández de Oviedo's great antagonist or specular figure and nemesis was Pedrarias Dávila, Governor of Darién, with whom Oviedo travels to the Indies on April 4,1514, and under whom he served as Lieutenant Governor. He would later repeatedly denounce him before the imperial court. About Pedrarias Dávila, instigator of an assassination attempt against our Captain, which he miraculously survived, Las Casas says he was an "infelice gobernador, crudelísimo tirano,... instrumento del furor divino" ( "infelicitous governor, most cruel tyrant,... instrument of divine wrath") who "grandes tierras y reinos despobló y mató, echando inmensas gentes que en ellos había a los infiernos" ("great lands and realms depopulated and killed, throwing an immense amount of their people to hell") (,Sumario 95). Pedrarias Dávila's strategy of primitive accumulation can no doubt be defined as vampiric, as it is told in nuce by Las Casas in the following anecdote: Dándole un cacique o señor, de su voluntad y por miedo (como más es verdad) nueve mil castellanos, no contentos con esto prendieron al dicho señor y átanlo a un palo sentado en el suelo, y estendidos los pies pénenle fuego a ellos porque diese más oro, y él envió a su casa y trajeron otros tres mil castellanos. Tórnanle a dar tormén-

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tos, y él, no dando más oro porque no lo tenía, o porque no lo quería dar, tuviéronle de aquella manera hasta que los tuétanos le salieron por las plantas, y así murió. (Sumario 98) Upon a cacique or lord giving them (Pedrarias's people), both of his own will and through fear (as it is more truthful), nine thousand Castillian pesos, not content with this, they arrested the said lord and they tied him to a pole sat upon the ground, and his feet stretched out, they gave them fire so that he would give more gold, and the lord sent to his home and they fetched another three thousand castellanos. They went back to give him torments, and the lord, not giving more gold as he didn't have it, or because he did not want to give it, was held in that guise until the bone marrow came out of his soles, and thus he died. But Oviedo himself was not above such exploits. Thus he tells the Emperor how, since 1514, he served in Tierra-Firme as a "veedor de las fundiciones del oro y... veedor de minas..., y de esta causa he visto muy bien cómo se saca el oro... y he hecho sacar oro para mí con mis indios y esclavos" ("supervisor of the gold works and a supervisor of mines..., and for this reason I have seen very well how gold comes to be extracted... and I have had gold extracted for me with my Indians and slaves") (Sumario 161). In any case, in 1525, Oviedo writes his Sumario in order to "traer a la real memoria" ("to bring to the royal memory") (Sumario 47) the need for an alternative relation to the conquered land that can be ciphered under the word "perseverar" (to persevere). Oviedo criticizes those "mancebos" ("young men"), "amigos de novedades" ("friends of novelty"), who would refuse, for instance, to settle the already depopulated Hispaniola "porque como se han descubierto y descubren cada día otras tierras nuevas, paréceles que en las otras henchirían más aína la bolsa" ("because since other new lands have been discovered and are discovered every day, it seems to them that in those lands they can fill up their bags all the sooner") (Sumario 54). But some, says Oviedo, are now starting to think about "perseverar en la tierra" ("persevering in the land") (Sumario 54), that is, about "sembrar el pan o poner las viñas" ("sowing wheat and planting vineyards") (Sumario 55). It is to these that Oviedo dedicates the most important work of his life, that is, the preparation of a great Historia general y natural de las Indias where the description of the American flora and fauna is set at the service of a presentation of the New World as "standing reserve," as Heidegger would put it, that is, the New World as naturally available to long-term Christian exploitation. Thus Oviedo criticizes those who, pospuestas sus conciencias y el temor de la justicia divina y humana, han hecho cosas, no de hombres, sino de dragones e infieles, pues sin advertir ni tener respeto alguno humano, han sido causa que muchos indios que se pudieran convertir y salvarse, muriesen por diversas formas y maneras; y en caso que no se convirtieran los tales que

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Alberto Moreiras así murieron, pudieran ser útiles, viviendo, para el servicio de vuestra majestad, y provecho y utilidad de los cristianos, y no se despoblara totalmente alguna parte de la tierra, que de esta causa está casi yermo de gente, y los que han sido causa de aquesto daño llaman pacificado a lo despoblado; y yo, más que pacífico, lo llamo destruido.

(,Sumario 81-82) their consciences and the fear of human and divine justice deferred, have done things, not of men, but of dragons and of infidels, for without observing or having any kind of human respect, they have been the cause that many Indians who could have been converted and saved died in diverse forms and manners, and in case those who so died had not converted, they could still have been useful, living, for the service of your majesty, and for the profit and utility of the Christians, and some parts of this land would not have been totally depopulated, that for this reason are almost void of people, and those who have been the cause of this damage call pacified what is depopulated, and I, rather than pacific, call it destroyed.

The natives are here understood as pure labor, that is, as human capital at the service of the enrichment of Caesar Charles' monarchia universalis. Hence Oviedo will praise the new laws and regulations, such as the establishment of the Council of Indies in 1525, meant to amend errors leading into genocide and depopulation and to set things in such a way that the kingdoms of Spain could be "muy enriquecidos y aumentados por respecto de aquella tierra, pues tan riquísima la hizo Dios, y os la tuvo guardada desde que la formó, para hacer a vuestra majestad universal y único monarca en el mundo" ("very enriched and increased by means of that land, since God made it so very rich, and God kept it hidden for you since He formed it, in order to make your majesty the universal and only monarch in the world") (Sumario 82). In his "Conclusion" Oviedo will lament that the gold that goes from the Indies to Spain is only good to make other European nations richer: "Testigos son estos ducados dobles que vuestra majestad por el mundo desparce, y que de estos reinos salen y nunca a ellos tornan" ("And the witnesses are those doubly minted ducados that your majesty throws around the world, and that come out of these realms but never return to them") (Sumario 177). Oviedo's primitive accumulation, based upon a systematic exploitation of natural resources, to describe which he writes his major opus, can be understood as an alternative and apotropaic form of vampirism: a vampirism meant to stem the excessive flow of gold and blood, and one for which Sumario's Chapter Thirty Five, entitled "Murciélagos" ("Bats"), gives us a splendid tropology. The background for my reading is given in Chapter Ten, "On the Tierra-Firme Indians," where Oviedo remarks that the Indians, who are "en continuas responsiones y inteligencias con el diablo" ("in continuous conversation and dealings with the devil") (Sumario 80-81), have come to give the Spaniards a nickname, "tuyra, porque así llaman al diablo" ("tuyra, for they call the devil thus")

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(Sumario 81). The Spaniards are placed in the position of that to whom the Indians "hácenle sacrificios en muchas partes de sangre y vidas humanas" ("make sacrifices in many places of blood and human life" (Sumario 81). Pedrarias Dávila's 1514 Darién expedition was meant to relieve the Southern Seas Adelantado Vasco Núñez de Balboa. Fernández de Oviedo tells us that the Darién vampires had been wreaking havoc among Núñez de Balboa's men: "que fueron muy peligrosos a los cristianos... cuando se ganó el Darién; porque, por no saberse entonces el fácil y seguro remedio que hay contra la mordedura del murciélago, algunos cristianos murieron entonces y otros estuvieron en peligro de morir, hasta que de los indios se supo la manera de cómo se había de curar el que fuese picado de ellos" ("for they were very dangerous to the Christians... when Darién was won, because, since the easy and safe remedy against the bat's bite was not known then, some Christians died then, and others were in danger of dying, until it was found out from the Indians how to cure someone who had been bitten by them") (Sumario 112). The danger of the vampire's bite did not only consist of the anti-clotting quality in its saliva, which induced a considerable loss of blood, but in the more alarming fact, as we all know today from other stories, that "si entre cien personas pican a un hombre una noche, después la siguiente o otra no pica el murciélago sino al mismo que ya hubo picado, aunque esté entre muchos hombres" ("if they bite one man among one hundred one night, the following night, and the next, the bat does not bite but the one it had already bitten, even if he is among many other men") (Sumario 112). The sucking quality of the bat is brutally persistent and persevering—perhaps only comparable to that of the men under the command of Pedrarias Dávila in relation to the Tierra-Firme gold. The application of fire to the feet, popular in Spain through the practices of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, was a choice tool of the Spaniards for their operations of accumulation. Just like the poor cacique would lose his bone marrow to fire before being killed in the Spanish sacrifice, in the same way the Spaniards would lose the blood that was accumulated by the extracting bat. Until a remedy is found in cauterization, through fire itself, or through boiling water. Fire plays here a role directly opposite to the one played in Spanish accumulation. If fire was used as a gold-extracting device by the Spaniards against the Indians, the Indians teach the Spaniards to use it as an instrument that prevents blood accumulation by the vampires: not an extracting but a preserving function, then, learnt from the Indians, taken from them. "I have been bitten," says Fernández de Oviedo. The modern reader cannot avoid thinking that the one speaking to the Emperor has therefore become a blood-extracting vampire and tuyra devil who has come to live off the "sacrificios de sangre y vidas humanas" ("blood and human lives' sacrifices") involving the Indians. Fernández de Oviedo, however, tells us that he was cured of the vampiric process through the boiling-water remedy. Having learnt from the Indians

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how to rid himself of his bloodletting and loss of substance, he then proceeds to set the remedy at the service of a mimetic project of appropriation and incorporation of his new domain's natural resources. Just after the sentence "I have been bitten, and I have been cured through water," he rather uncannily says: Otros murciélagos hay en la isla de San Juan, que los comen, y están muy gordos, y en agua muy caliente se desuellan fácilmente, y quedan de la manera de los pajaritos de cañuela, y muy blancos y muy gordos y de buen sabor, según dicen los indios, y aun algunos cristianos, que los comen también, en especial aquellos que son amigos de probar lo que ven hacer a otros. (Sumario 113) There are other bats in the island of San Juan, and they are eaten, and they are very fat, and in very hot water they are easily skinned, and they come to resemble the little birds that are skewered and roasted in Spain, and they are very white and very fat and of a very good taste, according to the Indians, and even according to some Christians who also eat them, especially those who are fond of trying whatever they see others do.

The politico-rhetorical figure of apotrope refers to a defense mechanism that consists of the appropriation and incorporation of a small part of that against which one wants to defend himself, precisely in order to defend himself against the totality from which that small part is taken. Fernández de Oviedo's apotropaic appropriation is complex. In the first place, the Indians use fire as a cauterizing device to defend themselves from the terminal bloodletting caused by the "bocadicos redondos de la carne" ("round little morcels of flesh") that vampires eat (Sumario 112). Thus, a smaller pain prevents a greater evil. The same remedy that is used by the Captain not to die bloodless—boiling water, water subjected to the principle of fire—will also be used by him and his people to imitate "what they see others do:" that is, in order to establish a relationship to the New World that places the latter in the position of a standing reserve, apt for a mimetic appropriation of natural resources. Against Pedrarias Dávila's or Núñez de Balboa's depopulating vampirism Fernández de Oviedo will suggest a type of colonization based upon progressive digestion: eat something, we could say, in order not to eat everything. This is of course consistent with his recommendation to "persevere in the land" and with the general outlook of his memorial to the Emperor. It gives us a model of imperial reason that will become dominant in the New World in the second phase of the Conquest. Fernández de Oviedo shares it with Las Casas: both write their work in order to request the mediating intervention of the imperial state so that early primitive accumulation could be controlled and the "destruction" of the Indies avoided. This destruction was foreseeable not only in 1542, when Las Casas hands over his Brevísima relación al príncipe Felipe, but also in 1525, when Fernández de Oviedo writes his Sumario. The latter, through his uncanny story of Tierra-Firme

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bats, succeeds in symbolically turning the page of primitive accumulation, which, as we will remember, is according to Marx "written in the annals of humankind in letters of blood and fire" (875). It is still blood and fire for Fernández de Oviedo, but now apotropaically controlled, and put at the service of a more perfect exploitation of the imperial dominium. Imperial reason has started to produce itself as its own critique. Granted that the full organicity of a thinker vis-a-vis the historical phenomenon that makes him or her possible as such is non-achievable, for reasons probably germane to those given in this essay's epigraph; and granted that primitive imperial accumulation in early Spanish imperial times was driven out of the possibility of direct expression by its very closeness, and thus remained an unthinkable—there are still grounds to argue that Las Casas, Sepúlveda, and Fernández de Oviedo, in their different ways, were organic intellectuals of imperial reason. As such, they were close to thinking the constitutive violence of the birth throes of empire: their ideological function became to think, as Anthony Pagden might have put it, ratio imperii (imperial reason) as imperium rationis (empire of reason) (See Pagden 20). But the way from one to the other undergoes a necessary moment of deconstitution. To produce reason of empire as the empire of reason is a constitutive feature of modernity. The blinding closeness between conquiro and cogito, and their radical separateness, can be thought as allegorical of the relationship that obtains between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the enunciated in Jacques Lacan's determination of the cogito as the subject of the unconscious. If it is possible to argue that Spanish imperial reason cannot be conflated with any of its enunciated moments, if it is clear that, as with the Cartesian cogito, the proper subject of empire is also "the void that remains, the empty distance towards every content" (Zizek, Tarrying 40; Zizek ed. for a number of essays dealing with the Lacanian reading of the Cartesian cogito-, also Lacan 136-48 and passim), then we could also say that the story Las Casas, Sepúlveda and Fernández de Oviedo, among others, tell us is the story of what surrounds the constitutive deconstitution of imperial reason as primitive imperial accumulation. Primitive imperial accumulation is the glissement, or constitutive sliding away, of the difference between the subject of imperial enunciation and its enunciated counterpart: the psychotic night of the world without which no empire could come into the light. Las Casas came closest to expressing it with paragraphs such as the following: Tenía [Alvarado] esta costumbre, que cuando iba a hacer guerra a algunos pueblos o provincias, llevaba de los ya sojuzgados indios cuantos podía que hiciesen guerra a los otros; y como no les daba de comer a diez y a veinte mil hombres que llevaba, consentíales que comiesen a los indios que tomasen. Y así había en su real solenísima carnecería de carne humana, donde en su presencia se mataban los niños y se asaban, y

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Alberto Moreiras mataban el hombre por solas las manos y los pies, que tenían por los mejores bocados. Y con estas inhumanidades, oyéndolas todas las otras gentes de las de otras tierras, no sabían dónde se meter de espanto. (119-20) [Alvarado] had this custom: when he went to make war to some people or provinces, he would take along as many as he could of the already subjected Indians capable of making war to the others; and since he did not feed those ten or twenty thousand men he carried with him, he would allow them to eat the Indians they took. Thus there was in his camp a most solemn butchery of human flesh, where in his presence they would kill and roast the children, and they would kill a man only for his hands and feet, considered the best morcels. And with these inhumanities being heard by all the other peoples in the other lands, they did not know where to hide in their fear.

These acts go well beyond the expropriating interpellation which is in its classic form always a version of the notorious: "your money or your life!" (Lacan 209-14; Dolar 18 ff.). Your money and your life, your thinking and being, your flesh: that is what Alvarado required of his hostages, and he did it unreasonably, as so many others in Las Casas's account. The surplus of subjective enjoyment upon which terror came to be known as the precondition of law in the land constitutes imperial reason at the same time it deconstitutes it. But it is only because its constitution cannot be thought without its deconstitution, it is only because the cogito cannot be thought without its shadowing madness, that imperial reason must posit the unthinkability of a primitive imperial accumulation as its very condition of possibility. In Las Casas imperial reason is already its own critique, just as in Fernández de Oviedo. Imperial reason is always necessarily apotropaic, and all the more so in that it comes to present itself as the empire of reason—today, for instance, as democratic universalism, in the context of which any domination could only be thought of as residual; unless, that is, democratic universalism comes to be accepted as the proper name of controlling domination. The society of control is a society whose most striking characteristic is also that "the dominated are not kept down, nor simply despised, but, rather, that they themselves are permitted, within the territory of the command, to offer their services for the continuation of the domination." Indeed, it may be so for the first time ever in a world scale. If the establishment of a difference remains possible, if a tropological distance is to be found today, not for the apotropaic naturalization of the regime of rule, as in the organic thinkers of empire that think empire through the critique of empire, but rather for its denaturalization, it is perhaps first of all through the thinking of its unthinkable history in Spanish imperial reason; and, consequently, of whatever residual access we may have today to the understanding of a power within control superior to control itself. If thinking the surplus of enjoyment in imperial reason is thinking primitive imperial accumulation, then

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imperial accumulation holds the secret to a deconstitution of the verum—and hence also of what is false and has been set as such. This is another way of thinking the violence of empire.

WORKS CITED

Louis. Machiavelli and Us. Ed. François Matheron. Gregory Elliott transi. London: Verso, 1999. — "The Only Materialist Tradition, Part I: Spinoza." The New Spinoza. Eds. Warren Montag & Ted Stolze. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. 3-19. ARRIGHI, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century. Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso, 1994. CHAKRABARTY, Dipesh. "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History. Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?" A Subaltern Studies Reader 1986-1995. Ed. Ranajit Guha. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. 263-93. DOLAR, Mladen. "Cogito as the Subject of the Unconscious." Ed. Zizek 11-40. DUSSEL, Enrique. Ética de la liberación en la edad de la globalización y de la exclusion. Madrid: Trotta, 1998. FERNÁNDEZ DE OVIEDO Y VALDÉS, Gonzalo. Historia general y natural de las Indias, Islas y Tierra-firme del Mar Océano. 2 Vols. Ed. José Amador de los Ríos. Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1851. — Sumario de la natural historia de las Indias. Ed. Manuel Ballesteros. Madrid: Historia16, 1986. GINÉS DE SEPÚLVEDA, Juan. Tratado sobre las justas causas de la guerra contra los indios [Democrates alter]. Trans. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996. GUHA, Ranajit. "On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India." Selected Subaltern Studies. Eds. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Foreword by Edward Said. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. 37-44. GRAMSCI, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Quentin Hoare & Geoffrey Nowell Smith ed. and transi. New York: International Publishers, 1997. HARDT, Michael. "The Global Society of Control." Discourse 20.3 (1998): 139-52. HEIDEGGER, Martin. Parmenides. Trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992. KRANIAUSKAS, John. "Cronos and the Political Economy of Vampirism: Notes on a Historical Constellation." Cannibalism and the Colonial World. Eds. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 142-157. KLOSSOWSKI, Pierre. Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux. Paris: Mercure de France, 1969. LACAN, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. New York: Norton, 1978. LAS CASAS, Bartolomé de. Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias. André SaintLu ed. Madrid: Cátedra, 1987.

ALTHUSSER,

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LEA, Henry Charles. The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies [1908]. New York: McMillan & Co., 1922. MARX, Karl. Capital. Volume One. Introduction by Ernest Mandel. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage, 1977. PAGDEN, Anthony. Lords of All the World. Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500-c. 1800. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. SEED, Patricia. Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World 14921640. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. SPIVAK, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography." Selected Subaltern Studies 3-32. TAYLOR, Charles. "Two Theories of Modernity." Public Culture 11.1 (1999): 153-74. WALLERSTEIN, Immanuel. The Modern World-System I. Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. San Diego: Academic Press, 1974. ZIZEK, Slavoj, ed. Cogito and the Unconscious. Sic 2. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. — Tarrying with the Negative. Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.

FORGOTTEN COLONIAL SUBJECTS Lucia Helena Costigan

INTRODUCTION

Sixteen years ago, Rolena Adorno ("Nuevas perspectivas") announced the expansion of the canon to include a broad range of discourses produced by colonial subjects that had been previously marginalized because they were not considered relevant for literary studies. Despite being very optimistic with the new paradigm, Adorno urged specialists in colonial literature to continue to cross the frontiers of gender, nation and ethnicity, and to engage in comparative studies related to the experiences of all of the colonial subjects. She also called special attention to the need for comparative studies on oral and written traditions of indigenous peoples, as well as those of African descent, from the Portuguese and the Spanish Americas. Despite her optimism, few comparative studies aimed at analyzing the experience and discourses of subjects of different ethnic groups in the Americas exist. The calls for papers for the forthcoming 2004 convention of the Modern Language Association announced by the Division of Colonial Latin American Literatures are encouraging the opening of the canon, by bringing to the forefront these marginal voices. This symposium on comparative colonial American studies also shows that the suggestions made by Rolena Adorno are still valid today. Since the late 1980s, due to the groundbreaking work of not only Rolena Adorno, but also Walter Mignolo, Stephanie Merrim, Stacy Schlau and other pioneering scholars of Colonial Latin American studies, "new" texts by male and female writers of indigenous and mestizo background, particularly from the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, are being incorporated into the programs of literature and cultural studies. However, texts by colonial subjects from other geographical areas such as Uruguay, Paraguay and other Hispanic areas of Central America and the Caribbean region are often still absent from the programs of colonial Latin American studies taught in the United States and abroad. As for Brazil, because most of the texts produced at that time were written in Portuguese, they are not incorporated into the graduate and undergraduate courses in the so-called Latin American literature; the relatively obscure position of the Portuguese language in the United States is a compelling factor for the absence of Luso-Brazilian texts in the colonial canon. In addition, the contribution of colonial subjects of different ethnic origin, such as those of African, Jewish, in-

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digenous people of Tupi-Guarani, as well as other minority groups is still absent from the literary canon despite the fact that these ethnic and religious groups made up a significant portion of the colonial population. Taking as an example the case of the colonial literary canon in Brazil, one notices that the voices of ethnic groups such as those of writers of African and Jewish origin are absent. One common explanation for this absence is that there are no written texts produced by Blacks before the abolition of slavery in 1882.1 However, a close look into the past and a reading of the poems by Domingos Caldas Barbosa (1740-1800), a mulatto poet who maintained his Afro-Brazilian identity in the Portuguese court, and Luiz Gama (1830-1882) who critized the Brazilian imperial society and denounced the marginalization of the writings by African descendents, dismantles this argument. Another ethnic group that has been silenced by the literary canon (or transformed by later critics and historians into proto-nationalists) is the one formed by descendants of Sephardic Jews that were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula or forced to convert to Catholicism in the last decade of the fifteenth century2. Although prohibited from migrating to the New World, many of them managed to come to the Spanish and the Portuguese Americas during the first three centuries of colonization. This was particularly true in Portuguese America, where these "New Christians" as well as African slaves played a major role as colonial subjects, as the members of the traditional Old Christian society preferred to stay in Portugal or to serve the Portuguese empire in Asia and Africa where gold and spices were abundant. Looking into the past, one finds differences and similarities among colonial subjects of African and Jewish origin. Perhaps the most important difference was the fact that most of the New Christians and conversos who came to the New World were educated people who, like Old Christians, acted as colonizers. As

' Fortunately, groundbraking research by Jan Vansina, Philip Curtin, among other Africanists, followed by the emergence of cultural and postcolonial studies and new research based on archival sources, such as Luiz Felipe de Alencastro's O trato dos viventes: no Atldntico Sul, Afrografias da memoria by Leda Maria Martins, and Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World (1441-1770) by James Sweet, are motivating literary scholars to add to their research agendas the experience of African and African descendants in the colonial Spanish and Portuguese Americas. 2 It was under the rule of the Catholic Kings, Isabel and Fernando, that the Sephardic Jews were expelled or forced to convert to Catholicism (in Spain this happened in 1492 and Portugal followed suit in 1496). After the forced conversions, the Jews who remained in the Spanish and Portuguese lands became known as New Christians or conversos. Due to the discrimination that they suffered after the imposition of Catholicism, some of them returned to Judaism as a form of resistance against the religious and political impositions of the Old Christians. In this paper the New Christians and conversos who practiced Judaism in secret are referred to as crypto-Jews.

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slaves, Africans were uneducated, dehumanized and treated as property. But there were certain similarities between the two groups as well, such as the fact that they had been prohibited to practice the religion of their ancestors. Many Africans and Jews who came to the New World had to rely on oral tradition and on collective memory to recreate and to maintain their cultural and religious beliefs. Because religious groups such as Muslims and Jews were seen as a constant threat to the Catholic Church, enslaved Africans and New Christians that lived in the New World were often accused of being heretics, which in turn made them targets of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Today, those Africans and New Christians have something else in common — they have both been marginalized by the canon of colonial Latin American literary and cultural studies. 3 In this paper I will focus on the colonial discourse of subjects of Jewish origin, using as example the case of Bento Teixeira, a Portuguese New Christian who lived in Brazil during the second part of the sixteenth century. The experiences of this special group of colonial subjects will enrich the canon and contribute to our understanding of the complex political, economic, and cultural issues related to Spanish American and Luso-Brazilian societies of the early modern times. Colonial subjects of Jewish origin offer excellent comparative studies involving not only the Spanish and Portuguese colonies but also the various trans- or circum- Atlantic empires. Writings by letrados who were persecuted by the Inquisition under suspicion of crypto-Judaism or practicing Judaism secretly, such as Luis de Carvajal, the Younger (1567-1596), Bento Teixeira (1561-1600), and Antonio José da Silva (1705-1739), are potentially of canonical importance to Latin American literature. In the book Jews and other differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies, Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin also recognize that the Jewish experience has much to offer to postcolonial and cultural studies related to the black Atlantic or the Indian diaspora.4 3 Except for a few initiative by specialists in colonial literature such as Margaret Olsen (who has studied the representation of Africans in colonial texts) and Kathryn McKnight (who is currently working on archival sources related to the experience of African slaves with the Inquisition), African subjects are still missing from the Latin American literature programs taught in most of the universities in the United States. 4 Research and critique of Jewish culture has much to offer to the cultural studies community as well, much that is specific enough to Jewish cultural history to be most richly articulated there but nevertheless applicable and useful in other cultural studies as well. Let us take, for example, the issue of diaspora. (...) Cultures of peoples in diaspora, their cultural preservation, and the doubled consciousness of such peoples-as well as the ways that diaspora becomes paradigmatic of a certain cultural condition in the postcolonial era tout court-ins increasingly vivid areas of thought within the paradigm. The Jewish diaspora, for which the term was invented, provides the longest history of diasporic cultural survival and production. Thus both its details and its theorization have much to offer to scholar-critics whose primary areas of focus are the black Atlantic or the Indian diaspora, for example. (Boyarin x-xi)

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Written and oral discourse of crypto-Jews who lived in Mexico, and their resistance to what Serge Gruzinski described as "la guerra de las imágenes" that ocurred in New Spain during the second part of the sixteenth century have not yet been addressed by specialists in colonial Latin American studies. One excellent example is Luis de Carvajal, a descendent of Portuguese New Christians who wrote poems and an intriguing testimonial work titled Memorias, which is rarely included in the programs of colonial literature. Historians such as Martin Cohen, Seymour Liebman and Alfonso Toro have written about him. However, because they attempted to present him as a humble martyr of the Jewish faith, and did not incorporate into their studies passages from Carvajal's poems and Memorias, they fail to show the resistance to the colonization of the imaginary present in discourse. Taking advantage of the oral confessions demanded by the inquisitors, he used rhetorical arguments to express overtly and covertly his opposition to and resistance against the imposed colonial system and religious order. Historians also have failed to explore the allegorical and rhetorical language found in his literary writings such as his poetry and his testimony as hidden messages to other crypto-Jews and as a resource to cope with persecution and torture through defiance and assertion of the Jewish faith. Some literary critics such as Jesús García Gutiérrez (La poesía religiosa en México, 1919), and Alfonso Méndez Planearte (.Poetas novohispanos 1521-1621, 1942), have included a few of Carvajal's poems in their anthologies, but they have presented the poems as religious works of questionable literary value. Although this may partly explain the exclusion of his discourse from the canon, one should also consider it likely that it was primarily because Carvajal affirmed his Jewishness through his writings that he was excluded. Antonio José da Silva (1705-1739) was a Creole crypto-Jew born in Brazil who was forced, along with his family, to go to Portugal to face the Inquisition, which eventually executed him. While in Portugal, he wrote several plays, mostly based on mythological themes. However, many of these works also contained subtle traces of resentment of the persecution and the trials he and his family were going through. His plays subtly challenged the decadent aristocracy of the time. The true value of his works is in this resistance, but many Brazilian critics have lauded his works only by seizing on his Brazilian-born status and seeing in him a Brazilian proto-nationalist. Few of them consider the importance of hidden resistance in those same works. In the case of Bento Teixeira, who had migrated from Portugal to Brazil around the same time that Luis de Carvajal came to New Spain, and who died in the cells of the Portuguese Inquisition in 1600, a similar situation occurred.

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T H E COLONIAL CANON AND THE BRAZILIANIZATION OF B E N T O TEIXEIRA

Bento Teixeira was born to New Christian parents in the city of Porto around 1561 who moved to Brazil when he was five years old. He studied with the Jesuits in the city of Salvador (Bahia), and became a man of letters fluent in Latin and Hebrew, and who was very familiar with mythology, Kaballah, classic and renaissance texts. Upon completing his education he married Filipa Raposa, a woman considered to be from an Old Christian family. To cope with the economic responsibilities of marriage, Bento moved to Pernambuco where, besides being a teacher, he found time to write, to translate the Old Testament from Hebrew into Portuguese, and to act as counselor for other descendants of Jews who lived in the region. As a result of the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in 1580, visitations of the Holy Office of the Inquisition were introduced in Brazil. It was during the first visitation to the Northeast of Brazil (1591-1595) that Bento became a victim of the Holy Office. Denounced before the representative of the Holy Office as a heretic, Bento Teixeira was jailed in 1595 in Recife, and in 1596 was transferred to the Inquisition's cells in Lisbon. He remained in the jail of the Inquisition until January 31,1599, when he participated in an autoda-fé and apparently abjured Judaism. As a result of his apparent repentance, instead of burning at the stake, Bento received the penitential garment "sambenito," and was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in Lisbon under the eyes and the care of a Catholic priest. However, shortly after his release from the Inquisition jails he died of tuberculosis in July 1600. The year following his death, his epic poem Prosopopéia appeared in a book entitled Naufràgio, que passou Jorge Dalbuquerque Coelho, Capitao,& Governador de Pernambuco. Perhaps to escape censorship by the Inquisition, the poem was strategically placed between a text entitled Relagào do naufràgio que fez o mesmo Jorge Coelho vindo de Pernambuco, which had been previously published, and a poem entitled Soneto per eccos. After the publication of Prosopopéia in 1601, it took more than a hundred and fifty years before the name Bento Teixeira appeared again in printed document. This happened in 1741 when the Portuguese bibliographer Diego Barbosa Machado (1682-1772) wrote an entry on the New Christian poet for his monumental work Biblioteca Lusitana (17411759). Mistakenly, Barbosa Machado stated in his entry that Bento was born in Brazil. He also thought that the correct name of the poet was Bento Teixeira Pinto. Due to this mistake Brazilian literary critics of the 19th and 20th century rescued the Prosopopéia from obscurity because they assumed that Bento Teixeira was a Brazilian poet. In 1873, when the epic poem was published in Brazil for the first time, Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen (1816-1878) discovered that the correct name of the poet was Bento Teixeira and that he had been a victim of the Inquisition, but the critics did not show any interest in his Inquisition process.

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Because Bento Teixeira did not overtly assert his Jewishness, and "passed" as Christian, that his poem Prosopopéia was included in some of the anthologies of Brazilian literature. However, due to the emphasis on the aesthetic criteria, Brazilian critics who first interpreted Bento Teixeira's literary work described it as poorly written and insignificant, particularly when compared to Luís de Camoes's Os Lusiadas, the most important epic written in Portuguese, and upon which Teixeira modeled his own work. In the second part of the 19"1 century, guided by the theory of hermeneutics developed in Germany and introduced in Brazil by Ferdinand Denis and Almeida Garret, critics such as José Veríssimo, Silvio Romero and Oliveira Lima, among others, admitted that the Prosopopéia was a mere imitation of Camoes, but saved it from obscurity because they considered it an early work of Brazilian nationalism. Other Brazilian critics that wrote about Bento Teixeira in the first part of the 20th century repeated the same ideas that had been expressed previously by Romantic and post-Romantic writers. In the fifties and early sixties, when New Criticism, and the ideas of Ezra Pound's prescription "make it new," became fashionable in Brazil, the teleological premises of traditional hermeneutics emerged again. As a defender of the aesthetic-evolutionary and psychological critical approach, Afranio Coutinho promoted appropriations of the past to compose a type of anthology of the supposedly greatest moments of Brazilian literature. In his book, A tradigáo afortunada, he states: O espírio de nacionalidade, tal como foi definido pela crítica do século anterior constitui o trago dominante das letras brasileiras e o alicerce da literatura do século xx. Aqui, toda a produfáo literaria é na base do genio brasileiro. (...) Porque é original a produ?áo literária desde a Colonia, a literatura brasileira é nacional a partir de entao. (Coutinho 179) Coutinho agreed with the 19th century critics of the Brazilian Romanticism era, who felt that the writings produced in Brazil during the colonial period were already Brazilian. To Coutinho, the early poets and writers, along with the 19th century critics and the Modernists that planned the "Semana de Arte Moderna" (Week of Modern Art) in April, 1922, were the founding fathers of Brazilian nationalism. This defender of New Criticism, like the Romantic critics before him, stated that the writings of 16th century writers such as Bento Teixeira's Prosopopéia "já testemunham o caráter nacional em forma§áo." (Coutinho 139).5

5 In opposition to the hermeneutic consensus, there has been more recently in Brazil a very significant revival of rhetoric and poetics as critical practices in analysis of Portuguese America's letters. This new critical perspective is based on an attempt to reconstruct the rules of meaning production used to create those texts. The rhetorical-poetic model confronts the artistic meaning of a text as historical contingency and tries to understand this very meaning as a result of the logical operations of well-established norms.

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Recent studies on Bento Teixeira by Sonia Aparecida Siqueira, Luis Roberto Alves are taking into consideration the inquisitional process of the poet, thereby avoiding the aesthetic and hermeneutic consensus and embarking on a historicist reading of the Prosopopeia. While these new studies are very positive because they do not insist in presenting Bento Teixeira as a proto-nationalist poet, they fail to properly situate the rhetorical, theological and political systems in which the poem was written. For example, Luiz Roberto Alves's Confissao poesia e Inquisigao (1983), (to date the only book that analyzes Teixeira's literary writings in the light of his inquisitorial trial) fails to recognize the fact that most of the criticism evident 'between the lines' of his epic poem was directed to the Spanish king Philip II, at the time the ruler of all Portuguese lands. This happened mainly because Alves limited his analysis to the concept of "colonial" Brazil (linked solely to Portugal), and did not consider the broader imperial context in which Portugal and Brazil were situated, especially between 1580 and 1640, when the Lusitanian lands were under the rule of the Spanish kings.

BENTO TEIXEIRA'S PROSOPOP£IA:

TEXT AND CONTEXT

Bento Teixeira's literary work can not be understood without a close look at his Inquisition process, and without situating his discourse—which includes his epic and his confessions— within the context of the early modern empires. Through many of the written confessions found in Bento Teixeira's Inquisition process (Processo 5.206 da Inquisigao de Lisboa) housed in the National Archives of Torre do Tombo, in Lisbon, one can see the vast network and the web of connections among individuals of Jewish heritage that had been dispersed from Portugal and forced refuge in the New World, in the Netherlands and other parts of Europe. As displaced subjects during the rule of Philip II, New Christians and Jews played a crucial role within the larger context of the Atlantic and Mediterranean world. It is clear from Bento Teixeira's trial that the Dutch capitalized on the resources and knowledge of the Portuguese New Christians to conquer Brazil and other strategic areas of the Spanish empire. One also sees glimpses of imperial rivalry between Spain and England, and also between Spain and the Dutch. The fluidity

As the meaning does not derive from nature, but from relationships established by culture and its unstable conventions, history and the particular moment of enunciation are responsible for generating textual meaning. This kind of systematic historicist reading of Portuguese America's letters is found in A Satira e O Engenho: Gregorio de Matos e a Bahia do Seculo xvn, published in 1989, and also in the work of Alcir Pecora and Ivan Teixeira. Hansen initiates a decisive practice to justify this point of view by reconstructing "rhetorical, theological and political systems" implicit in the foundations of seventeenth century satire.

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of imperial and colonial borders can be seen through the commercial and personal connections among New Christians from Brazil and other parts of the New World, particularly those from Perú, Cartagena de Indias and Tucumán. Through his process one can also study the jails of the inquisition, and the contacts and behaviors of the accused. Because traditional literary critics were concerned only with aesthetic or proto-nationalist ideas, and perhaps because they believed that Bento Teixeira's process was a document that belonged to historians, they missed these important points. To bridge the gap that exists between historians and literary critics, and also in an attempt to cross the "great divide" that John Elliot detects in colonial studies, and to leave the "academic confinement" that Norman Fiering sees in the Americanists who specialize on the colonial period, this paper will situate Bento Teixeira in the broad imperial and transatlantic context of the late sixteenth century. The objective is to show that his discourse, when situated within the broader context of the imperial world in which was produced, works as a puzzle piece that sheds light into the imperial and colonial past. Although most of the critics regard the Prosopopéia as an insignificant poem that "imitates" Os Lusiadas, they forget that Camoes, like other poets before him, had also modeled his poems on Virgil's Aeneid and on the writings of other classic Latin and Greek and poets. One should also consider the fact that in the art of imitatio, praise and subversion were usually equally present. In a time when the Inquisition determined the fate of a text, the writers also relied on "imitation" to escape censorship and to have their books published. It is possible that Bento Teixeira chose to model his poem after The Lusiads to pay homage to the beloved Portuguese poet, and also to escape censorship by the Inquisition. It is relevant to note that Camoes' epic was published for the first time in 1572, just eight years before Dom Sebastiao, the unmarried Portuguese king, disappeared in the Battle of Alcácer Kibir in 1578, leaving Portugal without an heir to the throne. Critics who compare The Lusiads to Prosopopéia have not looked past certain superficial similarities, such as structure. On a deeper level, the works are quite different, primarily because they were written before and after the traumatic loss of the Portuguese king. The Lusiads is about Portuguese imperial expansion in Asia and Africa, whereas Prosopopéia focuses primarily on Brazil and Pernambuco, and on how Portugal is coping with the new reality of their loss of sovereignty. The Lusiads also glorify Christian expansion; for example, in canto 5, it praises Vasco da Gama's voyage that brought the "faith in Christ" to the capes, the islands and the African kingdoms where the Portuguese had sailed with Gama. Prosopopéia does not praise Christianity or imperial expansion. Jorge de Albuquerque Coelho, the "hero" to whom Teixeira dedicates his epic, was a soldier from Brazil, who had fought the lost battle of Alcácer Kibir, in which Dom Sebastiao and all but one hundred of his army of over twenty thousand soldiers died or disappeared. Teixeira praises the

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courage of the soldier from Brazil who had been enslaved and humiliated. He also consoles the suffering Portuguese people who had lost their power, their monarch, and had become unwilling subjects of the Spanish empire. Particularly suffering under the new king were the New Christians, and Prosopopeia contains many hidden messages of resistance for them. These messages begin with the title itself. Prosopopeia, from the Greek prosopon (person), can be interpreted as the "person behind the mask." This sends Teixeira's first message: look for hidden meanings under the surface. The Jewish poet seeks inspiration in God, and rejects the help of the pagan muses that inspired Camoes. The Greek deities who appear in Teixeira's poem share aspects in common with crypto-Jews: Proteus, who had the power to assume any shape he pleased, and Thalia, a deity who holds a mask in her hands, both represent the dissimulation that crypto-Jews were forced to adopt. Proteus, according to Greek mythology, besides having the power of transformation and metamorphosis, also enjoyed the gift of prophecy, occupies the major part of the Prosopopeia. Proteus has traditionally been associated with old age, wisdom, and immortality. Because in mythology he had the power to change forms, to hide and escape (often in the deepness of the ocean) from those who wanted something from him, Proteus thus became an irresistible protagonist for the New Christian poet. Proteus's gifts of prophecy and metamorphosis correspond to the attributes of many of the great Jewish prophets — such as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. All these prophets used dissimulation to escape persecution from enemies. Proteus, who changed his form, who could interpret dreams, and who had power over water, could be identified with Moses — as well as with Bento Teixeira and his own crypto-Jewish brethren, currently hiding from the Inquisition. The iconography that appears at the opening and closing of the Prosopopeia is also significant. There are two images in the work. The first appears on the title page and is of a ship sailing in rough waters. This image symbolizes journeys, peregrination, or crossings, by the living or by the dead. The boat itself a secure way to effect this crossing, and has often been seen to represent the role of religion in overcoming the difficulties of life's travails. It is significant to note that a popular translation of the bible available in Portuguese in Teixeira's time had a very similar image on the title page as well.6 The second image that appears at the end of the poem is a pelican feeding three chicks in a nest. A water bird (which brings us back to Proteus and Moses),

6

This bible, known as the Ferrara bible, was printed by the family of Abraham ben Usque, who as a Portuguese Jew, was first forced to change his name to Duarte Pinhel and then to flee to Italy, where he and many others like him found refuge in the military city of Ferrara.

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the pelican feeds its young with its own blood. Because of this, the pelican has been adopted by Christian tradition as representative of Christ, who shared his own blood during communion. However, the pelican has another ancient interpretation: by passing along its own blood, the pelican, much like the phoenix, came to symbolize immortality and rebirth (for Christians, the pelican also represented Lazarus, who rose from the dead). It is this double meaning that Teixeira intended: Judaism might be in danger now, but it, like the phoenix, would be reborn. According to Arnold Wiznitzer the Lisbon synagogue in the time of Teixeira (closed in 1496 when forced conversion was imposed upon the Jews) had on the front door the figure of a pelican. One finds many other crypto-Je wish messages throughout the Prosopopéia. One of them can be found in the dedication. The poem was dedicated to Jorge de Albuquerque Coelho, governor of Pernambuco. This was different from other epics of the time, such as Os Lusiadas and La Araucana. Following the rules of their times, Camôes dedicated his epic to the Portuguese king Dom Sebastiâo, and Alonso de Ercilla dedicated La Araucana to the Spanish king Philip II. Two major facts may explain why Bento Teixeira did not dedicate his epic poem to the king, and chose instead to dedicate it to Jorge Coelho de Albuquerque, a marginal figure of little importance outside Pernambuco. First, because the governor's father, Duarte Coelho, had welcomed New Christians in Brazil, years before, when he became the captain of Pernambuco. Second, because he wanted to voice his opposition to the Spanish domination of Portugal, and to the policies of Philip II toward the descendents of Portuguese New Christians. Not only a source of subtle messages from one ciypto-Jew to his brethren, Prosopopéia is also a poem of subtle, but strong resistance against the Spanish domination. As the verses that follow suggest, the poet seemed to be encouraging the Portuguese people who were suffering persecution to find the strength to face the difficulties that they experienced after the disappearance of King Dom Sebastiâo: Neste tempo Sebasto Lusitano, (65) 7 Da fome, & da sede, do rigor passando, E outras faltas em fim dificultosas Convém-vos adquirir uma força nova Que o fim as cousas examina, e prova. (59) (In this Sebastian Lusitane time, / passing through hunger, thirst, / and other hardships even worse, / you should acquire a new power/ that examines and tries things at the final hour.)

7 The page numbers that appear after the Portuguese citations of Bento Teixeira's pic are from the orthographic updated edition of Prosopopeia published by Celso Cunha and Carlos Duval.

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The verses above allude to the intensification of sufferings of the Portuguese people after the death of Dom Sebastiao. The poetic voice urges them to acquire a new strength and power to face of the many adversities that they are experiencing. The intensification of hardships that the Portuguese people, and particularly the New Christians, faced after 1580, can be documented with the passages of Teixeira's trial. The findings of historians like Joao Lucio de Azevedo, David M. Gitlitz and Gordon M. Weiner, among others, point to the intensification of persecution of Portuguese New Christians after the coronation of Philip II as king of Portugal in 1580.8 A careful reading between the lines shows clearly that the Prosopopeia intertextualizes Os Lusiadas in communicating messages of hope and resistance to other Portuguese New Christians who were forced to disperse after the imposed conversions that occurred in the last decade of the 15th century, and also after 1580, when Philip II of Spain declared himself king of Portugal. The verses that follow illustrate this argument: - Companheiros leais, a quem no Core Das Musas tem a fama entronizado, Nao deveis ignorar, que nao ignore, Os trabalhos que haveis no Mar passado. Respondestes 'te 'gora com o fore, Devido a nosso Luso celebrado, Mostrando-vos mais firmes contra a sorte Do que ela contra nos se mostra forte. (59) (Loyal companions, whom the choir / of Muses have enthroned to fame, / ignore ye not (as I do not) / the labor ye have spent at sea, / until now ye have responded with the forum, / Owing to our celebrated Luso, / Showing yourselves firm against fate, / which, arrayed against us, is shown to be great.)

Verses that allude to collective sufferings and resistance, such as "Os trabalhos que haveis no Mar passado," and "Respondestes 'te 'gora com o foro/ ... Mostrando-vos mais firmes contra a sorte / Do que ela contra nos se mostra forte"

8 Joao Lucio de Azevedo explains that in order to get rid of the New Christians who lived in Portugal, Philip II obtained a special permission from the Pope that limited their benefits. In his words: "interveio Filipe II, alcanzando de Xisto V a proibifao de serem providos em beneficios individuos de linhagem hebraica" (151). (Philip II intervened, coercing Pope Xixto V to prohibit special benefits to those of Hebrew heritage.) David M. Gitlitz documents that in the last twenty years of the sixteenth century "more than fifty autos-da-fé" took place in Portugal (52). Gordon M. Weiner affirms that "After the Inquisition began in earnest in Portugal in 1536, and especially after the unification of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in 1580, there was a dramatic increase in Sephardic migration" (190).

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(59), are a reference to the persecution suffered by the Lusitanian of Jewish origin. They can also be seen as manifestation of the Lurianic Kabbalah movement that spread throughout the Old and the New World in the 16th and the 17th century, in response to the apocalyptic times experienced by Jewish exiles from the Iberian Peninsula that started in the last decade of the 15th century. After the disappearance of Dom Sebastiao in 1578, and the subsequent annexation of Portugal to the Spanish Empire in 1580, the cataclysmic experiences felt by the Portuguese people in general and the New Christians in particular gave origin to Sebastianism, a popular messianic movement that spread throughout Portugal and its colonies. Taking advantage of topoi of Renaissance of Baroque poetry on the instability of life, such as the verses "O sorte tao cruel, como mudavel," (Oh fate so cruel, so changing) (43) and "Neste tempo Sebasto Lusitano," (65) the poet seems to be allegorically referring to the uncertainty of the lives of New Christians who lived in the Portuguese empire at that time. Going against the norm of ancient epic tradition that attributed justice and other virtues to the king, this poetic voice does exactly the contrary. It denounces the king's injustice and lack of sincerity with his subjects: Mas quem por seus servijos bons nao herda Desgosta de fazer cousa lustrosa, Que a condi§ao do Rei que nao e franco O vassalo faz ser nas obras manco. (33) (But he who for his good works inherits / no dislike for doing a worthy thing, / If frankness is not the condition of the King, / in his works, the vassal is without merit.)

In stanza XXXIV the poetic voice again criticizes the king. This time it is the despotism and the ingratitude of the monarch that the poet attacks: Mas, quando virem que do Rei potente O pai por seus services nao alcanna O galardao devido e gloria digna, Ficarao nos alpendres da Piscina. 9 (43) (But, when they saw that from the mighty King, / the father receives for his work / neither due reward nor glory dignified, / they remained at the edge of the bethel.)

9 In note 8 of stanza XXXIV Cunha e Duval explain that the verse "Ficarao nos alpendres da Piscina" corresponds to "Ficarao a espera das merces reais" (117). This expression puts in evidence the power of the king. They also explain that the word Piscina, derived from the Latin term Piscis, corresponds to the Hebrew term Bethsaida or Bethesda, a biblical word that means lake, fountain, and place of healing. The Hebrew meaning of this word that appears in capital letters reinforces the idea of crypto-Jewish and messianic messages encoded in Bento Teixeira's poem.

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Silvio Romero detected a gesture of colonial resistance in these verses. He affirms in his Historia da literatura brasileira that the poem "encerra urna certa dose de humor satírico,- urna censura aos reis descuidados e inúteis." (362) However, due to the fact that he did not take into consideration the larger imperial context to which the poem was connected, Romero failed to understand that far more than "a certain dose of satirical humor and criticism against the careless and good for nothing kings," the poet from Pernambuco could very well be using his verses as an expression of resistance and criticism. This criticism was directed at Philip II, a king known among Spaniards by the nickname "Prudent," but who that was regarded by the Portuguese people in general (and the descendants of Jews in particular) as a controlling ruler who tried to get rid of the New Christians who lived in Portugal. As I have attempted to prove in other articles,10 based on passages of Bento Teixeira's inquisitional trial, the poet seemed to have regarded Philip II and his political and religious zeal as a threat to all descendants of Jews who lived in all corners of the Spanish Empire. A passage from his trial clearly shows the poet's opposition to the policies of the monarch regarding New Christians. In one of the statements written in the inquisition jails, the poet explains that he and other Portuguese New Christians caught by the inquisition had to pay large sums of money for forgiveness of their sins, and that even after the payment they did not obtain the pardon promised by the royal Highness, and the social stigma linked to their ethnic and religious past was never lifted: Mostrem este capítulo aos que vao para Madri, e digam-lhes que nao reparem com sua real Magestade em dinheiro inda que seja dar-lhe um milháo e meio d'ouro, porque pelo capítulo desta me obrigo a dar eu só 30.000 cruzados de letras passadas á vista e mais me obrigo só no Brasil tirar 400.000 cruzados. ("Quinto Aviso" Processo 5.206)

Here the poet implies that the Inquisition became harsher toward New Christians during the ruling of Philip II.11 Another passage found in his process makes clear that the policies of the Spanish emperor hurt New Christians: Estes anos atrás mandou El-Rei Filipe visitar as inquisifoes deste reino... as quais visitou Martin Gon§alves da Cámara, que em tempo del Rei Sebastiáo governou o reino todo. E tal seja a sua saúde e vida, qual foi a visita que ele fez, que se antes disto prendiam muita gente da na§ao mais prendem agora e penitenciam. ("Título das palavras que usam a gente da na9áo," Processo 5.206 )

10 See "A experiência do converso letrado Bento Teixeira ..." (1994), and "Empreendimento e resistencia do cristâo-novo face à política de Filipe II: ... " (2003). " Similar to Os Lusiadas and La Araucana by Ercilla the Prosopopéia breaks away from the rules of the ancient epic tradition by incorporating autobiographical elements in the poem.

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(Some years ago King Philip ordered the Inquisitions to come to this kingdom (...). Martim Gon^alves da Camara visited them, he who in the time of King Sebastian governed the whole kingdom. And such be his health and life, which was the visit he made, that if they have [previously] seized many people from the land, even more do they seize now and punish.) Prosopopeia praises Pernambuco for the generosity of its fauna and flora, for the courage of its people, and its port that functioned as a safe haven for those seeking refuge and a better life in the New World: Para a parte do Sul, onde a pequena Ursa se ve de guardas rodeada, Onde o Ceo luminoso mais serena Tem sua influi9ao, e temperada; Junto da Nova Lusitania ordena A natureza, mae bem atentada, Um porto tao quieto e tao seguro, Que para as curvas Naus serve de Muro. (31) (For the southern part, where the Ursa Minor / sees itself surrounded by guards, / where the luminous Heavens most serene / have influence and temperance; / Next to New Lusitania / Nature, a caring mother, arrays / a port so quiet and safe that it serves / as a wall for ships within its curves.) In the verses above, the poet depicts Nova Lusitania (today Pernambuco) as a locus ameno where one could find security. The capital of Nova Lusitania, Recife, is transformed in Bento Teixeira's epic into a kind of "Earthly Paradise" or "Promised Land" where anyone could find peace and prosperity. In this, and in other aspects, Prosopopeia shares commonalties with documents written in the last quarter of the sixteenth century by those who rebelled against Philip II, due to his controlling attitude. Teixeira and other Portuguese New Christians who lived in the New World shared the hostility of Dutch rebels. Teixeira's subtle (but strong) criticism of Philip II's politics, his empathy with the Lusitanian people, and the view of northern Brazil as a place of hope and salvation, echo the attitude that emerges from the following words of William of Orange: ... if in all Spaine they had bin able to have founde a tyraunt, more fit to exercise tyrannie upon the poore Portugales then he [Philip II]. (90) ... for amongst the Indies and in other places, where they [Spaniards] commaunded absolutety, they yeelded to evident a proofe, of their perverse, naturall disposition, and tyrannous affection and will. (Apologie 53)

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William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, known in the Portuguese-speaking world as Guilherme I de Nassau (1533-1584), was considered by the Spanish monarch to be the architect of Dutch rebellions against the Spanish in 1576. The persecution of William of Orange was launched on March 15, 1580 through the "Proclamation and an Edict in form of a Proscription" written by Philip II and sent to the Catholic kingdoms of Europe. The Spanish monarch not only accused William of Nassau of being a terrorist and "the cheefe Captaine and disturber of the state of Christendome," (150) but also offered aid and a major reward for anyone who would hunt and kill the Prince, described by the king "as a publique plague," a heretic, a hypocrite, and an evil person. Before being killed, William of Orange wrote an apology defending himself from the accusations of the king (Apologie Against the Proclamation of the King of Spain, 1581). In this apology, he employed a subtle rhetoric, making it clear that it was the King of Spain, not William of Orange, who was the one terrorizing the world: For, if the King of Spaine ...having all the world thorowe published, that I am a publike plague, an enemie of the world, unthankfull, unfaithfull, a traytor, and a wicked person: these are such injuries that no gentleman, (Sir) can or ought to endure. I do at this present and declare thereby, that the faultes, wherewith the King of Spaine mindeth to charge me, belong unto him selfe. 12 (3; italics his)

In the same period that he was being challenged by William of Orange in the netherlands, "the Prudent King" also had to face the opposition of Dom Antonio, prior of Crato, a Lusitanian prince who was born from a son of king Dom Manuel and a New Christian woman, and who challenged Philip II's right to the Portuguese crown. In Portugal the King persecuted not only Dom Antonio and his followers but also all the subjects that had Jewish blood. This fact can be confirmed by the correspondence exchanged between the Spanish king and his nephew the Archduke Albert of Austria, who between the years 1586-1593 accumulated the positions of Cardenal, viceroy and general Inquisitor of Portugal. It

12 The Apologie of Prince William of Orange Against the Proclamation of the King of Spaine. Edited after the English edition of 1581, by H. Wansink. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969, p. 2. A énfase em itálico se encontra no texto original. Segundo Benjamin Schmidt, seguindo os passos dos rebeldes propagandistas e buscando urna ampia audiencia internacional, o príncipe batavo publicou a Apologia originalmente em francés, traduzindo-a imediatamente para o holandés, alemao, latim e inglés. Schmidt afirma que poucos meses após a publicado do texto os representantes gerais das Provincias Unidas reiteraram o argumento de Guilherme I de Nassau ao acusar Felipe II da Espanha de buscar "to abolish all the privileges of country and have it tyrannically governed by the Spanish like the Indies." Cf. nota 16 de B. Schmidt, "The Hope of the Netherlands: Menasseh ben Israel and the Dutch Idea of America." In: Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering, Eds. The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 86-106.

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was during this time that the visitations of the Holy Office were introduced in Brazil. A letter found in the Archivo General de Simancas reveals that Philip II had ordered the Archduke to expel the descendents of Jews from Portugal. In a reply letter sent to his uncle on August 9, 1586, the Archduke writes: Por muitas vezes tratei a importancia de que he irem-se desta Cidade [Lisboa] os judeus que nella andào. E VMe. o tem assi mandado, E por mais diligencias que nisso se fizerào, até agora nào foi possivel acabarem de se ir ... (Secretarías Provinciales, Libro 1550) (Many times I have noted how important it is that the Jews of this City [Lisbon] leave. And Your Royal Magesty has ordered so. However, despite all the efforts made toward this end, until now it has not been possible to see that all of them leave...)

The letter above reveals that Philip II of Spain was behind the dispersion of the many Portuguese Jews in the last decades of the sixteenth century. Since Bento Teixeira suggests in his trial that after the death of Dom Sebastiào and the coronation of Phillip II as king of Portugal New Christians were persecuted by the Inquisition even more than before, it is clear that the encoded messages of the Prosopopéia are directed to other New Christians and Sephardic Jews who played an active role in the imperial rivalries involving Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch interests during the sixteenth and the seventeenth century. This is similar to what Camoes and Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga (1533-94) had done previously, and as detected by James Nicolopulos—"in these poems the hallowed accidental practice of imitatio ... poetic imitation, far from serving as mere digressive ornament... played a key role in the construction of a new 'poetics' of imperialist expansion" (ix). Different however from CamSes' Os Lusiadas and Ercilla's La Araucana, epics that share in common "vital rivalry and dialogue" (xi), Bento Teixeira's Prosopopéia does not defend the ultramarine expansion as a messianic mission reserved for the Christians of Portugal and Spain. Instead, the verses of Prosopopéia show it to be a poetic, messianic, and religious poem that assigns a central role to the descendants of Sephardic Jews in the imperial expansion to the West.13 It seems that the persecution of Jews and New Christians backfired: "Bento Teixeira and Luis de Carvajal are case studies that show that in the late 16th century the persecution of Philip II led to the dispersal of knowledgeable Portuguese Judaizers throughout the Iberian world, providing a number of atrophying cryptoJewish communities with an influx of fresh information and fresh zeal" (Gitlitz 232).

13 The poem also shares commonalties with documents written in the last quarter of the sixteenth century by the Dutch rivals of Philip II, such as The Apologie of Prince William of Orange Against the Proclamation of the King ofSpaine(1581), a sense of empathy with the Portuguese people, and a messianic hope for the New World.

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Benjamin Schmidt has studied the impact of the Dutch Revolt against Spain (1568-1648) and the ferocious war of words waged by the rebel party. He concludes that as a result of the work of the polemicists close to the Prince of Orange, "from the assumption of mutual suffering between the Dutch and the inhabitants of the New World, evolved a more ambitious notion of a tactical alliance between those two 'nations' that most intimately knew the misrule of Spain." (93 Therefore, the depiction of the northern regions of Brazil as a place of promise and salvation that emerge in Prosopopeia fits the imperial rivalries that helped to broaden the geography of the Netherlands during the late sixteenth century. The messianic role of Pernambuco envisaged by Bento Teixeira was fulfilled when, after the Dutch invasion of Pernambuco in 1630, Recife and the region described in the Prosopopeia, were transformed into a place where people from different religions, social, and ethnic background experienced prosperity and harmony. This was especially true between 1636 and 1644, under the rule of Joan Mauritz van Nassau-Siegen, the grandson of William of Orange's brother. 14

CONCLUSION

The writings of colonial subjects of Jewish origin, such as Luis de Carvajal in Spanish America, and Bento Teixeira and Antonio José da Silva in Portuguese America are part of a micro-discourse that contributes toward the understanding of the macro-discourse of colonial subjects who lived in the Americas and the Atlantic World during the modern imperial/colonial times. Their literary and inquisition texts cover events that, although they have been well studied separately, have never been examined as a collective whole because scholars working on colonial Latin America rarely look beyond the confinements of the geographic borders of the nation states. To dismiss these writers and their works as poor poetry, bad copies of better poems, or proto-nationalism of dubious value is to overlook their true value. Sixteen years later, we are still waiting for Rolena Adorno's words to come true. While advances have been made in certain areas, notably New Spain and Peru, there are still too many marginalized literatures and texts in the field of colonial Latin American literature. These works merit inclusion into the canon because they have a deep intrinsic historical value. The work of establishing a place for them in the colonial canon has barely begun.

14 Arnold Wiznitzer explains that from 1630 until 1654 Recife, the capital of Pernambuco became the first vibrant center for Jewish life in the New World. He also says that in the Sepharic congregation Zur Israel located in Recife "all Jews were considered citizens of the Jewish community, enjoying equal rights . . . " ( 1 1 ) .

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ARCHIVAL SOURCES

Processo 5.206 da Inquisigäo de Lisboa. (Microfilme 633) Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisboa. Secretarías Provinciales, Libro 1550. Archivo General de Simancas. (Microfilme)

WORKS CITED

Rolena. "Nuevas perspectivas en los estudios literarios coloniales." Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana 28 (1988): 11-27. ALENCASTRO, Luiz Felipe de. O trato dos viventes: Formando do Brasil no Atlántico Sul. Sào Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000. ALVES, Luiz Roberto. Confissäo, poesia e Inquisigäo. Säo Paulo: Ática, 1983. AZEVEDO, J . Lucio de. Historia dos cristäos-novos portugueses. [ 1 9 2 1 ] . 2 ed. Lisboa: Livraria Clàssica Editora, 1975. BOYARÍN, Jonathan and JONATHAN, Daniel, editors. Jews and Other Differences: the New Jewish Cultural Studies. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. CAMÖES, Luís Vaz de. The Lusiads. [1572]. Trans., intra., and notes by Landeg White. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. CÁNDIDO, Antonio and CASTELLO, Aderaldo. Presenga da literatura brasileira: Das origens ao Romantismo. 5 ed. revisada. Sào Paulo: Difusäo Européia do Livro, 1973. COSTIGAN, Lúcia Helena. "Empreendimento e resistencia do cristào-novo face à política de Filipe II: O processo inquisitorial de Bento Teixeira." Colonial Latin American Review 12.1 (2003): 37-61. — "Épica e Inquisifäo no Novo Mundo: A Prosopopéia segundo o Processo 5.206 da Inquisigäo de Lisboa." La formación de la cultura virreinal. Eds. Karl Kohut and Sonia Rose. Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2000. 161-180. — "A experiencia do converso letrado Bento Teixeira: Um missing link na historia intelectual e literária do Brasil-colonia." Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 40 (1994): 77-92. Celso CUNHA and Carlos DUVAL. "Introdufäo." Prosopopéia [ 1 6 0 1 ] . Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Nacional do Livro/MEC, 1972. COUTINHO, Afranio. A tradigäo afortunada (O espirito de nacionalidade na crítica brasileira). Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1968. ELLIOT, John H. "Introduction: Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800." Colonial Identity in the New World, 1500-1800. Eds. Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987. 3-13. FIERDMG, Norman. "Preface." The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 14501800. Eds. Bernardini, Paolo and Fiering, Norman. 2 Vols. New York: Berghahn Books, 2001. xi-xv. GITLITZ, David. M. Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-Jews. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1996. ADORNO,

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Jonathan I . Conflicts of Empire: Spain, the Low Countries and the Struggles for World Supremacy (1585-1713): London: London Hambledon Press, 1997. NICOLOPULOS, James. The Poetics of Empire in the Indies: Prophecy and Imitation in "La Araucana" and "Os Lusi'adas." University Park: Penn State UP, 2000. PARKER, Geoffrey. The Grand Strategy of Philip II. New Haven: Yale U P , 1998. PEREIRA, Kenia Maria de Almeida. A poètica da resistendo em Bento Teixeira e Antonio José da Silva, o Judeu. Säo Paulo: Annablume Editora, 1998. ROMERO, Silvio. História da literatura brasileira. [1888]. 6 ed. 5 vols. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1960. SCHMIDT, Benjamin. "The Hope of the Netherlands: Menasseh ben Israel and the Dutch Idea of America." The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450-1800. Eds. Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering. Vol. 2. New York: Berghahn Books, 2001. 86106. SEED, Patricia. Ceremonies of possession in Europe's conquest of the New World, 19421640. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. SIQUEIRA, Sonia Aparecida. "O cristäo-novo Bento Teixeira: criptojudaismo no Brasil Colònia." Revista de História 90 (1972): 395-476. TEIXEIRA, Bento. Prosopopéia [ 1 6 0 1 ] . Com introdu9äo, estabelecimento do texto e comentarios por Celso Cunha e Carlos Duval. Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Nacional do Livro/MEC, 1972. — Prosopopèa. Com prefäcio de Afränio Peixoto. Rio de Janeiro: Publicafòes da Academia de Letras, 1923. VAINFAS, Ronaldo. Dicionàrio do Brasil Colonial (1500-1808). Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva, 2000. VIEIRA, Nelson. "Simulation and Dissimulation: An Expression of Crypto-Judaism in the Literature of Colonial Brazil." Colonial Latin American Review 2.12 (1993): 143-159. WANSINK, H., ed. The Apologie of Prince William of Orange Against the Proclamation of the King of Spaine. [1581] Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969. WEINER, Gordon M . "Sephardic philo and anti-Semitism in the early modern era: the Jewish adoption of Christian attitudes." Jewish Christians and Christian Jews: from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Eds. Richard H. Popkin and Gordon M. Weiner. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994. 189-214. WIZNITZER, Arnold. The Records of the Earliest Jewish Community in the New World. New York: American Jewish Historical Society, 1959. ISRAEL,

SPANISH W O M E N IN FIRST NEW AND GOOD

CHRONICLE

GOVERNMENT:

THE INTERSECTIONS OF CULTURE AND GENDER 1 Raquel Chang-Rodriguez

Historians, anthropologists and literary critics have been intrigued by the reciprocal manner in which Europeans and Indians have viewed and described each other in oral and written testimonies. When studying the early contact period in the Americas, the examination of the written and pictorial records allows us to contrast and reinterpret works from both sides of the Atlantic with the aim of uncovering the dynamics of cultural appropriation and arriving at a more accurate understanding of events in their historical context and symbolic dimension. It must be indicated at the outset that in the area of Andean studies this preoccupation with bringing the "other" to the center of the cultural debate preceded European concerns with this topic and particularly the more recent interest in "subaltern studies." This is attested to by the research on the topic by, among other scholars, Maria Rostworowski, Antonio Cornejo Polar, Alberto Flores Galindo, Manuel Burga, Juan M. Ossio and Franklin Pease G. Y.2 Among the Peruvian works of the first decades of the 17th century none offers a greater wealth of material to our understanding of the Andean world and to researching the agency3 of its author than First New Chronicle and Good Government, the illustrated manuscript composed by the native historian Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. This chronicle has generated numerous books and articles. It is worth noting that, given the shortage of information on the ethnic

1 The research for this study was undertaken with the partial support of grant #668140 awarded by the PSC-CUNY Research Foundation of the City University of New York for which I am most grateful. This is the revised English version of an essay included in a collection honoring the late Franklin Pease G. Y. 2 Interest in the "other" entered the mainstream of colonial studies with the publication of Tzvetan Todorov's La Conquête de l'Amérique (1982). Subaltern studies also entered the critical mainstream in the 80's. The latter group proposed to analyze the consequences of British colonization in Asia, particularly in India, underscoring its impact among the colonized or subaltern people. Some literary critics interested in cultural studies appropriated a number of its tenets and applied them to the analysis of the Latin American reality. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Can the subaltern speak?," published in 1985 and revised in 1999, is one of the most influential essays on this topic. 3 See Mazzotti.

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groups and societies that the Europeans encountered upon arriving in Tahuantinsuyu, some scholars have studied it in order to understand the complex structure of the societies which formed the Inca empire (Varallanos; Condarco Morales; Murra). Others have researched the Spanish influence on the writings of the Andean author, particularly his conception of history and recasting of literary models (Porras Barrenechea; Adorno; Lopez-Baralt; Chang-Rodriguez). However, several thematic areas considered by the author of First New Chronicle deserve closer examination. Their analysis could shed light on the concerns that preoccupied Guaman Poma and on the peculiar juncture in which the "Indios ladinos" lived and worked. One recurrent topic into which critics have not delved much into is the representation of women, both indigenous and European. We may recall that First New Chronicle (1615) offers descriptions and drawings of the Coyas or queens of Tahuantinsuyu.4 It first details the origin, life and deeds of the twelve traditional Inca kings, concluding with the transfer of government to "Felipe III Inga" {Primer nueva cordnica 1: 118).5 After offering advice on civic matters, Guaman Poma goes on to offer "The first history of the queens, coia."6 He concludes it with a "Foreword" or "Prologue" addressed to the "letores mugeres" which in reality is an epilogue, as it is placed at the end of this section (144).7 The Andean historian represents in words and drawings the Inca queens of the four "suyus" (175-79), the principal indigenous women (771,2: 275), and some females in devout postures (2: 837), or seen in agricultural rituals (3: 1166). Other images describe the punishments and humiliations that Spaniards inflicted on Indian women (2: 507). The cited examples constitute only a partial repertoire of indigenous women depicted in this chronicle. However, they point to the author's interest in the representation of women and in issues related to their role and conduct in Inca and colonial times. More limited but equally significant is the depiction of Spanish females in Guaman Poma's history. Although dispersed in different sections of the chronicle, it is possible to group these representations under three categories: 1) religiosity, 2) attire, and 3) behavior. Concentrating on Guaman Poma's ideas on the

4 With regard to the Inca kings, the royal genealogies offered by Guaman Poma have been studied by Fernando Iwasaki Cauti and Monica Barnes; Murúa's genealogy has been studied by Ossio (Los retratos); the representation of Mama Waco, the first coya, has been analyzed by Adorno (Guaman Poma) and Garcés. 5 1 quote from the Murra and Adorno edition. 6 As previously indicated, Guaman Poma's descriptions of Incas and Coyas seem to be based on images he remembered (Adorno, Guaman Poma 47). This is evident when he describes in detail the Inca queens'clothing and its colors. 7 See Chang-Rodriguez "Iconos inestables."

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Government

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subject with the aim of evaluating his "agency" within the dynamics of cultural appropriation and colonial negotiations, this study will focus on how the Andean historian views Spanish women living in the Viceroyalty of Peru8. My discussion will underscore several points: 1) the importance of the presence of Spanish women in First New Chronicle; 2) and how the author places this presence in dialogue with his complex theses.9 From these probings I hope to place Guaman Poma de Ayala's ideas about conquest and religiosity in the center of the cultural debate, showing once more that this "ladino" Indian and others belonging to this cultural category sought to be able interlocutors in the debates of their time and place. Clearly, they aimed to be agents on their own behalf and on behalf of their people.

O N ABBESSES, OBEDIENCE AND CLOISTERED NUNS

AS I previously pointed out, the religiosity of Spanish women constitutes a central theme, notable for two reasons: 1) its impact on the Andean population, and 2) the contrast between female and male religious behavior. Two drawings with their written explanations comment on the behavior of Spanish nuns (Primer nueva coronica 2: 486-87,647-48). Framed inside the portion of the work dedicated to "good government," the first figure depicts an abbess with a book in her left hand; the index finger of her right hand points to another nun who is kneeling at her feet. In the center of the drawing, above the kneeling nun's head, the word "obediencia" appears (Illustration 1, 2: 486). In his explanation, the chronicler enumerates several convents, praises their sanctity,10 and proposes the construction of "monasterios de uirgenes monjas de las yndias y ne[gr]as para que aumente la fe de Jesucritsto en el mundo y ten[ga]n sus auadesas y uicarios en este rreyno y pulicia" (2: 487). Using the drawings to underline a reality and the text to offer a possibility, Guaman Poma brings to the fore the burning topic of the capacity of native women —and of the native population in general—, to receive

8 With regard to the need for reconsidering the representation of women in colonial texts, see Graubart. 9 Among these theses are: Europeans and Andean people share identical origins; the Indian population is decreasing; ancient Andean and Inca hierarchies are not respected; the bad government by Spanish colonial authorities is ruining the Viceroyalty; the behavior of clerics is an obstacle to the progress of religious conversion. 10 The author mentions the following convents: Nuestra Señora de la Encamación, Nuestra Señora de la Limpia Concepción, Santa Clara, Santa Ana, Santa María Magdalena, Santa Catalina, Santa María Egipcíaca, Santa Úrsula, Santa Lucía, Santa Barbóla (?) (2: 487). As for the Cuzco's convents [Santa Clara, Santa Catalina, Santa Teresa] see Burns ("Nuns"; Colonial habits) . On the representation of Indian women by the Spanish chroniclers, see Graubart.

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the catechism and participate fully in the ecclesiastical institution. His comment opens up the possibility of building convents for Black and Indian "vírgenes" and thus affirms their suitability to receive the Christian gospel. The ideal model of female religiosity appears to be the pair of Spanish nuns depicted by Guarnan Poma; in the drawing, obedience is one the hallmarks of female religiosity. The author also insinuates that Indian abbesses should direct the new convents designed for non-European women. Such a suggestion is in line with First New Chronicle's idea of returning power to the traditional native rulers at the expense of "mandoncillos" appointed by the colonial authorities. In other words, Guarnan Poma cleverly uses these gendered examples to reiterate the ability of native Andeans to rule themselves within the cloistered walls of a Christian convent and within the Spanish colonial cities. The second drawing of a nun appears in "Padres," a section where the author condemns the Spanish priests for their bad behavior and also exposes their lust and greed. This picture shows a nun behind the bars of a convent. She is characterized as one of those "señoras santas de conventos" and is depicted in conversation with an indigenous woman offering alms (Illustration 2, 2: 647). The representation underscores the "saintly" behavior of the nun who inspires the Indian neophyte to offer her generous gift. Guarnan Poma's comments elaborate on the importance of this drawing: Son tan santas y señoras rreligiosas, cierbas de Jesucristo que en todo el mundo hinche con su umildad y caridad y ubedencia, amor de próximo de los pobres. Mucho más en este rreyno que todos los yndios, yndias se allegan a su santa casa y ellas lo rreciben con amor y caridad ... Y ellas rruega a Dios por todo el mundo ... Y jamás se a uisto tener pleyto ni soberbia en el mundo, como las señoras del mundo son soberbiosas, auarientas, luxuria, uanagloria, de poca caridad y poco amor de próximo y no dan limosna a los pobres de Jesucristo en el mundo y en este rreyno. Y ací allegaos, señoras, a estas santas y prended de ellas para el cielo. (2: 648)

The prayer of the nuns whose universality bears the possibility of redemption for sinners would confirm the shared origin of the heterogeneous inhabitants of the Peruvian viceroyalty (men, women, Indians, Spaniards, Africans and mestizos) —an argument already advanced in the "Prólogo a los letores mugeres" (1: 144).11 Furthermore, when the chronicler criticizes "las señoras del mundo" for, among other sins, their avarice, arrogance, lust, and lack of charity, he appears to choose as his model the cloistered Spanish nun. At the same time, the author dignifies the Indian donor whose generosity sustains the exemplary life of the saintly convent ladies. In this portion of the chronicle, the contrast between the nun's

11

See Chang-Rodriguez "Iconos inestables".

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"saintly" life and the misbehaving of "the ladies of the world," further emphasizes how the conduct of the nuns helps promote correct Indian behavior. This is particularly significant if we consider that the author places these comments within a section, "Padres," in which he criticizes the sinful conduct of the Spanish priests. This criticism surely was dear to those intent on conversion through preaching and the example set by those living according to the Gospel. This was particularly so for religious orders such as the Dominicans or the Jesuits, who often reiterated that those in charge of catechizing the Indian population must behave according to Christian dogma. Spanish women's religiosity is thus represented in First New Chronicle by the abadesa and two nuns, one obedient and the other cloistered. Their exemplary lives open up the possibility for Indian and Black women to aspire to their saintly status. In addition, the representations of female Spanish religiosity give the author the opportunity to enhance the role of European and Andean women, criticize priestly conduct, and subtly affirm the common bonds of all inhabitants of Peru. While emphasizing the importance of praying and behaving in accordance with the Gospel, the iconic and linguistic comments made by Guarnan Poma can be viewed as fulfilling two key objectives: 1) underscoring the capabilities of women, a group as subaltern as the Andeans within Spanish society; and 2) transforming Spanish religious women into exemplary figures in contrast to their male counterparts.

T H E FIRST FASHIONS FROM SPAIN

The second thematic nucleus in which Spanish women appear revolves about European garments first worn in the Viceroyalty of Peru. It is framed within the section dedicated to the conquest and located after the imaginary beheading of Inca Atahualpa and the deeds of captain Luis Ávalos de Ayala. The image labeled "Primer ávito de España que trajo en la conquista el uso antiguo" (Illustration 3, 2: 394) shows a Spanish couple elegantly dressed and looking at each other in astonishment. They point to their garments with their index fingers. Although the attire reveals a high social status, the written description appears to contradict the graphic representation: "Cómo los primeros conquistadores trayyan otro traxe por temor del frío, coleto y bonetes colorados, unos calsones chupados y cin cuello como clérigo y trayya mangas largas, la rropilla, el capote corto. Acimismo las dichas mugeres, como usaron los antiguos yndios, unas camegetas largas, manta corta" (2: 397). Consequently, the depicted garments are not the first brought from Spain. The variation in the use of attire of European origin by Spanish and Andean men and women presents Guarnan Poma's recurrent fear. Unlike Tahuantinsuyu where during the Inca period it was possible to identify each person's ethnic ori-

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gin and social rank through clothing, in colonial times attire lost its traditional function. Indians wear Spanish garments and Spaniards disguise themselves as Incas. That is to say, the appropriation of other people's identities through the exchange of clothing is common. It is done in order to steal, to avoid punishment, to confuse and to survive in a corrupt society. In another section of his chronicle, Guarnan Poma mentions the classic topic of the "world-upside-down" to characterize similar doings: "... yndios uajos y tributarios, se ponían cuello y ci bestia como español y se ponía espada y otros se tresquilaua por no pagar tributo ni seruir en las minas. Ues aquí el mundo al rrevés" (3: 1138). The author takes pains in explaining that the bad example was first set by the conquerors: D i z e n que un español c o n la cudicia del oro y plata m a n d ó s e lleuarse en unas andas y ponerse orexas postisas y trage del Ynga. Entraua a cada p u e b l o , pidiendo oro, plata. C o m o uían Ynga barbado se espantauan y más se echaua a huyr los yndios, m u c h o m á s las m u g e r e s en este rreyno. (2: 3 9 7 )

Since carnavalesque poses proliferate in the new society,12 it is impossible to ascertain which is the first "ávito" from Spain; nor do we know if those who use this and other garments have the right to wear them. Foreigners have usurped the Inca's authority, his clothing and royal emblems and, following their example, the Andeans wear Spanish garments to assume another identity and confuse the authorities. Because Guarnan Poma has so often mentioned the impact of Spanish dress in Tahuantinsuyu and underscored how Indians of different social ranks should dress,13 is evidence of his concern for maintaining identity through clothing and using it as a means of social control. The fact that the drawing of the couple wearing the "first" Spanish garments precedes fatal events of the Conquest period 14 confirms the centrality of the topic as well as the tragic consequences of these exchanges for the Andean population. His comments about the misuse of garments by Europeans and Andeans reveal the gravity of the problem as well as its transnational, transethnic and transgeneric character.

12 Guarnan Poma laments: "cómo traen otro trage los españoles y señoras en este tiempo y la de antes trayan otro trage y costumbre y ubedencia en todo el mundo de la cristiandad y en este rreyno"... (2: 553). " S e e Primer nueva coránica 2: 383, 594, 619, 875, 877; 3: 9 4 4 , 9 8 5 , 1125. 14 For example, the burning of Guarnan Chava, Guarnan Poma's grandfather (2:398); the assumption of power of an Inca imposed by foreigners (2: 400).

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LEWD, GREEDY AND MODEL COUPLES

The third thematic nucleus revolves around a typological description,15 the linguistic and pictoric representation of two couples and the matrimonial ambitions of another offered through a conversation and a song. All are included in the section of the work dedicated to "españoles." In the depiction of the first couple we notice they are fat, of medium stature and look at each other in a lewd way (Illustration 4,2: 548). Elegantly dressed, the bearded man makes the erotic gesture of the "figa" with the fingers of his right hand while his left hand rests on the hilt of the sword. His wide feet point toward the lady at whom he looks aggressively. The elegantly dressed lady holds a rose, symbolic of Eros and Venus, in her right hand while the left hand rests on her pubic area.16 If we examine the various typologies or categories described by Guarnan Poma immediately after the couple's depiction (2: 549), it is easy to place the pair under the rubric of "gordos y grandazos." Therefore, both would be good eaters and drinkers, lazy and fainthearted (2: 549). According to the drawing, they also would be lewd. Curiously, the typological descriptions are followed by a revealing comment — "lo que ymaginan los cristianos españoles teniendo muchos hijos: Procuran, ymaginan todo en plata, oro y tener rriquiessas y están de día y de noche pensando marido y muger"—, and a lively dialogue between the two spouses of the second couple where the previous ideas are dramatized (2: 550-51). This is one of the harshest criticisms of Spanish behavior, whether masculine or feminine, in First New Chronicle. When projecting the future of the family, the spouses plan to have their children enter the priesthood, like it or not: "¡Qué bien dicho y pensado, señor mío de mis ojos! Pues que Dios nos a dado tantos hijos para ganar plata y ser rrico, el hijo llamado Yaquito sea cleriguito, y Francisquillo tanbién. Porque ganarán plata y nos enbiará yndios, yndias a servirnos.. .mucho rregalo de perdis y gallinas, güebos, fruta, mays, papas... chenitas y muchachitos, yndias depocitadas" (2: 550). Consumed by greed, the couple will prohibit their male offspring to enter the Jesuit or the Franciscan order because "son pobres hórdenes y se hazen santos y no ganan plata ni tendrá que darnos" (2: 550). When the children protest, they are characterized as "tontillos" and told of the many remunerations the ecclesiastical career and right order will bring them and their family —from money to mixed-

15

On this subject see Tundidor de Carrera. Mercedes Lopez-Baralt (110-15) has studied the depiction of this couple in a sexual context. She identifies the man's gesture of "hacer la figa" with coitus and the rose held by the woman with female genitalia. Lopez-Baralt sees the sword as a phallic symbol corresponding to the woman's left hand resting over her pubic area. Taking into account all of this, Lopez-Baralt added lewdness to the character traits described on the following page by the chronicler. 16

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blood sons and daughters. According to the couple's greedy plan, these illegitimate offspring will be incorporated into the household as domestic help. The ballad sealing this pact confirms the "perulero"17 character of this family: O qué bien dicho, Dios mío, O qué bien dicho, Dios mío, Que con el cantar el rréquiem Seremos rricos, seremos rricos. Qué buen pensar de padre, Seremos rricos, Qué buen pensar de madre, Seremos rricos. Y nos embarcaremos a España Seremos rricos, Que en España seremos rricos, En el mundo seremos rricos (2: 551)

Guarnan Poma's ballad not only summarizes the ambitions of the couple and of many Spanish settlers in the Viceroyalty of Peru, but also reiterates one of his main theses: the Europeans have replaced Christ with the gold of the Indies. Thus, they are as idolatrous as the Andeans whom they aim to convert to Christianity.18 This is particularly significant because the evangelization of the Indian population was one of the justifications of Spanish dominion in America. However, on account of the sinful behavior of many Spanish priests, it cannot be carried out. The logical corollary to this argument is as follows: the land should be returned to its rightful owners —the Andeans. Therefore, the iconic and linguistic representation of the lewd couple is used by the author as an opening to present issues related to Spanish dominion and behavior in the Andes. The couple's visual exchange is charged with sexual innuendo. According to the typology offered by Guarnan Poma, their physical traits symbolize the worst vices. The depiction of this couple foreshadows the actions of an even more disastrous pair, the "perulero" couple whose union is marred by ambition. They aim to better themselves and their family through the procreation of children that will be forced to enter the priesthood only to fill the family's coffers.

17

The Spaniard that arrived in Peru and returned to Spain rich (Diccionario de Autoridades). Adorno recognized very early the importance that the rhetoric of cardinal sins has on First New Chronicle (Guarnan Poma 66-68). See also Chang-Rodriguez (El discurso disidente 133-34). 18

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Cleverly, Guaman Poma points to an alternate model of behavior through a third couple. Within the same section dedicated to the Spaniards, another image of this thematic nucleus shows a couple from Castile (Illustration 5, 2: 556). In the drawing, the man and the woman appear elegantly dressed. In contrast to the lewd couple, the former is tall and thin; his beard is trimmed and he holds a rosary in his right hand. The latter is slender with small feet and a tiny waistline. She seems to converse with the gentleman as she gesticulates with her right hand in a manner typical of a person of authority, a "letrado" or "letrada." They look at each other discreetly. This couple fits well into the following typology: "Y los hombres y mugeres medianos de buen talle y rrostro, ojo grande, animosos, sabios y letrados, cienpre con su entendimiento cirue a Dios y a su Magestad... A de ser de pocas barbas y la muger, ojo grande y boca chica, la plantilla de los pies de quatro puntos, cintura de hormiga" (2: 549). Again, in contrast to the lewd couple, the rosary substitutes for the sword and the book replaces the rose. When representing the Castilian couple, Guaman Poma renders them as exemplary persons: they practice the Christian virtues of hope, charity and love for their fellow human beings; they keep the Ten Commandments; they are humble, loving and friendly. Taking all of these factors into account, the chronicler concludes that the Castilians are meritorious of praise: "Antes los pobres que bienen de Castilla hazen caridad y manda con amor a los yndios en este rreyno. Y aci son las mugeres cristianas. Y todo es trauajar y dar limosna y no dar ocacion ni enojo a los pobres yndios, que bien sauen que esta tierra lo dio Dios y su Magestad a los yndios deste rreyno. Y aci es grandesa lo de Castilla, cristiano biejo" (2: 557). One might ask why the author, in the iconic and linguistic representation of these Spanish couples, so vigorously underscores their physical differences, their diverse behavior patterns and their links to Peru. I propose that Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (1575), 19 the popular medical tract written by the Navarran physician Juan Huarte de San Juan and widely circulated in the Viceroyalty of Peru, could offer a clue.20 Translated quickly into several European languages, this book treated the relationship between psychology and physiology (Leonard 233). When the Navarran physician underscores one of the fundamental tenets of Hippocratic-Galenic medicine —the close link between the health of the individual and of the political polis (Seres 27)—, he aimed to harmonize nature and art with the needs of the state. In consonance with these objectives, Huarte de San Juan proposes the following to Philip II: "habia de haber diputados en la republi-

19

1 am grateful to my colleague Ottavio Di Camillo for bringing this reference to my attention. We know it was listed in an inventory of a book merchant in Lima; the book was in the library of a Spaniard residing in Manila (Leonard 221, 233). 20

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ca, hombres de gran prudencia y saber, que en la tierna edad descubriesen a cada uno su ingenio, haciéndole estudiar por fuerza la ciencia que le convenía, y no dejarlo a su elección" ("Proemio al rey" 151). According to ideas prevalent during his time, Huarte underscores how, in addition to an individual's genealogy, heroic deeds can bestow virtue and nobility (553-55). Huarte also explains that geographical areas enjoying a temperate climate, for example, Ancient Greece, tend to produce, but not exclusively, more ingenious and even-tempered people. He goes on to offer some of their character and physical traits: 1) red hair; 2) well proportioned bodies; 3) virtuous conduct; 4) good manners. The temperate people, adds Huarte de San Juan, "no son malignos, astutos ni cavilosos, porque esto nace de ser vicioso el temperamento" (585-87). The iconic and linguistic descriptions of the Castilian couple with their emphasis on proper origin, proportioned figures, pleasant faces, good deeds, Christian charity, even-handedness, and purity of lineage, echo the virtues associated with "gente ingeniosa" —with those qualified to govern, according to Huarte de San Juan. Indeed, the Castilian spouses are "cristiano[s] biejo[s];" their willingness to sacrifice for faith and king warrants their good treatment of the native population and their high status in the colonial hierarchy. It is remarkable that Guarnan Poma chooses to underscore the virtues of Castilian women: "Y aci son las mugeres cristianas. Y todo es trauajar y dar limosna... que bien saben que esta tierra lo dio Dios y su Magestad a los yndios de este rreyno" (2: 557). Does he highlight the model conduct of Castilian women, that is to say, of female subalternity with the purpose of creating a space for Andean subalternity in colonial society? In addition, could the flattering portrait of the Castilians lead to the following question: Is Guarnan Poma's Yarolvica ethnic group the Andean equivalent of the virtuous Castilians? The chronicler also praises Castilian conduct to ridicule the self-made "lords," be they Spanish or Indians, and to criticize those who unjustly abused "los pobres de Jesucristo" (2: 557). With firmness of purpose, the "autor y príncipe" reminds his heterogeneous readers that the land, by divine and royal will, belongs to the Andeans. It is, therefore imperative that the Castilians, loyal and devout subjects of the Spanish king, respect the native Andeans who are the rightful owners of the land. Let us now turn to the greedy couple depicted by Guarnan Poma and their links to Peru. Examen de ingenios may offer a clue to understanding their ambitions. The couple's "destemplanza" can be justified from a physiological perspective and, in line with Huarte de San Juan's ideas, it can also be placed in a political context: When Greece, explains Huarte de San Juan, was invaded by the Turks, "este hizo desterrar las letras y pasar la Universidad de Atenas a París de Francia ...; y así, por no cultivarlos, se pierden ahora tan delicados ingenios como los que arriba contamos" (576-77). Consequently, bad government can have a terrible impact on the preparation of intellectually able subjects. Basing himself on

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these ideas, the Andean chronicler might be insinuating that for these reasons many "delicados ingenios" are lost forever in Peru. Like the children of the greedy "pareja perulera" they would be forced to enter into professions for which they have no interest or aptitude, and such decisions will adversely affect the interests of the state. Thus, the desire of this couple to turn their male offspring into priests against their will offers another example of the "world-upside-down." Taking into account the circulation of Huarte de San Juan's book in the Peruvian Viceroyalty, one cannot help but wonder if Guaman Poma was influenced by his ideas when depicting the Spanish conquest of Tahuantinsuyu. Certainly, a parallel could be drawn between the impact of the Spanish conquest in the Andes and the invasion of Ancient Greece by the Turks. This comparison would have been attractive to religious and lay persons wanting to bring to the fore the terrible consequences of the conquest and of the poor administration of the Viceroyalty of Peru.

CONCLUSION

The portrait of Spanish women offered by Guaman Poma once again shows the Andean chronicler as a keen observer and able interpreter of colonial reality in its multiple contradictions. His depiction of female religiosity presents a model of behavior, attractive to the Andean population. By proposing obedience, prayer and a cloistered life as norms of daily conduct, his depiction helps to cancel out the abusive conduct of many priests. Guaman Poma's idea of creating convents for Indians and Africans recognizes the common bonds of all peoples and, more importantly, affirms the capacity of non-Europeans to assimilate Christian dogma and fully participate in ecclesiastical life. The inclusion of the fashionable Spanish couple's drawing and the author's comment on their garments in such a central portion of Primer nueva cordnica, expresses a recurrent concern. In the colonial chaos the traditional ethnic lords have been replaced by hated "mandoncillos;" the old hierarchies no longer count; traditional symbols and attire mean nothing. All of this is indicative of the "world-upside-down" created by Spanish rule; its disorder affects colonial society in its entirety —Spaniards, Andeans, the "castas," men and women. The thematic nucleus focusing on behavior is the most complex. In it the three represented couples —one lewd and Spanish, the other a model of good conduct and Castilian, and the third, a "perulero" couple—, as well as the comments on typology, show that Guaman Poma appears to be familiar with ideas on this topic presented in Examen de ingenios para las ciencias, a medical tract of wide circulation during this period. The underscoring of the model conduct of Castilian women could present once more the author's known interests in the key role

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played by subaltern subjects. In the drawing we have seen how the chronicler depicts a Castilian woman: Her admonishing gesture is identical to that of the "autor y prfncipe" represented in an imaginary conversation with the Spanish king (3: 976). The Castilian woman is thus depicted as a reliable person whose behavior should be emulated and whose advice should be heeded by Christian Spanish men. However, the most daring portion in this nucleus is the dramatization of the ambitions of the "pareja perulera." Through the use of diminutives which include pejorative semantic markers and a song whose leitmotiv is greed, the conversation between the spouses allows the chronicler to place the couple's ambitions within the rhetoric of cardinal sins —idolatry, greed and lust. It permits Guaman Poma to condemn those —the "peruleros"— who have substituted the crucified Christ with the gold of the Indies. Cleverly, their dialogue underscores the ideas of easy enrichment by the sweat of others, the deformed vision of the priesthood, the corruption of the sanctity of marriage and, if we follow Huarte de San Juan, the impact that this lamentable conduct will have on state affairs. On the other hand, when praising the Castilian couple and Castilians in general, the author repeats one of his paramount arguments: by divine and royal will Peru belongs to the Andeans. True Christians and loyal subjects of the Spanish Crown should recognize this fact and treat the native population with love and charity. This review of the presence of Spanish women in First New Chronicle by Felipe Guaman Poma of Ayala reveals once more the complexity of this historical document. It brings to the fore how culture and gender intersect in Guaman Poma's depiction of Andean problems. More importantly, it shows how the search for this reciprocal vision which incorporates European and native testimonies enriches our understanding of the past, both in its historical context and symbolic meaning.

WORKS CITED

ADORNO, Rolena. Guaman Poma. Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru. With a new introduction. 2nd ed. Austin: U of Texas P, 2000. — Cronista y principe. La obra de don Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. Lima: PUCP, 1989 — et al., eds. Guaman Poma de Ayala. The Colonial Art of an Andean Author. New York: Americas Society, 1992. BARNES, Monica. "The Gilcrease Inca Portraiys and the Historical Tradition of Guaman Poma de Ayala." Andean Oral Traditions: Discourse and Literatures/Tradiciones orales andinas: discurso y literatura. Eds. Margot Beyersdorff and Sabine Dedenbach-Salazar Saenz. Bonner Amerikanistische Studien/Estudios Americanistas de Bonn, Vol. 24 (1994): 223-56.

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— "A Lost Inca History." Latin American Indian Literatures Journal 12. 2 (1996): 11731. BURNS, Kathryn. "Nuns, Kurakas, and Credit: The Spiritual Economy of SeventeenthCentury Cuzco." Colonial Latin American Review 6. 2 (1997): 185-203. — Colonial Habits. Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. CHANG-RODRÍGUEZ, Raquel. La apropiación del signo: tres cronistas indígenas del Perú. Tempe: Center for Latin American Studies, Arizona State University, 1988. — "Rebelión y religión en dos crónicas indígenas del Perú de ayer." Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 14. 28 (1988): 175-94. — El discurso disidente. Ensayos de literatura colonial peruana. Lima: PUCP, 1991. — Review of Franklin Pease G. Y. Las crónicas y los Andes. Colonial Latin American Review 6. 2 (1997): 264-66. — Hidden Messages: Representation and Resistance in Andean Colonial Drama. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1999. — "Retratos, reyes y ropas en la Historia general del Pirú (c. 1616) de Martín de Muñía." Melanges Ma. Soledad Carrasco Urgoiti. 2 Vols. Tunisia: Fondation Temimi pour la Recherche Scientifique et ITnformation, 1999. 577-86. — "Las coyas incaicas y la complementariedad andina en la Historia (c. 1616) de Martín de Murúa." Studi Spanici (1999): 11-27. — "iconos inestables: el caso de la coya Chuquillanto en Primer nueva coránica y buen gobierno (1615)." Guarnan Poma y Blas Valera. Tradición andina e historia colonial (Actas del Coloquio Internacional, Instituto Italo-Latinoamericano, Roma, 29-30 de septiembre de 1999). Ed. Francesca Cantú. Roma: Antonio Pellicani, 2001. 293-312. — "Las mujeres españolas en Primer nueva coránica y buen gobierno: intersecciones genéricas y culturales." Homage to Franklin Pease G. Y. Eds. Javier Flores Espinoza and Rafael Varón Gabai. 3 Vols. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2002. 2: 345-55. CONDARCO MORALES, Ramiro. Protohistoria andina propedéutica. Oruro: Universidad Técnica, 1967. CUMMINS, Thomas B. F. "Representation in the Sixteenth Century and the Colonial Image of the Inca." Eds. Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo. Writing without Words. Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Durham: Duke UP, 1994.188-219. Diccionario de Autoridades [1737], Vol. 3. Madrid: Gredos, 1990. GARCÉS, Mana Antonia. "Fundaciones míticas: el cuerpo del deseo en Waman Puma." Mujer y cultura en la colonia hispanoamericana. Ed. Mabel Moraña. Pittsburgh: Biblioteca de América, Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 1996. 67-90. GRAUBART, Karen B . "Indecent Living: Indigenous Women and the Politics of Representation in Early Colonial Peru." Colonial Latin American Review 9.2 (2000): 213-36. GUAMAN POMA DE AYALA, Felipe. Primer nueva coránica y buen gobierno [1615], Eds. John V. Murra and Rolena Adorno. Traducciones y análisis textual del quechua de Jorge L. Urioste. 3 Vols. México: Siglo XXI, 1980.

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— Nueva coránica y buen gobierno. Complete digital facsimile edition. Royal Library of Denmark, Copenhagen. Scholarly consultant: Rolena Adorno (www.kb.dk/elib/ mss/poma). HUARTE DE SAN JUAN, Juan. Examen de ingenios [ 1 5 7 5 ] , Ed. Guillermo Serés. Madrid: Cátedra, 1989. IWASAKI CAUTI, Fernando. "Las panacas del Cuzco y la pintura incaica." Revista de Indias 46. 177 (1986): 59-74. LEONARD , Irving A . Books of the Brave [1949]. With a ne w introduction by Rolena Adorno. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992. LÓPEZ-BARALT, Mercedes. Icono y conquista. Guarnan Poma de Ayala. Madrid: Hiperión, 1988.

— Guarnan Poma autor y artista. Lima: PUCP, 1993. MAZZOTTI, José Antonio. "Introducción." Agencias criollas. La ambigüedad 'colonial' en las letras hispanoamericanas. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2000. 7-35. MURRA, John V . La organización económica del estado inca [ 1 9 5 5 ] . México D . F . : Siglo X X I , 1978.

Ossio, Juan. Los retratos de los incas en la "Crónica" de Fray Martín de Murúa. Lima: COFIDE, 1985. — "El original del manuscrito Loyola de Fray Martín de Murúa." Colonial Latin American Review 1. 2 (1998): 271-78. PACHACUTI YAMQUI SALCAMAYGUA, Joan de Santacruz. Relación de antigüedades deste reyrw delPirú [ c.1613], Ed. Marcos Jiménez de la Espada. Asunción: Guaranía, 1950. PEASE G. Y . , Franklin. Prólogo. Nueva coránica y buen gobierno [1615] de Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1980. 1, ix-lxxxix. — Las crónicas y los Andes. Lima: FCE-PUCP, 1995. PORRAS BARRENECHEA, Raúl. El cronista indio Felipe Huaman Poma de Ayala. Lima: Lumen, 1948. SERÉS, Guillermo. Introducción. Examen de ingenios [1575] de Juan Huarte de San Juan. Madrid: Cátedra, 1989. 13-123. SILVERBLATT, Irene. Moon, Sun, and Witches, Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru. Princeton N.J.: Princeton UP, 1987. SPIVAK, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of a Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999. TODOROV, Tzvetan. La conquête de l'Amérique. Paris: Seuil, 1982. TUNDIDOR DE CARRERA, Elvira. "Guarnan Poma, autor de la primera tipología morfológica americana." Revista Española de Antropología Americana 7. 2 (1972): 161-90. VARALLANOS, José. Guarnan Poma de Ayala: cronista, precursor y libertario. Lima: G. Herrera, 1979. ZUIDEMA, R. Tom. "Guarnan Poma between the Arts of Europe and the Andes." Colonial Latin American Review 3.1 (1994): 37-85.

Spanish Women in First New Chronicle and Good Government

•X 4 f n * '

-.HSt-fl

Illustration 1. Convent hierarchy. (2: 486). GkS 2332 4°. Courtesy of: Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Kobenhavn.

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Illustration 2. The model nun. (2: 647). GkS 2332 4°. Courtesy of: Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Kobenhavn.

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Illustration 3. The "first" Spanish attire (2: 394). GkS 2332 4°. Courtesy of: Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Kobenhavn.

Illustration 4. The lewd couple (2: 548). GkS 2332 4°. Courtesy of: Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Kobenhavn.

Spanish Women in First New Chronicle and Good

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MMMI

Illustration 5. The Castilian couple (2: 556). GkS 2332 4°. Courtesy of: Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Kobenhavn.

11

THE "INDIAN TUMULT" OF 1 6 9 2 IN THE FOLDS OF BAROQUE CELEBRATIONS. HISTORIOGRAPHY, POPULAR SUBVERSION, AND CREOLE AGENCY IN COLONIAL MEXICO Mabel Morana

The Spanish American xvnth-century, often identified as the period of "viceregal stabilization," is generally associated with two principal facts. First of all, with the overcoming of territorial strife which had devastated the colonial world since the "discovery;" secondly, with the flourishing of a culture that, for the first time in the history of the new continent, seemed not only to emulate but to surpass its European counterpart in its refinement and splendor. The monumentality that metropolitan models assumed in American territories, and the notion that the pax Hispanica had finally triumphed over the primitivism of the New World, overshadowed, in the critical evaluations of the era, the importance of the internal dynamics, particularly of interracial character, that ran deep within colonial societies. Nonetheless, even when the Baroque culture was at its peak, the social practices and symbolic production of the vast populations that escaped the processes of cultural conversion continued to develop on a popular level, in the outskirts and even at the heart of the lettered city. These practices gave evidence of a subversive potential which, coming from the margins of constituted powers, was capable of posing a substantial threat to the imperial project.1 Once these heterodox and anti-hegemonic dynamics emerge with enough strength as to impact the historical consciousness, they demand from us, on the one hand, a relativistic analysis of the models implanted from the conquest henceforth. On the other hand, they force us to scrutinize, from our current perspective, the discursive, interpretative, and representational strategies from which Creole culture registered or displaced the events that challenged the supremacy of Peninsular and American elites throughout various stages of their colonial domination. It is well known that colonial reports, as well as, liberal historiography, later on, provided a tinted account of subaltern mobilizations. They also created an ideological and stereotypical image of both conquerors and conquered peoples, through the elaboration of a triumphalist discourse that assigned fixed

1 The allusion to "Baroque Culture" and "the lettered city" obviously correspond to the works of José Antonio Maravall y Ángel Rama, respectively.

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values to historical events, social actors, or cultural developments that might have introduced hetereogeneity, transgression, or multiplicity on the already settled horizons of colonial societies. Multiplicity and representation constitute, then, two key elements within colonial culture, and particularly in the period at hand, when metropolitan models had already established their hegemony overseas, and had become the principal axis of the Creole imaginary. But the multiple is not, as Giles Deleuze indicates, that which has many parts, but rather that which folds in many ways (3), that which, as in Baroque architecture, intricately ties interior with exterior, high and low, presence and absence. It is the folding, refolding, and unfolding (el pliegue, el repliegue y el despliegue) of material and symbolic forms, whose labyrinthine relationship results in the production of specific and often contradictory modalities of rationality and sensibility. From our current perspective the era of the Colonial Baroque presents the challenge of penetrating the folds of the multiple forms of subjectivity -be they dominant or alternative- that manifest themselves in connection —or in confrontation— with the first modernity that impacted American societies in the xvnth-century, forms of subjectivity that challenged, each in its own way, the universalizing and Eurocentric processes of transculturation that were implemented since the discovery as one of the most fundamental strategies of colonial domination. Only a reading against the grain of the aesthetic and historiographical production of this period could allow for a new approach to the social dynamics of Creole society, a reality that we often apprehend through a distorted perspective, affected by what Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora called "the green glass" of subjectivism. History, then, reveals itself only in a partial and over-determined manner, particularly given the specific and contradictory articulation of Creole letrados within Baroque society, in which this sector struggled to affirm its own forms of preponderance and its social identity. The observations of the Mexican letrado Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora about "the green glass" of subjectivism we have just referred to, are included in the introduction of his well known piece "Indian Tumult and Uprising in Mexico," ["Alboroto y motín de los indios de México"], an account addressed to Admiral Andrés de Pez, which narrates, from the viceregal perspective, the Indian and Mestizo uprising of 1692. The subversion was precipitated by the rain, floods, and plagues that destroyed in that year the crops of com and wheat in the Anahuac Valley region.2 The insurrection included around ten thousand people, who were

2 Siguenza's text was published in English, in Don Carlos de Sigilenza y Gongora. A Mexican Savant of the Seventeenth Century (1929), by Irving Leonard, with the title "Letter to Admiral Pez." The text was published in Spanish in 1932.

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confronted with the repression imposed on that occasion by viceregal authorities. The uprising, which culminated in the burning of the viceregal palace, La Alhóndiga, endangered not only the material foundations and personal security of the Creole elite situated at the heart of the viceroyalty of New Spain. It also staggered the symbolic stability of a social and political order settled upon the material superiority and the rituals of power. The revolt resulted in a series of exemplary acts of persecution and punishment which included incarceration, torture, public executions, and banishment. In its social dimension and discursive repercussions, the uprising of 1692 constituted a paradigmatic instance that revealed, in multiple, unseen, and contradictory ways, the many facets hidden in the height of Baroque culture in its time of maximum splendor. If the topic focused by Sigiienza's text undoubtedly exposes one of the most frequent modes of expression of popular counterculture within the parameters of its time, its discursive organization also reveals the ideological make up and the Weltanschauung of the dominant sector, which came together when confronted with the threat constituted by the popular uprisings. In fact, from the lexical selection to the use of temporal-spatial units, through the characterization of real individuals to the rhythm itself of the narrative and the symbolic recourses employed in this account, the epistolary narrative of Sigüenza y Góngora, reveals the application of a poetics of historiography which is not only a tribute to the Spanish rhetorical tradition. It also incorporates notions of social control and American civility that were elaborated in the context of colonial society, and implemented by the administrative, political, and religious apparatus which had established its power in the New World.3 In its anti-heroic and disorganized dynamics, the events narrated by Sigüenza y Góngora crown the series of insurrections that characterized the history of the viceroyalty of New Spain from the beginning of the conquest. However, the uprising of 1692 is more concretely associated with the revolt that almost seventy years earlier, in 1624 had devastated, in a similar way, the guarded order of the Baroque city. But if the 1692 revolt couldn't but stir the historical memory of the city, its literary account also appropriated elements that, in form and spirit, referred to the genre of chronicles and relaciones that had been used for two centuries to report events related to the conquest and colonization of new térritories to the Spanish authorities. Nevertheless, in this instance the chronicler is not a Peninsular soldier or adelantado, but rather an erudite criollo with close ties to the local government. From this particular social and epistemological location,

3 The text "Indian Tumult and Uprising in Mexico" has been studied, among others, by Kathleen Ross and Sam Cogdell. Both critics have emphasized the importance of this chronicle as Criollo discourse, and studied the historiographical models followed in Sigtienza y Gôngora's composition.

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Sigiienza's epistolary discourse exposes, from the perspective of the institutional order, both the dramatic nature of social antagonisms in the region, and the conflictive nature of the Creole mediation, as they manifested themselves towards the end of the xvnth century. Siguenza y Gongora's letter, first compiled and published by Irving Leonard in 1932, comprised for a long time the most official account of the uprisings occurred three hundred years earlier. Nonetheless, today it is only one of the many existing sources we have for the reconstruction of these events. It is also, without a doubt, the version that is most tinted by the "vidrio verde" of Creole consciousness. In fact, the text clearly depicts the position of the Creole elite, which is caught at the center of the turmoil created by this new attack on the viceregal order. Situated in this defining moment, the privileged group —here represented by the narrative voice—, opts for the defense of a system that victimizes the very subjects that, in other texts, the erudite Siguenza represents as the descendents of a captivating culture, that he places, almost with veneration, at the center of his archaeological reconstruction of Mexican pre-history.4 In spite of the undeniable importance of this historiographic version, few studies have analyzed Sigiienza's text from a literary perspective, and even fewer have studied its historic value, its claims of verisimilitude, its construction of a paradigm of indisputable truth, its political functionality within the broad framework of colonial political tensions, or in connection with the complex process of emergence and consolidation of Creole consciousness. Only ten years ago, in a 1994 study by historian Douglas Cope, have we had a careful reading of the uprisings based on the existing documentation available at the Archivo de Indias, in Seville. This study provides a reconstruction of the accounts provided by witnesses and instigators of the insurrection. These witnesses testified before the Real Audiencia and other tribunals that investigated the events immediately after the revolt, and who made the decisions about the brutal punishments imposed upon those who were considered responsible for the uprising.5 I propose here then, that we consider Sigiienza's text only as a one of the possible sources for the analysis of the insurrection of 1692. In other words, his account should be taken just as one of the folds in which the historiographic conscience of the American Baroque reveals and at the same time conceals certain layers of collective memory and quotidian experience in the process of constructing the Creole imaginary. In this sense the event could be studied as a pre-

4 For studies on Siguenza y Gongora and the history of the Amerindian past, see Pagden, Leonard, and Ross. 5 This work is indebted to Cope's study and his careful reading of the accounts revealed in the documents filed at the Archivo de Indias. His findings have recovered a multiplicity of voices and perspectives which make it necessary to reinterpret Siguenza y Gongora's text at a new light.

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cise instance of localization and displacement of Creole subjectivity with respect to the symbolic nuclei of social and political legitimacy in viceregal society. But, at the same time, the insurrection reveals other aspects of the fragmentary, hidden, and discontinued history of the popular sectors that were materially and discursively subjugated by learned power. In fact, reading against the grain of official interpretations of this text, the popular sectors that rebel against the practice of "colonization of imaginaries" that is part of the project of colonial domination, appear in the temporal enclave of the insurrection as social subjects that defy Creole order through their actions, but also through their testimonials, offering pieces of information that were severely controlled and rigidly mediated by the dominant structures. Through this well regulated discursive production, the dominated defies both Creole canonicity and its correlative hermeneutics, creating its particular form of symbolic reversion of universalist and centralizing rationality.

BAROQUE OPPOSITES AND THE LOGIC OF SUBVERSION: SYSTEMS IN CONFLICT

The narrative elaboration of Siguenza's text is based on two principles which are central to the Baroque: first, the oxymoronic disposition that opposes, both at an aesthetic and at an ideological level, the qualities assigned to the narrative matter, thus offering a somehow reductive and polarized account of the historic event. Secondly, the strategy that proposes the interpretation of the revolt as a sudden and unforeseeable rupture of a social and political order, organized around the authoritative principles of monarchy and Christianity. In this manner, the uprising is represented in the text as a social catastrophe, as the unfortunate advent of exceptional circumstances that impact, in an unjustified and overwhelming manner, the harmonic reality of viceregal society.6 The first recourse creates an antithesis of elements which is easily identifiable within the framework of Baroque decorativism, as well in the context of religious doctrine and class hierarchies. The second principle reinforces the idea of an essential order that only temporarily succumbs to uncontrollable, exterior forces, which are shown as being more a product of nature than of the internal contradictions created by colonialism. In both cases the discursive strategies utilized by Sigiienza support the construction of a hyperbolized, polarized, and metaphorical account, where the destructive forces of the floods and the plagues that devastated the region resemble the turbulent dynamics mobilizing the masses.

6 In his study, Cope refers to the notion of catastrophe. Kurnitzky also mentions the "experiencing of catastrophe" as a means of social organization (10).

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Due to the very nature of the event narrated in the chronicle, but also as a result of Sigüenza's narrative perspective, the crescendo also appears as a central stylistic recourse, which becomes evident from the beginning when we observe the lexical construction of the text. The account starts by qualifying the uprising as a from of "disturbance" (['alboroto']a word that carries the connotations of confusion, disorder, or disruption) and escalates to the qualification of the event as a "riot" ("motín") which suggests the idea of a subversive, transgressive, and strategically planned mobilization, animated by a clear sense of purpose and a well defined teleology. Likewise, in referring to the participants as "Indians" or as "the populace," the globalizing strategy encompasses in one derogatory and collective concept, castes, Mulatto groups, slaves, and even Spanish descendants who were involved in one way or another in the mobilization. In this manner the text utilizes a binary system that reveals, throughout the dominant Weltanschauung, the antagonisms of race, class, and gender, that characterized the society of New Spain towards the end of the xviith-century. The general framework revolves around the oppositional terms: elite/Indian populations, order/chaos, commercial exchange/spontaneous appropriation, laws/crime, nature/civilization, thus providing strict parameters for the representation of the insurgence. Additional oppositions such as fiesta/riot, joy/sadness, body/spirit also contribute to support the anecdotal development of the text. As penned by Sigüenza, the text seems to take on the tone of a carnivalesque performance of Baroque celebrations, or the allegorical dramatization represented in the autos de fe or the profane theatre, which constituted an important part of the festive imaginary of Creole society. Nonetheless the conflict is not presented to the reader through the mere registry of these polarities, but rather through the process of inversion and intermingling of elements that produced a disturbing contamination between different spaces, in other words, by the dynamics of transgression of material and symbolic boundaries carried out by the mutineers. The flooded roads that mimicked the overwhelming force of an uncontrollable social reality, the lack of cargo animals capable of transporting provisions from nearby towns to the depleted city, the chiahuiztli worm that ravaged the crops, and the fires that destroyed the city, all seem to symbolize, in Sigüenza y Góngora's synthesis, a sudden and extensive degeneration, not only in material resources but also in the ideological components of Mexican society. These elements represented a sort of grotesque and invasive allegorization, the cancellation of ordinary channels of social communication and political negotiation on which the status quo was based prior to the uprisings. In order to mark the contrast with the narration of the events that were to follow, the letter to Almirante Pez begins by recounting the accomplishments and the concrete strategies used by Virrey Conde de Galve in order to avoid a further deterioration of the situation. Within a second framework, Sigüenza's report de-

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tails the elaborate festivities celebrating, during the days of the uprising, the matrimony of Carlos II and Mariana de Neoburgo, with a display of decorated carriages, costumes, and allegorical parades. The celebration unfolded in front of the Alhondiga amidst the flags, banners, and cries of the populace calling for the blood of the Virrey and the "gachupines" who participated in the local government. The anticlimax created by the festive background suggests the exceptionality of the revolt, the advent of a barbaric mobilization, and the need for an immediate return to the previous state. The social and psychological determinism suggested in Sigtienza's account seeks to divert the attention from the economic, political, and administrative reasons for the insurrection. They propose, rather, to focus on racial issues that supposedly reinforced the civilizing mission of the colonial order. The antisocial nature of Indians and castes, and the ingratitude and resentment that Sigiienza considered characteristic of the masses, added to their supposed lack of restraint, which would have been exacerbated by the consumption of large quantities of pulque. The transgression of frontiers, the violation of social order, the attacks on personal security and private property, the invasion of material and symbolic spaces that comprised the controlled confines of the viceregal elites, are presented as an unnatural inversion of the state of law and civility. These actions are also presented as proof of the ways by which American otherness undermined the very foundations of a system based on economic centralization and political authoritarianism. Finally, rural and urban spaces overlap in a subversion of social functions that had the effect of transforming individuals into subjects, subalterns into social actors. The infamous characters that become alive in Sigiienza's narrative expressed themselves through actions which, from the perspective of the authorities, would convert them, in turn, into victimizers and aggressors. Nevertheless, it is obvious that, if only momentarily, marginalized sectors managed to take control of the public space, suddenly turning a political arena into a battleground. This is, in fact, the "up side down world" that the Baroque satire represented in a burlesque registry, and that the chronicles showed in a dramatic light which did not exclude irony and scorn for the inferior classes that, if only provisionally, attained an active role in destabilizing the colonial order.

TEXTUAL BATTLES

There are, however, other stories, that emerged from the fragmentary and disperse accounts given by the participants of the uprising itself, and that were recuperated by Douglas Cope in his original study. These accounts articulate themselves in a variety of ways, to other textual sources which are part of the multiplicity of discourses that were produced around this insurrection, and that

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created a genuine textual battle that threatened the centrality and verisimilitude of official accounts. There is, on the one hand, documentation of the Junta of April 29, 1692, which details a meeting between members of the Real Audience, magistrates from different administrative institutions, high ranking members of the church, and the Cabildo. Cope qualifies this as one of the most impressive assemblages of its kind in the history of colonial Mexico. In the course of the meeting the participants discussed in detail matters such as the state of market, the popular demand, and measures that appeared to be needed in order to control speculation, the hoarding of crops by producers and distributors, as well as alternative means for the fixing of prices and the organization of consumption. In addition to the edicts and decrees issued the year before by Virrey Conde de Galve in order to control the lack of supplies and enforce the provision of corn, wheat, and other crops to the populations of surrounding areas, the testimonies we have of the Junta de Abril constitute the documentary corpus that serves to counterbalance the interpretation of the mobilization of Indians and Mestizos. Their actions were depicted, as we have seen, as part of the "spasmodic" dynamics through which the "spontaneous, unmotivated, and unforeseen" history of dominated sectors is usually expressed.7 But the documents related to the Junta de Abril allow us to understand the insurrection not as a violent and transient event, but as a result of the gradual process of closure of the channels of provision, communication, and political negotiation, in the months preceding the uprising. Along with these documents, Cope has recovered two anonymous letters sent directly to the King by individuals who signed as "his most loyal vassals," denouncing the abuses of the administration of New Spain, and holding viceregal authorities directly responsible for the crisis. Distancing itself from the usual eulogies of the Virrey that normally comprised this sort of correspondence, the letters focus on reporting accusations that included charges of administrative corruption, tyranny, bribery, profiteering, speculation, exploitation of manual labor, imposition of illegal tariffs upon cattle, as well as threats of banishment to Texas to anyone who would oppose the official order. In addition, the letters emphasized the accumulation of wealth on the part of Viceroy Conde de Galve, in a proportion which surpassed, according to these letters, what four others Virreyes would have amassed in a similar period.8 As a backdrop of these events, which unfold on the foreground of the discursive scenario where the uprising is being represented, many voices, with diverse 7 Cope refers to the "spasmodic vision of popular history" (5) in alluding to the forms of historical interpretation, currently under revision, that do not lend sufficient importance to the social and economic factors which prepare and explain massive insurrections in various contexts. 8 As Cope indicates, it may have been Peninsular aristocrats who disliked the Creole elite. See Cope 133, 134.

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functions, manifest themselves in various ways within the limits of the lettered city. They serve as an expression of the collective character of the populace: antiSpanish lampoons which precede and accompany the uprising, admonitions that the priests address to the subversive groups, sermons condemning from the pulpit the Viceroy, which in the opinion of Sigiienza y Gongora, imprudently confirmed the suspicions of the masses. In addition, the text presents the demands, gossip, and rumors of women whose voices rise in the crowd. Finally, the text alludes to the formal appeals presented before the archbishop and the viceroy, which upon being disregarded, become clear evidence of the cessation of the dialogue with the responsible authorities of the regional government, showing the necessity to find new strategies of collective action. Together with the multiplicity of voices, the official testimonials, and also those provided by the participants of the revolt make special emphasis on the sounds of deafening cries, the whistling, the tolling of bells and gunshots, a tumult that Sigiienza compares with the sound of a hundred drums beating at once. The noise marks the crescendo of the uprising, and contributes to the depiction of the event as a threatening and carnivalesque performance that terrorizes the elite and instigates the popular struggle. The cries call for the death of the gachupines and the blood of the "cuckold" ("cornudo") Viceroy Conde de Galve, the Virreina who had turned him into that, and the principal magistrate of New Spain (the corregidor). From the perspective of the elite, this overwhelming and cacophanous scenario is assimilated to the orality of the masses and to the fragmentary and contradictory nature of the testimonies offered by the direct participants of the uprising. This auditive depiction stands in notorious opposition to the organized historiography offered by Siguenza's account, where the tumultuous events are documented in a linear narrative that absorbs the chaos of the revolt into the order of the discourse. This contrast is made clear by the multiplicity of versions that Cope has compiled, which make a strong claim of verisimilitude, in response to the pressures of the authorities who attempted to subsume the events into a manageable rationality through the structures of forensic discourse, more in accordance with the organic and centralized nature of Viceregal society.

T H E OCTOPUS AND THE H Y D R A : THEORIES OF INSURRECTION 9

Be it the octopus, a beast with one head and a thousand invasive and destructive arms, systematically seizing what it finds in a centralized, albeit disorganized way, 9 According to Cope, "Spanish accounts, then, tend to depict the crowd as a vast octopus, a single will with many outreaching tentacles. But the rioters —once the palace was set on fire— may have more closely approximated a hydra, the multi-headed beast of classical lore" (144).

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or the hydra, the monster with a thousand heads, uncoordinated amidst an unattainable reality, functioning in traditional units of space, action, and time. Douglas Cope describes the theories explaining the Revolt of 1692 in these terms. Through these contrasting approaches each seeks to render a different account of the events that unfolded in Mexico that year, although both have the common goal of making sense of the incidents within the horizons of social experience in Viceregal society, and also within the foreseeable parameters of a well defined rationality. Amongst the official strategies utilized for the explanation of the events, the principal one consists, as Cope describes, in the attempt to prove a conspiracy theory through the identification of presumed leaders who could be individually blamed for the uprising. With it, is unleashed an entire spectrum of effects derived from the popular mobilization. For the most part, the interrogations managed to corrode the solidarity of the rebels and provoke the outpouring of real or imagined allegations of guilt in order to respond to the torture of the magistrates who questioned suspects once the uprising had concluded. In many instances, such as that of the mestizo shoemaker Miguel González, the interrogation techniques caused that the accused not only incriminates himself, but also denounces circumstantial accomplices which, consciously or not, would have accepted food, clothing, money, and varied goods obtained by insurgent rebels in the looting of stores and market stalls around the Alhóndiga. At the same time, there were attempts to justify incarcerations with material evidence, preferably money that was found in certain quantities in the hands of day laborers or artisans. This was the case of laborer José Ramos, detained for carrying pesos and not reales or currency of lesser value which corresponded to his wages. Others, such as Felipe de la Cruz, attempted to lie in order to save themselves by proposing scarcely credible accounts, which in the end resulted in their immediate execution. Other participants were detained for simply having been in the areas surrounding the Alhóndiga at the time of the uprising, or for having belonged at some point to suspicious groups. The case of José de Santos, one-eyed shoemaker, without legs who walked on his knees, is particularly noteworthy. Due to his conspicuous appearance, de Santos was accused by witnesses of being not only a participant in the revolt, but an instigator; witnesses' testimonies put him, in spite of his physical condition, in various places at the same time, during the period when the events unfolded.

CLOSINGS AND OPENINGS

The disclosure of the eyewitness' testimonies, aside from reconstructing an empirical account of the uprising and the preceding events from another perspective, offers a series of versions that contrast in form and spirit with the official ones, particularly the one provided by Sigüenza y Góngora. Nonetheless, it is less im-

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portant to compare diverging accounts of the event than it is to extract, from the complex textuality we have referred to, some conclusions relating to the construction of historiographic discourse and the implications that these practices may have had on colonial culture. In the first place, the testimonials provided by the participants in the revolt yield a faint trace of the actions carried out by the masses in the events before and during the uprising. At the same time, they offer a discontinuous outline of selfrepresentation. Due to the very nature of the situation in which these testimonials were produced, the represented subjects seem to be alienated from all forms of individual and collective subjectivity. In fact, the statements made by the suspects do not constitute a reliable declaration, as they were made under coercion, were heavily mediated by viceregal authorities and by the imposition, on a discursive level, of interpretive and representational models formalized by the dominant culture. The application of these models, which was as important in reestablishing social order as the physical punishment of insurgents, has fundamental consequences in the interpretation of this and other insurgencies, in a variety of contexts. It implies, on the one hand, the appropriation of the historicity of colonial subjects and the pilfering of any possibility whatsoever of preserving an autonomous space for subjugated voices. This is specially true in a context such as the one depicted by Siguenza, where mobilization neither responds to an advanced state of social consciousness nor is substantiated by an organizing apparatus capable of effectively subverting the foundations of a ruling system. Consequently, the insurrection seems limited to its symbolic content and its diagnosis value, which are easily absorbed into the power structure. On the other hand, the alternative discourse of the participants in the uprising, reversely defines the function of the official historiography as a practice conceived and implemented in complicity with the politics of the state. Historiography is then assigned a fundamental role, not only in the organization, but in the construction of history conceived as a reading of the past, and as the interpretation and processing of contemporary times. In a more political evaluation, historiography also plays a pivotal role for the legitimization of power, as well as for the continuity of social control, and the perpetuation of hegemony. As it has been indicated with regard to the accounts of popular insurrections elaborated by public officials, these versions ...may have an "appearance of objectivity," often expressed through an impersonal narrative, but events are in any case included in an explanatory discourse, that attributes them a pre-history and a causality, that are utilized, later on, to legitimate civilizatory or repressive actions carried out by the elites in order to eradicate o prevent the violence of insurgency. The rebels are deprived of the right of being subjects of their own revolt ["sujetos de su propia revuelta"], and are turned into excuses for a

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Also, in contrast to these official reports, on a popular level, the testimonies uncover the complex constituency of the Creole consciousness, which is trapped in the crossroads created by political and cultural struggles. In a study on the American Baroque, Bolivar Echevarría points out the way in which, in fear of barbarism, the Creole sector continued to align itself with the Spaniards in times when the viceregal stability was in crisis, even in instances of advanced consolidation of their sectorial identity. This happened in the midst of their search for a form of hegemony that after a long process of differentiation >from Peninsular power, would, in turn, revolt against metropolitan structures. The cultivated and ubiquitous Criollos, who acted in colonial Mexico in complicity with the status quo, did not hesitate in exploring the indigenous cultural matrix as the source for their own process of sectorial differentiation (the Creole as the natural depositary of pre-Hispanic legacies). Nonetheless, in facing a crisis within the existing order, the meaning of that other culture, attains a negative and threatening connotation for Creole population. In other words, the other, which retains his interest as a cultural object, cannot be assimilated as a political and as a social subject. In this sense, the ideology of racism —or, we could say, the politics of race— appears, in the colonial context, as a cultural construct of variable importance and oscillating value, depending on the historical junctures and the sectorial alliances that became necessary in different circumstances in order to solidify the increasing power of the criollos in Mexico's pre-national stages. The "civilizing" colonialist project had relegated the empirical reality and the irreducible materiality of subjugated sectors to the very edge of civility itself. The corporeal experience, the primary values of survival, and the right of self-realization of Indian populations were considered as de-centered, basically unproductive, and isolated practices. Nevertheless, popular mobilizations demonstrated that even in their disperse and discontinuous nature, the polarization of the world divided by violence and counter-violence denotes an essential instability in a system whose legitimizing foundations seem to rest upon the inappealability of the dominators and the irrepresentability of the dominated. The Indian and the colonial castes had been effectively assimilated by the representational strategies of colonial power. This power had assigned them a place on the stage where the games and festivities of absolute power were played out, and where subaltern groups acted the part of the "extras" always located in the background of colonial power. But the uprising placed these actors, even for the short period in which the events unfolded, on the forefront of the historical platform, through the mobilization, the rebelliousness, and the association with those who, even in a temporary manner, expressed their solidarity with them. This is why the historiographical practice of

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the letrados became such an important tool in the colonial period, and why individuals who where located at the center of Viceregal society understood the symbolic and strategic meaning of their work. This also explains the urgency that Sigiienza y Gongora, as well as other officials of the Viceregal administration felt during the events of June 1692, in saving from the fire and the rage of the crowd, the archives housed at the Alhondiga, which chronicled the history of colonial domination, and registered their own personal and collective involvement in the "civilizing" process implemented in Mexico. Finally the dual perspective of the uprising demonstrates, in varied aspects, the symbolic battle of cultures in conflict within colonial society. Accounts make reference to the deployment of religious symbols that found their place in the midst of the uprising. They mention, for instance, the cross, the religious images toted in the procession in order to conjure the demonic force of mass chaos, the administering of the Eucharist amidst the tumult to the dying on both fronts, the litanies and sermons of the pontiffs who attempt to contain the outrage of the populace, the allusions to the historical patrimony of dominating sectors. But the popular sector also exhibited its own paraphernalia of improvised flags, banners, makeshift weapons and offensive countersigns which included vulgarities aimed at the ecclesiastic and political authorities. If the measures of the Viceroy and the proceedings of the Real Audience, seek to reestablish an order suspended by the parentheses of the uprising, the actions of the populace reveal a symbolic display of alternative values, interests, and behaviors. According to the dominant conception of history and civil life, these practices manifests themselves as fragmentary, discontinuous, and disperse, and as a form of collective but inorganic action that is strongly attached to the empirical, the material, and the immediate. The appropriation of goods and the attempts to conceal the plunder from authorities, the contradictory web of false testimonies that, like Siguenza's report, stake their claim to the truth, the emphasis on the wounded, mutilated and executed bodies hung for public display, the fire that consumed the patrimony of an ostentatious, exclusive, and repressive culture, created a counterpoint that is difficult to assimilate and absorb through the purifying and selective codes of classic historiography. The discourses produced by dominated sectors, constitute themselves a battleground mined by the ideological and cultural strategies of dominant cultures. Subaltern textuality can be seen, then, as a symbolic territory re-colonized, re-appropriated, recuperated from the self-legitimizing and disciplinary rhetoric of the imperial other. The significance of oppressed subjectivities appears as merely residual, interstitial, inorganic, if seen from the centralizing and rationalizing perspective of the elite. Only the words and the writing of the dominator create, within the context of colonialism, order, truth, reality. The voice of the subaltern is used for the affirmation of the models of universality on which the identity of

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the Self and the alterity of the Other are founded. If the word reaffirms, then, its privilege as a vehicle for entering into the grand narrative of Occidentalism, and as the way to inscribe the local within the universal or the global upon which imperial domination is founded, the interruptions of dominant discourses by the reverse practices of dominated sectors manage to cancel, if only provisionally, the impunity of the masters, by exposing the folds of the multiple, the hybrid, the material, which is suddenly inserted in the vulnerable continuity of power. The fragmentary discourses and discontinuous practices we have been referring to here, as much as the silences, contradictions, and fallacies included in the discourses subjugated by Viceregal authorities, constitute, by their own merit, alternatives to the discourses of power. These alternative practices and discourses emerge from what we could call a productive irrationality that follows its own insurrectional logic, and its own liberating utopia, one that is difficult to assimilate through the methods of historiographic organization or the mannerisms of Western civility. They give evidence of the existence of marginal but productive epistemologica! locations, and reveal the ghostly presence of other agencies, other agendas, and other subjects.

W O R K S CITED

Sam. "Criollos, gachupines y 'plebe tan en extremo plebe': retórica e ideología criollas en Alboroto y motín de México de Sigüenza y Góngora." Relecturas del Barroco de Indias. Ed. Mabel Moraña. Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte, 1994. 245-

COGDELL,

280. COPE, Douglas. The limits of Racial Domination. Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City. 1660-1720. Madison: U of Madison P, 1994. DELEUZE, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1994. ECHEVERRÍA, Bolívar. "EL ethos barroco." Modernidad, mestizaje cultural y ethos barroco. Comp. Bolívar Echeverría. México: UNAM/E1 equilibrista, 1994. 13-36. — and Horst KURNITZKY. Conversaciones sobre lo barroco. México: UNAM, 1 9 9 3 . LEONARD, Irving. Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. A Mexican Savant of the Seventeenth Century. Berkeley: U of California P, 1929. — Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. Un sabio mexicano del siglo xvn. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1984. MARAVALL, José Antonio. La cultura del barroco. Barcelona: Ed. Ariel, 1 9 7 5 . PAGDEN, Antony. "From Noble Savages to Savages Nobles: The Criollo Uses of the Amerindian Past." Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1 9 9 2 . 1 1 1 - 1 4 2 . RAMA, Angel. La ciudad letrada. Hanover: Ediciones del Norte, 1984.

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Silvia and Rossana BARRAGÁN, comps. Debates Post Coloniales: una introducción a los estudios de la subalternidad. La Paz: Editorial historias, 1997. Ross, Kathleen. "Alboroto y motín de México: una noche triste criolla." Hispanic Review 56(1988): 181-190. — The Baroque Narrative of Carlos de Sigiienza y Góngora. A New World Paradise. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. SIGÜENZA Y GÓNGORA, Carlos de. "Alboroto y motín de los indios de México." Seis obras. Ed. William C. Bryant. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1985.

RIVERA CUSICANQUI,

" W E ' R E OUT THERE TAKING CARE OF FREEDOM": SLAVE RESISTANCE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRAZIL* Joäo José Reis

For most of the 19th century, slavery in Brazil underwent a vigorous expansion, associated with the increase in export agriculture, the growth of cities, and the intensification of the slave trade. In the late 18th century, the sugar plantation economy recovered from a long period of stagnation, taking advantage of an international market which had become less competitive with the departure of Haiti, its largest supplier up until the slave revolution that destroyed its export economy, along with the regime based on slavery. Brazilian sugar plantations thrived until, beginning in the decade of the 1830s, they were faced with the increased production of Cuban sugar along with that of sugar derived from beets. Sugar plantations, however, continued to be the main focus of slave labor in the Northeast until abolition in 1888. Cotton farming likewise prospered in several areas of the North. In Minas Gerais, despite the decline of mining, the region became a phenomenon in the massive and diversified use of slave labor, not just in the emerging cultivation of coffee but also in agriculture for local consumption, cattle ranches, small foundries, the textile industry, in addition to what remained of the mining operations. The ranks of slavery were also swelled by the use of slave labor in the meat jerking plants and on the tea and grain plantations of the South, in Rio Grande do Sul, Paraná, and Santa Catarina. It was, nonetheless, on the coffee plantations that slave labor most flourished in the 19th century after attempts to use immigrant settlers proved largely unsuccessful. Although coffee was grown in several regions of Brazil, beginning with the 1830s production centered on the Paraiba Valley and later spread to vast tracts of western Sao Paulo province, turning these regions into the primary focus of slave labor in the second half of the century. Slavery, however, came to encompass virtually all productive activities, not only those that were linked to the export sector. Earlier we mentioned the case of Minas Gerais, to which we should add that the area came to represent the greatest regional concentration of slaves not engaged in export agriculture. But in several other regions too one can observe the massive presence of slaves in farming * This essay is part of a broader project supported by Brazil's National Research Council-CNPq.

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for local consumption, in the cultivation of grain, manioc, and produce, in fishing, hunting, logging, and small-scale manufacturing. Finally, we should note the formation of large urban centers where slavery predominated, such as Recife, Salvador, and especially Rio de Janeiro. Rio came to represent the largest city in the hemisphere in terms of slave population, being home to nearly 80,000 slaves at mid-century (Karasch 61). In the cities, there emerged a peculiar system of slave labor for rent, particularly in the transportation of goods and persons (the latter by way of sedan chairs), but also in smallscale street vending, in the manual trades, and, of course, in domestic service, a vast sector chiefly comprised of female slaves. Brazilian slavery would reach its high point in the 19th century, nationwide as it was, extending to the various sectors of the economy, and shaping virtually all social institutions, particularly the family. It should be noted too that slave ownership was not confined to large slave holdings. Both in the countryside and in the cities, there was a large number of small slave holders who possessed one, two, or three slaves working in small-scale farming, in jobs outside the home, or in domestic tasks. For all of these reasons, slaves left a deep imprint on the customs, imaginary, culture, and even, through widespread miscegenation, the very ethnic and racial character of our people. Since Brazil was the last country in the hemisphere to abolish slavery, in 1888, it can rightfully be said that Brazil's history in the 19th century in Brazil, which witnessed the formation of this vast territory into an independent nation, is inextricably bound up with that of the heyday and decline of the slave-holding regime. In this regard, the demographics speak volumes. It was in the 19th century that Brazil received the greatest numbers of enslaved Africans, taking into account the almost three centuries that the trade in human beings lasted. Despite the banning of this trade in 1831, it went on until 1850. In that first half of the century, it is estimated that some 1,500,000 Africans arrived, mainly through the port of Rio de Janeiro, without a doubt the largest port of entry for slaves on the Atlantic coast. According to a recent estimate, between 1790 and 1830, 697,945 slaves debarked there, 123,590 of them just in the last three years of legal slave trade (1828-30) (Florentino, Em costas 50-51). Thus Rio imported in 40 years the equivalent of more than one third of Brazil's slave population in 1818, which amounted to 1,930,000 persons, or, in other words, the equivalent of almost 17% of all of the slaves imported into Brazil during the entire African slave trade. The importation of Africans became the most common mechanism for replenishing slave labor throughout the course of slavery in Brazil. With the definitive prohibition of the trade in 1850, the slave population was to decline, although it grew in the next two decades in the most prosperous coffee-growing regions as a result of the internal slave trade, especially from the north-northeast to the south. In total, slaves in Brazil numbered 1,715,000 in 1864, 1,540,829 in 1874, 1,240,806 in 1884, and just 723,419 in 1887 on the eve of abolition (Conrad 283,285).

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The reinvigoration of slavery and its eventual decline did not occur peacefully, always subject to the whims and designs of the country's traditional dominant classes. For it was they who had won Brazil's independence, who had imposed their style on the formation of the nation state, who had reconciled liberal and civilizational discourses with the maintenance of slavery. But theirs was not the only vision of Brazil available at the time. Besides the fact that they were not always united, besides the challenges raised by regional dissent often with popular appeal, besides periodically having to face the protests of free country and city folk, particularly in the volatile regency period, Brazilian elites and slave owners generally had to confront the resistance of slaves everywhere slavery thrived. This resistance suggests that the victor's project in a country based on slave labor was not enjoyed without the active opposition of the principal losers. The rebellions represented the most direct and unequivocal form of collective slave resistance. But not all revolts presupposed the destruction of the regime based on slave labor or even the immediate freedom of the slaves participating in them. Many were simply aimed at redressing the excesses of tyranny, reducing oppression to a tolerable level, demanding specific rights—at times the recovery of lost gains-or punishing especially cruel overseers. They were uprisings whose objective was to reform slavery, not to destroy it. In 1789, for example, on the Santana sugar plantation in Ilheus, in southern Bahia, slaves killed the overseer and fled into the woods with tools needed to operate the sugar mill, only to reappear with a peace proposal in which they asked for better working conditions, access to plots for subsistence farming, the means to market the surpluses of such plots, the right to choose their overseers, permission to hold freely their festivities, and other demands (Schwartz). The revolts became more frequent from the end of the 18th century, with the expansion of the areas devoted to export agriculture and the consequent intensification of the slave trade, which increased the size of the slave population, particularly its African component. A high proportion of slaves in the population and, among them, a larger number of Africans, indeed of Africans from the same ethnic group, reinforced the collective identity and piqued the awareness of strength before the free classes. Wherever native-born Africans made up the majority of slaves and also found it difficult to have families (owing to the paucity of females in the captive work force) was where it was hardest for the slaveholding class to control the slave population. Slave revolts and conspiracies in Bahia in the first half of the 19th century-numbering more than twenty-were instigated by enslaved Africans, specifically Hausas and Nagos, the latter referring to Yoruba-speakers.1

1 On slave pacification as a result of a greater presence of family networks, see the work of Florentino and Goes.

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But if in Bahia and other areas, still in the period of open slave trafficking, African-born slaves seem to have been the driving force of rebellion, the Crioulos (Brazilian-born blacks) were by no means passive. In addition to fleeing their captivity and organizing quilombos (runaway slave settlements), they had a greater presence than the Africans in movements conceived by other social sectors, such as the anti-Portuguese riots in the provinces of Bahia, Pernambuco, Sergipe, Rio de Janeiro, and Maranhao between 1821 and 1831, or the revolts that occurred in the Regency period of the 1830s. With the decline of the African slave population after the slave trade ended, the Crioulos would respond by forming quilombos and fomenting rebellions, especially in the final years of slavery. But even before this time there are examples of predominantly Crioulo slave populations involved in rebellions, as was the case of the aforementioned Santana sugar plantation. And as we are discussing African slaves, it should be noted that some ethnic groups were more aggressive than others. The fact that Bahia was the scene of many slave revolts is due to the convergence there of great numbers of Nagos and Hausas, peoples with recent experience with wars in their homelands, some of which involved conflicts surrounding the spread of Islam. By contrast, Rio received in the same period predominantly Bantu-speaking Africans, many of them quite young and inexperienced in the art of war. The Portuguese Crown installed in Rio realized the situation and thus demanded that the governor of the captaincy of Bahia better control its slaves, forbidding them to gather for batuques (African percussion sessions with dance and song) and other festivities that could provide them with a chance to foment revolt. In 1814, the Marquis of Aguiar wrote to the liberal Conde dos Arcos: "[B]esides the fact that there have been so far [in Rio de Janeiro] no disturbances, Your Excellency is well aware that there is a great difference between the Angola and Benguela blacks of this capital city and the blacks of your city [Salvador], who are bolder, more intrepid, and capable of any undertaking, particularly those of the Hausa nation" (Letter 22.3.1814). By that time, the cycle of Bahian slave revolts-which would not end for another twenty years—had already begun. These early revolts were actually carried out primarily by the "intrepid" Hausas, who were then replaced by, or joined forces with, the equally intrepid Nagos, whose rebellious campaign culminated in the Muslim Revolt of 1835. Both groups, particularly the former, possessed a substantial Muslim contingent. Besides the African factor, whose importance would of course diminish with the end of the slave trade, an atmosphere openly conducive to slave rebellion was taking shape in the course of the 19th century around the independence movements and regional rebellions, around the circulation of liberal and later abolitionist ideologies.

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The wave of political and ideological transformations that swept the Atlantic world during the so-called age of revolutions also exerted influence on black rebelliousness in the Americas, including Brazil. The debates concerning the rights of man and those of nations to be free, in addition to unmasking the hypocrisy of whites, who reconciled these principles with slavery, revealed to slaves that free men were divided. The so-called Conspiracy of the Tailors, which occurred in 1798 in Bahia, although it had free and freed mulattoes at its forefront, mainly craftsmen and soldiers, had the support of some slaves and included in its platform, inspired by the French revolutionary ideas, the end of racial discrimination and of slavery, at least for Brazilian-born captives.2 The French Revolution likewise fomented black rebellion on the American continent by indirect means. The only successful slave revolution in the New World took place in Saint Domingue, later Haiti, at the beginning of the 1790s. At that moment when France itself was divided by a revolution, in its Antillean colony mulatto and white masters split with one another in the struggle for power. Slaves took advantage of the revolutionary situation and rhetoric of the day to act. The Haitian Revolution destroyed one of the most lucrative European colonies and created a black state in the Americas, becoming a symbol of slave resistance throughout the hemisphere, a reminder that it was indeed possible to vanquish the slaveholding class.3 "Haitianism," "Haitian contagion" and similar expressions would define the influence of that movement on the political action of blacks and mulattoes, slaves and free men, in the four corners of the American continent. Brazil was not left out. In 1805, just one year after the proclamation of Haitian independence by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, his portrait graced the medallions hanging from the necks of black militiamen in Rio de Janeiro, an episode that takes on greater significance if we recall that Dessalines was also a soldier, the commander-in-chief of the Haitian forces that defeated the armies of Napoleon dispatched to retake the island and reintroduce slavery. In 1814, in Bahia, slaves spoke openly on the streets of the events in the French Antilles. On the occasion of the revolutionary events of 1817 and 1824 in the Brazilian Northeast, Haiti was the order of the day. In the Pernambuco Revolution of 1817, more radical tendencies comprised of blacks and mulattoes who favored a social revolution inspired by the Haitian model positioned themselves alongside the anti-colonialist current led by rebellious, native white planters. In 1824, in Laranjeiras, a village of Sergipe province,

2

See the works by Queirós Mattoso, Henrique D. Tavares, Jancsó, and Mota Atitude de inovagäo. The classic study of this revolution is C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins. An important recent interpretation, which emphasizes the quilombo tradition of Haitian slaves in the outcome of the movement, downplaying the importance of "democratic-bourgeois ideals," is that of Carolyn Flick. On the influence of the Haitian Revolution abroad, see David Geggus (ed.). 3

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during a "mata-caiado" feast — mata-caiado being one of the designations for the anti-Portuguese movements— shouts of "viva" were heard for the "Rei do Haiti" (King of Haiti) and "Sao Domingos, o Grande Sào Domingos" (Saint Domingue, the Great Saint Domingue) (Mota, Nordeste 117-120; and Mott 11-18). The same year, during the so-called Confederafào do Equador, in Pernambuco, soldiers of a mulatto battalion who try to loot Portuguese shops handed out lampoons that read: "Qual eu Imito a Crìstovào / Esse Imortal Haitiano / Eia! Imitai ao seu povo / Oh meu povo soberano" (As I Imitate Christophe / That Immortal Haitian / Come on! You Imitate his people / Oh my sovereign people!) (qtd in M.J Carvalho: 66-67, see also n.86; and Laite 102-103). Ironically, when he was thus hailed in 1824, Henri Christophe—the Christophe of these verses—who in 1811 had proclaimed himself Henri I of Haiti, had already committed suicide right after he was deposed (in 1820) by a revolt fomented by his own sovereign people (Blackburn 257). But he remained "immortal" in Pernambucan folk poetry, which thus suggested a revolutionary project for Brazil. Nevertheless, perhaps more than inspiring dreams of freedom in the senzalas (slave quarters) and hovels of Brazil, Haiti served to fuel nightmares in the big houses of the slave owners, governmental palaces, and even the clubs of rebellious whites. On the occasion of the decolonization of Brazil, several voices representing order cautioned against the reproduction here of the Haitian phenomenon, in the event that the differences between the Portuguese and Brazilians intensified. This fear was used with native planters as a bargaining chip by the commander of the forces that fought against the Pernambucan revolutionaries in 1817. During the disturbances attending independence in Bahia, a similar opinion was expressed by a consul and an admiral, both of them French, who, perhaps traumatized by what had occurred in their own colony, may have exaggerated the revolutionary potential of the situation. But they were not alone. The news of conflicts between Portuguese and Brazilians that reached Portugal by way of letters written by his sister in Salvador caused José Garcés to reflect: "If the army were not enough, it would be Saint Domingue all over again." Much later, in 1867, an authority in Maranhào recalled Haiti amid the fear that whites would be massacred during a revolt in the county of Viana, where slaves descended from the Sào Benedito quilombo to incite rebellion in the senzalas of local plantations. In view of its advanced date, this episode goes to show that "Haitianism" represented a long-lasting fear among Brazilian slaveholders (Mota, Nordeste 119; Reis "O jogo duro" 90-91; Araujo 50). Echoing Montesquieu's concept of political slavery, patriotic propaganda emphasized the image of slavery to define rhetorically the ties that bound Brazil to Portugal: Brazil was supposedly the "slave" of Portugal; the Portuguese parliament wished to "enslave" Brazilians; independence would "free" us from

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Portuguese "shackles." In 1822, after speaking of breaking free of manacles and throwing off shackles, the magistrate of Itu, Sao Paulo, added: "Oh, Brazilians! Dear compatriots! You will never again be slaves or lowly colonials." Some time later, the independence issue having been resolved, there still persisted in Bahia and elsewhere expressions such as "the enslaving Portuguese faction" to designate supporters of Portuguese-born Emperor Dom Pedro I (Letter Francisco Carinhanha to Joaquim Azevedo, 27.03.1831). This type of discourse was common throughout Brazil. Slaves listened attentively to all of this and many began to apply the rhetoric of whites to their own situation, especially the Crioulo slaves, blacks born in Brazil who would take stock in the possibility of their being freed from actual slavery, just as patriots claimed to want to free the country from the metaphorical colonial slavery. In 1821, again in Itu, the rumor circulated that the Portuguese parliament (or the King -there was some doubt) had allegedly proclaimed the end of slavery, but slaveholders and local authorities insisted on maintaining it. About political initiatives of slaves, I could go on indefinitely listing examples revealing that many slaves became active political actors on the stage of decolonization. They took advantage of the new opportunity opened up by the constitutional 1820 revolution of Oporto, for example, which promoted the assembly of Parliament in Lisbon. In 1822, a group of Crioulo slaves from Cachoeira, in the Reconcavo region of Bahia, a center of sugar-cane production, petitioned for freedom to Bahia's delegates to the Parliament, but apparently the latter failed to put the document up for discussion. Other Bahian slaves, as was the case with those of Itu, thought that they had already been granted their freedom by the Parliament and the king of Portugal before the colony separated from the mother country. According to the military commander of Salvador, the Portuguese Ignacio Luis Madeira de Mello, agitators were "filling the Slaves with the most diabolical ideas about revolting, telling them that they are free not only by virtue of the Constitutional system, but also by the Decrees of the King, which their masters have withheld; resulting from such an evil measure [...] that the Slaves are seduced in such a way that they despise obedience and signal in their mode of behavior a forthcoming rebellion." And he added that Bahia was close to repeating "the horrendous picture presented by the Island of Saint Domingue" The same year, an insurrection would occur in the village of Serra, in Espirito Santo. In May, a slave had spread the word that the slaves of Jacaraipe, Una, Tramerim, Queimado, and Pedra da Cruz should assemble to hear the vicar read the proclamation of freedom, "and everyone appeared at the mass armed with firearms, clubs, etc."4

4 On Itu, see Ricci 222-226, 258; on Bahia, see Reis "O jogo" 92 and APEBa, ma90 2860. (Proclamation of Madeira de Mello, 29.03.1822); on Espirito Santo, Almada 166. In Pàtria cornada,

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Everywhere, the conflicts among free men, as was the case during the age of Independence, favored slave rebellion. In theory, the disunion of free men was highly conducive to slave revolt for it revealed to the slaves the political weakness of masters, loosened the latter's individual and collective vigilance, and diminished their capacity for military retaliation. In Pernambuco, the inhabitants of quilombos residing on the outskirts of Recife swelled their ranks and increased their daring to the beat of the disquietudes stirring the universe of free men. "It is impossible to understand the existence of rebellious blacks attacking the outskirts of Recife," writes Marcus Carvalho, "without referring to the political divisions of the elites in 1817, 1821-22, 1824, 1831 or to the Cabanada revolt (1832-35), which forced the provincial government to concentrate its entire repressive apparatus on the other side of the province, on the border with Alagoas" (182). In Bahia, a wave of slave uprisings, begun at the start of the 19th century, intensified following independence, paralleling the mata-marotos (the anti-Portuguese riots), the barracks revolts, and the federalist rebellions. In 1831, a wave of fear gripped the province over a possible uprising of the "slave class," and free men who allegedly conspired against the monarchy were charged with trying to stir "the country's slaves" to rebellion (Libelo acusatorio, fl. 5v, in APEBa, Revolugao, ma50 2856). Federalist rebels, on two other occasions-1832 and 1837-when they were already almost defeated, made timid gestures to gain the support of the slaves by offering them emancipation. In neither case did the slaves respond positively to this self-serving and limited abolitionism, no doubt suspicious of the belated generosity. The Farroupilha (Ragamuffin) republican rebels of Rio Grande do Sul did indeed enlist the slaves of their adversaries (and of their sympathizers, these duly indemnified), who formed the Black Lancers battalion, which was brutally massacred by General Luis Alves de Lima e Silva, the future Duke of Caxias, in 1844 in the defining battle of Porongos. However, by article 7 of the Pact of Ponte Verde that celebrated the peace, signed the following year by the rebels and Caxias, it would be agreed that "the freedom of slaves who have served in the republican ranks or existed within them is guaranteed by the imperial government." The Farroupilha leaders had demanded this as a reward for the exemplary service rendered by the slave-soldiers, but that should not be confused with abolitionist principles. Exemplary service was the same principle that governed the concession of private letters of emancipation. Nonetheless, it is unknown just how many ex-slaves may have benefited —if indeed they actually did— or what fate befell them.5

Iara Lis Carvalho Souza, looked for but was unable to find the petition of the blacks of Cachoeira in the Diàrio das Cortes, which led her to conclude that "the Bahian delegation didn't carry the petition forward, not being recognized as the representative of those men" (129, n. 34). 5 See Reis, Rebeliäo eh. 2; P. C. Souza cap. 7; Maestri 76-82; and Piccolo 225-230; see also, on black participation in the movements of free men, Lima 71-75.

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The slaves of Maranhao province actively participated in the independence movement, which as in Bahia was bloody, and in the anti-Portuguese movements that followed. Afterwards, during the Balaiada (1838-41), the liberal rebels, called Bern -te- vis, and the slaves, the latter led by the freed slave Cosme Bento das Chagas, organized separate revolts, which did not converge until the final phase of the conflict. Like the Farroupilhas, the Balaiada rebels lacked an abolitionist ideology although there existed a certain racial identity among their poorest sectors. But Chagas, the black leader, who gave himself the title of "Protector and Emperor of Freedom" wrote in 1840 that "the Republic is for there to be no slavery." Such radical abolitionism led many Bem-te-vis to come over to the side of legality, thus facilitating the repressive role of the same Caxias who would later crush the Farroupilhas and their slave combatants (M. J. Santos, Assun?ao 433465). External wars likewise served to weaken the control over the slaves, frequently promoting dangerous alliances between the latter and poor free men. Such was the case of the conflict with Paraguay. The quilombos of Mato Grosso, a province bordering the theater of battle, swelled their ranks not only with runaway slaves but also with army deserters and free men trying to evade the draft. Not until after the war did the authorities have the opportunity to unleash repression upon the quilombo dwellers and deserters. At the other end of Brazil, Maranhao, war also had repercussions for the local quilombos, which allegedly experienced an "excessive increase not only of slaves but also of criminals and deserters," complained the town councilmen of the village of Turia9u in July of 1867. At the same time, authorities, merchants, and peasant farmers of the area alleged that the recruitment of national guardsmen for Paraguay had diminished the ability to fight quilombos, while leaving slave-masters at the mercy of their slaves (Volpato 186-197; Araujo 79, 84-85,135-138, for example). Yet, among the various political changes, it was the long abolitionist trajectory —from the laws that had banned the slave trade to those which reformed slavery and finally the campaigns of the final decade of the regime, or abolitionism as a social movement— that proved to be most important to slave agitation. Slaves participated actively, and at times surprisingly, in the process of effecting the disorganization and extinction of Brazilian slavery. Their visions of freedom constantly clashed with the gradualist vision of official abolitionism, for they formed their own, often radical interpretations of each juncture unfavorable to the survival of the system. There is no lack of examples. In Espirito Santo, the law of 1831, which banned (on paper at least) the external slave trade, was interpreted as emancipacionist by the slaves of the village of Itapemirim. The same law figured in the complex web of motivations of the slaves who plotted against their masters in the coffee-growing county of Campinas, Sao Paulo, in 1832. In his deposition, Crioulo slave Francisco

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Joâo José Reis [s]aid that on Sunday, as he was returning to the Farm, he met Joaquim Ferreiro, a slave of Capt. Joaquim Teixeira, as he was leaving the village and engaged him in conversation, and that he, the accused, had said, 'Tio Joaquim...now that blacks are no longer coming to Brazil, wouldn't it be right for them to also give us freedom?' To which Joaquim had replied that something like that is bound to happen (qtd. in Queiroz: 220).

The Campinas conspiracy was uncovered and the revolt ended up not taking place, but this deposition shows that the slaves kept up with, discussed, and acted on the stimulus of reports about things that had to do with them. It cannot be said that they were politically naive for having interpreted "erroneously" what was discussed in the white men's world, the important thing being that they interpreted according to their own interests. In a word, they too engaged in politics, though not in the conventional sense that we imagine politics to be. Twenty years later, again in Espirito Santo but now in the village of Sâo Mateus, slaves were harping on the same string. Rumors circulated among them that "the very recent Law to Suppress the Slave Trade has freed them from slavery, which [emancipation] they, supposing that their masters have hidden it from them, are attempting to obtain by violent and criminal means," wrote the president of the province. This was a reaction to the law of 1850, which put an end to the transatlantic slave trade. Historian Vilma Almada interpreted this and other, later episodes, particularly those of 1871, the year of the Law of the Free Womb, as the result of a libertarian reading by the slaves of the rhetoric and news reports of abolitionists. The same thing was to occur in Campos, in the province of Rio de Janeiro: slaves became restless as they interpreted the discussions of that law as a sign of the final abolition of slavery. By way of comparison, it should be noted that the same phenomenon was often repeated in other slaveholding areas of the Americas. In 1823, for example, the slaves of the English colony of Demerara (part of present-day Guyana) also interpreted as abolitionist the laws of the metropolis that were only meant to reform slavery, and believing that their masters and the colonial government were refusing to promulgate them, unleashed a revolt of sizable proportions.6 In Brazil, the law of 1871 sparked considerable disquietude among the slaves, though not in terms of a collective revolt. It was the first legal instrument that openly established certain rights of the slaves vis-à-vis their masters, such as the right to possess savings and to purchase one's freedom for a price determined by the court. For the first time, the state was getting deeply involved in the slave/master relationship, and slaves were able to take good advantage of the new situation, often getting the state to decide in their favor. There are several studies 6

See Almada 1984,167-174; L. Lima 1981,93. On Demerara, see Emilia Viotti da Costa (1994).

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that show them taking their masters to court in order to secure those rights by means of the legal instrument of agao de liberdade, the legal procedure by which slaves could sue masters to recognize their freedom. The law, as historian Sidney Chaloub so aptly put it, "politicized the day-to-day relationship" of masters and slaves. Based on these new circumstances, many a slave of African origin, imported after 1831, would file suit against his master on the grounds that he/she was illegally enslaved, since Africans who had entered the country illegally since then were regarded as free men. Although the legal resistance of slaves took the form of individual battles, the phenomenon would not have become so widespread without some collective effort, through informal channels, of the word-ofmouth circulation of information about the possibility of a rupture with the domination of the slaveholders. In this effort, slaves relied on the solidarity of free men, among them dedicated abolitionist attorneys such as the black Bahian lawyer Luiz Gama, the filer of scores of agdes de liberdade in Sao Paulo, whose progress and results he discussed in the press, publicly criticizing in some cases judges who dragged their feet in such suits or who decided them unfavorably.7 But slaves did not cease their legal struggle after 1871. During the final phase of slavery, there were uprisings and quilombos were set up in several parts of the country, although these were mostly localized movements, in general confined to one or two properties, and, in the months leading up to abolition in May 13th, 1888, mass escapes from the coffee plantations, with or without the assistance of abolitionist agents. There are reports of numerous plots and revolts in Sao Paulo province in the 1880s, not too well known at the time since, according to historian Maria Helena Machado, there was a kind of press censorship in place aimed at avoiding panic and any additional encouragement of rebellion. Small uprisings were common involving no more than a few slaves, who would kill overseers and masters before giving themselves up peacefully to the local authorities. But there were also revolts which, though put down right away, had the dual purpose of punishing oppressors and gaining freedom. In 1882, the slaves of Castelo plantation, in Campinas, revolted with cries of "Kill whitey!" and "Long live freedom!" And they actually killed the entire family of the plantation administrator —including the children— though they failed to gain their freedom (Machado 73,92-94). 8 It should be noted, however, that the subject of abolition in the slave revolts did not have to wait for the moment of greatest abolitionist agitation. If now not every uprising was aimed at winning freedom once and for all, the uprisings of earlier periods did not all just have as their objective the killing of overseers, reforming aspects of slavery, freeing only the few slaves involved, or escaping to 7

See Azevedo. On agdes da liberdade, see, besides Chalhoub, Grinberg; and Spiller Pena 45-57. On slave resistance and its impact on free populations, including the abolitionist movement, see, besides Machado's book, R. dos Santos (especially ch. 2); and C. Azevedo. 8

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set up quilombos. In 1867, for instance, during the revolt in Viana, in Maranhao, the inhabitants of the runaway slave refuge called Sao Benedito, who occupied local lands, espoused an abolitionist platform. At one point in the uprising, they forced the administrator of one of the rebellious plantations to write a letter in which they declared: "[W]e're out there taking care of the freedom of the slaves; we've been waiting for it for a long time ..." (Araujo 33-34). Earlier, several slave movements of the 1820s and x 30s, both in Maranhao and in other parts of the country, included freedom in their agendas. The difference was that, in the later years of slavery, the free population, earlier divided over other issues -Portuguese-Brazilian, regionalist, federalist, and republican conflicts— was now divided with regard to the specific question of slavery. Hence, the growth of alliances between slaves and the free abolitionist sectors, including members of the elites, alliances that used to be before only occasional or involved limited individual interests —such as relations between quilombo dwellers and tavern keepers, and peasant farmers— to whom they supplied products they grew or stole as well as their labor. With the rise of abolitionism, the political field of slave activity would broaden, empowering the slave movement and lending it new strategies, though not endowing it with a totally new direction. This brings us to an important discussion of slave resistance in Brazil, indeed throughout the Americas. As we saw earlier, rebellious slaves frequently appropriated liberal ideology, considered the property of free men, transforming it into a tool of slave emancipation. Historian Eugene Genovese claims that, in the age of bourgeois revolutions and Latin American independence struggles, cultural and ideological Africanisms, which he believes had oriented black rebelliousness in the earlier period, practically disappeared. He cites the formation of quilombos, by way of example. This thesis has been often refuted by historians of various regions and rebellions of the Americas who have concluded that the quilombos were not a return to some lost Africa nor were African ideologies ever entirely replaced by the spread of the new bourgeois democratic ideology (Genovese).9 If in Brazil the latter awakened the rebels attention to the rhetoric of liberalism, or inspired blacks (especially Crioulos) and mulattoes in the indirect, Africanized form of "Haitianism," this cannot be said of the mainstream of Bahian rebellions or other movements led by Africans. In Bahia, Muslim teachers constituted the leadership of the 1835 movement and, during the uprising, their followers took to the streets wearing Islamic garments and amulets containing passages from the Koran—not excerpts of the Declaration of the Rights of Man —which they felt protected them against the soldiers' bullets. The revolt itself was scheduled to take place at the end of the holy month of Ramadan of that year, the feast of Lailat

9

Among Genovese's many critics, see Craton, and Flick.

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al-Qadr, the Night of Destiny, which coincided with the popular Catholic feast of Our Lady of Guidance (Reis, Rebeliao 136-155). For the slaves, the attack on slavery did not always follow the calendar or employ the language of secular macro-politics. Often, the best time to attack was determined by day-to-day micro-politics or mysterious celestial politics. In this register of time, the master let down his guard during the period of feasts, on Sundays, and holy days, the very moment that slaves chose to worship their gods and to draw spiritual strength from them in order to change the world. A good part of slave politics was played out on a field of power erected between everyday reality and the other world. For this reason, quite a large number of slave conspiracies and revolts occurred precisely at festive periods, not only in Brazil but throughout the world. The president of Bahia explained in 1831 that in his province there were "frequent uprisings on the part of slaves, who particularly at the Christmas season create some disturbances because they have more time off of work for the holy days" (APEBa, Correspondencia do Presidente, vol. 679, fl. 140). Within the context of the slaves' recreational practices, cultural experiences took place that were quite alien to any "liberal" ideology, however broadly, loosely, or abstractly we may define the term. There, collective identity and solidarity were bolstered in rituals and symbolic enactments of battles that reaffirmed the ethnic and spiritual values of the group. There, an extraordinary climate of freedom and ritual reversal of the workaday world was established, which rebellious slaves sought to perpetuate in everyday life. Revolts were scheduled for feast days, particularly feast nights, not only because their leaders relied on the relaxation of the masters' control but also because they relied on the disposition of slaves possessed by a spirit of freedom often acquired in the realm of the supernatural. In short, slaves did not normally break with their masters' universe without relying on the help of their gods.10 Many of the African rebel leaders may have also been priests in the African religions. Inside the Urubu quilombo of Bahia, which was crushed in 1826 on the outskirts of Salvador, there was a functioning house of Candomble, as AfroBrazilian religions were called in Bahia. Manoel Congo, the leader of a revolt in Vassouras country in the province of Rio, in 1838, was called "father," perhaps with some religious connotation. The Campinas conspiracy of 1832 is one of the slave uprisings of which we have knowledge that received the most references to sorcery in the report of the subsequent judicial inquiry. Questioned on the matter, the slave Felizardo stated that the "herbal remedies were [used] to tame the whites so that their weapons would not harm us blacks and for us to rise up bold-

10 In my article "Quilombos e revoltas escravas no Brasil" I list a number of revolts that occurred or were scheduled to occur on feast days (31-32).

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ly to slay them and all become free." The "remedies" were usually roots prepared and sold by the Congo slaves of that region. One of the firebrands of that conspiracy, who was in charge of distributing the protective roots, was the slave Diogo of the Rebolo nation, or "Father Diogo," which probably referred, as in the case of Manoel Congo, to his status as what would later be called a pai-desanto or a priest of an Afro-Brazilian religion. Even Cosme Bento das Chagas, the commander of the slaves of the Balaiada, was renowned as a sorcerer and sought to legitimize his leadership with elements of folk Catholicism. He had been seen "transported in a chair in the arms of the blacks shouting vivas' to freedom from slavery ... in which procession they [also] carried quite a few images and vestments of the Church."11 As the case of Chagas suggests, the role of religion in the slave rebellions was not confined solely to primarily African expressions. Christianized slaves created in the New World a peculiar form of Catholicism which sometimes helped them in their revolts. In 1836, Bahian slaves joined forces with the free Catholic masses to destroy a cemetery built to assert the prohibition of church burials. Slaves and freed slaves who belonged to black lay brotherhoods supported this movement in defense of their right to be buried in graves in sacred ground, an essential measure for them to be able to attain a righteous death that would lead them to freedom in the other world. But other slaves touched by Catholicism preferred not to wait for the freedom attained in death. In 1849, the rebels of Queimado county, in the province of Espirito Santo, were convinced by their leader, a slave named Elisiario, that the Capuchin missionary Gregorio de Bene would persuade their masters to set them free on St. Joseph's day. The slaves donned their best clothes and headed for church to hear the good tidings during the feast day mass. It was all a mistake. The circumstances are not very clear, but they suggest that only Catholic slaves devoted to that saint, whose church they worked hard to build, could attribute this power to the priest (Claudio, especially chapters 2 and 3.). Catholic saints were involved as well in other slave struggles. It is said that Cosine Chagas was a devotee of Our Lady of the Rosary, a saint who was very popular with Brazilian blacks, and to whose brotherhood the freed slave recruited his combatants. He himself wrote in a tortuous Portuguese: "All those that wish to accept the Law, I concede to the brotherhood of the Rosary, where I have my army." Later, he referred to his movement as the "sacred party of that Brotherhood." (M. J. Santos 111). In Vassouras in 1847, slaves devoted to St. Anthony were allegedly involved in a plot that was scheduled to be put into ef" On the revolt of Manoel Congo, see Pinaud et al., and especially Gomes (ch. 2). On Campinas, see Queiroz, Escravidao 216, 219. About Bento das Chagas, see M. J. Santos (88, 96-102, 111, 118119, 132).

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feet on the day of another saint, St. John. Historian Robert Slenes suspects the complicity of St. Anthony in a vast conspiracy the following year, in which slaves of Bantu origin, spread over several counties of the Paraiba Valley and southern Minas Gerais, participated (Slenes 64). St. Anthony reappears in Sao Paulo in the final decade of slavery when Africans, Bantu-speakers and others, were already reduced to a minority. He reappears to reaffirm that religious, even messianic ideologies, could sometimes better serve the abolitionist objectives of slaves than secular ideologies. This is what happened in 1882 on the Castelo plantation in Campinas, in the episode briefly related above. Once the rebellion was quelled, a complex conspiratorial web, similar to the one that existed fifty years earlier in the same county, was discovered, involving leaders who distributed a "potion prepared from roots" designed to render the insurgents' bodies impenetrable to bullets. The leaders, according to the deposition of one slave, "continuously deceived the plantation slaves with sessions of witchcraft, in which they openly preached disobedience of the masters, robbery and murder of overseers and farm owners." (Machado 99). The image of St. Anthony was a part of the healing rituals of a certain Joao Galdino Camargo, not directly linked to the movement, but frequently sought-after by the slaves of the region. These rebels searched for freedom by way of a syncretic religious language, in an advanced state of creolization, which combined elements of the African religious register, particularly Bantu, with those of folk Catholicism and even of spiritualism. Something very close to what is today known as Umbanda in Southeastern Brazil. What we then had was a kind of abolitionist Umbanda (Machado ch. 3). What I have been discussing thus far is based on the relatively recent historiography of slavery, which has demonstrated that it is possible to understand the slaves as active historical subjects. Subjects who are political and thus historical in the sense that history did not pass them by unscathed, that they were capable of developing a critical vision of the society in which they lived and a vision of a redeemed future. Contrary to what sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso once wrote, the slaves' "consciousness of revolt" was not used up "in storytelling and religious beliefs" (242-43.) Indeed, the latter, as we have attempted to show, were often used as tools of social rebellion. Slaves obviously had few political resources at their disposal, but they were by no means unaware of what was going on in the political world of free men. They took good advantage of the divisions that separated the latter from one another, selecting themes that interested them from liberal ideology while translating and assigning their own meanings to the reforms brought about in Brazilian slavery over the course of the 19th century. Many of their leaders held abolitionist positions well before abolitionism was adopted by broad free sectors of society, and when the latter did so the slave movement was strengthened. In the Brazil

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of the second half of the 19th century, slaves rapidly identified the rifts opened by legislation and often took their masters to court to defend the rights guaranteed them by law. They did indeed engage in politics, but in a language all their own, or in the language of whites filtered by their own interests, or sometimes combining the elements of slave culture with the discourse of the liberal elite. They fashioned African religion or folk Catholicism into tools with which to interpret and transform the world, but not without assimilating for the same purposes many aspects of secular ideologies available in the various social milieux in which they circulated. Although defeated most often, rebellious slaves would set the limits beyond which their oppressors would not be obeyed, becoming a decisive force in the overthrow of the regime that oppressed them. Translated by Bobby J. Chamberlain

W O R K S CITED

Marques de. Letter to the Conde dos Arcos, 22.3.1814. Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia (APEBa), Ordens régias voi. 116, doc. 89. ALMADA, Vilma Paraíso Ferreira de. Escravismo e transigào. Rio de Janeiro: Graal, 1984. ARAÚJO, Mundinha. Insurreigào de escravos erti Viana, 1867. Sào Luis: SIOGE, 1994. ASSUNCÁO, Mathias. "Quilombos maranhenses." Liberdade por um fio. Eds. J. Reis and F . Gomes. Sào Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996. 433-465. AZEVEDO, Célia Maria M. de. Onda negra, medo bronco. Sào Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1987. AZEVEDO, Elciene. Orfeu de carapinha: a trajetória de Luiz Gama na imperial cidade de Sào Paulo. Campinas: Editora da UNICAMP: Cecult, 1999. BLACKBURN, Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848. London: Verso, 1 9 8 8 . CARDOSO, Fernando Henrique. Capitalismo e Ecravidao. Sào Paulo: DIFEL, 1 9 6 2 . CARINHANHA, Francisco. Letter to Joaquim Azevedo, 2 7 . 0 3 . 1 8 3 1 . APEBa, Juízes de Paz. Caetité, ma?o 2 2 8 4 . CARVALHO, Marcus Joaquim M. de. "Hegemony and Rebellion in Pernambuco (Brazil), 1824-1835." Ph.D. dissertation, U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 1989. CHALHOUB, Sidney. Visoes da liberdade: urna historia das últimas décadas da escravidáo na Corte. Sao Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1990. CLAUDIO, Afonso. Insurreigüo do Queimado. Vitoria, E. S.: Editora da Funda§ào Ceciliano Abel de Almeida, 1979. CONRAD, Robert. The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 1850-1888. Berkeley: U California P, 1972. COSTA, Emilia Viotti da. Coroas de glòria, lágrimas de sangue. Sao Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1998. CRATON, Michael. Testing the Chains. Ithaca: Cornell U P , 1 9 8 2 . FLICK, Carolyn. The Making of Haiti. Knoxville: U Tennessee P, 1990. FLORENTINO, Manolo. Em costas negras. Sao Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1 9 9 7 . AGUIAR,

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— and José Roberto GÓES. A paz das senzalas. Rio de Janeiro: Civilizaçâo Brasileira, 1997. GEGGUS, David Patrick, ed. The impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic world. Columbia, S.C.: South Carolina UP, 2001. GENOVESE, Eugene. From Rebellion to Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1979. GOMES, Flávio. Historias de quilombolas. Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 1995. GRINBERG, Keila. Liberata, a lei da ambigiiidade. Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará, 1994. HENRIQUE DIAS TAVARES, LUÍS. Historia da sediçâo intentada na Bahia em 1798 ("a conspiraçâo dos alfaiates." Sâo Paulo: Livraria Pioneira Editora, 1975. JAMES, C . L. R . The Black Jacobins Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. 2nd ed., New York: Vintage Books, 1963. JANCSÓ, István. Na Bahia contra o imperio. Säo Paulo: Editora Hucitec, EDUFBA, 1996. KARASCH, Mary C. Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro 1808-1850. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1987. LEITE, Glacyra Lazzari. Pernambuco 1824 :a Confederaçâo do Equador. Recife: Massangana, 1989. LIBELO ACUSATORIO, fi. 5v, in APEBa, Revoluçâo, maço 2856. LIMA, Lana Lage da Gama. Rebeldia negra e abolicionismo. Rio de Janeiro: Achiamé, 1981. MACHADO, Maria Helena. O plano e o pànico. Rio de Janeiro: EDFRJ, 1994. MAESTRI, Mário. O escravo gaucho. Porto Alegre: Ed. da Universidade, 1993. MOTA, Carlos Guilherme. Nordeste, 1817 estruturas e argumentos. Säo Paulo: Perspectiva, 1972. — Atitudes de inovaçâo no Brasil, 1789-1801. Lisboa: Horizonte, n.d. MOTT, Luiz. Escravidäo, homossexualidade e demonologia. Säo Paulo: Icone, 1988. PICCOLO, Helga I. L. "A questäo da escravidäo na Revoluçâo Farropilha." Anais da V Reuniäo da SBPH Säo Paulo (1986): 225-230. PINAUD, Joào Luiz, et al. Insurreiçâo negra e justiça. Rio de Janeiro: Expressäo e Cultura/O AB, 1987. PROCLAMATION OF MADEIRA DE M E L L O , 29.03.1822. APEBa, maço 2860. QUEIRÓS MATTOSO, Kátia M . De. A presença francesa no movimento democrático baiano de 1798. Salvador: Itapoà, 1969. QUEIROZ, Suely R. Reis de. Escravidäo negra em Säo Paulo. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1977. REIS, Joäo Jose. "O jogo duro do Dois de Julho." Rebeliäo escrava. Säo Paulo: Brasiliense, 1986. — Negociaçâo e confito. Eds. J. Reis and E. Silva. Säo Paulo: Cia. das Letras, 1989. — "Quilombos e révoltas escravas no Brasil." Revista USP 2 8 ( 1 9 9 5 - 9 6 ) : 3 1 - 3 2 . RICCI, Magda. "Ñas fronteiras da Independência," Masters Thesis. UNICAMP, 1 9 9 3 . SANTOS, Maria Januária V . A Balaiada e a insurreiçâo de escravos no Maranhäo. Säo Paulo: Atica, 1983. SANTOS, Ronaldo Marcos dos. Resistência e superaçâo do escravismo na Provincia de Säo Paulo (1885-1888). Säo Paulo: Instituto de Pesquisas Económicas, 1980. SCHWARTZ, Stuart. "Resistance and Accommodation in Eighteenth-Century Brazil." Hispanic American Historical Review 57.1 (1979): 69-81.

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SLENES, Robert. "'Malungu'Ngoma Vem.'" Revista USP 12 (1991-92): 64. SOUZA, Iara Lis Carvalho. Pàtria coroada. Sào Paulo: Editora da Unesp, 1999. SOUZA, Paulo César. A sabinada. Sào Paulo: Brasiliense, 1987. SPILLER PENA, E d u a r d o . "Liberdades e m arbitrio." Padè 1 (1989): 45-57.

VOLPATO, Luiza R. C. Cativos do Sertào. Sao Paulo/Cuiabá: Marco Zero/Universidade Federai do Mato Grosso, 1993.

HYBRIDITY, GENRE, RACE Joshua Lund

For underneath that codification of relations between Europeans and non-Europeans, race is, without doubt, the basic category. Aníbal Quijano.

In the contemporary human sciences, "hybridity" usually indicates the dynamics and implications (political, aesthetic) of inter-cultural mixing. It is a "key concept" in the loosely related reading strategies that have come to be known as "post-colonial theory" over the past twenty years (Ashcroft et. al. 118-21). Within the many and widely-cited debates that revolve around the contested relevance of post-colonial theory for the study of Latin America, only the category of the "subaltern" can rival hybridity as a flashpoint for controversy and polemics.1 Out of these conversations has arisen the conventional notion that the post-colonial idea of hybridity is at best an imprecise fit for Latin American discourse and society, and at worst effaces a long tradition of specifically Latin American ideas about culture-mixing articulated under thematic cognates such as mestizaje, antropofagia, sincretismo, transculturación, lo real maravilloso, heterogeneidad and so on (e.g. Franco 76; Moraña 217; Stam 83,91). In short, theories of hybridity —categorized under the sometimes competing banners of Latin Americanism and postcolonialism— have found it difficult to hybridize. Why has this encounter proven so problematic? This is a question worth asking: At stake is nothing less than the production of a truly internationalist critique of the globalization of liberal multiculturalism in its imperial mode, one that can transcend the gravitational pull toward a divisive territorialism. In other words: a critical project that refuses to take the bait of an old colonial lure that leads only to an insistent particularization of resistance, revolt,

Numerous drafts of this essay benefited from the feedback of more individuals than I can credit here. I would like to acknowledge, however, the critical engagement of several readers: Helen Kinsella, Adam Sitze, Santiago Castro-Gómez, Peter Hallberg, Juliet Lynd, Malcolm McNee, Gabriela Valdivia and Joel Wainwright. I also presented earlier versions of the essay at the MacArthur Brown-Bag Lecture Series (University of Minnesota, 2001) and at the conference Race in the Humanities (University of Wisconsin at Lacrosse, 2001). 1 Some major instantiations of this debate include the Latin American Research Review (1993) volume 28:3 (with commentary by Adomo, Mignolo, Seed and Vidal), Revista Iberoamericana (1996) volume 62:176-7 (e.g. Achugar, Cornejo, Larsen and Moreiras), Cuadernos Americanos (1998) volume 67:1 (e.g. Castro-Gómez, Mignolo, and Moraña). See also Beverley, and Larsen.

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or even just criticism. In response to that question are a number of possible lines of analysis, perhaps necessarily beginning with the historical fact that what is proposed in mid-1980s post-colonial theory as a vehicle for counter-Eurocentric, discursive and performative subversion (e.g. Bhabha "Signs Taken for Wanders," "Sly Civility") is already a generic mark of cultural production in Latin America (e.g. Reyes 232-3) that has also already been redeployed as a sign of resistance (e.g. Santiago) This fact has been widely noted. But the challenge of post-colonial theory is not (or should not be limited to) the naming of a difference, an historicocultural incommensurability. The more urgent work for Latin Americanism might be to take the recoil provoked by post-colonial keywords —in this case, "hybridity"— as a cue to revisit its own founding principles. This is precisely what I aim to do in the following essay, by taking as the object of my critique the Latin Americanist commitment to the production of "theories of hybridity," or hybridology. Against the current trend to think theories of hybridity "beyond ethnicity" (or, for that matter, to think Latin America "beyond hybridity"), this will entail placing hybridology back into dialogue with the condition of possibility that determines its modern intelligibility: a Eurocentrically-articulated theory of race. Let me be as clear as possible: This essay will not propose a re-reading of hybridological texts in the name of "exposing racism." Nor will it denounce hybridology as "fundamentally racist," as something that needs to be exorcised from a conceptual field. This essay assumes that, given that "hybridity" historically enters into cultural discourse as a contested term within the racialized and transnational debate over human origins, the necessary re-framing of hybridity is not best accomplished by placing it under (or against) the terms of the nation (Larsen 2001) or even the more broadly construed popular subject position (Beverley).2 Rather, hybridity will be best (re)thought in its emergence through a field of biopolitics? To rethink hybridity in terms of biopolitics is to bring back to the fore 2 Both Larsen and Beverley produce significant contributions to a more generalized critique of hybridity (articulated most forcefully against Bhabha and Canclini). I am attempting to suggest is that by reducing hybridity to questions of national politics and reasserting the very binarisms that hybridity theory tends to work between, they precisely leave standing, largely undisturbed, hybridity's strongest foundations. See especially their readings of Bhabha, in Beverley (via Dimitrov) (85-114) and Larsen (via Mariategui) (83-96). 3 Hybridity moves to the study of culture by way of "race science." It became a central concept in the nineteenth-century debate over human origins which pitted monogenists against polygenists. This debate was linked directly to justifications of slavery and largely turned on the question of the fertility of interracial offspring, or "hybrids." This history, conscious or not, enables the current usage of the term. See Young; cf. Hall ("When was the 'post-colonial'?" 259). It is worth noting that this biopolitical theorization has a much longer history in the Ibero-American world. Nevertheless, even there framing the question of "mixing" as one of "hybrids" rises in concert, and in dialogue, with nineteenth-century, Euro- and Anglocentric race theory: the naming of mulatos and mestizos as such is an enabling prelude to the history of cultural hybridity. Serge Gruzinski's comment (citing a typescript

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the social contracts that govern the naturalization of differential relations between subjects, bodies and the state, and that articulate race to nation.4 This has always been hybridity's domain and, I argue, it is this domain that still enables the conversion of hybridity into the generic mark of Latin American cultural production, whether the institutional host of this conversion coalesces at the level of the state, the academy, the press, or their conflation in the lettered city. And yet it is the field of biopolitics that is effaced in the largely insightful critique of the new hybridity that focuses exclusively on its alleged abandonment of the nation(-state) as a workable arena for the articulation of culture to politics. The reduction of hybridity to a confrontation with "nation" leaves the call to historicize materially in the paradoxical position of having forgotten the material history (that is, the historical conditions of production) of hybridity's function within Latin American discourse and society. These conditions are meaningless if extracted from their biopolitical history that runs smack through race. A necessary relationship thus emerges —and thus tends to go uncomfortably unspoken— between hybridity and segregation. If hybridity is rooted in a notion of blending, these same roots are nourished by a concept that always returns to segregation: the category of race. An impasse appears: hybridity, as the incessant process of mixing, traces its conditions of possibility to a discourse —race— that legitimates and institutionalizes separation.5 It is precisely the ill-advised, momentary suspension of this contradictory history that has left theorists of hybridity stalled in their attempts to move hybridity

by Carmen Bernand) on the politico-religious origins of metis in medieval Spain, far from delinking mestizaje from race (as he seems to indicate), in fact points to the political origins of the naturalization of difference that would later come to be called race (211, n. 11). 4 On the supplementary relations between race and nation that I am following here, see Balibar and Wallerstein. On "biopolitics" see Agamben's revision of Foucault's idea (Homo sacer). 5 Without discarding a constructivist idea of race—whereby race is understood not as a reflection of ethno-cultural difference, but as the production of the naturalization of that difference—I can cite a number of anti-essentialists that posit race's political force as essentially segregationist, e.g. Foucault ("Society Must be Defended") Derrida ("Racism's Last Word" 331), and Quijano. In short, a Western concept of race has founded a Eurocentric reason that scientifically organizes "man" at once into existential and ecological models of, on the one hand, self and other (e.g. Sepúlveda; later polygenists like Agassiz), and, on the other hand, standard and deviation (e.g. Kant and Hegel; later this model would underpin monogenetic theories and the paradoxical racism of, for example, Western abolitionists; for some striking examples in the US case see Talty ["Spooked"] and Menand [The Meta-physical Club]\ in the French case see Trouillot [70-108]). A number of critics have theorized variations on these duplicitous vicissitudes of racism, such as Balibar's racism and differentialist or meta-racism (17-29). Both models (binaristic self-other, or serial standard-and-deviation), however, consistently serve to regulate a segregationist, unequal distribution of social benefits ascribed to classes of people specifically constructed along racialized lines (as "races," "ethnicities," "nationalities," "tribes," etc).

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"beyond ethnicity." We could amass citations, but for now let me simply put forth one outstanding example. I think it is precisely through the evasion of biopolitics that Serge Gruzinski, in an ambitious attempt to take hybridity beyond ethnicity, can begin his narrative by first unselfconsciously detailing as the original agents of hybridity the forced "deportation of populations," the emergence of "centers of [European] penetration," and arranged marriages between "Portuguese soldiers" and the "daughters of indigenous dignitaries" (13), and then in the next breath refer to hybridity's roots in racialized differentiation as "embarrassing," something to be "avoided like the plague" (19). But this might be just the problem: disavowing that which embarrasses may in fact lead the embarrassing object to reemerge at a later, unsuspected, and perhaps inopportune moment. Embarazoso: hybridity, like race, ensures the "properly" gendered, socialized and strategic modes of (re)production. To emphasize: confronted with a post-colonial appropriation of hybridity, I am arguing for neither a change in Latin Americanist terminology, nor for a recovery of Latin American intellectuals who theorized it better, first, or more accurately for particular national-historical contexts. Rather, I am arguing for a sustained engagement with and critique of hybridology in the persistence of its uninterrogated biopolitical mode. One place to see this persistence in action is in writing. Succinctly, the kind of critique that I have in mind would require Latin Americanism to take seriously the unfinished work of Angel Rama and Antonio Cornejo Polar by heeding the call for historical specificity and hence re-reading America within its internationalist context, in other words, in its dialectical relations with Eurocentrism. Latin Americanism's most prominent participants in the post-colonial conversation —Walter Mignolo (The Darker Side), Fernando Coronil ("Más allá") — do precisely that. But while writing this history as a Latin Americanist critique of Eurocentrism is key, this project will remain unrealized or, at best, weak, if not accompanied by a critique of its own self-evidence; that is, a critique of Latin Americanism as a kind of Eurocentrism. And this shift changes the terms of the Latin American dialogue with post-colonial theory. In short, both Alfonso Reyes's old call to provincialize the metropole (which is precisely the space of the reading strategies today called "post-colonial"), and Aníbal Quijano's new one (544), must be effected through a critique of the efficacy of foundational, or "local," alternatives. The modest contribution to that task put forth here is a consideration of the ways that "hybridity" functions as the generic mark of Latin American writing. I maintain that a rigorous confrontation of hybridity with its history will ultimately open up avenues for (re)thinking the post-colonial in Latin America, by which I mean to indicate the intersections of cultural inclusion and political exclusion not only on a north-south axis, but also within and between Latin American societies, in the context of an ongoing colonialism. This framework is

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what I understand Quijano to be theorizing as "the coloniality of power," and which, following Stuart Hall ("When was the 'post-colonial'?" 248,250), is also precisely what post-colonial reading highlights. In the Latin American context, this project, now well under way, will be long and collective, requiring not only a rethinking of Canclini through and against Vasconcelos, but also the rereading of the 1 ^-century archive of Latin American identity construction at the biopolitical articulation of race and state formation. Anything beyond a fragment of this endeavor is more than I can or want to muster here. My goal will be to try to get at the inner logic of a problem, too easily written off as "false:" that is, the alliance of "hybridity" and "Eurocentrism" at the core of Latin American intellectual identity and thought (ontology and epistemology), counter-colonial or otherwise. As I have asserted, this will require me to think about hybridology's stake in race. Writers like Quijano and Roberto Schwarz have drawn out the specifically American articulations of race to colonial-national modes of production in powerful, if still schematic, ways. The task now is to trace how that socially embedded naturalization of (hierarchical) difference installs itself not only within bodies, but also within the structures of ideas, at once enabling and frustrating the Latin Americanist critique of Eurocentrism. The claim, then, is not that "race relations" go ignored in Latin America(nism) (they do not). Rather, I would argue that a full account of the discursive maintenance of race, as the production of naturalized cultural differences, has gone understated, and is still too easily subsumed within the racial exceptionalism of Latin American racial democracies.6 Hybridity's stake in race is of course explicit in classic hybridologists such as Gilberto Freyre or Fernando Ortiz. In an attempt to account for and trace the tenacious, ubiquitous and sometimes surprising ways that race underwrites major Latin American intellectual signposts that appear to have nothing to do with it, I have chosen texts that may be less obvious: namely, a famous essay by Jorge Borges, and a less-famous one by Antonio Candido. The absence therein of an explicitly biopolitical discourse will obligate me to get at race obliquely. The mediating term that I appropriate for this endeavor is the concept of genre as set forth in Jacques Derrida's essay, "The Law of Genre." Via this roundabout route, I will attempt to show how theories of hybridity are tightly bound up with a rhet6 This claim finds support in recent work by Quijano, who notes that basic elements of the genealogy of race in Latin America are "still an open question" (575 n. 5). A number of scholars are contributing to rethinking the nexes of race and power in Latin America that Quijano is getting at here. Some good (among many) examples include new work by Appelbaum et al., Fiol Matta, Jáuregui, Sánchez Prado, and B. Trigo, all of whom at once complicate and build upon the important mid-century analyses of Latin American race relations carried out by the likes of Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, José María Arguedas, Florestan Femandes, and Magnus Mòrner. I take the concept of "racial exceptionalism" from Michael Hanchard, whose work on Brazil has correlates in other regions of Latin America.

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oric that, while deriving its intelligibility from race, simultaneously obscures that relationship through strategies of exceptionalism and exemplarity. Ultimately, the same principle of racial marking that enables exclusionist political authority is that which administers both the cultural marking of genre, and its ostensible transgression via hybridity. At least since Mikhail Bakhtin's enquiry into novelistic structure, artistic and literary genre has been one of the most common sites at which to propose the critical potential of what is today called "hybridity." It has also been one of the most difficult. The difficulties can be readily demonstrated through Néstor García Canclini's influential study of "hybrid cultures" and its ephemeral turn to "impure genres" (314-22).7 Canclini identifies certain generic practices and forms —e.g. videotape (282-288), graffiti (314-16) and the comic strip (316-22)— as effecting a kind of cultural impurification in their modes of material production, critical strategy and public reception. Productively, "they bring the artisanal to industrial production and mass circulation" (315). Strategically, a genre such as the comic strip exhibits its impurity in the way that it draws upon multiple generic canons (316, 317), only to impurify them with strategies such as parody (317), anachronism (ibid.), unapologetic commercialism (320), resignification (322) and social critique (317, 321,322). Receptively, this impurity delinks culture from class (281-88; 314): the comic strip is literature for everyone, as it speaks to both popular and elite sectors of society (316-7); it decenters the location of culture, moving it from the library to the street corner. For Canclini, then, an impure genre is essentially a genre that mixes, or one that is mixed. He asserts this point by noting at the outset of his discussion that ostensibly impure genres like graffiti or the comic strip are in fact "constitutionally hybrid genres" (314). Upon suggesting this synonymous link between impurity and hybridity, however, the concept of the "impure" immediately vanishes from Canclini's text. The "impure," in fact, only appears in the title of a subsection (ibid.), henceforth usurped by the presence of the "hybrid." If hybridity is impurity —as this shift in signifiers leads us to conclude— then the hybridization of genres must be a kind of impurification. Thus the act that propels this transitive process —to "hybridize," to "impurify"— must be carried out upon or against something that is not yet hybrid, not yet impure. The object of this transgression, it stands to reason, will be pure genre. The aporetic nature of Canclini's account of genre is signaled in this inability to delink his notion of the "impure" from the purist implications of "genre." The comic strip, as the impure genre that he addresses most explicitly, is of

7 Unless otherwise noted in the list of works cited, all translations from the Spanish or the Portuguese are mine.

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course a universally-recognized genre in its own right (317), making the function of the tag "impure" somewhat dubious. Moreover, the specific example that he offers — Fontanarrosa's Inodoro Pereyra, a savvy and widely-read Argentine comic strip, published serially beginning in 1972— is no less a canonical cultural artifact than the foundational text that it most insistently impurifies or hybridizes: José Hernandez's gauchesco classic Martin Fierro (1872). Moreover still, the comic strip is no more hybrid than gaucho literature itself, which was never anything like a "pure genre," as Borges implied when, in "La poesia gauchesca" (1932), he called Martin Fierro a novel disguised in epic verse (32, 33). In fact, as Canclini admits at an earlier point in his narrative, transgressively hybrid forms reconvert into the same old class-based hierarchies of institutionally-sanctioned genre relatively quickly, if not immediately (287, 288). By bracketing and eventually discarding this moment of hesitation, however, his critique is reduced inevitably to an aporia in which hybridity merely hybridizes that which was once hybrid, but to which we now ascribe the purity of genre. In short, the critical force of Canclini's "hybridization" proves brittle at precisely the point that one might hope to find its sharpest edge. Now, I very much doubt that the world needs yet another entry into the long bibliography that could fall under the generic heading "critique of Canclini." While I will simply note here the curious absence of any treatment (that I am aware of) that deals with the interesting vicissitudes of race in Canclini's work, let me get beyond Canclini by concluding that what is at issue is the way that his theory stalls in the one-way street that it maps for the operations of hybridity's transgressive function. 8 Its critical force undercuts itself by producing a model that poses hybridity as a kind of automatic transgression against its other, coming after or in opposition to the implicit purity of genre or generic formalization, and by extension, against class stratification and hierarchy (258).9 His configuration thus obscures the kind of inter-dependency that governs the relations between "hybridity" and "purity." Let me also quickly point out that Canclini's sublimation of mixing is a common one in Latin Americanist criticism, and constitutes,

8

On the unidirectionality of Canclini's hybridity (in terms of temporalization), see Kraniauskas (130). Regarding race, Yúdice comments briefly on the underdevelopment of race and ethnicity in Canclini's more recent work ("From Hybridity to policy" xxxvi-viii); De Grandis concludes her comparison of Canclini and Bakhtin by exhorting us to consider race (223). For criticism that revolves around the articulation of economic power and political agency in Culturas híbridas, see Yúdice "Postmodernism;" Jameson; Beverley; López; Kokotovic; Kraniauskas. 9 Though he never uses the term, a significant object of engagement for Canclini is what in Bourdiean reading is often generalized as doxa, but what Bourdieu himself once more precisely called "class-centrism" ("Outline" 217), i.e. the naturalization of the "way of perceiving" of a particular social class as the "real" way of perceiving art and reality. Canclini explicitly notes his debt to Bourdieu (Culturas híbridas 37).

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as writers with projects as diverse as Alfonso Reyes, Silviano Santiago, Angel Rama (173-93), Jesús Martín-Barbero (2, 3), Nelly Richard (456-8) and René Jara (10) have all insisted, a founding principle of Latin American cultural identity: genre-mixing becomes the gestural signature of all Latin American cultural production Drawn into this complex Latin Americanist staging of cultural identity by way of impurity, hybridity, transgression, and genre, a question posed by Jacques Derrida is especially provocative: "And suppose for a moment that it were impossible not to mix genres. What if there were, lodged within the heart of the law itself, a law of impurity or a principle of contamination?" (Derrida, "The Law" 204). Might that "counter-law, an axiom of impossibility" (ibid.) find its explicit reconversion into natural law within the Latin American intellectual tradition? The prominent roll-call of modern Latin American participants in various "aesthetics of hybridity" (Yúdice, "From hybridity" xx) — which is essentially an aesthetics of mixing— has led generations of artists, essayists and critics to suggest as much. But before rushing into an essentialist, even exceptionalist, foundationalism, let us recall that Derrida first illuminates genre as a limit, in the sense that it can be formulated as a norm, and carries with it the force of law (203). No sooner has Derrida accounted for this disciplinary quality of genre, however, than he exerts against it the counterforce of its constitutive opposite. The limits established by genre only exist as such through the inherent possibility of transgression: any such trasgressive admixture "should confirm, since, after all, we are speaking of 'mixing', the essential purity of [a particular genre's] identity" (204). But, in general, "[g]enres are not to be mixed" (202). Genre in the generic sense should then require a kind of discipline; or, more precisely, discipline —as a field of multiplicities that is regulatory yet productive (Foucault The History of Sexuality,"Society Must be Defended;" Mowitt 31-2)— becomes the necessary companion of genre. The anxious question that arises is whether the artistic mixing of genres (as hybridity), or its scholarly correlate found in the movement between and across disciplines (as interdisciplinarity), can have any legitimacy at all. I do not exaggerate when I characterize this question as anxious. There persistently emerges, throughout the recurrent theorization of hybridity in Latin America, an explicitly articulated anxiety. The reiteration of this anxiety is precisely that which most incisively speaks to, and also suggests the danger in sublating, the links 10 Santiago is exemplary, but by no means exceptional, when he conflates religious syncretism, biological miscegenation, and literary discourse as all governed, in Latin America, by the same principle of mixing that "destroys" the "unicity and purity" of Europe and becomes the "greatest contribution of Latin America to Western culture" (18).

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between the will to mix of hybridity and the segregationist impulse of race: the act of theorizing hybridity participates in a racialized discourse. Prominent theorists of hybridity provide some illustrations. In the preface to an English translation of Casa-grande e senzala (1933), Gilberto Freyre gives as the fundamental inspiration for his mammoth inquiry into the hybridization of Brazilian culture the following: "of all the problems confronting Brazil there was none that gave me so much anxiety as that of miscegenation" (The Masters xxvi).11 In a prologue to the 1948 edition of La raza còsmica (1925), José Vasconcelos similarly recalls "the question that the mestizo has frequently asked himself: 'Can my cultural contribution be compared with the work of the relatively pure races that have made history up until our day, the Greeks, the Romans, the Europeans?' And within each nation [orig: pueblo], how do the periods of mestizaje stack up against the periods of creative racial homogeneity?" (43-4). Octavio Paz seems to be working through similar questions in his momentous treatment of the "pachuco" and the "hijos de la Malinche" (1950). Writing in a different political context, Roberto Fernández Retamar, at the outset of his famously polemical Calibán (1971), would equate the question of whether there exists a "Latin American culture" as tantamount to questioning the very existence of Latin Americans as such (7). That he proceeds, echoing Marti and Bolivar, by delineating a cultural program based upon a specifically mestiza America (8), again betrays the anxious link between cultural and racial legitimacy. Lest all of this be written off as a transcended history, recall that the racialized hybridity deemed "embarrassing" by Gruzinski still implies, as the late Antonio Cornejo Polar once put it to Canclini, the age-old question of the productivity of hybrids (7). If Derrida's account of genre is useful in this Latin American scene, it is because it confronts us with the dialectical relation by which the rule (law, pure genre, pure race) depends upon its exception (transgression, hybrid genre, mestizaje). Mestizaje, in this model, rather than an alternative to racial purity, instead reinforces it. Cultural hybridity, in a similar way, and as we saw in Canclini, mirrors the taxonomic gesture of the law of genre.12 To argue for the hybridity of mestizaje as the legitimizing mark of a kind of exceptional status or identity becomes a tacit recognition and admission of the preeminence of race. In other words, mestizaje as the exception to racial purity ultimately makes possible, le-

" The preface in question extracts sections from the original preface of the first Brazilian edition of Casa-grande e senzala. Therein the same anecdote appears, with the wording as follows: "E dos problemas brasileiros, nenhum que me inquietasse tanto como o da miscegenagao" (Freyre xlvii). I have been unable to verify to what extent Freyre collaborated with Sam Putnam in translating the prefaces to the English edition, which differ from the prefaces in Portuguese. 12 For example, Gruzinski speaks to the desire to categorize the uncategorizable when he notes his efforts to produce an "inventory" of "mestizo phenomena" (20).

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gitimates and reconfirms that purity. Understood as such, it comes as little surprise that the early Spanish colonial taxonomies of racial mixture mingled with and appropriated the force of law through the normative "society" or "regimen" of castas.13 With this cluster of juridical norms regulating many aspects of colonial life (handling of arms, access to wealth, commerce and social ascension), its multifarious recodification at once exposes the impossible fluidity of racial classification and reconfirms the social force of race.14 Centuries later, in an attempt to forge the patria by redefining a nationalist cultural specificity, Manuel Gamio would refer back to that colonial mixing as the originary mark of Mexico's national protagonist, what he calls the "mestizo type," in its "pristine purity" (66). Whether the terms of production are racial or cultural, imperial or national, to argue for the hybridization of genres and practices as the Latin American exception speaks to a genus universum whose parameters are defined elsewhere: the metropole, the political and economic center (Fernández Retamar 7).15 Positing hybridity as exemplary of an exceptional cultural singularity (exceptionalism) obscures the fact that that "elsewhere" —the site of genre— depends upon that very exceptionalism to maintain its legitimacy. This is what the early work of Homi Bhabha theorizes by pursuing the ambivalent operations of colonial discourse.16 The persistent rearticulation of hybridity as exceptionalism, even as a gesture of contestation, is a structural necessity of Eurocentrism. The ramifications of this structure are not all gloomy: the framing of Latin America as a kind of inner exterior, as Borges will argue, lends its writers the critical advantage of marginality that Hegel found in the perspective of the "bondsman," or 13 The etymology linking words like casta, castizo, and the adjectival casto (chaste), to questions of both purity and mixing is fascinating, and far too complex to pursue here. Tellingly, to call something castizo in Spanish is not only to designate one of the many human products of race-mixing (alongside mestizo, mulato, etc.), but also to speak of the authenticity of a thing's origins. Thus lo castizo is lo puro, but also lo tipico, by which context and inflection can link lo castizo to lo popular and lo tradicional. 14 Konetzke offers a set of primary documents regarding colonial Spanish America, a number of which are juridical edicts regulating social privileges and restrictions along the lines of social-racial categories. Môrner's classic studies give an overview of the relations between the system of castas, race and law in colonial Ibero-America (Race Mixture 35-74). 15 The concepts of metropole and political-economic center that I employ here do not stem from a traditional, relatively static model of colonial center (e.g. Spain) and colonized periphery (e.g. New Spain), which would be inapplicable in most of Latin America since at least the late 18,h Century. Rather, I am working (at both the level of theory and practice) through the context of Enrique Dussel's more flexible revision of world systems theory (see Dussel 1998a), which theorizes Latin America as a peripheral participant (vis-à-vis Europe and North America) in the North Atlantic circuit of both commerce and ideas. Quijano's influential theorization of the "coloniality of power" draws upon the same model. 16 This idea is all over Bhabha's work but see as two examples (The Location 86,112); cf. Larsen (81-2).

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Bourdieu in "female intuition" (Masculine domination 31). But the constant failure of attempting to overcome this marginality through hybridity, which Derrida's account of genre helps us see, suggests the need not so much for an interrogation of hybridity the social phenomenon, but rather for a reconsideration of hybridology by thinking through the political-cultural legacies of its historical conditions of possibility. Asking after those legacies and conditions forces a confrontation with the racialized logic of exemplarity —and its attendant discourse of typification— upon which the logic of hybridity is premised. Furthermore, it throws into question the very foundations of the "genre" of Latin American writing per se. The question, then, is not (or no longer): how can a Latin Americanist epistemology stand up to, or even overcome, a Eurocentric tradition that excludes it? Rather, it might be worth asking: how does that Eurocentric tradition depend upon Latin America as its inner exterior that will always fail at "standing up to it" (whether, to paraphrase Santiago, as deficient economy or deficient intellectual production)?17 Propelled by this question, let us turn to a pair of essays by Borges and Candido that engage the issue of genre and Latin American writing.18 In terms of a larger critical project, this reading might help construct a frame for rethinking the legacy of an earlier moment in theorizing hybridity with which modern Latin Americanist theories of hybridity always dialogue. At issue will not be an exposé of a "racism" that is always ultimately (and somewhat tediously) exposable; rather, the issue is to rethink an assumed distance that separates the new hybridology from its precursors. For now, however, let's see how this chain of signifiers —genre, race, mestizaje, hybridity, example, exception— plays out in the very limited, but exemplary, set of essays put forth here. The transgressive potential of the critical force unleashed by the mixing of genres is a recurrent theme in Latin Americanist literary and cultural theory. Whereas Borges harnesses this force and strives to explode a chauvinistic limit, Candido uses it to establish a basis for epistemological revalorization. Together, their distinct national perspectives conjoin in making an influential, exceptionalist case for Latin American singularity: Latin America constitutes a narratological terrain where theory and fiction hybridize; where boundaries blur; where gen-

17 Or again: how does "[t]he poverty of historical interpretation from the center [become] precisely the structural condition of possibility of the unequal exchange" (Gómez 367) of products and ideas? The ultimate futility of the binaristic strategy of insisting upon the non-deficiency of knowledge generated from the so-called periphery is here suggested by rendering Fernando Gomez's insightful comment as a question. 18 See Moreiras "Elementos de articulación" who also compares Borges and Candido, but takes that comparison in something like the opposite direction from which I take it here, that is, toward a positive genealogy of the basic questions that both found and complicate the effectivity of a Latin Americanist subaltemism. Moreiras has both refined and expanded upon this important essay in his recent book The Exhaustion of Difference (162-83).

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res mix. The kind of genre-blurring that Borges and Candido posit, however, does not portray Latin America as one pole in a Manichaean dichotomy external to and premised against its European opposite. Rather, they represent Latin America as that discursive space, within Europe (Dussel, The Invention 134), where European discourse —tradition, universality— experiences its most radical exteriority. In other words, they suggest (and, in their own critical work, confirm) that Latin American writing is the practice wherein the tacit contracts of Eurocentrism are most strongly felt and explicitly thought. The most radically autocritical practice of European writing, in this sense, is outside itself. In his 1951 lecture, "El escritor argentino y la tradición," Borges expresses this problematic through a consideration of the signs of purity known as tradition and genre. Against the apologists for a nationalist parochialism, he argues that anything resembling a regional literary "tradition" emerges only through inauthenticity (129-30). The gaucho literary mode, as the mark of generic argentinidad, is a bastard. Its canon resonates with the cultured spirit of Kipling as much as the earthy spirit of the pampa (133,134). In a move predictably similar to Derrida's critique of genre in general, Borges shows how the specificity of a gauchesco genre asserts itself through its own transgression (130, 131).19 For Borges, then, any authentic genre only comes into its own by recognizing its constitutive inauthenticity: it is precisely the foreignness of the gauchesco that makes it Argentinean. A pure Argentine genre, in effect, must be willing to disown its own claims to purity. A year earlier, in "Literatura e cultura de 1900 a 1945" (1950), Antonio Candido had already proposed the obverse of Borges's thesis, here for the Brazilian intellectual scene. For Candido, something like a genre of Brazilian writing achieves its apotheosis through its persistent impurification and hybridization of received epistemological norms. Noting the strong literary (by which he means subjective) and weak scientific (by which he means objective) evolution of Brazilian intellectual production, Candido suggests that the implicit generic terms —"literature" and "science"— and the epistemological weight that they each carry have been misapplied. Without the necessary socioeconomic conditions to foment strong institutions of scientific and philosophical advancement (154), Brazilians have always looked to a canon of fiction and rhetoric in order to know themselves (155).20 What goes by the name of Brazilian literature (e.g.

19 Both Borges and Derrida are participating in a long-standing critique of genre here (see Michael Beaujour's "Genus Universum" 1980). 20 Candido is here speaking through the old language of "underdevelopment" and "dependency," whose critical insight is summed up nicely, in the African context but with world-wide implications, by Paulin Hountondji when he notes that "if the economic activity of the colony was characterized by a kind of industrial vacuum, scientific activity, too, was characterized by a crying theoretical vacuum"

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romantic indigenismo, Alencar, Machado) serves the empirical function of a sociological science (154). Brazilian science, in its turn, cannot resist "the powerful magnet of literature" (153). The most productive investigations into the Brazilian psyche and social life —Cunha's Os sertdes (1900), Freyre's Casagrande e senzala (1933)— are both: hybrids, occupying "that mixed genre of essay...which combines... imagination and observation, science and art" (153).21 His insight is perceptive and critical. He is perceptive in that he understands that the rules of positive scientificity —legislated and executed elsewhere— adjudicates what counts as scholarship. He is critical in that he interrogates the essentially rhetorical nature of all scientific endeavors. Candido here identifies in an entire national-cultural tradition the same kind of constitutive interdisciplinarity —and its critical force— that Michel de Certeau would later find in Freud's axiom: "the novelist has always preceded the scientist" (Certeau 19,27). 22 Borges and Candido are both participating in an old ontological problem produced through the tension between the particularity of Latin American knowledge and the universality of Eurocentric tradition, understood here as the universalization of local European norms of science, philosophy, historiography, and reason (Mignolo Local Histories). Each attempts to solve this problem by diagnosing a (240). See also, for example, the way in which a theorist of the stature of Bronislaw Malinowski attempts to reconvert Fernando Ortiz's theory from the periphery into a kind of raw material for metropolitan appropriation in Ortiz's Contrapunteo cubano del azúcar y el tabaco (1940). I've analyzed the cultural politics of this moment (64-68), but the better source is Coronil ("Transculturation" xxxxlvi). That this center-periphery model has been fully decenteredt is made patently obvious less by "post-colonial theory" than by the cultural and intellectual industries of nation-states such as Brazil, Cuba, Mexico and many others; that it is still a concern is made equally obvious by the financial evisceration of Latin American universities since the 1970s, the recent collapse of the Cuban publishing industry, and the subsequent dislocation of Latin Americanist humanism. 21

For a similar argument in the case of Mexico, see Reyes. Other prominent scholars have made the case for the scientific efficacy of the essay as, in the words of Clifford Geertz, "the natural genre in which to present cultural interpretation and the theories sustaining them" because, reiterating what I take to be Candido's point, "[tjheoretical formulations hover so low over the interpretations they govern that they don't make much sense... apart from them" (25). Citing Geertz, Canclini says that he prefers the "scientific essay" over the "literary" because of the way that it "bases itself... on empirical investigations, and to the extent possible subjecting its interpretations to a controlled handling of the data" (Culturas 23-4). I think that Candido, at least within the context of Brazilian writing that he engages here, would read Canclini's distinction as a red herring: the scientific essay is a literary genre. What Canclini calls a "controlled handling of the data," Candido might call "rhetoric." 22

Certeau radicalizes Geertz's and Canclini's case for the essay (see previous note) granting to "fiction" (specifically, the novel) the theoretic function "which allows [history] to be thought" (20). Certeau's reading of Freud, by which rhetoric, literature and fiction are "the deployment of formal operations which organize historical effectiveness" and hence rise to challenge the "logic... of accepted scientificity" (23), is homologous with Candido's reading of Brazilian literature. This dynamic is crucial to both the scientificity and historicity that Freyre attempted to communicate in Casa-grande e senzala.

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kind of belonging without participation. In other words, they both assert Latin American cultural Westernness against what they perceive as a bad-faith, self-imposed stance of non-participation, or even exile, a stance that lends "like existentialism," Borges concludes, only "the charm of the pathetic" (135). Thus Borges's conclusion —readable as either an act of postcolonial reversal of or a neo-colonialist deferral to Eurocentrism— that Argentine "tradition is all of Western culture, and [that] we have a right to this tradition" (ibid.). Thus Candido's assessment that the best Brazilian literary works are those rare gems that exhibit a new voice while not rejecting their European and "Portuguese fathers," that assent to participate in the "family dialogue" (129-31). Years later, he would define Latin American literary maturity as the achievement of a cultural "interdependency" with the metropole ("Literature and Underdevelopment" 133), echoing a longstanding promise by Reyes (235). A Derridean perspective, however, would reverse the reading of this problematic, reformulating it as one of "participation without belonging" (206). This "taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set" links up with the "principle of contamination" (ibid.) that both founds and confounds the integrity of genre, and hence, the intelligibility of the work that should be contained within this or that genre. That principle of contamination, which governs the discriminatory effects of genre, is the same inner principle that enables the formulation of genus, a genus that we might here call the "Western intellectual tradition." If we understand genus in its classical, Aristotelean sense, as the original container which holds all things of a common set or class (Agamben The Man 80,81; Gruzinski 26), then we see that even this speciously self-evident concept is in fact, as Darwin understood, that which enables the metaphysical fiction known as "taxonomy." As guiding principle for taxonomic thinking, the naming of genus will produce not only generic commonality, but also the effective differentiation, for example, between man and animal (a historically confusing and problematic endeavor, especially for the Judeo-Christian West, Genesis notwithstanding; see Agamben The Man 80 passim). Likewise, this same principle governs the intelligibility of writing through which generic categories determine the distinguishing marks of legitimate and illegitimate production of knowledge. In a more Foucauldian language, genus, like its derivative genre, will require a disciplinary (and ultimately imperial) production of plurality —and mixing— that it then surveys and regulates. Within this logic of genus, all common things, including all mixed-things, define themselves through, while participating in the constitution of, the genus (Agamben The Man 83). Via this taxonomic framework, then, perhaps we can argue that el pensamiento latinoamericano, like any other post-colonial epistemology, has always participated in that genus called "Western tradition," but under the terms of a Eurocentric contract that presupposes its status as a constitutive peripherality (Dussel, The Invention 134; Said).

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Constitutive in this sense implies a productive agency that acts upon (participates by constituting) (see Agamben The Man), but finds no home within (does not belong to), the genus. If, as Giorgio Agamben has argued, the Western tradition has consistently —from Aristotle to Marx— defined the genus "man" tautologically as that being whose generic mark is the constitution of its own genus through production, praxis, action and will (68-93), then it is not surprising to find the epistemological status of the marginal (here, Latin American) "work" as a site of identitarian contest, and even a source of anxiety. Following the "logic of the example" (Derrida "The Law" 206), this problematic status frames Latin American cultural production and intellectual practice as at once exemplary (of the "set") and exceptional (from the "set"). Agamben helps us put a finer point on this paradox of exemplarity when, in his meditation on bare life, sovereignty and the camp, he theorizes the inextricability of the example and the special case. In short, for Agamben, while the example may participate in the exemplification of commonality, it is ultimately outside the bounds of the normal case: the example becomes the exception.23 For the "Latin American writer" (here understood immanently, on Borges and Candido's terms), then, to participate without belonging is to occupy a subject position whose exemplary participation is also that which throws its status of belonging into doubt. I think this is the aporia in which Borges and Candido find themselves entwined. They attempt to overcome a tradition of Latin American exceptionalism, in other words, the thesis that poses Latin America as an epistemological and geographical site where universal theories both fail and fail to be produced (see Schwarz 23). In failing, however, these attempts posit the exemplary limit without which the universalism of Eurocentric discourse could not define itself: exceptionalism becomes the constitutive limit-case of the universal rule.24 Latin

23 The rhetorical mode of the example is one of "denaturalization" in that the example becomes denaturalized, and hence exceptional. Agamben sketches out this dependent relationship between example and exception as follows: "The example [as representative of the set] is thus excluded from the normal case [within the set] not because it does not belong to it but, on the contrary, because it exhibits its own belonging to it. The example is truly a paradigm in the etymological sense: it is what is 'shown beside,' [from the Greek,para-deigma] and a class can contain everything except its own paradigm" (Homo sacer 22). Now paradigmatic, the example suddenly exhibits the qualities of the exception: "The exception is what can not be included in the whole of which it is a member and cannot be a member of the whole in which it is always already included" (25). 24 When I speak of the "limits" of Eurocentric universalism, I am thinking specifically about the "comparative advantage" (Dussel, "Beyond Eurocentrism" 5) known as colonialism which enabled Europe to claim its own local epistemologies as universal vis-à-vis the rest of the world. This "rest of the world" is the place wherein universality finds no purchase, and exceptions become the norm. The classic example is Hegel's African exception: "The peculiarly African character is difficult to comprehend, for the very reason that in reference to it, we must quite give up the principle which naturally accompanies all our ideas—the category of Uni versality" (93). It is worth pointing out that these

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American exceptionalism stems, paradoxically, not from an active exclusion, but rather a constitutive exemplarity. What constitutes Latin America's exemplary status, or, what does Latin America exemplify? Savagery.25 Within this historically-sedimented identification, the Latin American intellectual is caught in a double-bind. On the one hand, the nobility of the savage springs from an ignorance of the universal (as culture, civilization and politics), and a wholeness that is particular (the bodily experience of nature): "The 'simple' man... admits the particularity of his place and his experience; by virtue of this, he is already something of a savage" (De Certeau 72) ,26 De Certeau's savage is one that exemplifies an anthropological notion of culture (through a lack or an idealization) but is banned from Culture's realm — the city, the metropole— for precisely that exemplarity (Agamben, Homo sacer 8 passim). If discourse limited to the particular, experiential, corporal and "simple" is the mark of pure savagery, then to exit from the idiocy of savagery is, as Avital Ronell shows (3), to join the polis, the politics of the cosmopolitan dialogue. To do so as equals might require asserting either universal rights (Borges, Candido) or something like the oxymoronic legitimacy of a "barbarian theorizing" (Mignolo "Globalization"). Whatever the case, this exit will thus also be an entrance, a route maintained today, for example, in the un-deconstructed binary of tradition-and-modernity that underwrites Canclini's account of hybrid cultures (221-223). Hence, while on the one hand exemplifying savagery, on the other hand Latin America will also transcend the limits of the savagery that it exemplifies. This transcendence has been most explicitly theorized as the struggle against (e.g. Sarmiento) or incorporation of (e.g. Martí) la barbarie. But now, vis-à-vis the metropole, this disavowal or resemantization of barbarism yields nothing like the kind of "interdependency" that Candido will later have in mind. Rather, the residue of a savagery corrupted (i.e. "interdependent"), or only partially abolished, reconverts into a new exemplarity. What now does Latin America exem-

comments appear in his Philosophy of History, and have as their goal the exemplification of Africa as the exception from universal History, along with America, which "as a Land of the Future... has no interest for us here" (87). 25 The bibliography associating the topos "America" with savagery, as well as the Latin Americanist reconsideration of that theme, spans five hundred years. Some good contemporary (among many) studies of the topic include Jauregui, Jara, Mignolo (The Darker Side), Greenblatt, Mason and Hulme. 26 Outside of the universal and thereby History, non-Europe must constitute something like, as Hegel writes in the Phenomenology of Spirit, "organic nature [which] has no history; from its universal, namely life, it precipitates immediately into the singularity of the existing entity" (qtd. in Agamben, The Man: 81). Participating without belonging, Africa and America become the inner (organic nature) exteriority (savagery) of Universal History.

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plify? Hybrid monstrosity;27 a negation, neither one nor the other, in-between this and that, at once exemplary and exceptional. In other words, a hybrid that participates precisely by exemplifying what pure genus is not. Just as Latin American intellectual production participates in the constitution of the genus "Western tradition" but finds no home there, so is the topos "Latin America" constructed as a kind of savagery, but one damned to immediately evacuate that space of infantile, illiterate, idiotic wholeness. Latin America's hybridity soils the Eurocentric norms of genre, degenerates it, but also insures its integrity against accidents. In that sense, the two are complementary and interdependent. Genre domesticates the wild energy of hybridity by making an example of it; conversely, hybridity's very existence as an anomalous exemplarity, like Azevedo Bandeira, enforces the law of generic purity (i.e. the interests of the authorities). Each participates in the definition of the other, yet through an unequal relation of power. There is no genre "hybridity," just as there can be no real hybridity within "genre." Hybridity, like the social heterogeneity to which it responds (Bakhtin 360-1), can never stand alone as its own genre: the point at which a hybrid form becomes generic is precisely the moment that it overcomes its hybrid status (Beaujour 16). The transgressive, generic hybridization that once made the Quixote a heresy, we now call "novel." But what of the relations between genre, hybridity and race? In what ways are all three concepts conditioned by a discourse of typification and exemplification? Borges is on to something when he asserts that literary genre is an "artifice" (130). "Genre" is as arbitrary and imagined as "nation" or, more precisely, "national unity" (De Certeau 25), and attains coherence only through the totalitarian, organizing mark imposed by "falsifiers," "tourists" and "nationalists" (Borges, "El escritor" 132,133). His next move is to discard the problem as irrelevant and 27 This obnoxious cascade of metonyms is one of the conclusions drawn in Mr. and Mrs. Agassiz's narrative of their celebrated expedition, A Journey to Brazil (1867), which they undertook for the express purpose of scientifically proving polygenesis, i.e. the essential nature of racial difference (Menand): "The natural result of an uninterrupted contact of half-breeds with one another [in Brazil] is a class of men in which pure type fades away as completely as do all the good qualities, physical and moral, of the primitive races, engendering a mongrel crowd as repulsive as the mongrel dogs, which are apt to be their companions, and among which it is impossible to pick out a single specimen retaining the intelligence, the nobility, or the affectionateness of nature which makes the dog of pure type the favorite companion of civilized man" (A Journey 298-9). The long-standing systematization of this kind of race theory is specifically what many foundational Latin American hybridologists write against. But as I noted previously, even Gilberto Freyre, famous popularizer of Brazilian procreative "tolerance," confesses a certain "anxiety" over "miscegenation" when confronted (during his studies in New York) with the physical evidence of the "fearfully mongrel aspect" of the Brazilian working classes (The Masters xxvi-xxvii). Analogously, Pierre Bourdieu and Loi'c Wacquant, just after calling for a recuperation of Freyre for the study of race relations in Brazil ("The New Global" 71), note a similar repulsion when confronted with the "mongrel discipline" of Cultural Studies (74).

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exhort us to "abandon ourselves to that voluntary dream called artistic creation" (137). In other words, just write. There is something of the sleight of hand, however, in this writing away of the "pseudo-problem" (128) of nation, national identification, and by extension, the taxonomania of genre.28 Simply because we can unmask genre and expose it as a fiction (a made object) does not mean that we disable its authoritative effects; one does not so easily disarm the force of law. It is in this way that the impossibility of "genre," whose conditions are arbitrary (Borges) and depend upon their own instability (Derrida), operates along the same lines as the impossibility of race. Both are floating signifiers (Hall, Race). Nonetheless, both gain their social force through the taxonomic logic of (post)Aristotelean, Western discourse that monitors what counts and what doesn't, which artifact or which body fits in where, who participates and who belongs. Vigilance over both genre and race insures against, as Derrida puts it, the "risk [of] impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity" ("The Law" 204). Subtly, almost imperceptibly, Derrida sheds light on this necessary link between genre and race: "[I]n nature and art, genre [is] a concept that is essentially classificatory and genealogico-taxonomic;" hence, we are not surprised to find genre, through genos, linked to the "generous force of engenderment or generation —physis [nature], in fact— as with race, familial membership, classificatory genealogy or class, age class (generation), or social class" (208) and, of course, gender (221). He then speaks of a mark of genre as "the identifiable recurrence of a common trait by which one recognizes, or should recognize, a membership in a class" (210-1, my emphasis). Derrida's brief hesitation ("should recognize") calls our attention. The remarkable trait that determines "whether this or that, such a thing or such an event belongs to this set or that class" is also the quality that cannot, in and of itself, be classified (211). Thus the mark of exemplarity is also the condition of exemption, the trait that exemplifies membership in a set, but that enigmatically doesn't belong there itself, that participates without belonging (212). The same kind of trait that generates identification degenerates into differentiation (221). This trait or mark is managed, even if unmanageable (or, not containable), by (or within) the authority of (neo)colonial discourse; yet it is that upon which authority depends and must insist. As Bhabha has argued, the power-laden construction 28 In spite of Borges's optimistic cosmopolitanism, nothing that he does makes the social and discursive force of "the nation" irrelevant, for it is the ground upon which his essay stands. Indeed, his move to empty the nation of its political content as nation-state and turn instead to a more old-fashioned aesthetics of nationness (Q: "What is an Argentine?," A: "He who disavows his Argentineanness"), serves only to highlight the existential and juridical crisis in which the concept "nation" was explicitly entangled by the mid-20th-century (Agamben, Homo sacer 130). As Larsen shows through his reading of Schwarz's concept of "as ideias fora de lugar," even a false problem may "in its very falsity obey [...] a social and historical necessity" (80); that is, Borges's "pseudo-problem" is likely symptomatic of the most pressing, interesting and difficult cultural "problems."

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of difference does not stem from empirical "cultural differences" that are "simply there to be seen or appropriated," but rather is structured by the ambivalent operation that enables "the production of cultural differentiation as signs of authority" (The Location 114). Among these signs we find the categorical matrices of genre, race, and the movements between and within genres and races. Let me close with some textual examples. Derrida seems to be saying that the "mark" (that which we should recognize) of identification or commonality is ultimately uncontainable; and that any such identifiable trait will only succeed in producing or demarcating a difference. Candido also speaks of a mark that confirms a genre that we might call "Brazilian writing." It is, unsurprisingly, a mark of distinction through which he attempts to overcome the unequal order that regulates the dialogue between a marginalized Brazilian epistemology and its objectifying, Eurocentric Other. He argues that the interdisciplinarity of the essay produced in the confluence of "purely [segregated] scientific research and literary creation" that gives through "its synchretic [hybrid] character, a certain unity to the panorama of our culture" is what "constitutes the most characteristic and original mark [orig: trago-, mark, characteristic, line or trace] of our [Brazilian] thought" ("Literatura e cultura" 153). Borges famously suggests something similar when he states that Argentine writers take as their example the Jews —the "first" marked, constitutive others of modernity— who are (following Thorstein Veblen) "outstanding in Western culture, because they act within that culture and at the same time do not feel tied to it by any special devotion" (136). His conclusion that, like the Jews (he also mentions the Irish), "we [South Americans] can handle all European themes, handle them without superstition, with an irreverence that can have, and already has, fortunate consequences" (ibid.) defines a stance that resonates throughout the modern trajectory of Latin American hybridology. The Latin American innovation (Borges) effected through an insistent interdisciplinarity (Candido) that should mark out something like a genre of Latin American writing, instead displays a difference, a status of exception. As with the Jew ("outstanding in Western culture"), the exemplary participant of the set doesn't belong there ("do[es] not feel tied to it by any special devotion").29

29 Writing in the wake of the Third Reich's "final solution," Borges's arguments here, articulated with his studied parsimony, are really deceptively extreme: both suggestive and risky, as a reading of the last part of Agamben's Homo sacer, demonstrates. The strategies of revalorization and association with which Borges links "the Jew" and the "Argentine writer" are the same strategies that the architects of German National Socialism used to frame the "exemplary" Jew (of "superior" talents and intellect) as the exception at the national margins that propelled their biopolitical discourse of genocide, tied precisely, as Agamben emphasizes (132), to "denationalization." The fearful difference of the Jew as perceived by Nazi anti-Semitism, like today's constant exaltation of a "shadowy enemy" whose duplicity is without peer (and who is immediately denationalized as an "enemy combatant"), is not a radical difference, but rather a common difference, an inner exteriority, an exemplary exception. See Zizek (100-1).

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There is perhaps an even "more exemplary" subject in this regard (curiously replaced by Borges with Jewish and Irish cultural producers), one that implicitly hovers in and around the discourse of Borges, Candido and all Latin Americanist theorists of hybridity. That figure is the mestizo or mulato, specifically as embodied in this caricature offered by Sigmund Freud: "individuals of mixed race who taken all around resemble white men but who betray their coloured descent by some striking feature or other and on that account are excluded from society and enjoy none of the privileges" (qtd. in Bhabha, The Location: 89).30 Borges's and Candido's Latin American writer, while not "excluded from society" like Freud's "individual [...] of mixed race," nonetheless finds himself [sic] participating in a genre (the genus "Western tradition," wherein he "resembles" the standard "white men"), to which he does not belong (enjoys "none of the privileges"). The genre-mixing that is the striking feature of Latin American production (cultural, discursive, epistemological, generic, genetic) begets a distinguishing mark that makes it both exemplary and exceptional within the genus that we understand here as Western intellectual tradition, as the arbiter of Culture and Civilization. The hybrid as "distinguishing mark" claimed by the transnational, intelligentsia of Latin America for most of the twentieth century reappears today, where it holds fast not only at the aesthetic level, but also (re)sublimated (as it was, e.g., in Porfirian Mexico) as the basic, epistemological key to interpreting Latin American socio-cultural life.31 That Freud's anachronistic configuring of the "mestizo" is still with us —its biologism repressed yet not absent, now masquerading as a new culturalism— can be verified in almost any of the generic images trotted out as "evidence" of today's hybrid cultures. In the Latin American scene, these invariably lead to some variation of "Mexico City's mélange of Indian women strolling among Reforma's high-rise buildings," which Gruzinski goes on to classify as an example of the "surprising and sometimes awkward juxtapositions and presences" that "shatter" what he calls "standard frames of reference" (20). But his frame of reference seems to be misplaced, and his standard extremely contingent. Given that the neo-exotic "hybridity" put forth here does little more than describe a pedestrian scene in many major Latin American cities at any time during past hundred or so years, the value of calling it "hybrid" as op-

30 Freud here is neither constructing a discourse on the mestizo nor making a historiographical claim about the mestizo, but rather uses that figure—as an example, no less—to illustrate specific psychic processes of the unconscious. Nonetheless, his formulation is telling in the association that it draws between race, exemplification and exception, and remarkably germane to a long-standing Latin American discourse on mestizaje and hybridity. 31 Mignolo's ("From Cross-genealogies") introduction to the first issue of Nepantla offers a programmatic example of the sublimation of hybridity, broadly construed as a generalized status of being in-between.

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posed to simply "everyday contemporary urban life" seems questionable. Perhaps the more interesting, and socially pressing, question provoked by this scene is not how it allegedly shatters Western frames of reference (which it does not), but rather how it came to be representable as exceptional, or "awkward," at all. To pursue this question is to pursue the history of the out-of-place-ness of this scene: If various ideologies grounded upon various hybridities ("mestizo Mexico," "Brazilian racial democracy") mark Latin America's modernity whereby, as Canclini shows, the Latin American modern is unthinkable without the hybridization of cultures, races and spaces, then from whence does the remarkableness of the "mélange of Indian women" walking around in a modern city spring? In other words, how is it that these women are marked as "other," and thus cast into the "awkward," almost the same but not quite, the space of the old mestizo monster? In other words, how is it that their presence "shatters" the modern, as opposed to precisely confirming the condition of possibility of all modernity? How is it that their mark of exception becomes a mark of exclusion? At issue in answering, I think, will be the norms of cultural representation and material access that play out in a biopolitical field that regulates who participates, who belongs, and the naturalization of this inclusive exclusion. The cultural history of race is in play here: whether sublimated to the level of the exemplary mixing of epistemological genres, or debased to the terms of a socio-cultural "exception." The relationship between cultural mixing and racial marking is intimate, indeed inextricable. Given this relationship, what are the risks in theorizing cultural hybridity while resisting an interrogation of the racialized conditions of possibility that enable theories of hybridity in the first place? Provisionally, I will answer that the racialized structures that undergird hybridity will reemerge, intact, and in undesirable ways. In other words, theories of hybridity will find it impossible to erase race without leaving a trace.

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BETWEEN PROSPERO AND CALIBAN: COLONIALISM, POSTCOLONIALISM, AND INTER-IDENTITY

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

INTRODUCTION

The aim of this essay is to further ongoing research on identity processes in the time-space of the Portuguese language. A vast, multi-secular contact zone is implied involving the Portuguese people and other peoples of America, Asia, and Africa. The working hypotheses were formulated in previous work (Santos, Pela mao de Alice 49-67, 119-137). Let me recall them here briefly. First, Portugal is and has been since the seventeenth century a semiperipheral country in the modern capitalist world system. This condition best characterizes the modern long duration of Portuguese society. Although this condition has evolved across centuries, it has kept its basic features: an intermediate economic development and a position of intermediation between the center and the periphery of the world economy; a state which, being both product and producer of that intermediate position, never assumed fully the characteristics of the modern state of the core countries, particularly those consolidated in the liberal state since the mid-nineteenth century; cultural processes and systems of representation that do not adjust well to the typical binarisms of western modernity —such as culture/nature, civilized/uncivilized, modern/traditional— and may therefore be considered originally hybrid, even if ultimately merely different (a difference, incidentally, that cannot be understood in its own terms). My second working hypothesis is that this complex semiperipheral condition reproduced itself until quite recently on the basis of the colonial system and, for the past fifteen years, has continued to reproduce itself in the way in which Portugal has become part of the European Union. From the latter hypothesis derive three sub-hypotheses. First, Portuguese colonialism, featuring a semiperipheral country, was also semiperipheral itself. It was, in other words, a subaltern colonialism. Portuguese colonialism was the result both of a deficit of colonization —Portugal's incapacity to colonize efficiently— and an excess of colonization —the fact that the Portuguese colonies were submitted to a double colonization: Portugal's colonization and, indirectly, the colonization of the core countries (particularly England) of which Portugal was dependent (often in a near colonial way).

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The second sub-hypothesis is that, because of its characteristics and historical duration, the colonial relation reenacted by Portugal affected in a particular way the configurations of social, political, and cultural power, not only in the colonies but inside the Portuguese society itself. While modern capitalist power has always been colonial, in Portugal and its colonies it was always more colonial than capitalist. This condition, far from coming to an end with the end of colonialism, is still being reproduced. In other words, perhaps more so than as regards any other European colonialism, the end of Portuguese colonialism did not determine the end of the colonialism of power, either in the colonies or in the former colonial power. The third sub-hypothesis is that, in spite of its very short-time duration when compared with the colonial cycle, Portugal's integration in the European Union seems destined to have as dramatic an impact on Portuguese society as colonialism. The meaning and content of this impact is still an open question. As of now, it seems to lean towards reproducing, in new terms, the semiperipheral condition. The third general hypothesis that has come to guide my research concerns these two last questions, and particularly the analytical value of the theory of the world system under the current conditions of globalization. I have dealt with this topic elsewhere (Santos "Os processos"). Here, I will limit myself to enunciating the working hypothesis I then developed. I believe that we find ourselves in an unstable phase characterized by the overlapping of two forms of hierarchization: one, more rigid, constitutes the world system from its beginning as center, semi-periphery, and periphery; another, more flexible, distinguishes between what in the world system is produced or defined as local and what is produced or defined as global1. Whereas the former hierarchy continues to operate in relations among national societies or economies, the second one occurs among domains of activities, practices, knowledges, and narratives, be they economic, political or cultural. The overlapping of these two forms of hierarchy and the reciprocal interferences they generate explain the paradoxical situation we are in: inequalities inside the world system (and inside each society that comprises it) get worse, while the factors that cause them and the actions that might eventually reduce them are increasingly difficult to identify. Finally, the fourth general working hypothesis is that the Portuguese culture is a borderland culture. It has no content. It does have form, however, and that form is the borderland zone. National cultures are a creation of the nineteenth century, the historical product of a tension between universalism and particularism as managed by the state. The state's role was twofold: on the one had, it es-

1

For a different view of the world system under hegemonic globalization see Castells.

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tablished the difference of the national culture as opposed to the outside; on the other, it promoted cultural homogeneity inside the national territory. My working hypothesis is that in Portugal the state never played any of these roles satisfactorily; as a consequence, the Portuguese culture always had a lot of trouble distinguishing itself from other national cultures, or if you wish it always had great capacity not to distinguish itself from other national cultures; it has, moreover, kept to this day a considerable internal heterogeneity (Santos, Pela mào de Alice 132133).

PORTUGUESE COLONIALISM AND POSTCOLONIALISM T H E SPECIFICITY OF PORTUGUESE COLONIALISM

To formulate the characterization of Portuguese colonialism as "specificity" implies the relations of hierarchy among the different European colonialisms. Specificity states a deviation in relation to a general norm. In this case, the norm is British colonialism, in relation to which the contours of Portuguese colonialism get defined as a subaltern colonialism. The subalternity of Portuguese colonialism is twofold: it occurs both at the level of colonial practices and at the level of discourses. Concerning practices, subalternity consists in the fact that Portugal, as a semiperipheral country, was itself for a long period a country dependent of England, at times an "informal colony" of England. As with Spanish colonialism, the convergence of Portuguese colonialism with capitalism was far less direct than in British colonialism. In many cases, this convergence occurred by delegation, that is to say, by the impact of England's pressure on Portugal through mechanisms such as unequal credit conditions and international treaties. Thus, while the British Empire was based on a dynamic balance between colonialism and capitalism, the Portuguese Empire was based on an equally dynamic imbalance between an excess and a deficit of colonialism. As regards colonial discourses, the subalternity of Portuguese colonialism resides in the fact that, since the seventeenth century, the history of colonialism has been written in English, not in Portuguese. This means that the Portuguese colonizer has a problem of self-representation rather similar to that of the British colonized. As we know, this problem, as far as the colonized are concerned, consists in the impossibility of the colonized, or the formerly colonized Third World, to represent themselves in terms such that do not confirm the subaltern position ascribed to them by the colonial representation. The near dilemmatic nature of this problem is that to upset this position might surreptitiously confirm subalternity in the very process of upsetting it. As regards the Portuguese colonizer, this problem translates itself into the need to define Portuguese colonialism in terms of its specificity vis-à-vis hege-

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monic colonialism, which means the impossibility or difficulty of defining it in terms such that do not reflect subalternity, that is to say, in terms of what it was and not in terms of what it was not. A particularly complex research topic consists in assessing to what extent this problem of the Portuguese colonizer reverberates in the Portuguese colonized. Could it be that the Portuguese colonized have a double problem of self-representation: vis-à-vis the colonizer that colonized them, and vis-à-vis the colonizer that, not having colonized them, has nonetheless written the history of their colonial subjugation? Or, on the contrary, could it be that the problem of self-representation of the Portuguese colonizer creates a chaotic disjunction between the subject and the object of colonial representation, which in turn creates a field apparently empty of representations (but in fact full of sub-codified representations) that gives the colonized enough leeway to attempt their self-representation beyond or outside the representations of their subalternity? The question here is to determine whether the colonized by a subaltern colonialism are under-colonized or over-colonized. The specificity of Portuguese colonialism resides, therefore, mainly in reasons of political economy —the country's semiperipheral condition2— which does not mean that it manifests itself merely at the economic level. Quite the opposite, it manifests itself also at the social, political, juridical, and cultural levels; at the level of the daily practices of conviviality and survival, oppression and resistance, proximity and distance; at the level of discourses and narratives, common sense and other knowledges, emotions and affections, feelings and ideologies. Each one of these levels created its own materiality, its own institutionality and logic of development, which in turn acted back upon the semiperipheral condition, endowing it with a sociological density it would never have while referred only to a position in the world system. Hereby, semi-periphery stopped being the link in a hierarchy to become a way of being in Europe and overseas. The task of grasping this sociological and psychological reality and the scales, into which it crystallized itself, is still ahead. The difficulty lies in studying it so as to grasp what it was and not what it was not. But there is one more reason to add to the ones I mentioned above: the fact that the Portuguese colonial cycle was, amongst all European colonialisms, the longest, having preceded of three centuries the nineteenth-century capitalist colonialism of core countries. The latter, once consolidated, defined the rules of colonial practice —dramatically stated in the Berlin Conference (1884) and the Ultimatum (1890)— as well as the rules of colonial discourse —racist science, progress, the "white man's burden," and so on. Portuguese colonialism adopted these rules in ways and degrees that are still largely to be assessed.

2

On Portugal's place in Africa's colonial cycle, see Fortuna (31-41).

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In the case of Portuguese colonialism (and likewise Spanish colonialism), a previous multi-secular reality was to be reckoned with, which, having been retroactively subjected to the new criteria of analysis and evaluation, was reduced to a deviant particularism (predatory, mercantilist, informal3 colonialism). Charles Boxer's historiography symbolizes this process better than any other. The enormous asymmetry between British and Portuguese colonialism resided in the fact that the former did not have to break with a past that did not coincide with its present. British colonialism was ever, from its very beginning, the norm, because its protagonist was the country that imposed the normativity of the world system. In the case of Portuguese colonialism, once the possibility of a retroactive colonialism as discourse of rupture and desynchrony was created, it could be manipulated according to political conjunctures and demands. It offered itself both to disquieting readings —e.g. the underdevelopment of the colonizer resulted in the underdevelopment of the colonized, a double condition that could only be overcome by a developed colonialist policy; as well as comforting readings —e.g. Luso-tropicalism, "Portugal from Minho to Timor," friendly colonialism. Almost all readings, however, had both disquieting and comforting aspects. The negativity of Portuguese colonialism was always the subtext of its positivity, and vice-versa. Regardless of the originality of Portugal's participation in the project of European expansion, it could not sustain a discourse of originality about itself from the moment that industrial capitalism created a closer and more direct link with colonialism. From then on, originality, in its double sense of temporal priority and autonomous construction, gave way to derivation, particularism, and specificity. Thus, the dense and long temporality of Portuguese colonialism resulted in a strange suspension of time, an anachrony that indeed would turn out to be double: because it had existed before and continued to exist after hegemonic colonialism. Retroactivity, suspension, and anachronism ended up turning themselves into a temporality peculiar to a long duration subjected to strange criteria of temporality. These games of temporality impregnated the sociabilities and identities of the colonizer and the colonized alike, short of and beyond the colonial politico-juridical ties.4 Short of the colonial politico-juridical ties, because for centuries in many regions of the empire the relations between the Portuguese and the local populations could not, in practical terms, claim any juridico-political link external to themselves or to the encounters that originated them or resulted from them; 3 Some historians, such as Isaacman, describe the Portuguese colonial system as an "informal Empire," that is to say, an imperialism without a specific colonial government. 4 As Carlos Fortuna has eloquently shown, these games of temporality manifest themselves extemporaneously vis-à-vis hegemonic time, be it the moment of colonization or decolonization (41).

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beyond the colonial politico-juridical ties, because the coloniality of relations did not end with the end of the colonialism of relations. This issue stirs another, larger one on the nature of the binomial colonialism/postcolonialism in the space of official Portuguese language.

POSTCOLONIALISM

Postcolonialism must be understood in two main senses. The first one concerns a historical period, the period that succeeds the independence of the colonies. The second one is a set of (mainly performative) practices and discourses that deconstruct the colonial narrative as written by the colonizer, and try to replace it by narratives written from the point of view of the colonized. In the first sense, postcolonialism translates itself into a set of economic, sociological, and political analyses of the construction of new states. In the second sense, postcolonialism is part of cultural, linguistic, and literary studies, and privileges textual exegesis and the performative practices to analyze the systems of representation and the identity processes. It implies a critique, whether explicit or implicit, of the silences of postcolonial analyses in the first sense. Since I focus here on systems of representation and identity processes, I resort to postcolonialism in the second sense, although the analyses proper to postcolonialism in the first sense are constantly invoked as well. The working hypothesis in this regard is that the difference of Portuguese colonialism cannot fail to induce the difference of postcolonialism in the space of official Portuguese language. As a contemporaneous intellectual current, postcolonialism is basically an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon and its founding reality is British colonialism. It aims to create intellectual space for the postcolonial critic, but the way it goes about it changes from author to author. Very distinct positions are thus identified in the field of analysis that claim to be postcolonial. I shall identify merely what they may have in common, this being all that matters for the thesis I here present. Postcolonialism is a product of the "cultural turn" of the social sciences in the 1980s, having as forerunners Frantz Fanon (Les damnes de la terre, 1961) and Albert Memmi (The Colonizer and the Colonized, 1965). Drawing on the pioneer work of Edward Said on Orientalism (1978) and of Stuart Hall ("New Ethnicities" and "When Was the 'the Post-Colonial?") on diasporic cultures, it consolidated itself mainly through the work of Partha Chatterjee (Nationalist Thought), Paul Gilroy (The Black Atlantic), Homi Bhabha (The Location of Culture), Gayatri Spivak ("How to Teach") and the debates they stirred. It is basically a current animated by diasporic intellectuals, with roots in the countries colonized by the British Empire and working in the West. The decisive contribu-

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tion of work undergone in these countries in the period after independence, as for example the "Subaltern Studies" conducted by Ranajit Guha (Santos, Toward a New Common Sense 506-518; A critica da razao 340-354), are not always duly credited by postcolonial critics. This is not the place to deal at length with the major themes and concerns of mainstream postcolonial debates. However, a succinct overview of the field and what in it needs to be reconsidered in light of Portuguese colonialism and postcolonialism is in order. Hybridity in identity regimes. Whereas colonial discourse was based on the polarity between the colonizer (Prospero) and the colonized (Caliban), postcolonialism underscores the ambivalence and hybridity between the two, since they are not independent of each other nor is each one thinkable without the other. 5 Fanon's and Memmi's influence is decisive in this regard. According to Memmi, as according to Fanon, the link between colonizer and colonized is dialectically destructive and creative. It destroys and recreates the two partners of colonization as colonizer and colonized. The chain that links colonizer and colonized is racism, a chain, however, that is a form of aggression for the colonizer and a form of defense for the colonized (Memmi 131). The construction of this difference required the creation of the ambivalent stereotype of the colonized as savage. The stereotype's most notorious ambivalence is the fact that it is also constituted of the opposite of its negative elements: the negro is simultaneously the savage and the most dignified and obedient servant; the incarnation of uncontrolled sexuality but also innocent as a child; mystic, primitive and simple minded, and, at the same time, ingenious, liar, and manipulator of social forces (Bhabha 82). Translation, by making cultural communication possible, undermines the whole idea of essentialism of an original and pure culture. Hence the centrality of the concepts of hybridity and mimicry. The ambivalence of mimicry is that it affirms the difference in the very process of identifying the other. In the colonial context, race is the symbol of this difference, and in fact the cause of the failure of mimicry, since it does not allow for more than an incomplete presence. As Bhabha says, having India in mind, "to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English" (87). In the Portuguese context, it could also be said that to be assimilated is emphatically not to be Portuguese. By subverting essentialism, hybridity can alter the power relations between dominant and dominated meanings. Hybridity opens space by discrediting hegemonic representations, thereby dis-

5 1 resort to the names of Prospero and Caliban in Shakespeare's play The Tempest (1611) to signify that the zone of colonial contact appears as a contact zone between the "civilized" and "uncivilized." The notion of hybridization between colonizer and colonized is not original in postcolonial studies. It was perhaps first formulated by Gandhi, who called frequently attention to the continuity between the oppressor and the victim. On this issue, see Santos, Toward 516; A critica 351.

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placing antagonism in such a way that it stops sustaining the pure polarizations that made it up. Cultural difference and multiculturalism. By breaking with the clear distinction between the identity of the colonizer and the identity of the colonized, postcolonial identity must be constructed in the margins of representation, and by a movement that goes from the margins to the center. This is the privileged space of culture and the postcolonial critic, a liminal, in-between or borderland space. Cultural enunciation creates its own temporality. This specific temporality is what renders possible the emergence of alternative modernities to western modernity, precisely by means of "postcolonial translation." The anti-colonial liberation struggle itself is hybrid and based on translation. It does not sustain itself either in precolonial ancestrality or in pure and simple mimicry of western liberal ideals. Nationalism and postcolonialism. The problem of nationalism assumes various dimensions in postcolonial discourse. The most important one concerns anticolonial resistance. Postcolonial resistance resides mainly in the "decolonization of the image" mentioned by Ngâugâi wa Thiong'o (Decolonizing the Mind) and Achille Mbembe (De la postcolonie). Partha Chatterjee clearly shows the contradictory and ambivalent nature of nationalism in the eastern countries that were subjected to British colonialism. What happens is that these countries are forced to adopt a "national form" that is hostile to their own cultures in order to fight against the western nationalism of the colonial powers (Chatterjee). Inasmuch as the affirmation of national identity becomes a weapon to fight against colonial exploitation, the national question in the non-European world is historically embedded in the colonial question (Chatterjee 18).6 However, nationalist discourse (at least in India) frequently accepts the intellectual premises of modernity that ground colonial domination, while defying colonial domination itself. Among these premises is capitalism itself, whose universal impetus creates a permanent tension with nationalism, now under the form of an independent nation-state. The state mediates between nation and capitalism, but such mediation is a project destined to fail. By contesting the idea of the homogeneity of cultures, postcolonial studies contest, whether implicitly or explicitly, the idea of nation or nationalism, since one and the other presuppose a certain cultural homogeneity upon which a national, anti-colonial identity may be grounded. The challenge consists, to my mind, in finding a balanced dosage of homogeneity and fragmentation, for there is no identity without difference, and difference presupposes a certain homogeneity to identify what is different in differences. Such was the challenge faced by intellectuals like Leopold Senghor (Liberté 1, Anthologia de la nouvelle poe-

6

Cf. Mondlane and Anderson.

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sie négré), Aimé Césaire (Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, Discours sur le colonialisme), Frantz Fanón (Les damnés), Kwame Nkrumah (I Speak of Freedom, Neo-Colonialism), Julius Nyerere (Freedom and Unity), Eduardo Mondlane (The Struggle for Mozambique), and Amílcar Cabral (Guiné-Bissau), who were determined to build a national culture understood as the right of the colonized to selfsignification.7 The construction of "national consciousness" (Fanon) must avoid the temptation of racism by giving voice to the popular classes, as suggested by the agenda of the Subaltern Studies Group.8 This is also the only way for nationalism to avoid the temptation of sexual discrimination (Nira Yuval-Davis 116117). Postcolonialism and diaspora. The transnationality of diasporic communities is the central topic of the analysis of the Atlantic transit of blacks since slavery, "the middle passage" and its impact, both in representations of black communities and in the idea the West's ethnic and racial homogeneity (Gilroy, The Black Atlantic). John McLeod refers to diasporas as "composite communities," dynamic spaces of construction and reconstruction of identities that challenge both the pattern of national identity and the notion of roots (McLeod 211). Diaspora identities characterize what Stuart Hall designates as "new ethnicities." He means diasporic groups that contest the rigidity of the representations imposed on them in the name of their different social experiences and subjective positions (e.g. "black"), and look for alternative forms of organization to those sponsored by the dominant society for the sake of their own legitimation, rather than to solve the real problems of immigrants.9 Postcolonialism and postmodernism. In previous works, I have explored the relation between what I call oppositional postmodernism and postcolonialism (Santos, "On Oppositional Postmodernism"). Postcolonialism —because of its emphasis on textuality or discursivity, hybridity, fragmentation, and performativity— has significant affinities with a certain kind of postmodernism. Indeed, the same authors inspire both: Nietzsche, Bakthin, Lacan, Barthes, Derrida. My critique of mainstream postmodernism, the version I designate as celebratory postmodernism, resides in the fact that it draws from the diagnosis of the crisis of the paradigm of modernity (which I share) the conclusion (which I do not share) that

1 For a more detailed analysis of the national question in Africa in relation to the emergence of the new independent states, see Mazrui and Tidy. 8 On the Subaltern Studies Group, see Santos, Toward 515; A critica 350. ® In more recent work, Gilroy offers a more inclusive approach to the diaspora question. According to Gilroy, the diaspora identity has a crucial dimension in migration that accounts for the production of a "double consciousness" resulting from the fact that the new identity does not entirely assimilate the culture of the country of immigration, nor does it entirely preserve the cultural references of origin.

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the modern aspirations of social change (liberty, equality, solidarity) must stop being a central problem of the social sciences. This conclusion carries along a series of theoretical and epistemological orientations, such as: utter indifference to issues of power, structural inequalities, and social exclusion in contemporary capitalist societies; reducing social reality to its discursivity, neglecting non-discursive practices; silencing the discursivity of the popular classes and oppressed social groups; obsessive insistence on textual deconstruction with the result that it becomes impossible to formulate resistance, since resistance itself is also trapped in the deconstruction of the power it constitutes as resistance to power.

BEYOND POSTCOLONIALISM

I resorted to postcolonialism to criticize celebratory postmodernism and offer an alternative: oppositional postmodernism. Resorting to postcolonialism was justified in that it places at the center of the analytical field a power relation that is particularly asymmetrical —the colonial relation. The analysis proper to postcolonialism, I suggested, might be relevant for the analysis of other kinds of asymmetrical social relations outside the modernist analytical canon.10 The proposed articulation with postcolonialism aimed then to ground Utopian emancipatory practices and subjectivities outside the modernist canon. Resorting to a device dear to postmodernism and postcolonialism alike, I grounded the emancipatory Utopias on three metaphors: the frontier, the baroque, and the South (Santos, Toward 475-519; A critica 305-354). I used the concept of frontier, in the sense of extremity rather than contact zone or borderland, to signify the displacement of the discourse and practices from the center to the margins. I advanced a phenomenology of frontier marginality based on the selective and instrumental use of traditions;11 on the invention of new forms of sociability; on weak hierarchies; on the plurality of juridical powers and orders; on the fluidity of social relations; on the promiscuity between strangers and intimates, between inheritance and invention.12 "To live in the fron10 In an important book that came to my attention only after I had completed this essay, Walter Mignolo argues that postmodernism does not lie outside the modernist canon; rather, together with Marxism, deconstruction, and world-system analysis, postmodernism is a critical discourse within "hegemonic cosmologies." I agree with him, the question being, can we say the same about my "oppositional postmodernism"? This is a topic for future research. 11 The instrumental nature of tradition has been the object of a variety of studies. See, for example, Ranger, Bazin, and Nandy. 12 When I defined Portuguese culture as a frontier culture, however, I used the concept of frontier in the sense of contact zone or borderland. For an analysis of this cultural formation, see Santos, Pela 132-136.

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tier," I concluded, "is to live in the margins without living a marginal life" (Santos, Toward 496; A critica 327). The concept of the baroque allowed me to ground the concept of mestizaje, close to hybridity, and understood as "the creation of new forms of constellations of meaning, which are truly unrecognizable or blasphemous in light of their constitutive fragments" (Santos, Toward 503; A critica 335). The baroque metaphor permitted also to discuss the construction of Utopian subjectivity on the basis of baroque "extremosidad" (Maravall 421), mainly the extremism of the baroque feast informed by disproportion, laughter, and subversion. Finally, I used the South metaphor to signify the systemic human sufferance caused by global capitalism. I meant, on the one hand, the size and multifaceted character of oppression in contemporary societies; on the other, the capacity for creation, innovation, and resistance of the oppressed peoples once they were liberated from their condition of victims. Unsuspected latent possibilities of emancipation reside in this capacity. I therefore proposed an epistemology of the South based on three orientations: to learn that the South exists; to learn how to go to the South; to learn from and with the South (Santos, Toward 508; A critica 342). I conceive of the colonial relation as one of the unequal power relations on which modern capitalism is grounded, but not the only one. It cannot be fully understood without articulating it with other power relations, such as class exploitation, sexism, and racism (only partially taken into account by postcolonialism). The analysis of culture or discourse cannot do without the analysis of political economy.13 In the second half of the twentieth century the silences of postcolonialism became more strident. Authors like Anne McClintock, Stuart Hall, Patrick Chabal, and John McLeod have addressed this issue eloquently. Aijaz Ahmad has pointed out that the striking absence of class problems in postcolonial criticism derives from the fact that postcolonial studies are the product of an academic and intellectual class that ignores the actual social problems or has no interest in them. Overlooking neocolonialism is one of the most disempowering limitations of postcolonialism. While eager to criticize homogeneity and applaud fragmentation and difference, postcolonialism ended up homogenizing the colonial relation because of its total lack of historical and comparative perspective. Even within the British Empire, there were wide differences among the Irish, Indian, Australian, Kenian, South African, and other experiences. Not to mention other colonialisms, namely the Portuguese and Spanish colonialism.

13 Cf. also Miguel Vale de Almeida's interpellation of postcolonialism from the viewpoint of anthropology (230ss.). To my mind, the interpellation is not much different if made from the viewpoint of sociology.

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PORTUGUESE COLONIALISM AND THE SILENCES OF POSTCOLONIALISM

The difference of Portuguese colonialism must reflect itself in the difference of postcolonialism in the space of official Portuguese language, namely vis-à-vis Anglo-Saxon postcolonialism. For convenience's sake, I use the expression Portuguese postcolonialism to designate postcolonialism in the time-space of official Portuguese language. The first difference is that the ambiguity and hybridity between colonizer and colonized, far from being a postcolonial claim, was the experience of Portuguese colonialism for long periods of time. The practice of ambivalence, interdependence, and hybridity was a necessity of the Portuguese colonial relation. For this reason, what is important in the context of Portuguese postcolonialism is to distinguish among various types of ambivalence and hybridity, namely between those that reinforce the power inequalities of the colonial relation and those that minimize or even subvert them. Anglo-Saxon postcolonialism has its origin in a colonial relation based on the extreme polarization between colonizer and colonized —between Prospero and Caliban— a polarization that is both a practice of representation and the representation of a practice. The radical critique of Anglo-Saxon postcolonialism rightly addresses this polarization. But where are we to anchor a radical critique when such polarization has been largely weakened or strongly nuanced, namely as regards the cultural domain, and concerning particularly the daily experience of cultural practices mentioned by Bhabha? Portuguese postcolonialism must rather focus on the critique of ambivalence than on claiming it. The critique itself lies in distinguishing between the forms of ambivalence and hybridity that do indeed give a voice to the subaltern (emancipatory hybridity) and those that use the subaltern's voice to silence them (reactionary hybridity). The second difference of Portuguese postcolonialism has to do with race and the color of the skin. For Anglo-Saxon postcolonial critics, the color of the skin is an inescapable limit to mimicry and assimilation practices. Depending on the cases, skin color either negates beyond enunciation what enunciation affirms, or, on the contrary, affirms what it negates. In the case of Portuguese postcolonialism, the ambivalence, or hybridity, of the very color of the skin must be taken into account: the mulatto man and woman. The in-between space, the intellectual zone that the postcolonial critics claim for themselves, incarnates in the mulatto man or woman as a body and corporeal zone. The desire of the other, upon which Bhabha grounds the ambivalence of the representation of the colonizer, is not in this case a psychoanalytic phenomenon, nor is it doubled in language (The Location 50). It is physical, creative, and engenders creatures. Far from being a failed mimetic gesture, the mulatto man and woman are the negation of mimicry. They affirm a limit a posteriori, that is to say, they are the affirmation of a limit

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that only affirms itself after having been overcome. They are the affirmation of the white and black man and woman at the very point of reciprocal elision. Miscegenation is not the consequence of the absence of racism, as argued by Luso-colonialist or Luso-tropicalist reasoning, but it certainly is the cause of a different kind of racism. The existence of ambivalence or hybridity is, therefore, trivial, as far as Portuguese postcolonialism is concerned. What is important is to understand the sexist rules of sexuality that usually allow the white man to sleep with the black woman, but not the white woman with the black man. In other words, Portuguese postcolonialism calls for a strong articulation with the question of sexual discrimination and feminism. The third difference of Portuguese postcolonialism lies in a dimension of ambivalence and hybridity unsuspected in Anglo-Saxon postcolonialism. In Portuguese postcolonialism, the ambivalence of representation does not derive solely from the lack of a clear distinction between the identity of the colonizer and the identity of the colonized. It derives as well from the fact that the distinction is inscribed in the colonizer's own identity. The identity of the Portuguese colonizer does not simply include the identity of the colonized other. It includes as well the identity of the colonizer as in turn himself colonized. The Portuguese Prospero is not just a Calibanized Prospero; he is a very Caliban from the viewpoint of the European super-Prosperos. The identity of the Portuguese colonizer is thus doubly double. It is constituted by the conjunction of two others: the colonized other, and the colonizer as himself a colonized other. Because of this profound duplicity, the Portuguese were often emigrants, rather than settlers, in "their" own colonies. Indeed, in the genealogy of the mirrors upon which the Portuguese see themselves, it remains to be decided whether their identity as colonized does not precede their identity as colonizer. The conclusion may therefore be drawn that the disjunction of difference (Bhabha, The Location) is far more complex in the case of Portuguese postcolonialism. Such complexity may, paradoxically, rebound as conjunction or unsuspected complicity between the colonizer and the colonized. The "other" colonized by the colonizer is not totally other vis-à-vis the colonizer's colonized "other." As opposed to Anglo-Saxon postcolonialism, there is not one single other. There are two others that neither conjoin nor disjoin. They merely interfere in the impact of either on the identity of the colonizer and the colonized. The otherother (the colonized) and the proper-other (the colonizer while colonized himself) contend upon the colonizer's identity for the demarcation of the margins of alterity, but in this case alterity is, as it were, on both sides of the margin. This has consequences for two of the core procedures of postcolonial discourse: mimicry and stereotype. Colonial mimicry is always a lie because, according to Bhabha, it always occurs at the crossroads of what is known and permissible and what is not known

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and must be concealed (The Location 89). At the geopolitical level, says Benedict Anderson, this kind of mimicry is what makes empire and nation compatible. Underlying this conception is the supposedly obvious idea that what is at stake in colonial mimicry is the colonized's mimicking of the colonizer. Now, as far as Portuguese postcolonialism is concerned, nothing of the sort is at all obvious and rather needs to be looked into. Mimicry games were in this case far more complex and mutual, and again for the sake of survival. Mimicry practices were much more chaotic because, far from being the purposeful tool of imperial domination, they were often intersubjective contingencies in contexts of difficult survival. They were like a first-aid kit in situations when one could not be easily evacuated by the long, nimble arm of the empire. For this reason, the "empire's lie," which, according to Bhabha (The Location 138), results from the pretense of integrity and completion in the appropriation of indigenous cultural knowledge, is different in the case of the Portuguese empire. The lie, in this case, often consisted in claiming to be an empire "like the others," while hiding the fear of being absorbed by the colonies, as when the Portuguese crown fled to Brazil and established the empire's capital in Rio. This was an act of representational rupture without parallel in western modernity. For the same reason, the stereotype of the colonized was never as final as the stereotype in the British empire, or at least it was far more inconsequent and transitory. Sexual penetration converted into territorial penetration, and racial interpenetration gave rise to fluctuating signifiers that equally sanctioned opposed stereotypes, according to origin and intent of enunciation. They sanctioned racism without race or, at least, a "purer" racism than its racial basis. They sanctioned racism as well on the excuse of anti-racism. Thus, the sexist and interracial bed could become the basic unit of the empire's administration, while racial democracy could be waved as an anti-racist trophy in the white, brown, and black hands of racism and sexism. The fact that the colonizer was colonized in turn does not mean that he was better or more closely identified with those he colonized. Nor does it mean that those colonized by a colonized-colonizer are less colonized than those colonized by a full-fledged colonizer. It simply means that the ambivalence and hybridity noted by Anglo-Saxon postcolonialism are, in the case of Portuguese postcolonialism, way beyond the representations, gazes, and practices of enunciation. They are rather incarnate bodies, daily experiences and survivals that went on for centuries and were sustained by forms of reciprocity between the colonizer and the colonized, unsuspected in the space of the British empire. In order to explain this difference another one must be introduced concerning games of authority. In postcolonial studies the colonizer always appears as a sovereign subject, the metaphoric incarnation of the empire. Now, as far as Portuguese colonialism is concerned, no such thing can be easily assumed. Only

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for a very short period —in Africa, since the end of the nineteenth century — does the colonizer incarnate the empire, and only in very selective circumstances. Aside from that, the colonizer only represents himself. He is an empire of one. As such, he is as free for the excesses as for the deficiencies of colonization. Moreover, precisely because his imperial identity is not granted him by anybody beyond his own self, he is indeed as deprived of sovereignty as the colonized. Therefore, authority does not exist beyond the power or negotiation that can be mobilized in the contact zone. This double ambivalence of representation affects both the identity of the colonizer and the identity of colonized. It may well be that the excess of alterity I identified in the Portuguese colonizer could also be identified in those he colonized. Particularly in Brazil, one could imagine, hypothetically, that the identity of the colonized was, at least in some periods, constructed on the basis of a double other, the other of the direct Portuguese colonizer and the other of the indirect English colonizer. As we shall see, this doubleness became later the constitutive element of Brazil's myth of origins and possibilities for development. It inaugurated a rupture that is still topic for debate. It divides Brazilians between those that are crushed by the excess of past and those that are crushed by the excess of future. Portuguese colonialism carries with itself the stigma of an undecidability that must be the main object of Portuguese postcolonialism. Has colonization by an incompetent, reluctant, originally hybrid Prospero resulted in undercolonization or overcolonization? A colonization that was particularly empowering or disempowering for the colonized? Mightn't a chaotic, absented Prospero have given way to the emergence of substitute Prósperos in the very bosom of the Calibans? Could it be for this reason that within Portuguese postcolonialism the issue of postcolonialism is less important than internal colonialism? It is no doubt significant that independence, both of Brazil and the African countries, took place in the context of important progressive political transformations in the metropolis: the liberal revolution of 1820 and the April revolution of 1974. This fact, combined with the country's semiperipheral position in the world system, prevented neocolonialism from following the traces left by colonialism, as was the case of British or French colonialism. This is not to say that neocolonialism has not occurred (or will not occur). It seems, however, that neocolonialism exists only in such small countries as Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Sâo Tomé and Príncipe, and Timor, where, given the scale of operations, it can thrive in spite of the deficiencies of the former colonizer. The postcolonial excess of all large former colonies is related to the deficit of the colonialism they suffered. This deficit of colonialism and neocolonialism helps to explain the specificity of the political forms that emerged with the independence of the large colonies. In opposite directions, these forms swerved from the norm of decolonization es-

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tablished by hegemonic colonialism. In Brazil occurred one of the most conservative and oligarchic independences of the Latin-American continent, and the only one that was a monarchy. The conditions were thereby created for external colonialism to be followed by internal colonialism, for colonial power to be followed by the coloniality of power. In Angola and Mozambique, on the other hand, swerving from the norm materialized in the revolutionary regimes adopted by the new countries, which were thus placed, right in the midst of the Cold War, on the opposite side of the one they had occupied earlier as Portuguese colonies. The vicissitudes these countries have undergone these past twenty-five years (the end of the Cold War, civil war) do not allow us to assess the extent to which internal colonialism will end up characterizing the new countries. The undecidability and lack of pattern that characterize Portuguese colonialism provoke the following question that should be pondered for the sake of a situated postcolonialism: why did it last so long, much longer than hegemonic colonialism, and why, in the case of the more important colonies, did its end require such a prolonged liberation war? My working hypothesis is that the other colonizer also played a crucial role in this regard. I mean central colonialism that from the nineteenth century onwards followed closely in the footsteps of the Portuguese colonizer. Both in the Berlin Conference and at the end of World War II, the conflicts and mutual conveniences of core capitalist countries dictated the continuity of the Portuguese colonial empire. In the latter case, the Cold War and the fact that Africa was left out of the Yalta agreements allowed the core capitalist countries to use Portuguese colonialism as a stopper against the Soviet danger. Given the weaknesses of the Portuguese Prospero, they managed to use him to control Africa and, above all, to protect South Africa without being charged with colonialism. In this way, under a new guise, the identity of the colonized colonizer could be reproduced until the end of the empire. The issue is whether and under what forms this identity is still being reproduced, now that Portugal has earned the periphery of Europe as its rightful place. A periphery, in fact, entitled to the imagination of the center.14 The undecidability of Portuguese colonialism provides ample material for inquiry into a situated, contextualized postcolonialism, that is to say, a postcolonialism that won't be trapped into the play of similarities and differences between Portuguese and hegemonic colonialism. Otherwise, some will only see the similarities, some the differences, and between the two undecidability will vanish like one last incommensurate object, as invisible to itself as the gaze. In the present context, situated postcolonialism presupposes careful historical and comparative

14 On the concept of imagination of the center, both in the sense of imagining the center and imagining how the center imagines itself, see Santos, Portugal 49.

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analyses of the different colonialisms and their aftermaths. One crucial question to be answered is who decolonizes what and why. Only thus may postcolonial discourse account for dissemination as proposed by Bhabha, a discourse that oscillates between different cultural formations and social processes without a central logical cause ("DissemiNation" 293). Failing this historic and comparative specification, postcolonialism would be one more form of cultural imperialism, a particularly insidious one at that because credibly anti-imperialist.

M I R R O R G A M E S , I : A C A L I B A N IN E U R O P E

Identities are the product of mirror games among entities that, due to contingent reasons, define relations amongst themselves as relations of difference and ascribe relevance to such relationships. Identities are always relational but seldom reciprocal. The relation of differentiation is a relation of inequality that hides behind the supposed incommensurability of differences. Whoever has the power to state difference, has the power to declare that difference superior to the other differences reflected in its mirror. Identity is originally a mode of domination based on a mode of production of power that I designate as unequal differentiation (Santos, Toward 424-428; A critica 264-269). Subaltern identities are always derived and correspond to situations in which the power to declare difference is combined with the power to resist the power that declares it inferior. In subaltern identity, stating difference is ever an attempt to appropriate a difference stated to be inferior so as to cancel out its inferiority. Without resistance there is no subaltern identity; there is only subalternity. Dominant identity is thus reproduced by two distinct processes: by totally negating the other; and by vying for the other's subaltern identity. The former leads almost always to the latter. For example, the dominant, matrix-like identity of western modernity — Prospero/Caliban, civilized/uncivilized— reproduced itself at first by the former and then by the latter process. The two processes continue to be effective in different mirror games. Nonetheless, from the viewpoint of the superior different one, dominant identity only becomes a political fact inasmuch as it contends with subaltern identities. This political fact we nowadays designate as multiculturalism. In either mode of reproduction, dominant identity is always ambivalent, for even total negation of the other is only possible through the active production of the other's nonexistence. The production implies the desire of the other experienced as an abysmal absence or insatiable lack. The ambivalence can be seen in representations of America at the beginning of European expansion. Most reports of the discovery and most travel narratives of the period yield a peculiar mixture of Utopian images of the new continent and the indigenous peoples' cannibalistic

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practices. On the one side, lush and benevolent nature; on the other, repulsive anthropophagy. In "Des Cannibales" (1580), Montaigne was the first one to analyze these two seemingly contradictory images —Utopia and cannibalism— as interdependent mechanisms. Revulsion from cannibalism is the other side of the desire for unity with nature and the kosmos, the unity the Europeans had lost and believed the Indians still had (Klarer, 1999). Concerning identity games in the Portuguese time-space I propose the following hypotheses. First, these games are particularly complex because in the course of history the Portuguese were always on both sides of the mirror: as Prospero reflected in Caliban's mirror, and as Caliban reflected in Prospero's mirror. Second and as a consequence, ambivalence is strengthened in this time-space by the fact that the subject of desire was also the object of desire. Third, the dominant identity in this time-space never accomplished the total negation of the other, thereby failing as well to face subaltern identities in a political manner. The features invoked by the Portuguese to construct the image of the primitive and savage peoples in their colonies from the fifteenth century onwards are quite similar to those ascribed to themselves at the time by North European travelers, traders, and monks:15 underdevelopment and precarious life conditions, sloth and sensuality, violence and affability, poor hygiene and ignorance, superstition and irrationality. The contrast between the north of Europe and Portugal comes across clearly in the report of friar Claude de Bronseval, the secretary of the abbot of Clairvaux, concerning their trip to Portugal and Spain in 1531-1533. They complain of the bad roads, the people's rough manners, and the lousy accommodation and treatment, which are "in accord with the country" (Bronseval 577, vol. 2). They also resent strange habits such as the fact that noblemen accommodate foreigners in the poorest houses for fear of being considered innkeepers (431, vol. 1). As to the monks' education, they note that "few of them in these Hispanic kingdoms like Latin. They only love their ordinary language" (461). The visitors' description of Lisbon could not be more eloquent concerning their general attitude: "This densely populated city is a cavern for Jews, a food board for a crowd of Indians, a dungeon for the children of Hagar, a storage of goods, a furnace for usurers, a stable of lust, a chaos of avarice, a mountain of pride, a sanctuary for runaways, a haven for condemned Frenchmen" (329, vol. 1). In Portugal de D. Joao V visto por tres forasteiros [King John the Fifth's Portugal as seen by three foreigners], Castelo Branco Chaves presents three reports written by visitors between 1720 and 1730. According to Chaves,

15 By "North Europe" is meant here the Europe considered "civilized." In other words, countries like England, France, and Germany that will have later a decisive role in colonization.

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The general picture one gathers of the country is that of a fertile, rich land, yet squandered, and living off Brazil's gold almost exclusively. Most of the food and clothing, most timber for urban and naval construction, most of the necessaries of life, all came from abroad, from England and Holland, and purchased with Brazilian gold. The Portuguese are lazy, do not take advantage of their country' riches, nor do they know how to sell their colonies' riches well. (20)

With the only exception of the final reference to the colonies, this characterization fits perfectly what was then said, and had been said for two centuries, about the indigenous peoples of America and Africa. The Portuguese are said to be jealous, cruel, vindictive, sly, scornful, frivolous, and silly. Now, cruelty, vindictiveness, dissimulation, frivolity, and silliness also constitute the European stereotype of African or Amerindian peoples. This is often implicit in the reports themselves when the skin color of the Portuguese is invoked to confirm the truthfulness of the stereotype. According to one of the reports, the Portuguese are "tall, handsome, and generally dark-skinned as a result of their intermixing with blacks" (Chaves 24). While the Portuguese claimed miscegenation as a humanistic triumph or a clever colonialist device, the European Prospero's gaze inscribed on their skin miscegenation itself as a burden. After the second half of the eighteenth century the "black legend" of Portugal and the Portuguese among the British as a fallen, degenerate, and imbecile people becomes more consistent. Among her recordings of English impressions on the Portuguese in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Laura Pires mentions a letter by a certain Captain Richard Croker, dated December 1780, in which the Portuguese are depicted according to the racist stereotypes of the time: extremely ugly, certainly not white, and rather the result of some clearly disgusting ethnic mixture, the Portuguese are said to combine the worst defects of blacks, Jews, Moors, and ... the French. According to another visitor, in 1808 there were no Portuguese books worth acquiring in the country (Pires 112, 85). In her study of the impressions culled by the German Commissary of the British army, August Schaumann, during his stay in Portugal between 1808 and 1814, Maria Teresa Byrne shows that the Portuguese are in general described as peasants and rather primitive. "I pitied these poor devils with all my heart," Schaumann writes, regretting the situation of a people that is invaded by two countries, one attacking (France), the other defending it (England) (Byrne 108). About the same time, Lord Byron visited Portugal (1809) and left his impressions in his famed Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-1818). As he expresses his admiration for the natural beauty of the country ("Oh, Christ! It is a goodly sight to see / What Heaven hath done for this delicious land / ... What beauties doth Lisbon first unfold"), the poet does not spare the Portuguese not only for their arrogant subalternity before invaders (the French) and allies (the British) alike, but also for their swarthy, uncomely appearance and uncouth manners:

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At the end of the seventeenth century, however, the Reverend John Colbatch, who occupied the post of chaplain of the British Factory in Lisbon, left a fairer opinion of the Portuguese ("no people less addicted to drunkenness"), while nonetheless noting their "mortal hatred" of "foreigners" and their lack of gratitude for the English "who had been with such frequency their saviours" (qtd. in Macaulay, The Went to Portugal: 224-225). One hundred and fifty years later, Reverend J. M. Neale presented a sorry picture of the "primitive barbarity" and wretched living conditions in the country at the time ("you lie at nights on the boards of inns to which you would hesitate in England to consign a favourite dog"), and warned that "when in a passion the Portuguese become dangerous" (207-208). The romantic poet Robert Southey visited Portugal for the first time in 1796. Although he claims to have admiration for the Portuguese, Southey nonetheless thrashes them for being a retrograde, superstitious, filthy, lazy, jealous, vain, ignorant, and dishonest people. A people, moreover, palsied by the tyranny of state and church, both of them corrupt and ignorant, and a people at the mercy of astonishing and shocking institutions —justice totally inefficacious and medicine in the hands of ignorant and discredited physicians (Castanheira 83). In a sentence that vividly enhances the symmetry with the European stereotypes concerning the indigenous peoples of Africa or America, Southey asserts: "Sensuality is certainly the vice of the Portuguese. The debauched imagery of Camoens, his island of Love, and Venus the protector of Gama, prove they pike themselves on their debaucheries of this kind" (qtd. in Castanheira: 92). The symmetry between the North European stereotypes of the Portuguese and the North and South European stereotypes of the indigenous peoples of Africa and America becomes particularly consistent as regards the ambivalence with which the act of stigmatizing the other is mixed with the radical desire of the other. Like Byron, Southey has a harsh view of the Portuguese while at the same time exalt-

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ing the natural beauties of the country: "I would give one eye to blind Fortune if she would let me look on the Tagus with the other" (qtd. in Castanheira: 75). The rich fertile, land, yet squandered by its inhabitants, is a recurrent topos in all accounts. Carlos de Merveilleux, the French naturalist physician invited by King John the Fifth to write the "natural history of this reign," reports: "The lands produce almost with no toil and give abundant compensation for their care and tillage... What wealth wouldn't accrue to His Majesty if His estates were peopled by anabaptists and other such hardworking people" (qtd. in Chaves: 20). The dialectics of foreignness/desire and repulsion/attraction that we find in the description of the animals of the new continent and the Indians' relationship with them, can also be found in the accounts of foreign travelers in Portugal. Dora Wordsworth Quillinan, the poet's daughter and wife of Edward Quillinan, one of the translators of Os Lusiadas, writes vividly of the grotesque emotional attachment that the Portuguese have for their ugly and repugnant pigs (Pires 40) The dialectics of representation of the colonized turns them into attractive and repulsive beings at one and the same time: docile and threatening, loyal and treasonous, angelic and diabolic. Stereotypes, therefore, could never be univocal or consistent. According to the colonizer's representation needs, now negative now positive stereotypes prevail, even though both pertain to each other reciprocally. This dialectic also occurs in representations of the Portuguese by foreigners. Alongside "negative" representations, there are "positive" representations as well. As a matter of fact, as with descriptions of the colonized in colonial narratives, the controversy on the "profile" of the Portuguese among foreign observers was often fierce. Negative stereotypes prevailed after the second half of the eighteenth century as England's ascendancy over Portugal intensified, although closer to us several other narratives emerged, aimed at contesting and offering alternatives to previous narratives, now considered false. Some even try to reconstruct the history of the representations of the Portuguese so as to highlight their positive face, as is the case of Rose Macaulay in her two books on reports of journeys to Portugal (Macaulay). The stereotype of mild manners, although quite recent, is perhaps the most consistent of them all. It is at the root of an even more recent one: Luso-tropicalism.

M I R R O R G A M E S , I I : A C A L I B A N I Z E D PROSPERO

In the previous section I showed that the Portuguese were never at home in the European Prospero's original time-space. They lived there as if internally displaced in symbolic regions not their own and where they were not at ease. They suffered applause and humiliation, stigmatization and patronizing, but ever aloof, as if never totally contemporaneous of the time-space in question. Forced to play

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the game of modern binarisms, it was hard for them to know which side they were on. Neither Prospero nor Caliban, they were left with liminarity and the borderland, and with inter-identity as original identity. Apparently contradicting all this, Portugal was the first European power to embark in overseas expansion and the one that kept its empire the longest. If colonialism played a crucial role in the system of representation of western modernity, Portugal was pioneer in the construction of this system and hence in the founding mirror game between Prospero and Caliban. Herein lies the enigma: how did the European Caliban manage to become Prospero overseas? Or could it be that, because he never fully assumed either identity, he managed to be both at the same time? Portugal's hegemony in the world system did not last long. By the end of the sixteenth century, Prospero's and Caliban's signifiers were already circulating beyond the control of the Portuguese. The inscription of such signifiers in the systems of representation of the Portuguese were of such complexity and went on for so long that they ended up giving rise to contradictory stereotypes and myths, each of them resonant with half truths. Up until now, the historical construction of the Portuguese discoveries and colonialism has been haunted by myths that reciprocally reinforce and cancel each other. On the one hand, Charles Boxer's construction: The Portuguese as an incompetent Prospero, bearing all of Prospero's faults and none of his virtues. On the other hand, Gilberto Freyre's construction: The Portuguese as a benevolent, cosmopolitan Prospero, willing to make an alliance with Caliban to create a new reality. Bearing in mind the disorder and chaos of the practices they wanted to sort out, these two constructions are both credible. This undecidability corroborates a regime of interidentities. The Portuguese, ever in transit between Prospero and Caliban (hence, frozen in such transit), were both racist —often violent and corrupt, more prone to pillage than to development— and born miscegenators, literally the forefathers of racial democracy, of what it reveals and conceals, and better than any other European people at adjusting to the tropics. In Africa, Asia, and Brazil, this inter-identity regime had many manifestations, among them "cafrealization" and miscegenation. The two phenomena are related, although referring to distinct social processes. Cafrealization is a nineteenth-century designation used mainly in Eastern Africa to stigmatize the Portuguese men that yielded their culture and civilized status to adopt the ways of living and thinking of the "cafres," the blacks depicted as primitive savages. Portuguese men, we might say, caught in Caliban's snares, or indeed Calibanized, who broke with their original culture and lived their lives in the company of their Caliban women and children according to the local customs. The designation emerges with this connotation in colonial discourse in a precise moment of the history of Portuguese colonialism. I shall call it "the moment of Prospero." It expresses a practice that spread between the sixteenth and the

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nineteenth centuries mainly in Africa's eastern coast. It consisted of a prolonged interaction of the Portuguese with the local cultures and powers, whose commercial interests could not be sanctioned by any imperial power worth the name and which, for that reason, tended to be characterized by reciprocity and horizontality, if not subordination and vassalage to local sovereigns and authorities. The continued practice of such interactions pushed them beyond sheer commercial activity into deeper kinds of relationships, often including family ties and the acquisition of native languages and manners. Including, in a word, cafrealization. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the term "cafre" did not have the negative sense that it acquired later.16 It was used only to distinguish blacks (cafres) from the Arab-speaking peoples that had been long engaged with Arab, Muslim, and Swahili traders in the region. The easy interaction between the Portuguese and the local populations and the ensuing hybrid cultural practices are well documented since the seventeenth century. The accounts, often written by priests, criticize these practices, while showing understanding for the difficulties faced in those regions by people with no colonial power to protect them. Here is Friar Joao dos Santos in his 1606 Etiopia Oriental [Eastern Ethiopia]: A Portuguese man named Rodrigo Lobo had possession of most of this isle, 17 which the Quiteve [king] granted him in friendship. The king also bestowed the title of his wife on the man, which was the name that the king called the Captain of Mozambique and Sofala, as well as all the other Portuguese he loved. With this name the king signifies that he loves them and wants them to be honored as his wife is. (Santos, "On Oppositional: 139)

Over a century later, in 1766, writes Antonio Pinto Miranda: [The Europeans in Mozambique] ... marry local ladies and others of Goan descent ... forget their Christian upbringing and do not so instruct their children, who then behave the way I have related concerning our countrymen ... They take other women besides their wives ... and lazily lie in hammocks days on end, forgetful of death till it comes to claim them. (Miranda 64).

In 1844, Joao Juliao da Silva wrote in his Memoria sobre Sofalla [Memoir of Sofala]: The civilization of this town [Sofala] has not progressed from its primitive state ... its inhabitants were among the greatest criminals and people without morals who were

16 The term "cafre" derives from the Arabic kafr used to refer to the non-Muslim or nonbeliever. On Arabs and blacks in Portuguese Africa, see also Monclaro 167-170. 17 Located in Sofala, Mozambique.

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Boaventura de Sousa Santos sent here to serve life sentences and settled here ... They quickly familiarized themselves with the cafres ... They wedded black women of the jungle in the cafre way and begot mulattoes, who were raised like cafres, and many to this day do not know how to read and write... They are ignorant even of the rudiments of our Holy Religion, the Portuguese language, and the European manners, (qtd. in Feliciano and Nicolau: 36)

The act of disqualifying as primitive and savage the indigenous peoples and the Portuguese that mingled with them and adopted their manners occurs frequently in these accounts.18 For a long period of time, the prevailing Portuguese stereotype has nothing to do with Prospero, rather with a proto-Caliban, or a cafrealized person. As we get to know better the narratives of these cafrealized Portuguese, we will have a more complex idea of the processes of hybridization, no doubt a different idea from the one that comes to us from the accounts of those who visited the jungle in meteoric apparitions of the imperial power, whether church or crown, otherwise always absent. The disqualification and stigmatization of the cafrealized Prospero was facilitated by the origin of the Portuguese that peopled the territories. As Marc Ferro states, "the Portuguese were the first ones to get rid of criminals and delinquent by sending them to serve sentences overseas —an example that England followed in large scale after 1797 by sending convicts to people Australia" (179). After 1415, every ship sent to explore the coast of Africa carried aboard its own contingent of deported people. Ignacio Caetano Xavier refers to them in strongly pejorative terms in his account of 1758-1762 (Xavier 175-176). The subtext of Xavier's account is that the social origin of the Portuguese in Africa called for a stronger colonial authority. Such authority, however, was weak, as we saw, and so inconsistent that it could rather be characterized as an apparitional power. The apparitional nature of colonial power is, to my mind, crucial to understand the ways of inter-identity in Africa during this period. The fact that Portuguese colonialism in Africa was for centuries more intent on controlling sea trade than settling the territory, in conjunction with the political and administrative weakness of the colonial state, resulted in the fact that the Portuguese engaged in trade in the region were colonizers without a colonial state and therefore forced to practice a kind of colonial self-government. This colonial self-government allowed each and every one to identify themselves at pleasure with the empire's power, but did not provide any other imperial power but what they themselves could procure by their own means. Since the means were scarce, the Portuguese had to negotiate everything, not only trade but also survival itself. The

18 At the end of the eighteenth century, Ignacio Caetano Xavier comments that the "cafres" are "enemies of work," use skins of animals and trees for garb, and do not engage in agriculture "more than they need for their daily sustenance" (Xavier 177-178).

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Portuguese "colonizer" was often in the situation of having to pay allegiance to the local king. Since colonialism was nonexistent as an institutional relation, there was a wide gap between the settler, on the one side, and the colonial state and the Empire, on the other. Xavier is quite eloquent on this situation (174-175). The same lack of colonial state often resulted in having several tasks of sovereignty, for example the protection of frontiers, "subcontracted" to local populations, as reported in the eighteenth century "Noticias das Ilhas de Cabo Delgado" [News from the Islands of Cabo Delgado]19 (Portugal 276). Likewise, colonial legality, for lack of a strong colonial state to implement it, was less in the hands of those issuing the laws than in the hands of those who were supposed to obey them. Colonial self-government led to the formation of a parallel legality that combined highly selective application of official legality with local legalities or legalities adjusted to local conditions. This may well be the first example of modern legal pluralism.20 From the point of view of the Portuguese in the colonies, the juridical status of their activities was neither legal nor illegal; it was a-legal. From the point of view of the crown, it was a system of disobedience that could not be assumed by anyone. It was similar to the system in Spanish America known by the phrase "I obey but do not execute." It was an in-transit [torna-viagem] juridical system. The laws were dispatched from Lisbon, sometimes they would never reach their destiny, when they did they were ignored, and when, much later, acknowledged at all the conditions had changed so much that not implementing them was entirely justified. The laws would then be returned to Lisbon, along with the justification of the colonial government and the final vow of obedience: "Waiting for instructions." Such features of political economy could not but have impact on the interidentity regime, on the way the Portuguese would cafrealize themselves, that is to say, on the hybrid way in which they mingled with the cultures and practices they had to live with. If this impact is all but obvious, its precise meaning, however, is one of the factors of the undecidability of the system of identity representations in the time-space of Portuguese colonialism. Was cafrealization and, in general, "adaptation to the Tropics," a result of facility or necessity? Did facility make it necessary, or rather necessity make it easy? The facility reading tends to destigmatize cafrealization and render it empowering. Jorge Dias's analysis is a paradigmatic version of this reading: The heterogeneous composition of the Portuguese people and their traditional communitarian and patriarchal structure allowed them to assimilate perfectly the

19 Located in the most northern part of Mozambique, these islands are known today as the Quirimbas Archipelago. 20 On legal pluralism, see Santos, Toward 112-122.

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Boaventura de Sousa Santos Christian spirit of fraternity in a wholly coherent manner, even when challenged by situations of great racial and cultural contrasts ... The Portuguese did not bring along attitudes of conquest; they rather tried to establish friendly relations with the populations of the various continents, and only when necessary were they drawn to the use of arms ... Our assimilationist action was never violent... we tried to adjust to the natural and social milieus, with great respect for the traditional ways of life ... we managed to arouse in the indigenous peoples some respect for certain principles of our western civilization. (Dias 155-156)

In this reading, cafrealization is the unsaid that sustains its opposite: assimilation.21 Indeed, it is a double unsaid. An unsaid of assimilation because assimilation is inverted: the assimilation of Prospero by Caliban. But also the unsaid of cultural imposition typical of colonization, whether assimilationist or not, because it is a negotiated identity. Curiously enough, in what appears like one more mirror game, this reading is in accord with some of the accounts of foreign travelers in Portugal since the eighteenth century, who were not inattentive to the porosity of identity practices among the Portuguese. The Irish Captain Costigan, who visited Portugal in 1778-1779, expressed astonishment at the pleasant familiarity of the Portuguese towards their servants, something unheard of in England (Macaulay, They Went to Portugal Too 193). On the contrary, the necessity reading tends to see in cafrealization Prospero's unavoidable weaknesses and incompetence. It appears as the expression of a degeneration whose backwardness drags along the colonized's backwardness. This is largely Charles Boxer's reading, as well as the reading that underlies the colonial policies from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, although, in the latter case, the reading aims exclusively to justify the break with the previous colonial policies. Miscegenation is another manifestation of the porosity of Portuguese identity regimes. It is not the same as cafrealization and may occur without it. But when the colonialist and racist discourses were more intense — what I call the moment of Prospero— the stigmatization of cafrealization dragged along the stigmatization of miscegenation (miscegenation as cafrealization of the body). I do not deal

21 In Mozambique, assimilation policies were introduced as part of the colonial political system at the beginning of the twentieth century (1917). From then on, the distinction between natives and non-natives was reinforced. As lower class citizens, the assimilated (blacks, Asians, and mixed) held ID's that distinguished them from the mass of non-assimilated workers, who held a native pass. Natives, who were the majority of the population, were not entitled to citizenship or rights, were badly paid and exploited, received but rudimentary instruction, were subject to forced labor, liable to penal deportation, and so and so forth. For example, when in 1950 Eduardo Mondlane arrived in Lisbon to register at the university, his application was not immediately accepted. The problem was that he was not assimilated, had no Portuguese ID, and was not a citizen (Manghezi).

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with this issue in this paper. That miscegenation was the "Portuguese exception" in European colonialism (Ferro 177) tends to be rather consensual today, as is the fact that not only the Portuguese practiced it. The porosity of frontiers between Prospero and Caliban reached its greatest expression of identity in the figures of the mulatto and the mulatta. The ambivalence of their representations is quite significant of the nature of a colonial pact that was as open as devoid of guarantees. Now looked upon as genetically degraded beings, the living expression of treason against Caliban, now looked upon as superior beings, combining what best was there in Prospero and Caliban, mulattoes were, in the course of centuries, a symbolic commodity whose rate varied according to the vicissitudes of colonial alliances and struggles. In periods when Prospero tried to affirm himself as such or when Caliban gained consciousness of his oppression and was ready to fight it, the mulattoes' social rate decreased. On the contrary, it increased in the much longer periods when neither Prospero nor Caliban felt the need or were able to affirm themselves as such. As expression of racial democracy, the mulattoes, without willing it and against their interests, contributed to legitimating racial social inequality. By deracializing social relations, they allowed colonialism to shed their guilt concerning their proper way of producing social inequities: "Black because poor" became the credible alibi for those who acted under the mirror assumption: "Poor because black." The conclusion may therefore be drawn that the debate about the sociological political and cultural value of miscegenation is undecidable in its own terms, because it is one of the ersatz debates of the settling of accounts between Prospero and Caliban, a debate as yet undecided between European colonialism and its colonized. One more tricky aspect of the identity regime of the Portuguese is that the Portuguese may be themselves already miscegenated, that is to say, mulatto to begin with and unable to engender but mulatto men and women, even when they are white men and women. We saw in the previous section that the foreigners who visited Portugal in the course of centuries took the skin color of the Portuguese as a recurrent signifier of distance and disqualification. The skin color becomes part of the scientific narrative of identities at the end of the nineteenth century. The undecidable debate about the racial and ethnic complexion of the Portuguese emerged then. As in the case of the others, what was at stake in this debate was not verification but rather justification. Those who would render the Portuguese as a proper and prosperous Prospero ascribed to them a Lusitanian, Roman, and Germanic ancestry. On the contrary, those that viewed the Portuguese as a reluctant, inconsequent, and cannibalized Prospero ascribed to them Jewish, Moorish, and African ancestry. The controversy is the proof of the fluctuation of the signif i e s at the mercy of the justifications in question. The versatility and flexibility of fluctuations stress the possibility of an original hybridization, a kind of autophagic self-miscegenation that precedes and makes possible all the others.

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A primordial kind of miscegenation, under the guise of racist signiñers inscribed in the skin color but also in the physical constitution and even in manners, pursued the Portuguese wherever they went. Outside their colonies or former colonies, and particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world, the Portuguese were often the object of perplexity. Unbelievable either as Prospero or as Caliban, they were the objects of wild taxonomies that are nothing if not manifestations of inter-identity. In 1946, referring to Azorian immigrants in Bermuda, Reverend J. W. Purves wondered in the Bermuda Historical Quarterly: «But WHO are the Portuguese? To which of the world's racial groups do they belong?» His answer characterized the Portuguese as «one of the Latin nations, those dark-whites peopling the northern shores of the western Mediterranean» (Hamey 113). In the Caribbean and Hawaii, the Portuguese were always considered an ethnic group distinct from the whites and Europeans, halfway between them and the blacks or natives.22 In the Caribbean and Hawaii, they were designated as "Portygees" or "Potogees," indentured laborers that came to replace the slaves after abolition and who were therefore not white, but rather one more variety of "coolie men," like the Chinese and East Indians. For the Afro-Caribbean historian Eric Williams, there is nothing strange about describing the ethnic groups that supported the People's National Movement in Trinidad and Tobago as "Africans, Indians, Chinese, Portuguese, Europeans, Syrians ..." (Harney 114). Likewise, V. S. Naipul described the postindependence struggle in Guyana as having taken place between six races: Indian, African, Portuguese, White, Mixed and Amerindian (114). In his trip to Trinidad, Miguel Vale de Almeida records from informers of Portuguese descendent (the "potogees"23) that the "elites did not consider them white, at most Trinidad-white, and the nonwhites did not treat them as superior" (Almeida, Um mar 7). This intermediary status helps to explain the role of Portuguese-descendent Albert Gomes as political leader of Afro and Indo-Caribbean Trinidadians before the 1960's, at a time when political parties were still divided according to ethnic divisions (Harney 115). Albert Gomes' ancestors were the "Africanized Portuguese" from the slave harbor of Vera Cruz where, according to Antonio Garcia de Leon (1993), they served as intermediators and interpreters between the newly arrived slaves and those buying them. In her research on the migratory fluxes of the Portuguese between 1820 and 1830, Maria Ioannis Baganha finds out that in Hawaii the Portuguese were seen as an intermediary ethnic group, superior to the Asians but inferior to white Caucasians (haole) (288). Early in the next century, the Hawaiian distinguished 22 This intermediary social and ethnic status can be observed in other continents. In South Africa, for instance, Afrikaans designated the Portuguese pejoratively as wit-kaffirs (white blacks) (Harney 116). 23 The designation varies. Harney mentions "Portygees" and "Potagees."

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between the "Portuguese" and "Other Caucasians." This intermediate status, although structurally ambiguous, was quite precise in the local practices. In the work place, the Portuguese were field bosses (lunas) but never head overseers, the latter position being only accessible to haole elites like the Scots. Likewise, Portuguese carpenters earned higher wages than the Japanese, but a Portuguese blacksmith earned half the salary of a Scottish blacksmith (Harney 115). The intermediary racial status of the Portuguese went way beyond labor relations. In an important rape trial in the 1930s, it was decisive to help reach a compromise. Since the accused were Asian and native Hawaiians, if the composition of the jury were entirely white (haole), the defendants would surely be found guilty; but if the jurors were Asians and native Hawaiians, the opposite could easily happen. The solution was a jury composed of one Portuguese, two Japanese, two Chinese, and one Hawaiian (Harney 115). In the United States the situation was not much different. The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (1980) mentions with distress that, as late as 1976, the town of Barnstable in Cape Cod listed its ethnic groups in two alphabetical sequences, one of "whites," another of "nonwhites," namely Finns, Greeks, Irish, and Jews, on the one hand, and blacks, Portuguese, and Wampanoags on the other. According to the same logic, the Ethnic Heritage Program of 1972 described the Portuguese as one of the country's seven ethnic/racial minorities, the others being "Negro, American Indian, Spanish-surnamed American, Oriental, Hawaiian natives and Alaskan natives" (Harney 117). In other words, the Portuguese are the only group of European immigrants to whom the European origin is denied.24 Of mixed race to start with, calibanized at home by foreign visitors, cafrealized in his own colonies, semi-calibanized in the colonies and former colonies of the European powers, how could this Prospero be a colonizer and colonize prosperously? Can one be consistently postcolonial vis-à-vis such a disconcerting and exasperatingly disqualified and incompetent colonizer?

MIRROR G A M E S , I I I : T H E M O M E N T S OF PROSPERO

The most striking feature of the identity of the Portuguese as reflected in the two other relevant signifiers —the foreign visitor and the colonized— seems to be an incomplete union of opposites. The incompleteness of this union has two distinct

24 Maria Ioannis Baganha, while not contesting these data and the existence of racism against the Portuguese, mentions that some racism was addressed as well to other groups of Europeans, namely from Eastern Europe. She also emphasizes, however, that the Johnson Act of 1924 and the National Origins System of 1927 restricted entrance in the US of "nonassimilatable" groups, amongst which were the Portuguese (Baganha 448).

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sides. The first one refers to the regional differences frequently mentioned in a variety of accounts. At the end of the ancient régime, Adrien Balbi mentions the union of opposites ("[the Portuguese] combine the phlegm and steadfastness of the Northern peoples with the brilliant imagination of the southern peoples"), highlighting at the same time the stereotypical regional differences: "the peasants of Estremadura and Alentejo are lazy; the inhabitants of Estremadura are the most polished, those of the Algarve the liveliest, those of Beira the most hard-working, those of Minho the most ingenious and dynamic, those of Trás-os-Montes, although rather uncouth, are very active" (qtd. in Bethencourt: 500-501). These differences appear even more striking when the Portuguese are seen by the Portuguese themselves. As seen by themselves, the Portuguese recognize themselves as Portuguese only rather late. José Mattoso recounts a "perfectly verisimilar" anecdote about King Dom Luis. Sailing once in his yacht off the northern coast in the late nineteenth century, the King asked some fishermen whether they were Portuguese. "Oh no Sir," they replied, "not us. We come from Póvoa de Varzim" (Mattoso 14). The union-of-contraries concept has another, to my mind more important, side to it. At certain historical moments and under specific pressures, it was possible for the Portuguese to assume one of the contraries, even if not necessarily with verisimilitude. Since they are a union of opposites (i. e. Prospero and Caliban), at given moments or contexts the Portuguese may be either predominantly Prospero or Caliban. In this section I deal with the former possibility, what I call the moment of Prospero. I distinguish two moments of Prospero: 1. the end of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century; 2. the April Revolution and integration in the European Union. At any of these moments, Prospero's prevalence in the identity magma of the Portuguese is due to the pressure of external factors that have to do with developed capitalist Europe. The first moment of Prospero occurs after the Berlin Conference, when effective occupation of the territories under colonial dominion becomes a condition to maintain dominion itself.25 Once the partition of Africa was accomplished, the industrialized European countries invest the colonial enterprise with an imperial aspect that closely entails the colonies to capitalist development. The capitalist exploitation of the colonies, which presupposes a tight political and administrative control, becomes the other side of the civilizing mission. To secure its presence in Africa, Portugal feels compelled to act as the other European powers, as if the domestic development of Portuguese capitalism made the same kinds of demands, which was not the case at all. This fact 25 Among other resolutions, the Berlin Conference decided that a country was entitled to a given overseas territory only if it actually occupied said territory and governed it in such a way as to guarantee individual rights, freedom of trade and religion, and the establishment of civilizing missions.

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does not fail to catch the attention of English historiography, at the service of the British Empire, hence hostile to Portuguese imperialism. Thomas Pakenham's stance, in his The Scramble for Africa, 1876-1912, is paradigmatic: "Then there was Portugal, half-senile and three-quarters bankrupt, hoarding her ancient possessions in Africa, Angola and Mozambique, more out of pride than any hope of profit" (qtd. in Furtado: 77). I do not intend to linger on this period here. I just wish to highlight the identity metamorphoses that occur therein. The major one is the polarization between Prospero and Caliban. It is precisely at this moment that the primitive native emerges, along with the contrapuntal Portuguese colonizer, representative or metaphor of the colonial state. The process by which the natives are lowered to the status that justifies their colonization is the same that raises the Portuguese to the status of European colonizers. The dichotomy between the Portuguese and the crown disappears. The portable empire that the Portuguese carry from now on is not a self-empire, subject to the weaknesses and forces of whoever carries it, but rather the emanation of a transcending force —the colonial state. The white Portuguese and the primitive natives arise together simultaneously divided and united by two powerful instruments of western rationality: the state and racism. Through the state, the attempt is made to guarantee the systematic exploration of wealth by converting it into a civilizing mission through the transference for the colonies of the civilized metropolitan ways of life —this is the mimetic creation of "little Europes" in Africa that Edward Said talks about (The Question 78). Through racism, the scientific hierarchy of races is obtained both with the help of the social sciences and physical anthropology. The territorial occupation, a good example of which is Portugal's campaign against Gungunhana, aims to reduce the Africans, starting with their kings, to the condition of docile, subordinate subjects. By the same token, successive missions of scientific exploration —such as Santos Junior's eight missions in the 1930s and 1950s— aim to establish and confirm the inferiority of blacks.26 Considering the context of prosperization of the Portuguese settler, no wonder the abovementioned forms of hybridity — cafrealization and miscegenation— are stigmatized with particular violence. At the end of the nineteenth century, Antonio Ennes suggests that "cafrealization is a kind of reversion of the civilized man to the primitive state" (Ennes 192). In the same way, Norton de Matos, a former governor of Angola and a paladin of assimilationism, cries out against inverted assimilation: "Some Europeans, fortunately in small numbers, circulated among the natives [in 1912], fully adjusted to their uncivilized habits and usages" (qtd. in Barradas: 54).

26

On the supposed insensitivity of blacks to pain, see Santos Junior and Barros 619.

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Whereas the Portuguese go from being deported criminals susceptible to cafrealization to the condition of civilizing agents, the natives go from being kings and servants of kings to the condition of the basest bestiality. The Portuguese become "the valiant whites that guarantee the possession of the African land ..., an affirmation of the necessary presence" (Junior 19). In view of the despicable nature of the raw material, the task of the Portuguese is huge. Now the blacks appear bestialized and capable of being domesticated only by the imperial gesture. The violence of this gesture, the brutality of forced labor, is the other face of the bestiality of blacks, the latter perversely justifying the former.27 On how difficult it was to force the blacks to work is recounted in an official publication of the Ministry of the Colonies in 1912: "The natives are prone to drunkenness because of the atavism of many generations; they resist manual labor, to which they subject their women; they are cruel and bloodthirsty because they were thus brought up by their milieu; family love and the love of fellow-creatures is not deep set in their souls" (qtd. in Barradas: 124). The demonization of the colonized reaches paroxysm, however, when referred to women. The black woman is the one deemed responsible for miscegenation, now stigmatized as the major factor of the degeneration of the race. In 1873, Antonio Ennes writes: Africa charged the black woman with taking revenge on the Europeans, and she, the hideous black woman —all black women are hideous— seduces the lofty conquerors of the Black Continent into the sensuality of apes [... and] the brutishness of inferior races, and even the tusks of the quizumbas [hyenas] that dig the cemeteries. (192)

Between the black man and the white man an insurmountable barrier rises that is at the same time the line that unites them. In this mirror game, the blacks are savage, and because they are savage they tend to think that "we" are the savage ones. This is what José Firmino Sant'Anna, a physician practicing in the river Zambeze valley, wrote in 1911: In [the natives' eyes], we are the savages, they ascribe to us the worst instincts ... the distrust with which natives receive the physician... Incapable of explaining in any other way the blood samples drawn for tests, they think it is for eating. The physician

27 According to Rodrigues Júnior, "there is no doubt that whites are not prepared to perform certain functions in Africa. For instance, they do not endure physically the hardships of the hoe" (22-23). Quoting Marcelo Caetano, the author adds that "the blacks have conditions of natural resistance and adaptation to the environment that allow them to perform certain activities in tropical climates in far better conditions than the Europeans ... It is necessary to force [the blacks] to give their contribution to the development of common wealth; they must be forced to produce ... The blacks must be protected and integrated in Mozambique's economic system" (22-23).

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that engages in this practice is viewed by the majority as an anthropophagous. Even the people that served me closely thought that the wine I consumed was blood. (22) Cannibalism is a recurrent topic in moments of polarized mirror games between Prospero and Caliban. Here, too, the line that separates abysmally, allows as well for the closest reciprocity. The charge of cannibalism against Africans often had its counterpart in the charge of cannibalism against the colonizers by the Africans. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Henry Junod recorded a colorful anecdote about the cannibalism of the Portuguese among the peoples he studied in the South of Mozambique: — Nghunghunyane is dead.28 The Portuguese ate him up! — What are you saying? — Of course. The Portuguese eat human flesh. Everybody knows that. They have no legs. They're fish. They have a tail instead of legs. And they live in the water. —Well then, if they're fish and have no legs, how come they fight against us and beat us? — Oh! Those who fight against us are young and have legs... They choose one of us and make a little cut in his pinky to see if he is fat enough. If he's not, they shut him up in a big basket full of peanuts and make him eat to fatten him up; when he's fat enough they make him lie down in a redhot oblong pan the size of a man... (Usos e costumes dos Bantos 299-300, vol.2) In the face of polarization, effective colonization is a right and a duty. Africa, for Hegel, is not an historical part of the world: [What] we call Africa remained closed to all relations with the rest of the world; it is the land of gold turned upon itself, the land of childhood, hidden in the dark's night beyond the day of self-conscious history... The truth is Africa is no part of the historical world, it exhibits no movement or evolution, and what in Africa, that is to say, in its northern part may have happened belongs to the Asiatic and European world ... What we truly mean by Africa is the a-historical and closed up, still wholly confined to the spirit of nature... (120; 129) Colonization constitutes, therefore, as Ruy Ennes Ulrich argued forcefully in 1909, the natural duty of the "civilized states" and "superior peoples" to guide and instruct the "backward peoples" (698). Henry Junod likewise saw colonization as "a duty to perform vis-à-vis the weaker races" (Usos e costumes dos Bantu

28

The story refers to the King of the Changane, who was deported to Potugal after being defeated in Mozambique by the Portuguese troops at the end of the nineteenth century, during the so-called "pacification campaigns."

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18). This duty, however, could not be fulfilled without violence, as Alberto d'Almeida Teixeira explains in a 1907 "Report on the operations to prolong occupation up to River Cuilo": [Since] the idea of independence is intuitive in primitive peoples, as is innate in them hatred of the superior race, persuation and catechesis will in principle be almost always sterile and need the support and previous manifestation of force to bear fruit, (qtd. in Barradas: 128)

Presupposing the dichotomous polarization between the white man and the black savage, this civilizing mission imposes on the colonized a double identity dynamics: anthropology and assimilationism. Colonial anthropology aims to learn the uses and habits of the primitives better to control them politically, govern them, and make them yield taxes and forced labor. The different forms of "indirect rule" that were adopted at the end of the nineteenth century in Africa are based on colonial anthropology. Assimilationism is a construction of identity based on a game of distance and proximity of the colonized vis-à-vis the colonizer, in terms of which, the colonized —through procedures that have similarities with the process of naturalization— sheds the savage state. The subordination of the colonized is then no longer inscribed in a special juridical statute (such as, for example, the "Estatuto do Indigenato" [Indigenousness Statute]), and is rather ruled by the general laws of the colonial state. The assimilated thus become the prototype of blocked identity, an identity somewhere in between the African roots, to which they stop having direct access, and the options of European life, to which they have but a much restricted access. In other words, the assimilated imply an identity constructed upon a double de-identification. Assimilationism, together with miscegenation, is what confers to the African society its distinct heterogeneity. In 1952, Alexandre Lobato wonders: And what does one observe in the Mozambican population? A few million blacks in primitive state, a few thousand civilized whites, a few thousand largely semiEuropean and semi-primitive mulattoes, a few thousand Indians divided into two very distinct groups for ancestral reasons, and a few assimilated, civilized, Europeanized blacks... There is no Mozambican people in the sense we speak of the Portuguese people... There is no collective thought in Mozambique. (116-17)

The maximum of possible consciousness of the colonial thought is to regret that the colonized peoples are precisely that into which the colonial policies have transformed them. The Portuguese moment of Prospero at the turn of the nineteenth century was an excessive moment vis-à-vis its conditions of possibility. Strongly conditioned

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by the international pressures following the division of Africa, the Portuguese colonizer was nonetheless unable to break totally with the historical long duration of inter-identity between Prospero and Caliban. And so he proved to be an inconsequent and underdeveloped Prospero. In a classified report dated March 6, 1915, Norton de Matos, then outgoing general governor, wrote with chilling colonialist distance of the total inability of the Portuguese to occupy and control Angola (Barradas 132). A few years earlier, Oliveira Martins expressed the same preoccupation, stressing that "plantation colonies were never made with freedom and humanity" (234). In another passage, Oliveira Martins' discouragement at the Portuguese colonizer's lack of conditions to colonize with competence is even more striking: To hold a gun —with no trigger— in one's hand, to be upon the walls of a decrepit fortress, with a custom-house and a Palace where vegetate badly paid employees, to be helpless witness to the trade foreigners engage in and we cannot, to expect attacks of blacks everyday, and to hear the scorn and contempt with which all travelers in Africa refer to us —honestly, it's not worth it. (286)

Prospero's incapacity to assume himself as such is witnessed not only by colonial administrators but also by foreigners and assimilated. In 1809, Captain Tomkinson briefs Vice-Admiral Albermarble Bertie about the Portuguese of Mozambique: "The soil appeared rich, abundance of tropical fruit... but the plantations ... have more the appearance of belonging to a poor uncivilised native than a European... they only grow fruit and a sufficiency of Indian corn and rice for their own consumption" (4-5, vol. 9). Years later, in 1823, Captain W. F. W. Owen writes in a letter that the "decadence" that follows the Portuguese everywhere is the "natural consequence of their narrow and miserable policy" (34, vol. 9). About the same time, in 1918, the German naturalists Spix and Martius visiting Brazil contrast the Europeans with the Portuguese, the latter said to be more vulnerable to the "moral degeneration" of the settlers in the Tropics; these settlers showed "lack of diligence and indisposition towards work" and revealed a general decadence, resulting from "lack of upbringing and respect in their intercourse with the house slaves, because not used to them in Europe" (Lisboa 182-183). Equally caustic is the assessment of the colonizer by the assimilated in a moment of Prospero. This is what Joao Albasini writes in 1913 about the suburban white man: In a dark stinky hut, a greasy counter, a few casks of the stuff, cans of sardines, dark benches, flies fluttering and ... lots and lots of trash. On the other side of the counter, a hairy and bearded creature moves with some difficulty, now and then casu-

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ally glancing at the sordidness of the things that guarantee his bliss, the bread, and the dough. This is molungu, this is the gentle soul of colonization.

Like a curse, the Portuguese Caliban pursues the Portuguese Prospero, following in his footsteps and carnivalizing his stance as if it were a petty mimicry of what he wants to be. The second moment of Prospero occurs in the context of the April Revolution and the end of the colonial wars, the recognition of the liberation movements and the independence of the colonies, and continues in the establishment of relations of cooperation with the new countries of official Portuguese language and the creation of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP) in 1996. This is the moment of an anti-colonial or decolonizing Prospero, a moment similar to the one experienced by the other European colonial powers almost three decades earlier. The end of colonialism was a moment of Prospero inasmuch as the colonial powers, facing the inordinate political costs to maintain the colonies, looked for a new and more efficient form to reproduce domination over them in the recognition of their independence. This became known as neocolonialism. The colonized Caliban turned into the underdeveloped or developing country. The identity regime was thereby significantly changed, but the underlying political economy was not changed with like intensity. On the contrary, the economic and political ties with the former colonial powers continued to be decisive to the newly independent countries. Paradoxically, Caliban disappeared so that Prospero could survive. Once again, the moment of the decolonizing Portuguese Prospero differs significantly form the equivalent moment of the European Prospero. First, the two historical decolonization processes, the independence of Brazil and the independence of the African colonies, occurred concomitantly with profound progressive transformations in Portuguese society, the liberal revolution in the first case, and the April revolution in the second. As a result, in both decolonization processes there is a shared sense of liberation, both for the colonizer and the colonized. This shared sense created a certain complicity between the Portuguese political class and the political class of the new countries, particularly in the case of the African independences. The most decisive consequence of the simultaneous ruptures was that, together with Portugal's semiperipheral position in the world system, they helped to minimize the neocolonialist effects of the post-independence period. In Brazil's case, the neocolonialist incapacity of the Portuguese Prospero expresses itself in panic before the consequences of the loss of Brazil. Actually, Brazil played the role of "colonizing colony," in Marc Ferro's words, when it sent to Angola the largest contingent of white immigrants (179). Angola, in fact, had been long in the economic dependence of Brazil. According to Marc Ferro, the

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Portuguese minister Martinho de Melo e Castro used to complain in 1781 that commerce and overseas trade were escaping Portugal entirely "since what the Brazilians do not control is in the hands of foreigners" (180).29 The colonial weakness and incompetence of the Portuguese Prospero did not make neocolonialism possible, but by the same token it facilitated, particularly in the case of Brazil, the reproduction of colonial relations after the end of colonialism —what is known as internal colonialism. As a consequence, among the elites that went on exerting dominion in their own name a difference emerged on their historic responsibilities and how to share them with the former colonizer. They differed, basically, on whether the incompetence of the elites to develop the country mightn't be the result of the incompetence of the Prospero they had just gotten rid of. Would Prospero's incompetence turn out to be a heavy legacy, an insurmountable constraint of the possibilities of postcolonial development or, on the contrary, an unsuspected opportunity of alternative forms of development? The controversy between Iberianists and Americanists in Brazil (e.g. between Oliveira Vianna and Tavares Bastos) must be understood in this light. According to the Iberianists, the backwardness of the Latin-American society could be transformed into an asset —the possibility of a non-individualist and non-utilitarian development, based on a communitarian ethic to which the rural world could be witness. According to Oliveira Vianna, Brazilian uniqueness was less a product of the history of the metropolis than of the specificity of the social relations prevailing in the agrarian world, where an aristocratic class held a particularly aggregating power (162). On the contrary, Tavares Bastos saw in the legacy of the Iberian political culture and its atavistic anti-individualism the very foundation of the obscurantism, authoritarianism, and bureaucraticism of the Brazilian state. Tavares Bastos maintained, therefore, that it was necessary to break with such legacy and create a new social model, a yankee Hispanic-American social model having as its referent the North American society, its industry, and education. Tavares Bastos went so far as to make the Iberian Prospero's incompetence quite explicit: because Portugal did not have the strength of the Northern countries, it permitted "the general depravation and barbaric roughness of Brazilian manners [to end up prevailing] against the imposition of Portuguese culture" (157). In other words, Prospero's deficiencies alone made Caliban's excesses possible.

29 Until the eighteenth century, Mozambique was under the rule of the Vice-Roy of India. As a consequence, the economic system was largely dominated by Indians. In 1679, Antonio Lobo da Silva complained against the canarins (pejorative term for people originally from India) for "robbing" and "ruining" the Portuguese. Much better to renounce their contracts and get rid of them, Lobo da Silva recommended to the authorities in the metropolis, and then have the territories adequately populated by Portuguese settlers (Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, 3, 77).

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In the case of Africa, the historical assessment of the Portuguese colonial Prospero is still to be made. Moreover, it is not yet possible to judge properly the persistence of neocolonialist consequences, particularly after Portugal became part of the European Union. The trials that the CPLP has undergone illustrate well the weaknesses of the Portuguese Prospero. Unlike the English and French Prósperos in their respective commonwealths, the Portuguese Prospero has not been able to impose his hegemony. Not only has he contended for hegemony with his former colony —Brazil; he has also been unable to prevent some of the new countries from integrating "rival" language communities, as is the case of Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. Since the hegemony of the latter communities has amounted to the legitimation of neocolonialism, the weakness of the Portuguese Prospero opens enormous potentialities for democratic and truly postcolonial relationships. Whether the former colonizer will be able to transform such weakness into strength, and whether the former colonized are interested in that at all, is, however, an open question.

INTERIDENTITIES: T O W A R D S A SITUATED POSTCOLONIALISM

If ever Prospero disguised himself as Caliban, it was with the mask of the Portuguese. Semi-colonizer and semi-colonized and incapable of creating adequate rules to meet their complex situation, the Portuguese were unable to govern their colonies efficaciously, and were therefore unable as well to prepare their emancipation orderly. The colonial war in Africa best demonstrates this double incapacity. Furthermore, no other colonies and former colonies were ever so autonomous vis-à-vis the colonizer and former colonizer. No other colonial power transferred the capital of the Empire to its own colony, nor was ever in any other country such anxiety about the ascendancy of the colony. Portuguese colonization thus emerges as a chaotic process which, by repeating itself across centuries, ended up becoming a kind of order. Either because of lack of competence or power, Portuguese colonialism was often confused with solidarity, allowing for pockets of non-imperial relations inside the Empire itself. Gradually, the absence of a pattern and this oscillation between a Prospero in Caliban's shoes and a Caliban longing for Prospero, consolidated to give rise to one the characteristics of Portuguese identity, perchance the most intrinsically semiperipheral of them all. We might call it, after sports newsmen commenting on the uneven performance of the national soccer team, "oito-oitentismo" (upand-downism). Oito-oitentismo, while being a pattern, is the absence of a pattern as well. It intimates a form of identity that lives permanently in a turbulence of scales and perspectives, trivializes extremes, be they exalting or insignificant, and never radicalizes anything except the radical option of never to make radical op-

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tions. The turbulence of scales and perspectives results in a devouring presentification wherein the palimpsests that we are gain a disconcerting contemporaneity: everything appears as contemporaneous with everything else. The attitudes and behaviors contained in this form of identity predispose to forms of representation and performance which do away with proof, that is to say, forms characterized by sheer emergence, by their apparitional nature, with no other justification for being than their post-factum evidence. Dispensing with proof, emergence, and contingency became particularly common from that moment, as early as the seventeenth century, when the history of European expansion stopped being written by the Portuguese. From then on, the Portuguese were caught in the binarisms of hegemonic colonialism, such as subject/object, civilized/uncivilized, culture/nature, human/animal. But all these binarisms were experienced at a distance, through impure scales and "curious perspectives," in the sense of post-renaissance painting (Santos, A critica 233). Thus, binarisms were carnivalized as abstract zones where everything is proportionate to its own disproportion. In the absence of pure and peremptory criteria and conclusive reasons, the Portuguese Prospero was not able to present an opulent menu of imperial identities. Being neither an emancipatory nor an emancipated identity, he oscillated between Prospero and Caliban as if in search of Guimaraes Rosa's third margin of the river. As such, it was impossible to consolidate essentialisms, and these were mentioned only, if at all, to be contested, thus revealing their intrinsic contingency. The colonies were now colonies, now overseas provinces; miscegenation was seen now as the degradation of the race, now as its most exalting feature; and the indigenous peoples were now savages, now national citizens. Prospero's instability, imperfection, and incompleteness rendered problematic his self-identification, a condition that ended up dragging Caliban along as well. A non-ostentatious Prospero convoked a pedestrian Caliban. In the absence of pure criteria, there is no greatness, but when such criteria, rather than lost, were never there, there is no pettiness either. When the enemies do not let themselves be measured, they are neither great nor petty, thus destabilizing the struggles against them. A Prospero so diffuse as to be confused at times with Caliban could not but confound the latter, upset his identity, and block his emancipatory will. The difficult calibration of Prospero's dimension and real stature and identity made Caliban run the risk of being colonialist in his eagerness to be anti-colonialist, and at the same time allowed him more than anyone else to be pre-postcolonialist within the formal constancy of colonialism. The informal colonialism of an incompetent Prospero saved large sectors of the colonized peoples for a long period of time from living Caliban's experience daily, and let some of them (and not just in India) conceive of themselves as the true Prospero and act as such in their domains. They were often allowed to negotiate the administration of the territories and its rules with the European Prospero almost on an equal footing.

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How difficult it is to conceive of postcolonialism in the space of official Portuguese language, is confirmed by the above. To my mind, in this space postcolonialism must paradoxically focus on the weaknesses of the Portuguese Prospero. Two guidelines appear to me to be decisive. The first one concerns internal colonialism and is particularly relevant in the case of Brazil. The internal weakness of Portuguese colonialism made possible the conservative independence of Brazil. The oligarchic elites were allowed to cash in on the structures of colonial domination while singing the praise of the inaugural act of the construction of the national state. Internal colonialism is the great continuity in this space. The first guideline instructs us to aim the postcolonialism of the Portuguese language at this internal colonialism. To what extent internal colonialism exists or is emerging in Africa's former colonies, particularly in Angola and Mozambique, is still an open question. The second guideline has to do with counter-hegemonic globalization. It concerns Prospero's external weakness, that is to say, the fact that Portuguese colonialism was from the start prey to hegemonic colonialism, mainly in its English version, and prey as well to the forms of imperialism into which it translated itself until its latest avatar in our time, namely neoliberal globalization presided over by the United States of America. Actually, these imperial forms are responsible today for the consolidation of internal colonialism in countries formerly under Portuguese colonialism. The second guideline, therefore, is that postcolonialism must be aimed at hegemonic globalization and the new constellations of local/global, internal/external domination that it gives rise to. From the point of view of postcolonialism, it is today as senseless to wave the anti-Spanish flag in Cuba or Colombia as to wave the anti-Portuguese flag in Brazil or Mozambique. Bearing in mind these two guidelines, the conclusion must be drawn that postcolonialism in the Portuguese space is very little post- and very much anticolonialism. The struggle is not against a past present but rather against a present past. It is, moreover, a deterritorialized postcolonialism because aimed at a mechanism of social injustice, domination, and oppression that does away with the modern binarisms that have been so far the basis of postcolonialism: local vs. global, internal vs. external, national vs. transnational. Indeed, this different kind of postcolonialism makes sense only inasmuch as it is a struggle for a counter-hegemonic globalization, that is to say, the search of new local/global alliances among different social groups oppressed by the different kinds of colonialism. It must be borne in mind, nevertheless, that the Portuguese Prospero, however reluctant, incompetent, incomplete, and calibanesque, at the same time that he grounds this progressive postcolonial attitude, renders its fulfillment difficult, in that it tends to conceal or naturalize power relations. Inasmuch as he is an incomplete Prospero, the world he created is the same world that created him. The power of creation thus appears shared by a calibanized Prospero and a prosper-

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ized Caliban. Herein lies the arrogance and legitimacy of the post-independentist oligarchic elites. A content analysis of some recent Brazilian formulations concerning the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the discovery of Brazil reveals the emphasis given to the plurality of peoples that went there, besides the Indians that were already there and the Africans that were forced to go: Italians, Germans, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and so on. Side by side with the other immigrants, the reluctant Prospero gets dissolved in the crowd. Again, for being so similar, he goes unnoticed. And yet, this equation conceals that, at least until independence, the Portuguese were not a group of immigrants amongst others and that the colonial power that they protagonized, however specific, was nonetheless colonial. By emptying out Prospero, this representation of the rainbow nation also empties out the relations of colonial power, and turns the discovery into a plural, non-imperial act, an exercise of fraternity and intercultural and interethnic democracy. This concealment may well foster the laziness of the anti-colonial will and the neutralization of the emancipatory energies. There is reason to suspect, therefore, that the elites are far from being naïve when they promote such representations. Now too close to be noticed, now too telescopic to be seen by the naked eye, this coy Prospero invites complacency vis-à-vis the power of elites, seemingly rendered powerless because of Prospero's powerlessness. The difficulties in developing postcolonial strategies in the space of Portuguese colonialism are, thus, the other side of the ample possibilities for counter-hegemonic globalizations created by this type of colonialism.

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SANTOS,

COUNTERING CALIBAN. FERNÁNDEZ RETAMAR AND THE POSTCOLONIAL DEBATE' Nadia Lie

What a sobering and inspiring thing it is therefore not just to read one's own side [...]• Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism

In 1971 an essay entitled "Calibán" appeared in the Cuban journal Casa de las Americas. It had been written by the journal's editor-in-chief Roberto Fernández Retamar and soon gained a very wide circulation in Latin America and beyond. The article's success can be attributed to its polemic character, and to its programmatic promise of a form of literary criticism which would take into account Latin America's specific cultural identity. It is largely due to this programmatic aspect that the article has managed to withstand the ravages of time. Stronger, "Calibán" has turned into the figure-head of "la nueva crítica latinoamericana," an influential movement which explicitly prefers a more contextual approach to text-immanent interpretation. In recent years, however, the essay has acquired yet a new dimension: Fernández Retamar has increasingly become associated with "postcolonial" thinkers such as Edward Said and Gayatri C. Spivak. On the back of the 1989 English book translation of "Calibán," Fernández Retamar is praised for his "meticulous efforts to dismantle Eurocentric colonial and neocolonial thought," and in his foreword Fredric Jameson considers "Calibán" to be "the Latin American equivalent of Said's Orientalism" (in Retamar Calibán: viii). Six years later, in an interview published in Critical Inquiry, Fernández Retamar is placed alongside Fanon as "one of the precursors of what has come to be known as postcolonial discourse" (Diana and Beverley 421).2 In a recent reader, postcolonial studies are presented as "based in the 'historical fact' of European colonialism, and the diverse material effects to which this phenomenon gave rise" (Ashcroft et al. 2). There is much diversity of opinion as to the precise chronological and geographical significance of "postcolonialism," but the-

' I would like to thank Jürgen Pieters, Kristine Vanden Berghe and Peter Venmans for their critical comments on this essay. An earlier version was read carefully by Bruno Bosteels. 2 Even though he does not explicitly object to this association, Fernández Retamar remarks: "The world as we know it is not so much postcolonial as neocolonial" (Diana and Beverley 421).

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matically speaking, especially "the confrontation between colonized and colonizing culture" or "between margin and centre" is highlighted (D'haen 12). Next to a specific research domain, postcolonialism attempts to offer a series of "alternative reading practices" (Ashcroft et al. 45) through a critical and "oppositional" way of reading texts (Slemon, "The Scramble" 45). Two concepts are central to this reading: the contextual-social embeddedness of texts and the status of the Other. Both concepts are fundamentally connected: the alternative reading approach views the contextual dimension as essentially having to do with power (Skura 222), and power involves processes of image (de-)formation with regard to races and cultures (Bhabha, "Postcolonial" 437). The task of a postcolonial critic then is to check how literary, scientific and other texts in their "worldliness" (Said The World) form part of "the mechanics of the constitution of the Other" (Spivak, "Can the Subaltern" 90), and to allow the suppressed voices to speak again (Said, The World 53). To illustrate what an oppositional reading practice can yield, the example of The Tempest is often cited. To Ashcroft et al. (190), The Tempest is "perhaps the most important text used to establish a paradigm for post-colonial readings of canonical works." The alternative reading strategies that were applied to it by people like Brown, Hulme (Colonial Encounters; "Toward") and Greenblatt ("Martial;" "Culture;" "Learning to Curse") re-site this "timeless" work as part of a broader "colonial" discourse, and Prospero and Caliban are turned into a kind of archetypal colonizer and colonized.3 Yet, such re-siting has always been with us, if not in the critical centre, then in the creative periphery, viz. in the form of critical, "counter-canonical" (Tiffin) rewritings of The Tempest: African and Caribbean writers have long reconsidered Shakespeare's masterpiece through the eyes of the oppressed Caliban. The fact that the periphery has thus preceded the centre has given rise to a conviction referred to implicitly or explicitly in many postcolonial books: people from the margin are better, more attentive readers, because, being direct victims of oppression, they are more sensitive to "refractory places" in literary works (Barker and Hulme 204) or to "false universality claims" in literary theories (Ashcroft et al. 12). Thus, little by little a kind of reversal of terms has developed. After having stood in the shade of the centre for many decades, the margin now suddenly appears as the outstanding place for reflection on literature and literary criticism. It therefore comes as no surprise that postcolonialism has lately made a thorough search for forerunners of its ideas in what used to be called "the Third World" (Williams and Chrisman 15). And that is how post-colonialism came across someone like Fernández Retamar.

3

These alternative readings are sometimes also associated with "new historicism." According to Meredith Anne Skura, the link between The Tempest and the New World was already established at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but the new historicists go further than that and "claim that the New World material is not just present but is right at the centre of the play" (222).

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Being a critical rethinking of The Tempest and at the same time a representative voice from the margin, Fernández Retamar's "Calibán" assumes a privileged position in the debate. Even Edward Said, generally considered to be the founding father of postcolonialism, acknowledges the essay, and treats it as an example of what he calls "the culture of resistance" that originated in the (ex-)colonies as a reaction against "imperialism" (Culture 275-78). Said's own oppositional reading practice, which he himself prefers to call "contrapuntal," however, is mainly reserved for the (many) Western masterpieces which he discusses. This in itself legitimate corpus demarcation might inadvertently convey the impression that voices from the "margin" dispose of a kind of ideological virginity, that they are less "worldly" than Western texts. In the following analysis, I will therefore approach Fernández Retamar's "Calibán" not so much as a "postcolonial text," but rather as a document that can be analyzed by means of "postcolonial reading strategies." My attitude towards postcolonialism as a literary-theoretical movement will thus resemble the attitude of postcolonial critics towards Western theory: I will not repudiate it, but recycle it for new use (Ashcroft et al. 168).

LATIN A M E R I C A AS A C U L T U R A L C O M M U N I T Y

"Calibán" (1971) presents itself as an essay on cultural identity. Starting from a question put by a European journalist, "Does a Latin American culture exist?" (3), Fernández Retamar advances two propositions. The first proposition claims that Latin America does indeed have a specific cultural identity which distinguishes it from all other continents. The second proposition has it that, as a culture area, Latin America shows two diametrically opposed traditions: one of denying its cultural identity, and one of affirming it. Fernández Retamar's first proposition constitutes a reaction to the repeatedly surfacing belief that Latin America is a mere reflection of Western European culture because its inhabitants speak Spanish and Portuguese. Fernández Retamar endorses the claim that Latin America suffered intense linguistic colonization, but also argues that these Western languages, together with the conceptual apparatus that is linked to it, are being used in Latin America's very own way. In this respect, Caliban forms the most adequate symbol of Latin-American culture: Caliban learns to speak thanks to Prospero, but at the same time he uses this knowledge to curse Prospero. Or, to put it in Caliban's own words as cited by Fernández Retamar (6): "You taught me language, and my profit on't/ Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you/ for learning me your language!" (I.ii.362-64). The second proposition amounts to a critique of those who present LatinAmerican culture as a homogeneous or at least harmonious whole. Once again using The Tempest as an analogy, Fernández Retamar considers Latin America to be

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the setting of the conflict between Prospero and Caliban over the rightful ownership of the island. This time Prospero symbolizes the imperialist invader and Caliban represents the wrongfully oppressed people. Fernández Retamar wants Latin-American writers and intellectuals to take the side of the suffering people of the continent, or, in other words, to take Caliban's side. Caliban thus becomes a two-fold symbol: he refers to a certain social class (group) — the "people" opposed to the "exploiters" — but at the same time also to a cultural community — "Latin America." Latin-American writers and intellectuals in turn are associated with yet another character from The Tempest: Ariel.4 He is the one that has to choose between Prospero and Caliban, in favor of or against the invader, in favor of or opposed to Latin America.5 If he chooses for Latin America and rejects the invader, he belongs to the real culture of the continent, if not, to the "anti-America" of the westernized, colonial writers. Both traditions are to be found on Latin-American territory, but, says Fernández Retamar, they are radically irreconcilable. Similar to what is done in some postcolonial readings of The Tempest, then, Fernández Retamar relocates a character that was traditionally seen as rather marginal in the plot, i.e. Caliban, as central to the story. He considers Caliban not as the disobedient slave, but rather as the oppressed native. He sees him not as "the wrong side" of the piece, but rather as "the other side" (Nixon 575). Fernández Retamar, however, goes even further than that and, via a gesture which he terms the "dialectics of Caliban," he attempts to identify with the distorted picture given by Caliban's Other, i.e. Prospero, to turn it into a "mark of glory" (16). His identification is primarily based on the verbal behaviour of Caliban, "the curse," but also on the name "Caliban," which via the anagram "cannibal" would directly refer to the Caribbean.6 What's more, Fernández Retamar pays attention to the role of Ariel in The Tempest: the story could have turned out differently if Ariel had chosen Caliban's side, instead of Prospero's. If one looks at it from that angle, Fernández Retamar's essay constitutes a "counter-canonical strategy" towards Shakespeare's play in two ways. First, he claims the negative symbol of

4

Fernández Retamar explicitly borrows this inteipretation from Aníbal Ponce and Aimé Césaire. According to Fernández Retamar, "There is no real Ariel-Caliban polarity" ("Caliban. Notes" 28). Basing herself on this passage, Spivak claims that "Retamar locates both Caliban and Ariel in the postcolonial intellectual" ("Three Women's" 245). The exclusive symbol of the intellectual, however, is Ariel, and if anything is "located" in Ariel, it is the conflict between Caliban and Prospero. There are other points of Spivak's reading of Fernández Retamar's essay that are rather problematic, as has been indicated by Fernández Retamar himself ("Adiós a Calibán" 240). 6 "More important than this is the knowledge that Caliban is our Carib" (Fernández Retamar, "Caliban. Notes" 9). According to Vaughan and Vaughan (146), this directly referential interpretation gives Fernández Retamar's essay a unique position within the "Third World interpretation" which is "symbolic, not historic;" "it adopts Caliban for what he represents to the observer, not for what Shakespeare may have had in mind." 5

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otherness as the symbol of identity. Second, he presents The Tempest as a "possible" story, the end of which is connected with Ariel's position. In this way, The Tempest becomes a play dealing with intellectual responsibility, with choices. However, Fernández Retamar's "Calibán," next to a reaction to The Tempest, is just as much a reaction to another text, viz. to Ariel (1900) by the Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodó. Rodó sees in Ariel the true symbol of Latin America; Caliban, on the other hand, only represents the imperialistic Northern part of the continent. The background to this comparison is that Ariel is equated with art and spirituality, while Caliban is considered a materialistically inclined Philistine. With his essay, Fernández Retamar wants to pay homage to his Uruguayan predecessor, the centenary of whose birth was being commemorated in 1971, the year of publication of "Calibán." Nevertheless, Fernández Retamar also states quite plainly that Rodó is mistaken as to the symbols used, even though Rodó's essay is equally anti-imperialistic. "Our symbol then is not Ariel, as Rodó thought, but rather Caliban. This is something that we, the mestizo inhabitants of these same isles where Caliban lived, see with particular clarity" ("Caliban. Notes" 14).7 As a "counter-canonical" essay, then, "Calibán" has to be analyzed in a dual perspective: not only as "countering" a Western masterpiece — the usual approach in postcolonial studies, but likewise "countering" a non-Western essay. This immediately makes clear that, at least as far as Fernández Retamar's "Calibán" is concerned, a concept like "master-piece" does not only apply to the literature of the old colonial power, but likewise to Latin America's own literature. The double intertextuality invoked moreover has immediate repercussions on the interpretation of "Calibán:" as a rethinking of The Tempest, Caliban is opposed to Prospero, that is, if one follows the colonizing reading of Fernández Retamar's time. In the Latin-American tradition, however, the name "Caliban" immediately evokes that of "Ariel." Such being the case, it should not come as a surprise to find the final section of the essay entitled "And Ariel now?"

7 The word mestizo in this context functions to mark the opposition with the Uruguayan Rodó, who comes from a part of Latin America where racial blending is minimal. It represents an attempt by Fernández Retamar to explain the other perception of Caliban within Latin America itself. Said presumably bases himself on this excerpt when he claims that Fernández Retamar prefers Caliban to Ariel, because the former would better match "the Creole or mestizo composite of the new America" on the basis of its "strange and unpredictable mixture of attributes" (Said, Culture 257). Said thus, however, fails to take into account the most essential motivation for the symbolic value of Caliban in Fernández Retamar's essay: the linguistic, oppositional relation with his ruler.

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THE PADILLA AFFAIR

The question about Ariel should be linked to the specific circumstances in which Fernández Retamar's essay was written, or, to put it differently, it should be related to its own immediate "context." As was said before, the interaction between text and context forms an important topic in all readings which can be termed postcolonial. The idea that there exists something like a "dominant" context can especially be found in Barker and Hulme. The label "dominant" arouses questions as to "the assumption about what we mean by the 'relevant discursive context' , about how we agree to determine it, and about how we decide to limit it" (Skura 230). Fifteen years after publishing "Calibán," Fernández Retamar himself launched an appeal for his essay to be read against the background of certain events. It goes without saying that such an appeal for contextualization again derives from a certain context and that it is not because the author himself points at the relevance of the contextual factors that he is necessarily "right." However, the essay providing our working hypothesis concerning the "dominant context" — "Calibán revisitado" (1986) — was included as a kind of epilogue in the English translation of "Calibán" and thus acquires a privileged status as compared to other statements on "Calibán's" context. As a concrete example of contextual influences that played a role in the genesis of his essay, Fernández Retamar refers to "the Padilla affair :" "If it [the essay] is now disengaged from that polemic, or if that polemic is not taken into account, it is evident that the meaning of 'Caliban' is betrayed" ("Caliban Revisited" 53). Of course several different versions of the polemic exist, but a summary of what happened could go like this. Padilla stands for Heberto Padilla, a Cuban poet who, after having been j ailed for one month in 1971, pleaded guilty to counterrevolutionary activities. As he himself openly declared to the Cuban Writers' League, his principal fault was that he had reviled a novel by a Cuban writer, and had sung the literary praises of a "traitor of the Revolution:" Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Padilla's imprisonment and his public declaration produced a general outcry among a large group of leftist intellectuals who up until then had been supporting the Cuban Revolution. As a result of these events, two open letters to Fidel Castro were published in Le Monde, signed by prominent intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Mario Vargas Llosa. The first letter asks for additional information about the sudden arrest of Padilla, and expresses the concern that "sectarian" tendencies might resurge in the Cuban Revolution.8 In the second letter, Padilla's public statement is directly linked up 8 The term "sectarianism" was used in Cuba in the sixties to refer to the dogmatic joining of the communist model of the Soviet Union. Most documents dealing with the affair-Padilla are to be found in Libre (see "Documents" 1971) and Casal.

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with the practice of self-criticism under Stalin, and it is strongly condemned. In between the publication of the two letters, a speech by Fidel Castro, delivered at the First National Congress on Education and Culture, has to be situated. In that speech, Castro severely criticizes the signatories for their interference in Cuba's internal affairs, and he denies them further access to the island. Together with the second letter, the speech put an end to the good relations obtaining between the Castro-regime and many intellectuals within Latin America and beyond. Even though Fernández Retamar emphasizes the significance of the polemic for the genesis of his essay, he especially highlights one aspect of it: the at first sight unnecessarily sharp tone in which the controversy was carried on. Significant in this respect is the following passage: "I do not demand that readers familiarize themselves with all the material that surfaced in the heat of the polemic, but rather that they recall its bitterness" ("Caliban Revisited" 53). Nonetheless, a "postcolonial reading strategy" will precisely attempt to uncover the ways in which the context is present in "Calibán," how this affair "exists at the same level of surface particularity as the textual object itself' (Said, The World 39) and how the contextual background, as an instance of intertextual background, can increase the understanding of the essay (Barker and Hulme 192).

FROM CONTEXT TO TEXT

What immediately strikes us is that the context, as it is described by Fernández Retamar in 1986, is only marginally present in "Calibán." References to the events concerning Padilla are casual and indirect. The author, for instance, does briefly refer to "a Cuban writer's one month in jail" ("Caliban Revisited" 30) and to the accusation of "deformations in our revolution" (40), but the term "Stalinism" is never dropped and the name Padilla is left unmentioned. In fact, the term "marginal," as I used it in my previous paragraph, should also be interpreted in a literal sense: the two most important references to the events of 1971 are to be found at the beginning and end of the essay. The opening question by the European journalist, "Does a Latin American culture exist?," is presented as "one of the roots [of] the recent polemic regarding Cuba" (3). The commotion about Padilla, interpreted abroad as a political issue, thus appears as a problem with essentially cultural reasons. This legitimizes the essay's further treatment of the affair in the form of a meditation on cultural identity. The second explicit link with the Padilla-case is given in the final passage on Ariel: "More recently we have not been lacking either in individuals who attribute the volcanic violence in some of Fidel's recent speeches to deformations — Caliban, let us not forget, is always seen as deformed by the hostile eye — in our revolution" ("Caliban. Notes" 40).

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With an air of naturalness, the parenthetic clause switches from the symbol of Caliban to the Cuban Revolution, that is to say to Fidel Castro. The linking of both concepts is supported by the emphasis which is laid on the aspect of "voice:" the "volcanic violence" of Castro's speeches fits in with Caliban's cursing. At the same time, Fernández Retamar uses another, new aspect of Caliban in the context of the polemic: his looks. By presenting the reproach of ideological "deformation" via the character of Caliban and calling it a deliberate deformation by "the hostile eye," it becomes neutralized. These two aspects — appearance and verbal behaviour — thus indirectly legitimize the analogy between the symbol Caliban and the man Fidel Castro, who in that way also becomes associated with Latin America and "the people." In other words, what looks like a repressive act in the eyes of the enemy turns out to be a measure taken to serve "the people," and what the signers of the letters attribute to "deformation or to foreign influence "(i.e. stalinism), according to Fernández Retamar goes back to "an attitude that is at the very root of our historical being" ("Caliban. Notes" 40).9 My analysis hitherto implies that Ariel's choice between Caliban and Prospero amounts to a choice for or against the Cuban Revolution, that is, for or against Fidel Castro. To put it differently, the Padilla-case forms a touchstone for the two opposed cultural traditions of the continent. The specific interpretation of Caliban and Prospero as oppressed/oppressor, and the association of Caliban with Latin America as a cultural community then gives an indication as to what is the right choice to make. Siding with Castro equals remaining loyal to one's origins as a Latin-American intellectual. Those that turn against Castro, on the other hand, betray their identity. It follows that the geographical concept "LatinAmerican" is rewritten into a discursive-cultural notion and becomes part of a logic of gain and loss, or rather, of reward and punishment. The fact that this happened in an essay that is written by the editor-in-chief of Casa de las Americas ("House of the Americas") and published in the journal of that same name, is significant. In the years after, the journal would set itself up as defender of "authentic" Latin-American culture and would thus function as a site of in- and exclusion (Lie, Transición y transacción 237-75). Marginal as they are, the casual references in "Calibán" to the "external" context therefore activate, through the Shakespeare characters, a network of positive and negative associations which are advantageous to Castro. This brings us to the

® The link Castro-Caliban also surfaces in a self-reflexive passage of the essay. Fernández Retamar defends the choice of a Western symbol for a Latin-American concept of identity by citing Fidel Castro, who states that marginal peoples don not necessarily have a name of their own apart from the one that was given to them by their oppressors ("Caliban. Notes" 16). If you look at it from that angle, the choice for the symbol of Caliban is not so much "ironic" (Vaughan and Vaughan 162), but historically and culturally determined.

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performative character of the essay "Calibán:" put back in its contemporary context, the text turns out to support the official Cuban viewpoint in the affair Padilla. But there is still another way to show the text's performative character. Following Barker and Hulme's analysis of The Tempest, we can interpret the notion of "context" also as a collection of texts with which "Calibán" has intertextual relations. Rather than with explicit references, we are then dealing with lexical and narrative connections. From this angle, Fernández Retamar's essay clearly echoes Castro's speech at the First National Congress on Education and. Culture. Especially Fernández Retamar's description of "the recent polemic regarding Cuba" at the beginning of his essay is revealing in this respect. We were discussing, naturally enough, the recent polemic regarding Cuba that ended by confronting, on the one hand, certain bourgeois European intellectuals (or aspirants to that state) with a visible colonialist nostalgia; and on the other, that body of Latin-American writers and artists who reject open or veiled forms of cultural and political colonialism. ("Caliban. Notes" 3)

The affair Padilla is treated here as a confrontation between supporters and opponents of colonialism, and an identical depiction of the facts figures in Fidel Castro's speech. Castro calls Padilla's friends "accomplices of mental colonialism" and he considers the struggle against "cultural colonialism" to be the main task of the Cuban officials of culture: "We have revealed that other, subtle form of colonization, a form that might even be harder to eradicate than economic imperialism or colonialism. We are alluding to cultural imperialism, to political colonialism, an evil which we have discovered to exist on a large scale" (26). Castro's speech could also explain why direct references to the affair Padilla are so rare in "Calibán:" that the "Westernized" intellectuals make such a big fuss over the case to Castro proves their petty bourgeois mentality: "Let them publish their stories and snags in one or the other literary journal. That should suffice. Our problems are of a totally different nature: they have to do with the underdevelopment you left us in and have to overcome it" (26-27). As a result, the theme of cultural identity becomes the only opportunity to make the affair Padilla a subject of discussion without calling the suspicion of being petit bourgeois on oneself. Making it into a subject of discussion however does not mean that the topic becomes "discussable," it only implies that it is "acceptable," "legitimate" to talk about it. In his speech, Castro depicts the letter-signers as "intellectual rats," "poisoners" and "intriguers," and the affair Padilla is compared to intellectual "rubbish" and "backbiting" (26-28). By changing this kind of "volcanic violence" into an essay on Shakespeare and cultural identity, Fernández Retamar manages to tailor a political speech to a cultural field, or to translate it in literary terms.

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One important difference between Fernández Retamar's essay and Castro's speech remains: via Ariel Fernández Retamar introduces the idea of a conscious choice. As was said before, Castro's speech formed the closing of a major event: the First National Congress on Education and Culture. Here we meet with the institutional context in which Fernández Retamar's essay was published in Cuba, a context that is missing with "Caliban revisited," but that, following, for instance, Greenblatt's analysis of The Tempest certainly deserves particular attention ("Martial Law").10 Both in Cuba and outside, the congress is nowadays considered the starting point of "The Grey Quinquennium," a period in which strictly ideological criteria were expected to create a new kind of "popular culture." The message underlying Padilla's "self-criticism" and other such events that took place in subsequent days, seems to have been precisely that Castro's politics were not to be debated in principle. The Congress marks the definite end of the relative autonomy which the cultural field had enjoyed throughout the sixties. Now, by emphasizing the aspect of "choice," Fernández Retamar manages to transform a politics of culture which at that very moment is being imposed rather heavy-handedly by the political authorities on the intellectual field into a matter of individual choice. The implied message is that the Cuban Ariels have chosen this cultural policy out of their own free will11 and that they now invite their Latin-American brothers to do the same. The final section, "And Ariel Now?," ends with the image of Caliban inviting Ariel to take up his position in the "rebellious and glorious ranks" ("Caliban. Notes" 45).

T H E VOICE OF THE OTHER

Even though in the final section of his essay Fernández Retamar calls on Ariel to side with Caliban, almost all of the preceding pages are devoted to the Ariel that 10 If we take into account Greenblatt's analysis, we can moreover state that the position of Fernández Retamar's "Calibán" towards Castro's speech shows remarkable parallels with the position of Shakespeare's Tempest towards the so-called Bermuda pamphlets, in particular William Strachey's letter. In both cases there are clear institutional influences at work: Fernández Retamar is editor of Casa de las Américas, a journal which is subsidized by the Cuban government, and through his membership of the King's men, Shakespeare is shareholder of the Bermuda-company, of which the fleet runs ashore in Bermuda. In both cases one could speak of an authority-crisis, situated in a rather idyllic setting (Virginia, Cuba), which leads to a series of draconic, social measures. Both in Fernández Retamar and Shakespeare, this context is rendered "negotiable" by including it into the text in a creative way. 11 It is therefore highly problematic to say, as is done by Peter Hulme, that "his [Fernández Retamar's] role as editor of Casa de las Américas seemed to offer some guarantee that Castro's famous phrase 'within the revolution, everything' might still have some recognizable meaning (after the Padilla-case)" (1992, 78). It is precisely what follows in Castro's speech of 1961, namely "against the revolution, nothing," that is the central theme of Fernández Retamar's essay (1989a [1971], 43-45, my translation); Baker translates "contra" as "outside" and this mistake is not without consequences (See Lie 1996b).

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has taken Prospero's side, at least in Fernández Retamar's opinion. We thus arrive at the second postcolonial point of interest: "How can we know and respect the Other?" (Said as qtd. in Williams and Chrisman: 8). We mentioned earlier that Fernández Retamar associates the letter-signers with the Ariel that sides with Prospero. It is, however, not so much this Ariel which is criticised, but rather the "members of his family" in the Latin-American tradition. Fernández Retamar is critical of writers-intellectuals like Jorge Luis Borges and Carlos Fuentes for being slavishly attached to Western culture, and he consequently brands them as essentially "colonial" writers. In the case of Borges, especially his exaggerated intertextuality with Western sources is rejected. As far as Fuentes is concerned, his literary-critical work La nueva novela hispanoamericana (1969) is zoomed in on. Fernández Retamar claims that the structuralist reading method which Fuentes in this work applies to Latin-American writings leads to a radical negation of the latter's historical and cultural specificity.12 He moreover states that the "cultural colonialism" which Borges and Fuentes are deemed guilty of places them alongside right-wing political thinkers and implies a repudiation of the Cuban Revolution.13 One Latin-American author deserves special mention in the present context: Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. This Argentinean writer, who eventually became president of his country, is believed to be the forefather of the Latin-American intellectuals that took Prospero's side. To be precise, Sarmiento's most important work Civilización y barbarie (1845) is seen as the material embodiment of Prospero's voice in Latin America. As it happens, the two concepts in the title express the essence of the discourse with which Prospero wins the Latin-American intellectuals over for his cause: he plays the role of bringer of "civilization" and he depicts the native Calibans as "barbarians." The natural habitat of culture (even political culture) is Europe or West, his message goes. By means of this ideology, Prospero manages to take possession of the continent, to deprive the real Calibans of their country, and even to extirpate them outright.14

12 This critical comment on structuralism brings Fernández Retamar's essay again very close to post-colonialism as a theoretical movement which aims at bursting false universality claims as put forward by, for instance, some forms of structuralism (Ashcroft et al. 12). 13 Borges condemned the Cuban Revolution already in 1961 at the time of the invasion of the Bay of Pigs, while Fuentes only openly came to criticize Castro as a direct result of the Padilla affaire. This time difference, however, according to Fernández Retamar does not alter the fact of their essentially identical viewpoint. 14 It would take many more years before the Cuban José Martí would burst this discourse. In Nuestra América ("Our America," 1891) he claims that "civilización" is actually tantamount to "falsa erudición." Because of this interpretation, Fernández Retamar places Martí at the basis of that other family of Latin-American intellectuals: those that take Caliban's side.

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Still, a "postcolonial" reading of a text does not only involve an attempt to identify the voice of the Other. It also implies that we approach the issue as seen through the Other's eyes, that we take in a "contrapuntal" viewpoint (Said Culture).15 This mental exercise has been undertaken by Spivak ("Three Women's") and especially by Chanady ("Latin American Discourses"), who both query the relationship of self-identification with the indigenous population of his country, which Fernández Retamar as an intellectual has entered into. Both authors define "the Other" as a text-external concept: "the Maya, the Aztecs, the Incas, or the smaller nations of Latin America" in Spivak's analysis (245), "the Amerindian" in Chanady's (42). Fernández Retamar's "dialectic of Caliban," however, implies that this self-identification itself produces a new Other: Prospero in Shakespeare's play, Sarmiento within the Latin-American tradition.16 Taking in a contrapuntal position thus comes down to viewing the issues raised in Fernández Retamar's essay from the perspective of Civilización y barbarie or of The Tempest. But how can one do that? How does one take the viewpoint of a dead writer or of a fictitious character? One possible answer to this question is obvious: one can let Sarmiento or Shakespeare speak, namely by going back to their original texts. Reversal of perspective then entails the reversal of the relation between the text which is commented upon and the text that is doing the commenting, for also this relation is essentially one of power: the commentator decides which passages will or will not be discussed and thus creates an image of the text that is being commented on. By rereading Sarmiento and Shakespeare integrally, with Fernández Retamar's arguments at the back of our mind, new passages come into relief which, without being directly related to the Cuban situation in 1971, can nevertheless broaden our view on it in a contrapuntal way.

T w o CONTRAPUNTAL READINGS: SARMIENTO AND SHAKESPEARE

What attracts attention while reading Sarmiento in the light of Fernández Retamar's essay 150 years after date, are the many points of agreement between both texts on a purely discursive level. Sarmiento and Fernández Retamar, even

15 "Post-colonial counter-discursive strategies involve a mapping of the dominant discourse, a reading and exposing of its underlying assumptions, and the dismantling of these assumptions from the cross-cultural standpoint of the imperially subjectified "local" (Tiffin 98; emphasis added); "More explicitly, the critic is responsible to a degree for articulating those voices dominated, displaced or silenced by the textuality of texts" (Said, The World 53). 16 Fernández Retamar clearly posits: "The other protagonist of The Tempest [...] is not of course Ariel, but rather Prospero. There is no real Ariel-Caliban polarity" (1989a [1971], 16).

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though they appear in "Calibán" as polar opposites within Latin-American culture, turn out to make use of essentially the same rhetorical strategies to build their arguments. In both works a Latin-American concept is being symbolized by a proper name: "Calibán" in Fernández Retamar's essay, and "Facundo" in Sarmiento's work. That Caliban is a literary character, while Facundo Quiroga stands for a historical — be it only legendary — person is of marginal importance in this context, for Facundo loses his directly referential function as Sarmiento's argument unfolds. He becomes the symbol of a typically Latin-American way of ruling a country, as it was at the time of the publication of Civilization and Barbarism embodied by the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas. Besides, the main title of Sarmiento's book is precisely "Facundo," after Facundo Quiroga, and not, as Fernández Retamar writes, "Civilization and Barbarism." A second resemblance is that both Sarmiento and Fernández Retamar construe their argument on the basis of strong contrasts: Prospero versus Caliban, Civilization versus Barbarism, Sarmiento versus Marti, for or against Dictator Rosas, for or against Castro. Most striking, however, is that Sarmiento pays as much attention as Fernández Retamar does to the relation between language and power. Sarmiento does not only condemn Rosas' regime, he also analyses it. He states explicitly that this regime owes its power not only to a repressive police force, but that it does so just as much to its use of a rhetoric which conceals the oppression going on. In this rhetoric, the concept of "America" plays a crucial role. To many Latin-American countries, the Argentinean dictator Rosas appeared as the defender of "(Latin) America," and with his crass remarks directed against the European powers, which condemned and boycotted his regime, he won the respect of many on his own continent. But, as Sarmiento sneers, Rosas was only able to formulate his torrents of abuse in the language of the Western powers which he detested: "and you speak evil in the language of these foreigners!" (220). Nowhere could the analogy between Caliban and Rosas/Facundo be shown more clearly than in this passage, except maybe in the explicit depiction of Rosas as the "cannibal of Buenos Aires" (140), which immediately brings to mind Fernández Retamar's etymologic reflections on the name "Caliban." There is also an important difference between the two symbols, a difference which in a way runs parallel to the reversal in the quote from Sarmiento, where the emphasis is on the shared language, and not on the cursing. If Facundo can be compared to Caliban, then Sarmiento's personage certainly is a powerful Caliban. Facundo was a "caudillo," who ruled over other local potentates, and Rosas was a "dictator" ruling over the whole of Argentina. In Sarmiento, the hybrid symbol which Fernández Retamar sets up around Caliban again breaks up into two parts: Latin America and the oppressed people. Facundo and Rosas do indeed symbolize Latin-American barbarism, but at the same time they represent "rulers" who oppress their own people via a certain rhetoric. If we are aware of the fact that

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Sarmiento condemns the dictator for oppressing intellectuals and artists like himself, for doing this in the name of a certain notion of "America," and finally, for hurling reproaches at those foreign powers that put pressure on him by means of a blockade, his book Civilización y Barbarie becomes an act of criticism avantla-lettre of the Castro-regime, comparable to the criticism that was ventilated by Padilla's supporters in 1971. In short, the same book in which Fernández Retamar recognizes the so-called "language of Prospero," with its dichotomy between "civilization" and "barbarism," contains an analysis of "the language of Caliban" as soon as the latter accedes to power. While Fernández Retamar presents Caliban merely as a cursing creature and therefore as a negation of all that Prospero stands for, Sarmiento engages in filling in the words Caliban would use if given the floor. What does he say and do when he becomes the more powerful? Does he really differ that much from that other ruler, Prospero? And particularly, how does a concept like "cultural identity" function in a concrete situation of power? Fernández Retamar thinks Sarmiento's book furnishes evidence that an ideal picture of Western culture can be used to oppress the Latin-American people, but Sarmiento demonstrates that the same holds true for exaggerated pictures of any native "(LatinAmerican" identity. Sarmiento's book thus raises questions as to Caliban's rhetoric in Fernández Retamar's essay itself. Why this emphasis on the notion of "our America"? Whose interests are being served with it? The issue of Caliban's rhetoric could also be investigated in The Tempest itself. In Shakespeare's play too, Caliban makes use of rhetorical figures, but notably these are not related to the notion of "cultural identity," but to another concept central to Fernández Retamar's essay: "oppression." The concept concretely emerges in the first act, in which Prospero and Caliban provide us with two versions of the history predating the action of the play. According to Caliban, he himself was king of the island until Prospero's arrival there. At first, Prospero behaved civilly towards Caliban, and therefore Caliban gladly showed him around on the island. Suddenly however, Prospero's attitude towards his generous host changed, and Caliban was confined to a cave and treated as if he were a slave. Especially this version of the facts has been drawn attention to in postcolonial readings of The Tempest (Hulme). It also plays a crucial role in Fernández Retamar's essay, legitimizing the identification of Caliban with the Caribbean (Fernández Retamar, "Caliban. Notes" 14). A contrapuntal reading, however, prompts us to also listen without prejudice to Prospero's version. Even though he starts by calling Caliban a "most lying slave" (I.ii.347), he does not contradict Caliban's account of what happened. Instead, he completes it by revealing that Caliban's present situation results from his attempt to rape Prospero's daughter, Miranda. If it is true that "Caliban's account of the beginning of the relationship is allowed to stand unchallenged"

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(Hulme 125), then it is equally right to claim that Caliban at this point does not contradict Prospero's version, but rather confirms it: "O ho, O ho! wouldn't had been done!/ Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else/ This isle with Calibans" (I.ii.350-52). The so-called untruthfulness of Caliban in this respect has got nothing to do with what Caliban says, but rather with what he does not say. By keeping silent about his own contribution to his oppression, Caliban insinuates that Prospero was after the island from the start and that he managed to trick Caliban out of it by cunning and feigned friendliness. The rhetorical figure of ellipsis is thus doubly distorted: it embellishes the picture we get of Caliban, and it deforms Prospero's image. Caliban turns into the erroneously oppressed slave, whereas Prospero becomes the oppressor eager for power. Prospero's intervention corrects this picture by replacing the terms "oppressor/oppressed" by something like "father/punished person." This also introduces a third character on the scene: Miranda. On Miranda, the one who in fact had bothered most to teach Caliban to speak, Caliban also perpetrated an act of "usurpation" by trying to rape her. If it is true that colonial discourse often represents women as symbolizing the colony (Spurr 170), it follows that Caliban himself can be called a kind of colonizer. As in the Sarmiento-reading, the two oppositional characters thus come closer to one another; the concept of "effacement" or "euphemization," which "new historicists" have brought to bear on Prospero's usurpation of Caliban's island (Brown 64) could perhaps also bear on Caliban himself. The rhetorical dimension of Caliban's oppression, which of course has its roots in reality, reappears when Caliban hatches a plot against Prospero. In slightly different words he uses the image of Prospero as the cunning oppressor once again: "[...] I am subject to a tyrant, a sorcerer, that by his cunning hath cheated me of the island" (III.ii.40). This time, however, Caliban not only withholds that he has tried to rape Miranda, he also keeps silent about the fact that he considers himself to be the first king of the island. One of the ways to urge Stephano (and Trinculo) to oust Prospero is by promising them that Stephano will become the new king of the island, with Caliban serving as "true subject." Rather than absolute freedom, Caliban looks for "a new master," and on several occasions he volunteers to kiss Stephano's foot as a token of his complete subordination. In his new contacts, Caliban thus uses his negative self-image of "oppressed person" in a positive way: as "subject."17 It not only demonstrates that images of "oppres-

17 Prospero also uses the imagery of power and oppression supplied in the first act in his self-designed plot. To be more precise, Prospero introduces Ferdinand to Miranda as someone who came to the island as a spy in order to take it from him, thus in fact consciously reproducing Caliban's discourse. He especially makes use of the image of Miranda as "sex object," offered to him by Caliban, and translated in terms of the possibility of marrying her off.

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sion" can be used out of self-interest, but it also makes clear that a discourse of "resistance" can be directed against one specific master, and not against another one. In The Tempest, Caliban uses language not only to curse his former master, but also to serve and flatter his prospective master. It is telling that, while performing his dance of joy, Caliban has no trouble combining the notions of "freedom" and "new master" (Il.ii.185-86). It is precisely in this regard that a major difference with Ariel can be observed. Even though Fernández Retamar does not see any fundamental polarity between Ariel and Caliban ("Caliban. Notes" 16), their attitude towards the notion of "freedom" in The Tempest differs greatly: Ariel's rendering of services has got everything to do with Prospero's promise to release him by the end of the play. One could therefore say that Ariel does not take Prospero's part: Ariel merely sides with himself. We thus once again arrive at a point where we have to consider the "affair" which was the topic of the moment in 1971. The questions raised by Shakespeare in Fernández Retamar's essay run as follows: To what extent does the discourse on oppression serve the interests of a new master: Castro? What is the exact significance of the Cuban Ariel elaborating this discourse? In this context we should mention that the Padilla affair witnessed the dissolution of the editorial board of Casa de las Américas, which from 1965 onwards had been led by Fernández Retamar. The non-Cuban members of the old editorial staff, especially Julio Cortázar and Mario Vargas Llosa, had been directly involved in the polemic: both signed the first letter, and the second letter even turned out to have been written by Vargas Llosa. What's more, several of the signatories had previously published in the journal Casa de las Américas. Fernández Retamar's severity towards this group is therefore probably also influenced by his desire to openly distance himself from his ex-colleagues and to protect concrete institutional interests, among which his own...

CONCLUSIONS AND PREVIEWS

A contrapuntal reading of "Caliban" calls attention to the possible abuse of exactly those concepts which Fernández Retamar, by means of the dual symbol Caliban, emphasizes: "Latin America" and "oppressed people." In view of the great importance of this kind of notions in postcolonial discourse itself (be it in the more general form of "cultural identity" and "margin"), it follows that the much advocated attention to "the rhetoric of empire" (Spurr) might have to be complemented by what could be termed "the rhetoric of the colony." It goes without saying that this does not imply that colonialism has not existed, nor does it deny that the pernicious effects of colonialism continue to be visible. What it does, however, hint at is that those people that live in the "margins," are not "bet-

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ter readers" — if they are at all — simply on the basis of their oppression by the West, but also because of concrete, local interests. At a moment when postcolonialism has according to some become the scene of "newfound power" (Dirlik), the task of a culture critic has grown beyond trying "to hear the accents of Caliban" (Greenblatt, "Learning to Curse" 232) and now also has to include attempts "to decipher his power." "The power of Caliban," however, is also located in the symbol of Caliban itself as he appears in The Tempest. According to Vaughan and Vaughan (289), the Caliban-metaphor has, due to Shakespeare's play's lacking of a "sixth act," builtin limitations which render it less applicable to newly liberated nations: "what he [Caliban] does with his new freedom, is beyond the metaphor." In the Cuban essay, however, it is precisely this lacking of a sixth act which prevents that questions are asked about how authority is exercised by a regime that claims to have liberated itself from (neo-)colonial powers. That this question was open to discussion shows from a contextual approach of Fernández Retamar's essay. Similar to the ellipsis in Caliban's story, then, this "non-dit" within the Caliban symbolism allows for a productive dimension. All in all, it seems highly problematical to classify Fernández Retamar's "Calibán" in categories like "counter-canonical" or — in Said's case — "culture of resistance." Such labels at least presuppose that one is specific about what one is offering resistance to, and that one allows for the possibility that the answer is multiple, or ambivalent. If we place Caliban back into the context of the Padillapolemic, the essay rather seems to become part of "the culture of acceptance" or "legitimation." It is likely that here we have also come across Fernández Retamar's main motive to finally bid farewell to his personage in 1993 (ironically, he did so in the epilogue to a Cuban republication of his essay). Rather than the disappearance of world-scale decolonization-movements, which according to Nixon (576) and Vaughan and Vaughan (282) reduced the force of attraction of the Caliban-icon, the specific background of the crisis in the Castro-regime seems to have made a further association with this personage problematic to Fernández Retamar. The epilogue nevertheless contains a passage which might prove to be very interesting for the future "postcolonial" reception of "Calibán." In "Adiós a Calibán," Fernández Retamar no longer presents his essay as a polemic with others, but rather calls it an internal dialogue. To prove his point, he refers to his continuing admiration for Borges. It follows from this statement that Fernández Retamar no longer applies the "dialectics of Caliban" only to Western culture, but also to that other Latin-American tradition, which he used to call inauthentic. One could say that he again translates "the wrong side" into "the other side," but this time within his own essay.

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Thus he comes close to that other recycling of Caliban in recent LatinAmerican cultural criticism. Some years after the publication of "Calibán," Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Fernández Retamar's arch-enemy on issues literary, claimed Caliban to be the most adequate emblem for those writers that Fernández Retamar treats as non-authentic. It is precisely the use of intertextuality by someone like Borges, whom Fernández Retamar accuses of mimicry and of cultural colonialism, that perfectly fits the metaphor of "cannibalism" associated with Caliban. Intertextuality, then, stands for creative linguistic activity, for cultural cannibalism. This in turn leads us to that other voice of postcolonialism which we have heard so little in this essay: Homi K. Bhabha ("Of Mimicry"). His alternative approach to phenomena like "mimicry," and his critical questioning of binary ways of thinking get us to understand that also a contrapuntal viewpoint still rests on the distinction between two terms: Caliban and Prospero, centre and margin. It is possible that this postcolonial movement in the years to come will allow us not only to "canonize" or to "counter" Fernández Retamar's text, but also to rewrite it as the point where the two Calibans meet.18

AFTERWORD ( 2 0 0 3 ) 1 9

Since 'Countering Caliban' was published, postcolonialism's embrace of Fernández Retamar's work has only been strengthened. Authoritative guidebooks on the field cannot do without him (see e.g. Loomba 174-175) and Latin American scholars themselves now commonly refer to Fernández Retamar as an "antecesor ineludible" of postcolonialism20 and of Edward Said in particular (Sklodowska & Heller 8). It is remarkable that one of the best known replies to "el prosperiano discurso del commonwealth teórico del poscolonialismo anglosajón" (Achugar 104), has also claimed inspiration from Fernández Retamar. While leading scholars such as Bill Ashcroft welcome Latin America's presence in the postcolonial paradigm as "colonialism's antagonist and interlocutor" ("Modernity's First Boom" 7-8), thereby indirectly rehearsing the Calibanmetaphor, Walter Mignolo ("Posoccidentalismo") has listed Fernández Retamar 18 Maarten van Delden recently suggested that there might be a connection between the concept of "curse" which is so central to Fernández Retamar's "Calibán," and the notion of "parody," which critics like Emir Rodríguez Monegal have drawn attention to in their "cannibalist" interpretation. 19 The preceding article was completed by an analysis of thematic receptions of the Caliban-essay within postcolonialism in Lie "Shakespeare's suit-case" (1999), in which I centered on the word 'mestizaje'. The translation of the Caliban-essay into English is the subject of "Translation studies" (2003). In 1997,1 dedicated a section of a comparative analysis of Casa and Caribbean Quarterly to Caliban in relation with Contradictory Omens of Edward K. Brathwaite. 20

See Gerald Martin in Text on the cover of Sklodowska & Heller.

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among his sources of inspiration to find a way out of the fundamentally dualistic mode of thinking I denounced at the end of my essay. The word 'posoccidental', used by Fernández Retamar in his 1976 essay "Nuestra América y Occidente," has indeed been proposed by Mignolo as a fruitful alternative to the term 'postcolonial' and blended with an Anzalduan longing for non-dichotomic, non-occidentalist thinking. In this way, Fernández Retamar has slipped into the other variant of postcolonialism, not the 'militant' one that centres on 'resistance' and 'oppression' and believes that differences count, but the one that hinges on 'ambivalence' and 'hybridity' and stresses the constructedness of these differences. Fernández Retamar's inclusion in this 'softer' variant of postcolonial studies has also affected readings of the Caliban-essay. Whereas the image of the 'curse' very well fitted the more militant form of postcolonialism, the other one centres on a short moment of self-reflection in 'Calibán', in which Fernández Retamar acknowledges that Caliban, as a symbol of Caribbean identity, is also - and necessarily so - a borrowed symbol.21 The idea of the inevitable double bind between colonizer and colonized, which explains why 'their concepts are also our concepts' and vice versa22 now runs parallel to the interpretation of the essay as an example of the culture of resistance. Simultaneously, José David Saldivar's use of 'Caliban' in interamerican studies has helped Fernández Retamar to recode the geo-cultural imagery of his 1971 essay, based on José Martí, from a militant latinamericanist discourse into a more moderate hemispheric one (Machín 166). Both expressions of postcolonialism have clustered around the concept of mestizaje. To some, the repeated use of the term 'our mestizo América' in 'Caliban' is symptomatic of its identitarian, homogenizing logic with respect to Latin America's internal other23; to others mestizaje evokes the idea of the double bind between colonizer and colonized and becomes mixed up with the post-modern, anti-essentialist concept of hybridity (Loomba 174). 'Caliban', then, indeed has become the meeting point between the two kinds of postcolonial reading strategies, as 'Countering Caliban' predicted. If this ironically demonstrates one of postcolonialism's basic convictions, that words are sites of conflict and divergent appropriations, it is equally true that nei-

21 "In proposing Caliban as our symbol, I am aware that it is not entirely ours, that it is also an alien elaboration, although in this case based on our concrete realities. But how can this alien quality be avoided?" (Fernández Retamar, "Caliban. Notes" 16). 22 "Right now as we are discussing, as I am discussing with those colonizers, how else can I do it except in one of their languages, which is now also our language, and with so many of their conceptual tools, which are now also our conceptual tools?" (Fernández Retamar, "Caliban. Notes" 5). 23 See for instance Chanady "Latin American Discourses" and "El discurso canibalesco" (249), and Jáuregui Canibalia (2005).

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ther of the postcolonial approaches seems to get hold of Caliban's historical meanings. Perceiving it as a 'document of resistance' wiped out the essay's ultimate condescendence towards official cultural politics in Cuba, but its presentation as a meditation on the undecidability of cultural identity even further removes it from its originally dualistic message.24 However, it is precisely thanks to these kinds of 'misunderstandings' that Fernández Retamar has been able to prove Jorge Ruffinelli all wrong when the latter predicted Caliban's decline under postmodernism (301). In fact, Fernández Retamar's own writings of the nineties, including his comments on readings of Caliban, have been important elements in the production of its postmodernization. This aspect has been perceptively analyzed by Horacio Machín (161) as part of a double discursive economy, one directed to his Cuban, national readers, who are told by the author that his beliefs have remained unchanged, and another one to his transnational public, which finds him intelligently recuperating new readings of his texts. Machín believes that Fernández Retamar's skillfull managing of this double dialogue is what turns him into an example sui generis of the 'diasporic intellectual': the one who, according to Rama, addresses various audiences at once. Though Fernández Retamar's association with "diaspora" might not convince everybody, Machin's article which makes a productive use of a fashionable 'postcolonial' concept by blending it with older texts of Rama, shows us that postcolonialism as a language will still, for a long time, surround Caliban's reception and yield surprising results. What is still lacking, however, is an answer to the question what Caliban, as a critical meditation on literary theories of the sixties, might have to say about the postcolonialism which invaded academies in the nineties. Perhaps the answer lies in a double invocation of the Caliban-essay: an explicit one, and an implicit one. The explicit one can be deduced from Fernández Retamar's polemic with Fuentes and could be re-actualized as a renewed outcry to take into account the precise historical context in which texts (literary or other) are produced, especially when a postcolonial perspective is adopted. The implicit one draws attention to the repeated use of the words 'confusion', 'misunderstanding' and 'deformation' in the Caliban-essay. The essay then shows, already through its own

24 Whereas "Countering Caliban" attempts to restore 'Caliban' to the immediate historical context of Cuban social discourse, I have studied Caliban's very important relationship with a previous text, "Palabras a los Intelectuales" (1961), in my book on Casa de las Americas (Transición y transacción, 1996) and in "Shakespeare's suit-case" (1999). 'Caliban' is productive in the disappearance of the third position that had existed in Cuban social discourse since 1961 as a 'non'-revolutionary stance, in between 'revolutionary' and 'counterrevolutionary' positions. I refer to these texts because I believe they provide an answer to the important question Quintero Herencia (62) raises concerning this intertextuality, without however providing a clear answer.

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history of reception, that 'misunderstandings' can be turned into an advantage. In this respect, it points to postcolonialism's force as an instrument of canonization in spite of — or precisely because of — the misreadings it sometimes produces. Translated by Liesbeth Heyvaert Edited by Juliet Lynd

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Goffredo and John Beverley. "These Are the Times We Have to Live In. An Interview with Roberto Fernández Retamar." Critical Inquiry 21.2 (1995): 411-33. DIRLIK, Arlif. "The Postcolonial Aura. Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism." Critical Inquiry 20.2 (1994): 328-56. "DOCUMENTOS [relacionados con el caso Padilla]." Libre 1 9 7 1 . 1 . DOLLIMORE, Jonathan and Alan Sinfield, eds. Political Shakespeare. New Essays In Cultural Materialism. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1985. DRAKAKIS, John, ed. Alternative Shakespeares. London: Routledge, 1985. FERNÁNDEZ RETAMAR, Roberto. Caliban and Other Essays. Translated by Edward Baker. Foreword by Fredric Jameson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. — "Caliban. Notes Towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America" [1971], Caliban 345. — "Nuestra América y Occidente." Casa de las Américas 98 (1976): 36-57. — "Caliban Revisited" [1986], Caliban 46-55. — "Calibán, quinientos años más tarde." Nuevo Texto Crítico 11 (1993): 223-44. — "Adiós a Calibán." Casa de las Américas 191 (1993): 116-22. — Todo Calibán. La Habana: Letras cubanas, 2000. GREENBLATT, Stephen J., "Martial Law in the Land of Cockaigne." Shakespearean Negotiations. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. 129-98. — "Culture." Critical Terms for Literary Study. Eds. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. 225-32. — "Learning to Curse. Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century" [1976], Learning to Curse. Essays in Early Modern Culture. London: Routledge, 1990. 16-39. — and Giles GUNN, eds. Redrawing the Boundaries. The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1992. GRIFFITHS, Trevor. "This Island's Mine. Caliban and Colonialism." Yearbook of English Studies 13 (1983): 159-80. HULME, Peter. Colonial Encounters. Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797. London: Methuen, 1986. — "Towards a Cultural History of America." New West Indian Guide 66.1-2 (1992): 77-

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Heberto. "Intervención en la Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba." Casa de las Américas 65-66 (1971): 191-203. QUINTERO HERENCIA, Juan Carlos. "El espacio de la maldición: escenografías del calibán de Roberto Fernández Retamar." Sklodowska and Heller 55-87. RUFFINELLI, Jorge. "Calibán y la posmodernidad latinoamericana." Nuevo Texto Crítico V 9-10 (1992): 297-302. RODRÍGUEZ MONEGAL, Emir. "The Metamorphoses of Caliban." Diacritics 3 ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 7 8 - 8 3 . SAID, Edward. The World, the Text, and the Critic. London: Faber and Faber, 1984. — Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994. SARMIENTO, Domingo Faustino. Facundo. Civilización y barbarie [ 1 8 4 5 ] , Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1970. SKLODOWSKA, Elzbieta and Ben A . Heller, eds. Roberto Fernández Retamar y los estudios latinoamericanos. Pittsburgh: Instituto International de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2000. SKURA, Meredith Anne. "The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest" [ 1 9 8 9 ] . Bloom 2 2 1 - 4 8 . SLEMON, Stephen. "The Scramble for Post-Colonialism" [1994]. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 6-45. — "Unsettling the Empire. Resistance Theory for the Second World" [1990], Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 104-113. SPIVAK, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism." Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 243-61. — "Can the Subaltern Speak?" [1988], Williams and Chrisman 66-111. — The Post-Colonial Critic. Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Ed. by Sarah Harasym. London: Routledge, 1987. SPURR, David. The Rhetoric of Empire. Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. TIFFIN, Helen. "Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse" [1987], Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 95-98. TORO, Alfonso de and Fernando de TORO, eds. El debate de la poscolonialidad en Latinoamérica. Una postmodernidad periférica o cambio de paradigma en el penPADILLA,

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Sarniento latinoamericano. Madrid/Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 1999. VAUGHAN, Alden T. and Virginia Mason Vaughan. Shakespeare's Caliban. A Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. W I L L I A M S , Patrick and Laura CHRISMAN, eds. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. A Reader. New York: Harvester, 1994.

RECONFIGURATIONS OF EMPIRE IN A WORLD-HEGEMONIC TRANSITION: THE 1 8 9 8 SPANISH-CUBAN-AMERICAN-FILIPINO WAR Agustín Laó-Montes

In spite of the spectacular display of exhibits, gatherings, and publications enabled by the U.S. and Spanish knowledge industries on the so-called splendid little war of 1898, there is not much analysis of its significance as a world-historical event.1 This article will analyze the 1898 Spanish-Cuban-American-Filipino War (SCAF)2 as a crucial point and as a critical determinant of the transition from British to U.S. hegemony in the modern world-system. I will not attempt to articulate a historical account of the war per se but will rather try an interpretation of 1898 as a key moment of hegemonic change, a conjuncture 3 of new beginnings (to paraphrase Said) in the character and cultures of imperial rule, in the production of imperial discourses, and in the genres of anti-imperial politics and countercolonial movements. The article will focus on two intertwined processes, the significance of the 1898 SCAF war in the configuration of a new stage in the history of modern capitalism, and how this juncture was characterized by a fluid and contested terrain of struggles over economic, political, and cultural hegemony. The 1898 SCAF war was a prime moment of structuration and change in the modern world-system and as such signified a special set of circumstances where there was a particularly enabling cross-fertilization of structure and agency. 1898 denotes a peculiar situation of systemic transformation in which all the logics of the modern/colonial worldsystem (economic, geopolitical, geocultural) where in flux.4 1

Some important exceptions are Balfour, Smith and Davila-Cox (1999), Naranjo et al. The expression SCAF war is meant to signify the confluence of a diversity of military confrontations in a conjuncture of intense anti-colonial struggles and inter-imperial competition. Thus, at stake is not only the 1898 war between Spain and the United States but also the war between Spain and Cuba (1868-1898), between the Philipinnes and the Unites States (1899-1902) as well as social struggles in various places including Filipino fights against Spain (at least since 1896), and conjunctural anti-colonial movements and subaltern resistances in Puerto Rico. 2

3 The 1898 conjuncture includes the immediate context before the SCAF war, the war itself, and the aftermath of the war. 4 For the multiple logics of the modern world-system see Grosfoguel and Cervantes-Rodriguez (eds.) The notion of modern world-system was coined by Wallerstein (Modern World System, 1974). Mignolo ("La colonialidad") developed it as modem/colonial to conceptualize the centrality of coloniality in the very constitution and reproduction of modernity itself.

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The article will be divided in two general parts. The first part will analyze the significance of the 1898 SCAF war in the late nineteenth century moment of crisis and restructuring in the modern world-system emphasizing the inter-imperial dynamics between Spain and the United States and focusing 4n the Cuban revolutionary movement. The second part will concentrate in the struggle for cultural hegemony between the two Americas. In this register, the question of hegemony will be discussed in terms of the contending claims between the United States and Latin America5 for the heritage of European (i.e. Western) aesthetic, ethical, and intellectual leadership, and the importance of these culture wars in the transition from the Age of Europe to the Age of America. There are several reasons why the 1898 SCAF war can be defined as a worldhistorical event. First, it opened the path that established the conditions for the rise of the United States of America as a world power which after World War II became the hegemon of the capitalist modern/colonial world-system. In this sense, it significantly contributed to redefine the main protagonists, the rules of the game, and the balance of world power. 1898 was a cornerstone for the redrawing of imperial, regional, and national boundaries, not only in the Americas and within the Atlantic System, but also opening the American gates to the Pacific through the incorporation of Hawaii to the U.S. federal union in the same year, and the seeking of the Philippines and the Micronesian archipelago. The SCAF war was also a keystone in the configuration of a hemispheric geohistorical formation, a capitalist imperial contact zone of unequal exchanges, uneven developments and transculturations in the Americas (Pratt). After 1898 the Americas were reconfigured as a field of power, a regional formation that served as a stepping-stone for U.S. world hegemony. Thus, the American Empire was built in three moments: first, a moment of continental consolidation (from the 1848 Mexican-American War to the Civil War), followed by the emergence of the U.S. as the main hemispheric potency and a transoceanic imperial power (the moment of 1898), and lastly the rise to world hegemony after World War II. Finally, the 1898 SCAF war, as a landmark of the hegemonic transition from British to American hegemony, and as an event that marked the end of the first modern empire (Spanish) and the beginning of the world empire of late modernity (United States); represented a conjuncture of epochal change and redefinition of the politico-economic and cultural-ideological logics of the modern world-system.

5 As we shall see in the article, both the U.S. and Latin America as geohistorical discourses and as historical formations were reinvented in the conjuncture of 1898.

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WORLD HEGEMONIC TRANSITION AND THE GLOBALIZATION OF IMPERIALISM

The late nineteenth century has been baptized as the "age of empire" (Hobsbawn, The Age of Empire). It was certainly a time in which European imperial powers launched an initiative of economic exploitation and political domination of most of the globe. The nineteenth century is known as the time of Pax Britannica, the period of British hegemony in the world-economy (production, trade, finance) after the politico-military victory against the French competitor, and in the light of the so-called industrial revolution. This was also the era of the rise of antisystemic movements (Arrighi, Antisystemic Movements', Hopkins, The Age of Transition; Wallerstein, The Modern World System) against capitalism and colonialism as manifested in the European waves of class struggles and socialist organization in the 1840s and 1870s; and earlier, in the first wave of decolonization led by Creole independence movements and the Haitian Revolution in the Americas. By the end of the century the capitalist world-economy was facing a systemic crisis and British hegemony was beginning to face serious competition from other European powers, especially from Germany. Arrighi and Silvers define world hegemonic transitions as periods of "radical reorganization of the modern world-system... moments of change both in the leading agency of world-scale processes of capital accumulation and in the political-economic structures in which these processes are embedded" (Chaos 21-2). In this sense, hegemonic transitions are symptomatic of economic and political systemic crises. In the history of modern capitalism there have been three periods of world hegemony (17th century Dutch hegemony, 19th century British Hegemony, and 20th century U.S. hegemony) followed by hegemonic crisis and transitions. The world-economy had entered in a general crisis of profitability since the great depression of 1873. In spite of minor recuperations in the 1880s, by the late 1890s the symptoms (e.g., lower profit rates, overproduction, declines in real wages, mass unemployment) of an accumulation crisis persisted. These economic conditions corresponded to and exacerbated inter-imperial competition for markets, raw materials, and territorial domination; this occurred in tandem with an escalation of competition among larger capitalist firms and informed the rise of a new wave of class struggles and anti-colonial strife. The end of century conjuncture of crisis and change also entailed a rise of statist nationalisms linked to greater centralization of power, partnerships of rule between state and corporate capital, and empire-building. In Spain, economic malaise corresponded to political turmoil, social unrest, and a fiscal crisis, that compelled the institutions of the dying empire to increase the tax burden and tightly control the trade of the remaining overseas colonies. A deep colonial crisis in Cuba, their bigger and most productive remaining colonial possession, accompanied by endemic political instability in the peninsula (char-

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acterized by an alternation of monarchic and republican governments and by a crescendo of social struggles),6 motivated disparate acts of imperial (mismanagement and desperation that alternated between promoting limited liberal reforms (like the 1897 granting of autonomy to Cuba and Puerto Rico), and enforcing naked imperial despotism and fierce colonial exploitation.

SPAIN: IMPERIAL DECAY AT THE CLIMAX OF EUROPEAN IMPERIALISM AND THE CULTURAL RECONFIGURATION OF EMPIRE

It is a widely shared belief that the 1898 SCAF war marked the end of the Spanish empire. Spain was built along with the first modern empire. If we conceptualize modernity as an historical condition and a process characterized by an entanglement of capitalism, coloniality,7 and Occidentalism,8 the Spanish empire was clearly the first imperial power of the emerging modern/colonial world-system. The emerging Spanish absolutist state became the head of the first modern empire in so far as it led to the creation of the Atlantic system, developed new modes

6

See Smith and Davila-Cox, and Balfour. 1 am using the neologism coloniality as a signifier of the centrality of imperial/colonial relations, classifications/stratifications, and discourses/categories in modem regimes of power. This refers to Anibal Quijano's concept of the coloniality of power. Quijano represents the coloniality of power as an intersection between two axes, one characterized by the relationship between Capital and Labor (the axis of exploitation), the other representing the relationship between "Europe" and its "Others" (the axis of coloniality). In this analysis, modernity appear as consubstantial to the emergence of the capitalist world-economy, the invention of the Americas, and the rise of the West. The economic rule of capital corresponds to the creation of an inter-state system, and the conception of modem modes of ethnoracial stratification along with gendered racial and national/cultural domination. 7

8 Occidentalism is an umbrella term to denote the emergent modem discourses that enabled the invention of Europe as a geocultural entity, of the west as a spatio-temporal civilizational construction, and of whiteness as the key signifier in relationship to which racial categories and hierarchies were to be historically produced. Hence, Occidentalism refers to the cluster of discourses through which Europe and European subjects (including Euroamericans) were geoculturally conceived as embodying universal excellence in aesthetics, ethics, politics, and knowledge. This overarching field of discursive production which Mignolo characterizes as the dominant "imaginary of the modern/colonial world system" replicates a set of categories and tropes through its many avatars. For instance, Occidentalist discourses which by definition are founded on the idea of the west and of western civilization tend to articulate notions of reason and progress within a linear/teleological narrative of history as progression from Greek antiquity to capitalist modernity. Occidentalisms are also based on a racialized distinctions between civilization and barbarism whereby "Western Civilization" is conceived as superior to "non-western" lesser races/civilizations. In this definition, Occidentalism operates similarly to the role ascribed by Shohat and Stam (2) to Eurocentrism as "an ideological substratum common to colonialist, imperialist, and racist discourse." For genealogies of the west and notions of Occidentalism see, Carrier, Chinweizu, Coronil, Federici, Latouche, Mignolo ("La colonialidad," Local Histories), Patterson.

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of labor exploitation (like the encomienda and chattel slavery) as constitutive of the nascent capitalist colonial order of things; and recreated late medieval/early modern social hierarchies and political forms in the imperial context. The very categories of racial and ethnic classification of the modern self, "Blanco," "Indio," "Negro," "Mulato," "Mestizo," began to be created and signified in the context of the conquest and invention of the Americas (Quijano, "'Raza', 'Etnia', 'Nación'"). As cultural products of the first modern empire, Spanish imperial discourses began a process of defining European powers as "Lords of the World."9 The Spanish empire championed a new kind of universalism characterized by an emerging worldly consciousness and a teleological sense of European superiority grounded in discourses of historical progress and a civilizing mission. However, Spain never was able to become the hegemon of the modern world-system. The seventeenth century marked the rise of a relatively brief Dutch hegemony, followed by a period of core capitalist competition that disembogued in a powerful process of empire-building and globalization under the aegis of British Hegemony. By the time that the British were beginning to feel the first symptoms of hegemonic decay, the Spanish empire was materially in barebones. Some of Spain's imperial strengths in early modernity (a financial and commercial empire based on economic monopoly and territorial expansion) turned into crucial weaknesses. The lack of ability to maintain an imperium terrarium of a Roman type in the context of a capitalist world-economy, the military and aristocratic unproductive drainage of the fruits of colonial wealth, and the scarcity of liberal democratic political forms and of a dynamic mode of capitalism in the metropole, organized the scenario for a long but persistent process of imperial erosion. The maturation in the Spanish American colonies of Creole elites with significant economic and political contradictions with the imperial state and ruling classes motivated successful wars of independence in the context of Napoleon's domination of Spain. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century most of the territories formerly possessed by the Spanish empire became independent. By the end of the century the only remaining colonies in the Americas were Cuba and Puerto Rico, and in the Pacific the Philippines and Micronesian islands were still under Spanish rule. Even though the symbolic capital of Spain had been significantly devalued in the post-Enlightenment redefinitions of the meanings of Europe and of the West (from the South to the Northwest of the region), the Spanish ruling classes (and 9 For the inter-textuality of European imperialism see Pagden. Also see Cooper and Stoler for a nuance analysis of the contradictions within and between modern empires but also of the constitution in capitalist modernity of a European field of imperial power that was constitutive of a "Homo Europeus" and of European national identities.

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to some extent the subaltern classes) continued to be self-defined by Occidentalist discourses of white European superiority that were founded by symbolic, emotional, political, and economic linkages with both the remaining as well as the former colonies. This will be the historical foundation for the later emergence of transatlantic discourses of Hispanism. By the fin-de-siecle, the will to imperial power and the consciousness of empire informed the national self-image and the policies of the Spanish state. At the time, the Spanish metropolitan economy was still largely dependent on colonial profits and on the imperial monopoly of trade. Given that the residues of empire had such a significant symbolic meaning and material value to Spain, Cuba as the largest and richest colony was a particularly precious possession. Hence, the widespread description in Spain of the war of 1898 as a historic disaster or catastrophe owed much to the lost of the war in Cuba.

T H E W A R IN CUBA: IMPERIAL COMPETITION AGAINST AN ANTI-COLONIAL SOCIAL REVOLUTION

1898 can be represented as a set of interlocking local histories that compose a world-historical conjuncture and as a set of local wars interweaved by inter-imperial struggles for global hegemony. The manufactured memories of the war and its implications vary in each place.10 If in Spain 1898 it is remembered as the year of a great historical disaster constituting the formal end of empire and a foundation to twentieth century historical calamities, the dominant memories of the war in the U.S. intellectual and public cultures is at an event marking the coming of "America" to world power. In Cuba 1898 was, for many, the end of a thirty year revolutionary process against Spanish colonial rule, slavery, and racial domination. Indeed, Cuban perspectives on the conjuncture, challenge common sense accounts (especially in the U.S.) of 1898 as a 113 day event known as the SpanishAmerican War. As persuasively argued by Cuban historians, one of the key motives of U.S. intervention in the Cuban revolutionary war against Spanish imperialism was to prevent a multiracial insurgent army with a strong anti-colonial

10 Given that the politico-juridical condition of Puerto Rico is still, by any definition, colonial, arguably, it is in Puerto Rico (and for Puerto Ricans) where the arena of memory of the war and its consequences is more of a living terrain of political contest. There is a developing body of literature on the character of the 1898 war in Puerto Rico, and about the politics of its memory. Thus, Puerto Rican historiography on 1898 is a contested terrain characterized by different interpretations of the links between coloniality and Puerto Ricaness, and of its implications for various meanings and scenarios for the decolonization of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans. See, among others, Díaz-Quiñones (La memoria rota. El arte de bregar), Pabón, Pico, González-Vales, Alvarez Curbelo et al.

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and anti-racist ideological outlook, to take power in their so-called backyard (Pérez, The War of 1898\ Ferrer). For most of the nineteenth century, there was a partnership of convenience (as well as an ideological convergence) between the Cuban Creole ruling classes (especially the sugar slave plantocracy) and the Spanish imperial state and capital. After the Haitian Revolution, in the era of industrialized slavery (or the second slavery), Cuba became the most productive slave colony in the world, and consequently the most valuable colonial possession of Spain, as well as a precious object of the imperial desire of the nascent North American empire. For most of the century there was an unstable equilibrium of compromises between Spanish colonial rule and the Cuban Creole elite sustained by a common fear of another slave revolution like the Haitian. Cuban Creole racist discourse developed the notion of the impossibility of an independent Cuban nation due to an alleged threat of race war and chaos. Nonetheless, by the last part of the century, the growth of middleclasses in Cuba (including free blacks and mulatto intellectuals) and the deepening of the Spanish imperial crisis (both domestic and overseas) that provoked economic strangulation and ruthless authoritarianism in the colonies, exacerbated the tensions between Peninsulars and Creoles, and a cry of insurrection erupted. The Cry of Yara in 1868 began a thirty year long process of back and forth anti-colonial and anti-racist revolutionary activity epitomized by three wars.11 As the earlier Haitian Revolution, this Cuban revolutionary moment can be characterized as "a revolution that was forgotten" (Trouillot). The Haitian and the Cuban insurgencies were revolutionary movements against colonialism, slavery, and racism. Hence, arguably, in the nineteenth century the Haitian and Cuban processes represented the only two real attempts of social revolution in the Americas. The Cuban struggle produced new discourses of race and nation. The emerging revolutionary nationalism advocated a notion of the Cuban nation as a community without racial differences and hence free of racism.12 The Cuban revolutionary army was substantially non-white including at the top levels of leadership, and the anti-colonial fight was explicitly anti-racist, and in its most radical expressions (like in Maceo and Marti) also defended a project of popular democracy and social justice. Landlords who supported the revolution freed their slaves, abolishing slavery against the dominant rationality of the colonial state and racial capitalism. After a political and military rollercoaster, by 1898 the revolutionary army had around 50,000 troops with presence and support throughout the island of Cuba.

11 The three wars were the ten year war (1868-1878), the tiny war (Guerra Chiquita 1879-1880), and the final war (1895-1898). 12 In spite of its democratic vocation, the problem with this discourse on race is that in its worst versions it implies a denial of a pervasive racism and in its best an erasure of the specificity of AfroCuban difference in the name of a raceless cubanidad.

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There are different interpretations of the correlation of politico-military forces and the possible outcomes of the war between the Spanish empire and Cuban revolutionaries. In any case, it was clear that there was a real chance of victory for the insurrectionary army. In spite of an incredible display of close to 200,000 Spanish troops and the reconcentration of Cuban rural dwellers in urban pockets as a military device of colonial governmentality, the imperial army was demoralized and fatigued.13 In contrast, the morale and determination of the rebels was relatively high not only because of the dynamic of the war itself but also because of their widespread political support inside and outside Cuba. This situation was compounded by the societal (politico-economic and legitimization) crises that provoked controversy about the Cuban war in both Spain and in the United States. When U.S. President McKinley took military action in Cuba in 1898 the act of war was not only against Spain, but also and in a very significant fashion, an undeclared intervention against the Cuban anti-colonial and anti-racist revolutionary forces in the name of democracy and decolonization.

A

S P L E N D I D LITTLE W A R ? E X T E N D I N G THE IMPERIAL FRONTIER A N D CIVILIZING THE

TROPICS

In 1898 the United States was facing a national crisis characterized by economic depression, severe class conflict, deepening racial strife, changes in gender relations, massive migrations and immigrations, and the rise of populist, labor, and socialist movements. The maturation of the industrial revolution in the U.S. implied a problem of over-accumulation that acquired the character of crisis in the context of the world-economic depression of the 1870s. The U.S. recession of 1893, the immediate economic context of the moment of 1898, was located within this long wave of world economic crisis and restructuring. The continental U.S. economy grew as one of the largest and most productive in the world at the same time that it confronted problems of profitability, employment, and effective demand. This transitional period in the history of world capitalism was also being

" Everdell (116-126) argues that General Valéry ano Weyler y Nicolau (the Capital General of Cuba from 1896 to 1898) policy of reconcentrating rural dwellers in urban zones with the intention of controlling the war, should be interpreted as the modem invention of the concentration camp. I will add that as a state act of regulating a colonial population it was a prime example of colonial governmentality, of the use of bio-power (in the Foucaltian sense of regulating, disciplining, and discursively producing bodies as an effect of power and a power effect) in a colonial setting (Foucault). This state performance of modern coloniality contrasts with another contribution of Cuban Colonial Modernity to modern politics, namely the invention of the theory and practice of guerilla war by the Cuban insurrectionary army. For the notion of colonial governmentality see Scott (1999). Also see, Chatterjee, Thomas.

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shaped by the emergence of a new type of capitalist firm, namely the vertically integrated multi-unit large corporation. The crisis of profitability along with the growth of productive capacity beyond the ability of the continental market constituted strong economic motives for empire-building in search of markets, cheap raw materials, and cheap labor. In fact, throughout the nineteenth century, while building a continental territorial empire, the empire-nation rising as a world force began to open markets and to develop diplomatic and military presence in the Pacific and across the Americas. However, there was significant debate about the nature and the balance of the relationship between the economic, political, and cultural components of the emerging empire. In spite of the differences, there was a developing common sense that defined a terrain of imperial discourse according to which economic expansion was seen as an outlet to the crisis, and that assertively wished to distinguish the upcoming empire from European territorial colonialism. The late nineteenth century was a period of significant historical change in the United States. The crisis was not only economic but also social. Class struggles exacerbated to the level of persistent labor unrest and striking, the most dramatic example being the world-historical Chicago Haymarket class struggles of 1886. A wave of agrarian and populist revolts were tied to the decline in agricultural prices, itself a symptom of the great depression. The intensification of social struggles and the rise of social movements catalyzed the growth of a socialist movement. The completion of a transcontinental railroad and the birth of mass media (especially the telegraph and the newspapers as objects of mass consumption) indicated a more integrated public space and the development of "the public" and "public opinion" as objects of regulation and persuasion, as well as subjects of consultation and representation. The scenario described above is the overall context within which the United States turned from a continental territorial empire to a transoceanic world-imperial power. It is widely recognized that 1898 is a groundbreaking moment in such a process. All sorts of historiographical traditions converge in evaluating the aftermath of the 1898 war as a great leap forward that marked the emergence of the U.S. as a main player in the world contest for wealth, power, and prestige. North American revisionist historiography had mostly analyzed the 1898 SACF war as a landmark in the architecture of the new empire (LaFeber, Kaplan and Pease). In these accounts, the war is conceived as a crucial event within a historic conjuncture in which the U.S. economy demanded searching for overseas markets, the social crisis called for immediate outlets, and the young and unstable national cohesion gained from displacing conflict abroad and from finding new racial and cultural others, in order to consolidate a weak federal union. This way of framing the context and motives of the 1898 SCAF war provides necessary but not sufficient theoretical representation of the event because of its being excessively cen-

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tered on the endogamous rationalities of the U.S. imperial nation. We need a more global analytical framework in which we can register how the webs and threads that constituted the world-system accounted for the globality of the 1898 war, at the same time that we analyze the particular histories tied to this world-historical event. This implies that there are global as well as local narratives on the character and significance of the 1898 SCAF war. Thus, I will return now to an analysis from the angle of the relationship of the United States and Cuba. Socialist historian Philip Foner used the expression Spanish-Cuban-American War to acknowledge that there was a full-fledged revolutionary war in Cuba when President McKinley directed the U.S. military intervention in April, 1898. Indeed, Cuba had been an important referent to the young U.S. nation and to the rising empire for close to a century. Already by 1808, Jefferson wished for the annexation of Cuba. At the same time, John Quincy Adams uttered the famous phrase that the "laws of political.... gravitation" implied that Cuba "like and apple severed by the tempest from its native tree" will eventually "gravitate only towards the North American Union" (LaFeber 4). Along with this geo-logic of proximity there was a concern for national security and cohesion, "the acquisition of Cuba would greatly strengthen our bond of union" (Perez, The War 4), said James Buchanan around the same time. Cuba was seen as the gate for a hemispheric empire. Senator Robert Toombs asserted that with Cuba "we can make first the Gulf of Mexico, and then the Caribbean sea, a mare clausum" so that the day will come "when no flag shall float there except by permission of the United States of America" (Perez 4). In short, since the beginning of U.S. national formation, Cuba had a place in the national imaginary whether as an expression of the will to conquer that founded the nation as empire, and/or in relationship to the fear of barbaric otherness that motivated the building of symbolic and physical walls between the continental white republic and its others. For, instance, U.S. northern commercial capitalists desired tropical goods such as sugar, while sectors of the southern plantocracy wished for Cuba to be annexed to the union in order to extend the frontier of slavery. There were even vicarious desires for Cuba to become a place where all blacks could be sent in order to solve the so-called U.S. race problem.14 Nonetheless, the odds for the annexation of Cuba were not simply dictated by U.S. masculine imperial desire15 but depended on a complex equation of fac-

14 Indeed, as Ada Ferrer argues, there was considerable racial ambiguity in the U.S. about Cuba. In some racist interpretations Cuba was described as mongrel and uncivilized but in others as "very close to us" and as part of the West. 15 McClintock identifies a diversity of intertwined logics of imperial power: racial, gender/sexual, economic, and political. For empire as a matter of sexual desire and patriarchal domination also see Stoler.

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tors including Spain's strong will to maintain its most valuable (materially and symbolically) colonial possession, and a highly contested terrain of U.S. imperial policy. Cuba triggered important debates such as whether the rise of the U.S. as a world power should be based on an empire of commerce16 or if this could also involve occupying territories as part of the U.S. "civilizing mission" and in order to build a global network of military bases and coal stations. Imperial competition (with Japan, Great Britain, and Germany) and local instability in the Pacific islands had shifted U.S. policy in favor of the annexation of Hawaii. In this fluid atmosphere of historic risks and possibilities, the anti-colonial Cuban revolutionary war caused controversy in both the U.S. government and in U.S. public culture. A combination of structural constraints and a dance of wills pointed to the resolution of the Spanish-Cuban conflict with the Spanish-American war. By the fin de siècle U.S. capital had significant investment in Cuban plantation agriculture and around 70% of Cuban sugar was consumed in the United States.17 The Cuban war was a matter of heated debate both in U.S. state institutions as well as in venues of public life such as the mass media. U.S. ambiguities toward Cuba were played out in a public discussion that oscillated between proposals for annexation, and a manifest will to support the rebels' search for independence. There was a resurgence of U.S. anti-Spanish sentiments in the tradition of the myth of the Black Legend expressed, for instance, through narratives of Spanish cruelty and backwardness dramatized by the depictions of starving Cuban peasants as a result of the Spanish colonial policy of displacement and re-concentration of civilian population. A less patent but more critical imperial concern was for a possible victory of a Cuban revolutionary army largely composed and led by blacks and mulattoes who defended an anti-colonial project of racial democracy. Its social and racial composition, along with its ideological outlook (anti-colonial, antiracist, and popular-democratic) gave the Cuban movement a particularly revolutionary character in the age of global imperialism, scientific racism, as well as the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow in the U.S. South (Ferrer). The Spanish-American War itself, strictly defined, was brief and spectacular. Technically speaking, it lasted from April 19 to August 12, 1898, and the diplo16 The notion of Empire of Commerce was developed in the 1860s by William Henry Seward who occupied different prominent position in the imperial state (including Secretary of State under John Quincy Adam's presidency) and who, arguably, was one of the key organic intellectuals of the American empire in the last half of the nineteenth century. Steward conceived the U.S. as an Empire of Freedom defined by commercial leadership instead of territorial domination, and also by a divine mandate to civilize the barbaric world. 17 This was not the case in Puerto Rico were the dominant sector of capitalist agriculture by the end of the century was a gourmet kind of coffee that was consumed more in Europe than in the United States. See Bergad and Davila-Cox (in Smith and Davila-Cox).

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matic resolution was the Paris Treaty of December 10, 1898 in virtue of which Spain ceded Cuba, Puerto Rico, Manila, the Wake Island, and Guam to the United States. As the first mass mediated war it was portrayed in the newly born film industry, 18 newspapers, cartoons, and photographic images as a marvelous tropical picnic, a foundational performance of imperial triumphalism. Even though it was narrativized and memorialized as a short and easy enterprise, in Cuba it was the final blow to a demoralized and deteriorated Spanish army,19 while in Puerto Rico despite a relatively easy military victory it opened a period of social unrest and subaltern resistance (Santiago-Valles, Pico). The U.S. war with Spain was also an opportunity to establish commercial and politico-military power in Asia (the Far East as it was called). The battlefront at the Philippines involved confronting a large and determined Filipino anti-colonial movement and revolutionary army. Filipino anti-colonial forces had been fighting an insurrectionary war against the Spaniards since 1896. In sum, the American-Filipino war (1899-1902) accumulated around 200,000 casualties.20 The vigor of the Cuban and Filipino nationalist movements motivated U.S. public debate and governmental policy21 to bargain for a neocolonial relationship that involved economic exploitation (through investment and trade), a political protectorate, and the establishment of military bases in Cuba and the Philippines. The lack of such powerful movements influenced the annexation of Hawaii and the colonial appropriation of Puerto Rico22 and the Micronesian islands. The balance of the war pointed to the birth of a new world empire with its own technologies of rule, neocolonial economies, and imperial discourses. The so-called empire of freedom would develop its own forms of economic exploitation, political and military rule, along with its own civilizational discourses, racial nomen-

18 Shohat and Stam analyze how the birth of cinema around 1898 signifies a new era of imperialism. The 1898 SCAF war was the first war to be filmed with all the implications this had in terms of the politics of imperial representation, dissemination, and commemoration. 19 Also, the military victory of the U.S. over Spain was not a self-evident act but a product of the dynamics and contingencies of the war itself. See Balfour (1998). 20 Arguably, the 1898 Spanish-American war started in the Philippines with the Battle of Cavite in Manila. For reasons of focus, space, and expertise, I do not analyze the Filipino angles of 1898. 21 The political debate about the 1898 war in the U.S. included an important anti-imperialist antiwar movement which itself was divided according to ideological and political positions, some of which was guided by liberal and paternalistic discourses, but others were inspired by socialist and more radical democratic goals. 22 Scarano analyzes the particularity of the U.S. imperial gesture (1898 and its effects) in Puerto Rico as an act of colonial possession (as distinct from a simple intervention), and in this sense, as a revealing moment of the character of the growing empire. Davila-Cox in a careful discussions of the different explanations of the rationales behind the U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico in 1898 draws a complex picture that demonstrate how such an act of colonial appropriation was neither a last minute accident nor a product of a conspiracy but a calculated act in light of conjunctural and structural logics.

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clatures, and ways of defining the "civilizing mission." All of these imperial strategies together prepared the soil for the U.S. struggle for world hegemony, an imperial goal that its seeds were planted in 1898.

AMERICA AS THE FUTURE OF THE WEST: MANIFEST DESTINY AND THE EMPIRE OF FREEDOM

The 1898 conjuncture set the stage for what was later called the American century. 1898 represented a crucial juncture in the contest over the meaning of Americanity23 and in the patterning of power in the hemisphere. The 1898 war was not only a product of political and economic motives but also of an ideology of U.S. civilizational and racial superiority, a self-understanding of America as the ultimate bearer of the white man burden of civilizing the barbarians and dominating the "lesser races," and a search for cultural hegemony and imperial symbolic capital (i.e. prestige). Hence, the road to the war, the actual war, and its implications, were defined not only by military and diplomatic battles, but also by the cultural race over intellectual and moral leadership. In this sense 1898 was a cultural war, an ideological battleground. As a main drama in a hegemonic transition, 1898 was a historical theater of fluidity and change, in both the political-economy of historical capitalism as well as in the discursive domain. The continental nation with the vocation of becoming a major player in the world contest for wealth, power, and prestige, developed an imperial sense of identity, at once identified with and in opposition to Europe. In the emerging discourses that shaped U.S. national-imperial identity and hegemonic culture, America was imagined as the present and future of the west. Perhaps, the boldest enunciation of U.S. Occidentalism is in the expression "manifest destiny" that was first used by John O'Sullivan in the conjuncture of 1848 when President Polk annexed more than half of Mexico to the union and intended to buy Cuba. The notion of manifest destiny became a key imperial trope and slogan to signify the idea and self-image of the U.S. as a nation with a God given mission of civilizing the world thus entailing an imperative to expand, and a burden to conquer and modernize allegedly "less developed peoples" and "lesser races."24 "The last order of civilization which is democratic received it first per23 Quijano and Wallerstein define Americanity as a quintessential modern discourse that emerged with the simultaneous birth of the capitalist world-economy, the rise of the west, and the so-called discovery of America in the long sixteenth century. They contend that Americanity is characterized by the creation in the Americas of four basic components of modernity: coloniality, ethnicity, race, and the ideology of newness itself. 24 The American concept of Manifest Destiny is an occidentalist notion that is a heir of British conceptions of "white man burden," and more indirectly of European imperial discourses such as the

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manent existence in this country...A land separated from the influences of ancient arrangement...vigorous and fresh from the hand of God, was a requisite for the full and broad manifestation of the free spirit of the new-born democracy. Such a land was prepared in the solitudes of the Western hemisphere" (Stephanson 3940), wrote Sullivan. This conception of the United States as the first universal "nation of human progress," the most advanced expression of western civilization and the ultimate evolution of modernity, gave a mark of identity to U.S. Americanist Occidentalism. Sullivan's quote articulated what after 1898 became imperial common sense, the belief that the U.S. by virtue of its virility, dynamism and newness, was the true heir of the power and wisdom of the west. A Hegelian undertext of history marching from east to west, the U.S. being the end of history, informed Americanist Occidentalism. An imperial modernist narrative that the U.S. did not have to fight against the darkness of an ancien régime, promoted a self-conception of the continental empire as the climax of world history representing the ultimate stage of modernity. Thus, according to the American imperial imagination, the U.S. combined the latest developments in science, technology, and democratic life, and was better equipped than any other imperial power to be in command of global affairs. This self-conception of nation and empire was largely based on a racist conception of the United States as a white republic led by the Anglo-Saxon race, allegedly the bearers of the highest variant of western civilization. In the conjuncture of 1898 the logic of manifest destiny was developed, along with the elaboration of the Monroe Doctrine, as a founding rationality of U.S. Pan-Americanism but also of the global will to power of the rising empire. Imperial desire of global power in the fin de siècle age of corporate capitalism and high modernism promoted the production of particular forms and fields of knowledge such as geography (Godlewska, Smith and Dâvila-Cox) and geopolitics (Tuathail). The ideological landscapes of the newborn U.S. empire were also defined by a will to globalism that encouraged the production of new discourses of globalization that corresponded to the consolidation of the modern/colonial world-system as a global phenomena in the nineteenth century. For instance, Harvey characterizes the late nineteenth century globalization as the first moment of "time-space compression," namely the instantiation of a global space produced by a diversity of developments including the integration of world credit, a technological revolution in transportation and communication, and the emergence of advertising and mass consumption. The goal of global leadership was tied to a spatio-temporal modernism according to which "America" was seen as a world-

French notion of "mission civilizatrice" and of the Spanish idea of having mission of christianizing natives and infidels.

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historic center, a universal nation blessed by "a sharp break with the past" and a "boundless future." As early as 1848 a writer in O'Sullivan's Review predicted that "The barriers of time and space will be annihilated."25 Later on, Raymond L. Brigman continued that line of reasoning, in 1905 he wrote, "Time and space are not nearly as much against the organic unity of the world now as they were against the organic unity of the United States a hundred years ago" (Peyser vii). The emerging discourses of U.S. global hegemony were largely a product of the agency of a group of organic intellectuals and officers of the imperial state. One of the most influential (both inside and beyond the United States) projects of globalism was the one formulated by naval Captain and scholar Alfred Mahan who argued that naval leadership was a key aspect of power throughout world history. Mahan proposed the development of a global network of trading and military outposts along with the construction of an Isthmian Canal in Central America to connect the Atlantic and the Pacific, all under the command of U.S. state and capital in order to compete against Europe and Japan. Mahan's global cartography of an empire based on leadership in world commerce, based on a worldwide network of trade and military nodes resonates with Seward's project of an empire of commerce as a premise for the dominion of the empire of freedom. However, Mahan's unholy trinity of factors (production, shipping, and colonies) that were supposedly necessary to build and keep such an empire reveal the dilemmas and contradictions of the U.S project of an alleged postcolonial imperialism.26 In imperial narratives the U.S. was represented as "a sublime moral empire" that, in contrast to European colonialism, wanted to diffuse freedom and its methods were not despotism, plunder, and territorial conquest, but economic and political modernization and the promotion of civilization, progress, and democracy. This implied building an empire without colonies. However, the annexation of Hawaii and the colonial appropriation of Puerto Rico and the Micronesian islands, and the neocolonial rule of Cuba and the Philippines composed an imperial field of power that contradicted the dominant self-representations of the rising empire. Indeed, the new imperial formation would be better represented as a powerful continental historical formation developing as a politico-economic empire in the Americas (especially in the Caribbean and Central American, its immediate

25

The quotes in the prior sentence and in this one are from O'Sullivan (in Stephanson: 41). There is a built-in ambiguity in the very definition of the United States as a nation that was bom out of a struggle for independence from the British empire at the same time that it was born in relationship to the colonial subjection of Native Americans and slaves (most of them African) and of the conquest and colonization first of continental and then overseas territories and populations. There is much discussion of the meaning of this and of whether or not we can talk about the U.S. as a postcolonial nation. For an interesting unorthodox discussion in the realm of cultural production see Buell. 26

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terrain of imperial domination), while it was trying to build a global web of politico-military, economic, and symbolic power. The image of a strong continental base sustained by an infrastructure of outposts (military bases, coaling stations, commercial nodes) placed in a group of islands that could be colonial and neocolonial possessions depending on the local conditions (a cognitive map similar to Mahan's) captures better the form of the new empire. In fact, the nascent American empire was multiform and polyvalent combining: territorial/non-territorial and direct/indirect rule, productive and commercial imperial economies, as well as liberal and despotic political rationalities. The bravado and naked machismo of Teddy Roosevelt, another key organic intellectual of the emerging world empire, revealed another angle of U.S. imperial discourse, namely the Social Darwinism and bold Anglo-Saxon masculinist racism. "Of course, there have been many instances of brutality, cupidity, and stupidity by the conquerors, but by and large, the subject nations have benefited. To begin with, in all logic, as a rule, the conquering nation has been more civilized, certainly more virile," said Roosevelt in an unscrupulous testimony of the darker side of U.S. imperial Occidentalism. The aftermath of the war produced a flood of U.S. commanded strategies of modernization and imperial discourses that promoted and disseminated U.S. centered narratives of Americanism. The new places and populations in the redefined landscapes of the empire motivated the production of imperial knowledges in order to recognize, understand, classify, regulate, rule, and civilize the new colonial subjects and imperial spaces. Imperial knowledge was produced and enacted in fields such as public health and education with an explicit will to civilize, sanitize, and educate the natives so that they could acquire a work ethic, and learn the values of enlightened civilization and the principles of self-government (Santiago-Valles 1994, Díaz-Quiñones 1998). Empire-building in the age of mechanical reproduction and mass communication included the production of cinematic, photographic and printed texts/images about the "new possessions," the tropicalized and orientalized islands that became the new objects of masculine imperial desire (Thompson, Matos). The proliferation of visual stimulus in light of the integration of new human and geographic landscapes into the geographies of the empire motivated a reconfiguration of the imperial gaze for the elaboration of new sexual and racial categories and hierarchies (Santiago-Valles). These fields of production of imperial discourse included a redefinition of the meanings and the boundaries between civilization and barbarism, specific definitions of the meaning of modernity, and a resignification of the spatio-temporal coordinates of the west.

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T H E T W O A M E R I C A S : CONTENDING OCCIDENTALISMS AND THE RISE OF AMERICANISM

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, known as the "age of revolution" (Hobsbawn, The Age of Revolution) was the era of the first modern wave of decolonizations and the rise of nationalism in the Americas (Anderson). Independence from European territorial colonialism implied a reconfiguration of political bodies and historical identities. Throughout the nineteenth century several possibilities of national, regional, and hemispheric formation and identification were rehearsed and negotiated. These processes of nation-building, sub-regional configuration, and hemispheric regionalization were framed within a historical matrix in which emerging Creole ruling classes (from both the United States and from Latin America) tried to define their identities and projects as distinct from Europe, but also against each other and in opposition to their respective subaltern classes/sectors. Thus, the first wave of decolonization involved the rise of Americanism as a discursive project of the emerging ruling classes of the Americas to claim an identity and a space of power and recognition in the modern world. It is in this context that the Americas are reinvented as the "Western Hemisphere" which implied the reimagining of the very meaning of the west (Aguilar; Whitaker; Mignolo, "La colonialidad"). After the 1776 "revolution," the newly born North American nation was seen by Spanish American elites as an example of economic and technological development and of political liberalism that should be emulated in their civilizing mission against the presumed barbarism and backwardness of the subaltern sectors of the emerging Spanish American nations. By the 1820s the vast territory that composed the Spanish empire in the so-called new world had gained independence. Various scenarios of regional reconfiguration were discussed and rehearsed in the newly politically independent territories of Spanish America but national (and sub-national) fragmentation prevailed over Bolivar's dream of regional supranational unity. A split developed between the emerging Latin American nations (most of them haunted by civil wars and serving as suppliers of raw materials and agricultural products in the world-economy) and the United States a continental nation-empire that despite uneven development between a liberal commercial North and a Slave-based agricultural South, it was eventually unified as a White Republic. Since the inception of Americanism in the early nineteenth century there was conflict between the U.S. definition of the Americas as their hemispheric zone of leadership against European powers (hence their metonymic reduction of America to the United States) as spelled-out in the 1823 Monroe Doctrine ("America for the Americans"); and the various Latin American projects for a transnational regional community from the standpoint of the south. Nonetheless, in spite of the geo-historical division between the two Americas, American ruling classes shared world-historical locations that framed them within a common field

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of discourse that I have been calling Americanist Occidentalism. The ruling classes of the infant American nations shared an identification with the ideology of Western civilization in their race to define their space in the world as distinct yet related to Europe, and as substantially different from American subaltern sectors (working classes, genders/sexualities, races; such as "blacks," "indians," "peasantries, etc.)- Dominant discourses of Americanism were paradoxically Eurocentric because they were conceived by and articulated the very same categories of European hegemony (e.g., western civilizational progressivism against non-western barbaric backwardness, white superiority over "lesser races"), at the same time that they began to redefine the center of the west from Europe to America. As we have seen, since the 1840s imperial discourses were developed in the United States according to which America was the ultimate incarnation of modernity embodying the latest stage of western civilization. In the South, organic intellectuals/ statemen articulated the emerging civilizational and nationalist discourses that defined Spanish America as a world region (and its constitutive nations), thus developing what I call peripheral genres of Occidentalism. The ideological contest between the two Americas can be analyzed as two competing claims over the authentic heritage of European modernity in the context of the transformation of the "new world" into the western hemisphere, a space emerging as a center of economic, political, and military power. Americanism was at once a defensive posture against the strong offensive push of European imperialism (especially France and England), and an effort of the new ruling classes to carve a world identity. In this last register, it was a devise to gain symbolic capital, to gain a status in a cosmopolitan community of whiteness and western civilization. The Occidentalism of the Spanish American Creole elites can be labelled as peripheral not only because of the subordinated location of the region (first in relation to Europe and later also to the United States) but also because of its discursive hybridity and mimicry. Americanist Occidentalism by definition is a derivative discourse of Eurocentric notions of modernity, but while U.S. Occidentalism is an imperial discourse (a product of "postcolonial" white settler imperialism), Spanish American peripheral Occidentalism insofar as it did not have the same vocation of world hegemony, it claimed its authority more clearly from its inheritance of western wisdom. This corresponded to a culturalist Occidentalism according to which Latin American cultures (or civilization/race) claimed to be superior to the United States' by virtue of its kinship with European high culture. Latinamericanist Occidentalism was also defined by a discourse of hybridity, a myth of racial democracy, that in light of the integrative racial hegemonies in Latin America27, defined regional and national ideologies of identity as 27

In spite of the variety of racial discourses and racist regimes in both sub-regions (Latin America and the United States),broadly speaking, we can distinguish between a tendency toward integrative

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a product of racial and cultural mixing (i.e. mestizaje) assuming Euro-Latin American political-economic and cultural command. If the age of bourgeois revolutions, Pax Britannica, and the first wave of decolonizations and nationalism gave birth to Americanist ideologies; the moment of 1898 (the age of empire, hegemonic transition, and antisystemic movements) firmly established the rise of Americanist Occidentalisms and of a clear-cut discursive divide between the two Americas. The conjuncture of 1898 was a threshold in the configuration of a great divide between the two Americas in terms of a civilizational/racial distinction between anglos and latinos, that, in some ideologies of identity, corresponded to other antinomies such as that between modern logics (instrumental reason and historical reason, modernization and aesthetics) and intellectual cultures (the culture of the sciences and the culture of the humanities). Military and diplomatic contests and economic competition between North (the United States) and South (Latin America and the Caribbean) corresponded to cultural wars over who was the superior civilization (Anglos or Latinos). The U.S.-sponsored Pan-American Conference of 1889-1890 in Washington, D.C. mediated a more aggressive reenactment of the Monroe Doctrine through the new ideology of Pan-Americanism. The aftermath of the SCAF war of 1898 marked a new balance of imperial power in the world sustained by a new correlation of politico-military and economic forces in the Americas. This reconfiguration of imperial power relations, with its fundamental implications for the contests over both hemispheric and world hegemony, altered the geographies of power in the world to the extent that the political and economic core began to shift from Europe to America. In the arena of cultural and symbolic power, the struggles between the two Americas were defined by the hegemonic Western Episteme and its notions of civilization, progress, science, politics, ethics, and aesthetics. The claims of authority and leadership from both sides of the hemispheric divide were sustained and justified by postEnlightenment western European criteria. Hence, for the most, the ideological battleground between the two Americas occurred within Occidentalist terms of discourse. Within these general terms, there was a significant level of debate. In Spanish America, an emerging cultural current called modernismo took the task of defining an identity and a cultural-political agenda for the region in the fin de siècle moment of crisis, transition, and restructuring.

racial hegemonic strategies in Latin America ideologically expressed in the myths of racial democracy, as distinct to the exclusionary racial hegemonies as manifest in the myths of racial homogeneity (i.e. uncontaminated whiteness) that founded European as well as U.S. national-imperial imaginaries.

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MODERNISM(O) AND PERIPHERAL MODERNITY: OCCIDENTALISM AND LATINAMERICANISM

Modernismo is the name given to an end of the century Spanish-American cultural (aesthetic, intellectual, political) movement that emerged in the world conjuncture of intensive capitalist modernization and extensive imperialism, as an attempt to articulate a cultural politics from a Latin American perspective. Even though Modernismo was primarily defined as an aesthetic (and more particularly a literary) movement, it was a regional expression (in the Hispanic world)28 of the polyphony of cultural, political, and philosophical strategies of production and representation that composed the Modernisms of the late nineteenth century era of modernization of capitalism and globalization of imperialism. This critical period of modernization29 (industrialization, urbanization, large-scale production and consumption, changes in communication and transportation) was characterized by an equal intensity in cultural creation, articulated by cultural movements which are classified under the rubric Modernism (Calinescu, Huyssen and Bathrick, Jameson, Larsen). Modernism is a signifier of the cultural movements (and products) that consciously challenged dominant processes of modernization of late nineteenth century capitalism. The same way that we should conceptualize modernity, against the grain of Eurocentrism and Occidentalism, as a plurality of modern experiences, we should trace a diverse geography of located modernisms. Modernisms together constituted a transnational cosmopolitan cultural movement30 that devised discursive strategies (aesthetic, philosophical, etc.) to grapple with the challenges of the new form of capitalist modernity (alienation, anomie, fragmentation, economic and political centralization, systemic crisis, hegemonic transition) .Spanish American Modernista poets were the first to positively define modernism as an aesthetic, political, and epistemological framework (Aching, Jrade, Ramos, Zavala). Cuban poet and revolutionary intellectual José Marti and Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario were the main originators of

28 Is important to see Modernismo as both a Spanish American cultural movement as well as a phenomenon (to a large extent literary) of the Spanish speaking world (Pérez de Mendiola). Zavala coined the term Hispanic Modernisms to signify the transcontinental edge of Modernismo. I recognize the existence of a cultural current between Spain's "generation of 98" (Shaw) and Spanish American modernismo but also argue for distinguishing them. 29 In this context the notion of modernization denotes a particular moment of rapid and intensive change in the economic, political, and social conditions that define a particular formation of capitalist modernity. 30 For instance, Spanish American Modernistas developed a literary movement in exchange with French symbolism and parnassianism, and praised North American writers like Emerson, Poe, and Whitman. For a critical analysis of Marti's reading of Whitman see Sommer. For the relationship between 19lhcentury American literature and imperialism see Kaplan. On Modernism and Imperialism see Jameson.

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Modernismo in the 1880s. What gave Modernismo the character of a movement, was a shared space of aesthetic (mostly literary) practice, and a common ground of philosophical and political discussion in a historical context of significant changes in the dynamics of capitalist development and hegemonic power. There is a widespread agreement that the 1898 SCAF war and its aftermath were decisive for the shaping of cultural and intellectual currents in Spanish America and particularly for the development of Latinamericanist discourses. Modernismo was crucially colored by the 1898 SCAF war. In Latin America, the war was largely interpreted and remembered with a modernista gaze. The 1898 war provoked the production of particular strand of Latinamericanist discourses against the rising empire of the North, characterized by an eminently culturalist anti-imperialism and a peripheral Occidentalism that claimed for Latin America the true heritage of western civilization in the Americas. This anti-imperialism (i.e. antiU.S.) of 1898 that was championed by the Modernista generation developed its notions of Latin American culture and identity by means of an identification with Hispanic and French heritages (Jàuregui). This Hispanophilia of 1898 contrasted with the oppositional discourse against Spanish imperialism priorly developed by Puerto Rican Ramon Emeterio Betances and by Cuban José Marti. This shift from a more global anti-colonial ideology and politics (contra both European and American imperialism) prior to 1898, toward the hegemony of Occidentalist latinamericanisms, is one of the most significant ideological legacies of the war. In order to understand the differences between these two Latinamericanist modern projects, I will now turn to a counterpoint between two representative authors (Marti and Rodò) and two canonical texts (Our America and Ariel), to then return to a general assessment of Modernismo. Our America was published in 1891, in New York and Mexico, partly as a Latinamericanist manifesto against the rising U.S. Empire and its project of a Pan-American neocolonial order as the immediate terrain of U.S. hegemony. Our America is framed as a polemic essay against both the "internal tigers" and the "external tigers" that Marti described as the "giants with seven-league boots" (81). In other words, Our America is a polemic against both the despotic power of Creole ruling classes and imperial potencies. As we have seen, post-independence Creole discourses on the newly born Spanish American nations and world region were presided by a peripheral Occidentalism. The Creole elite of men of letters who protagonized the articulation of national and regional ideologies of history, culture, and identity, based their foundational discourses in western notions of reason and progress, and used the Occidentalist distinction between civilization and barbarism to claim modern civilizational and racial heritage in opposition to the allegedly backward and barbaric racialized and gendered internal others of the nations and the region (Indians, blacks, peasants, workers, subaltern women). Marti, in contrast, transgresses the distinction between civilization and barbarism itself, and criticized

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continuities in subaltern condition from the colonial to the post-independence period. To that effect Marti writes in Our America, "The struggle is not between civilization and barbarism, but between false erudition and nature" (87). The opposition between false erudition and nature is not simply correspondent to a romantic notion of natural man but it also articulates a sort of postcolonial critique of the Creole habit of mimicking western culture and values. In this regard Marti writes, "the imported book [is] conquered in America by natural man," and adds, "The European University must bow to the American university" (87). This critical kind of Americanism guided by a postcolonial reason also has an edge of post-Occidentalist critique31 as clearly shown when Marti contends that, "Our Greece must take priority over the Greece that is not ours" (88). This discursive subversion of Hellenism, one of the pillars of the very ideology of western civilization is accompanied with a rejection of Francophilia and a vindication of subaltern sectors when Marti observes that a "phrase by Sieyes does nothing to quicken the stagnant blood of the Indian race" (86). Marti's identification with subaltern modernities32 in Our America is ambiguous. This is manifest when he argues that the "uncultured masses are timid and lazy" (87), thus revealing his partial kinship with the dominant intelligentsia that he calls "the artificial Creole." However, this should not obscured the importance of his radical populism and anti-racism in an intellectual and political context dominated by liberal elitism, positivism, and civilizational racism. Marti takes issue with the Europhilia of this Spanish American Occidentalism in writing that, "neither the European not the Yankee could provide the key to the Spanish American riddle" (91). Marti's project entailed a double dialectics of liberation from both Creole and imperial regimes of domination. In his own words, "Our America is running another risk that does not comes from itself but from the difference in origins, methods, and interests between the two halves of the continent" (93). Thus, his "struggle [is to] clear away the ruins and the scars left upon by our masters [European colonial empires and post-independence westernized creole elites] ...and the scorn of our formidable neighbor who does not know us is Our America's greatest danger" (93). Hence, Marti's postcolonial discourse denounces "The colony [that] lives in the republic" (90) while it calls attention to

31 Postoccidentalist critique refers to a theoretical practice committed to reveal the analytical pitfalls and power effects of Occidentalist discourses and to unthink and transcend Occidentalism as an imaginary horizon. Postcolonial critique plays the same kind of role in relationship to coloniality. 32 By Subaltern Modernities I mean looking at modernity from below, from the experiences, practices of everyday life, forms of knowledge, cultural expressions, and political genres from a vast diversity of domains and levels of subaltemity some of which are almost completely marginalized from the spheres of representation. For Marti's ambiguities and slippages, especially on question of race and gender, see Ferrer (1999), Lugo-Ortiz (1999).

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the dangers of the emerging U.S. empire to the "Latin nations" of the hemisphere. In this sense, Marti was a main author of a radical (postcolonial) brand of Latinamericanism that articulated a modernist project of developing regional and national identities against the cultural hegemony of both Europe and the United States. In short, Marti developed the most radical and complex anti-imperialist discourse from a Latinamericanist perspective in the late nineteenth century age of the globalization of imperial domination within a world-hegemonic transition. The radical peculiarities of José Marti, namely his postcolonial critique of postindependence Latin American nations, his complex (economic, political, cultural) anti-imperialism, his radical Americanism in opposition to both European and U.S. hegemony, and his identification with subaltern causes, entails placing him and his project in the context of the Cuban revolutionary war, as well as U.S. modernization and emerging empire, within a world-historical conjuncture of economic, political, and discursive instability and change. In so far as Marti's Americanist discourse (ambiguously) challenged Eurocentrism and (inconsistently) confronted Occidentalism, while it criticized the continuities of colonial oppression in post-independence republics, his rhetoric and his project were distinct from the common sense of the period. The SCAF war of 1898 marked significant shifts in the contested terrain of struggles for cultural hegemony and regional/national self-definitions in the Americas. Arguably, it was more of an ideological than a military war, especially if we consider the conjuncture more than simply the event. If a single text can be selected that articulated the dominant discourses of Latinamericanism in the context of 1898, it was Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó's Ariel, published in 1900. Rodò began the essay defining Ariel as "the empire of reason" in contrast to Caliban who represented the "symbol of sensuality and rudeness" (22).33 This resignification of the characters of Shakespeare's The Tempest, as is well known, symbolizes the two Americas, the United States and Latin America. 34 In contrast to Marti, Rodò erases the subaltern sectors in favor of a grand narrative where Latin America appears as the bearer of the high culture, spiritual values, and the authentic scientific attitude of the great western civilization that allegedly evolved from Greek Antiquity and Christianity into the Modern European spirit (Jàuregui). Represented as a bronze statue, Ariel symbolizes the endurance and forever renaissance of the true spirit of the west, characterized by the ideals of beauty, morals, and truth, in its holy war against all the evils of barbarism. In this vein, the American reenactment of the battle between civilization and barbarism,

33

All the translations are my own. For an inversion of the arielista paradigm see "Caliban" by Roberto Fernandez Ratamar (1973). See Jâuregui (Canibalia) for an ample study of arielismo and calibanismo. 34

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and corresponding binaries such as good and evil, delicacy and rudeness, and body and mind, find expression in the struggle between the two Americas. For Rodo, the spirit of the United States is defined by utilitarian ethics and knowledge, and by an extensive form of democracy that promotes "equality in mediocrity" (68). In this schema, the United States, as masters of economic activity and technology (industry and work), represents a particular expression of "our" western civilization from where "our" modern concept of freedom emerged. Rodo recognized the "titanic grandiosity" of the U.S. and acknowledged the achievement of a continental democracy at the same time that he criticized American imperial vanity and the "recent violences of its history" (76), clearly a reference to 1898. Rodo developed his critique arguing that "the American spirit" "had not acquired... the good taste" of western civilization, and "had not received the heritage of poetic instinct" that the "English people" have by virtue of the "high and inalienable pillar" that is the "institution of aristocracy" (80). This explicitly aristocratic and neoidealist modern project leads Rodo to the conclusion that, contrary to their ambition of becoming "the axis of the world" where the "new Capitol" would be situated, the United States was not equipped to become the hegemon, "their own character denies them the possibility of hegemony" (87). Hence, for Rodo the very technological and corporeal strengths that accounted for U.S. industrial and military successes accounted for their incapability to achieve cultural hegemony fatalistically destining the rude giant to fall like the Roman Empire did. Ariel was perhaps the most acclaimed articulation of the contestation of the hegemonic claims of the rising American empire from the standpoint of Rodo's generation of Latin American intellectuals. Its anti-imperialism founded in an Occidentalist logic according to which our Latin culture was the true heir in the Americas of the best tradition of greco-roman, Christian, and European aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological values, became common sense in the intellectual, governmental, and public cultures that presided the very discursive conception of Latin America as a world region. However, Rodo's rampant Eurocentrism and aristocratism (in which Latin America was virtually an incarnation of Europe), as well as his shy civilizational and racialist anti-imperialism (which implied a rather timid Americanism in spite of his defense of the Latin American spirit and his rejection of mimicry in relation to the United States), sharply contrasted with Marti's radical democratic antiracist project of local, regional, and global decolonization. In fact, Rodo never directly compares the United States with Caliban in Ariel, and given his clearly stated analysis that the U.S. represented an important variant of the west and his famous declaration of ambiguity about Americans "I admire them but I don't love them" (76), arguably, Rodo's Americanism has more in common with U.S. Occidentalism than what is usually admitted.

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1898 was a threshold in the consolidation of Modernismo as what Iris Zavala calls "a sustaining narrative of anti-colonial struggle" articulating a "master narrative of decolonization" (3). In the very moment of the war, Darío published an article called "The Triumph of Caliban"35 in which the emerging order was characterized in terms of an opposition between a barbaric empire of the dollar and conspicuous consumption (the United States as Caliban), and our America, described as "daughter of Spain, niece of France, and granddaughter of Rome" (Darío 455). Darío's Latinamericanist anti-imperialism, like Rodó's, was guided by a claim of cultural hegemony for a world region (Latin America) that was conceived as the true heir of the aesthetic wisdom of western civilization and the cultural finesse of Europe in the Americas. This involved an aestheticization of politics (and of knowledge) that more than a modernist defense of "art for art sake" represented a claim of civilization superiority against the United States and of parity with Europe. After 1898, this Latinamericanist claim of intellectual and moral leadership over the U.S., premised an aesthetized critique of the American imperialism that left European colonialism off the hook, and took for granted U.S. political-economic and military-technological domination. In contrast to Marti's critique of Europhilia and Betances ironic qualification of Spain as "the stepmother," the new common sense that emerged with the Spanish American modernism in the moment of 1898 advocated a Hispanophilous Hispanismo and a Francophilic Latinismo,36 as we have seen in both Rodó and Darío. In sum, 1898 marked a long-term discursive divide between two Americas and a shift in Modernista discourses toward Hispanismo and Latinismo (i.e. Peripheral Occidentalism). Marti's barricades of ideas turned into wages of civilization, or claims of Latin American cultural hegemony to compensate for the economic and politico-military dominance of the rising colossus of the North. In light of the imminent fall of the Republic of Letters, the new generation of intellectuals, partly displaced from former political and symbolic power in the national arenas, and facing the hemispheric domination of Uncle Sam, developed a culturalist and elitist genre of anti-imperialist Occidentalist discourse. As put by Julio Ramos (1989), after "1898 literature given its claim of autonomy from economic power became the basic vehicle for an anti-imperialist ideology that defined the Latin American being in opposition to the modernity of the [Anglo] others" (55).

35

I am translating from Jáuregui's critical edition of Darío's article with an excellent introduc-

tion. 36

For the relationship between conservative Hispanismo and 1898 see Díaz-Quiñones.

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1 8 9 8 AND BEYOND: RESTRUCTURING THE AMERICAS, REINVENTING THE W E S T , MODERNIZING MODERNITIES, AND THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

After the Paris Treaty in December 10, 1898, Puerto Rico became a colonial territory of the United States and Puerto Ricans a colonized labor force (SantiagoValles). The annexation of Hawaii also in 1898, the beginning of U.S. neocolonial rule of the Philippines in 1902 (after three bloody years of the Filipino-American War), the 1901 Piatt Amendment that granted limited (regulated by the U.S. imperial state) sovereignty to Cuba, and the strong initiatives for a U.S.-commanded Pan-American order (as articulated in the 1903 Rosselvelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine), all together composed the conditions for the rise of the American Empire as a key player in the imperial contest for world hegemony. The signing of the Paris Treaty between Spain and the United States in December 10,1898, also sealed the end of the first modern empire as a politicomilitary and economic force. By signing the Treaty, Spain lost the last remnants of the distant empire (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Philippines, and Guam). However, the Spanish empire was redefined as a cultural force and reconfigured as a linguistic community, a literary tradition, and a Hispanic Civilization and "Race." The 1898 war provoked both conservative and progressive movements that tried to redefine the role of Spain in relationship to a transnational Hispanic community. Hence, in the case of Spain, empire persisted until today as a "habit of mind"37 as an imagined translocal community defined by linguistic, literary, and historical kinship, as it can be perceived in the politics of memory embedded in the exhibits and conferences commemorating 1492/1992 and 1898/1998 organized by both Spanish and Latin American governmental and academic institutions. But the persistence of the colonial legacies of the old empire can also be seen in cultural-economic activities such as pan-Hispanic tourism, and the renaissance of Spanish financial (Banks) and productive (Telephone Companies) capital in Latin America. Finally the historic battle between the Hispanic and the Anglo persists with its different avatars in the discourses of latinidad and hispanidad in the heart of empire in the U.S. territorial nation. After 1898 the American empire developed its own technologies of colonial rule, imperial discourses, and cultural forms. Given that the SCAF war of 1898 was not a single armed conflict but a multiplicity of wars, a web of colonial conditions and subaltern struggles unevenly (and only partly) unified by the commonality of imperial domination and the rule of global capital, the new imperial-

37 Kale (4) contends that empire means "not merely a specific institutional or geographic referent...but also a habit of mind, an awareness or consciousness of resources and constraints"

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ism was defined in relationship to the particular conditions of each colonial location. The new imperialism eventually developed its own neocolonial order of things with specific strategies of modernization (economic, political, cultural) of coloniality. In this tenor, if we conceptualize empires as translocal zones of power and fields of discursive formation, as "complex assemblages" (Comaroff and Comaroff) which are "multiple, contradictory, and shifting, rather than monolithic and stable" (Kale 4); we should distinguish between imperial designs and the actual imperial practices and outcomes in particular locations.38 Paradoxically, Puerto Rico, the relatively invisible colonial nation in the U.S. national arena, and to a lesser extent also in the Hispanic world, became one of the key colonial laboratories for the imperial discourses (scientific, racial, governmental), political rationalities/forms of power (schooling, health, religious civilizing mission), and colonial capitalism (plantation agriculture) that composed the rising Empire. After World War II hegemony, the American empire developed a late modem form of imperial rule in Puerto Rico characterized by colonial democratic liberalism (a partial form of home rule), and for a brief period even a limited form of colonial fordism (Grosfoguel, Pabon). In the climax of U.S. hegemony, during the Cold War, and later in the world-historical conjuncture of antisystemic movements of the sixties, Cuba and Puerto Rico reemerged as central scenarios in world theaters of power, this times as Caribbean crossroads or showcases of battles between the so-called East and West (Socialism and Capitalism) and North and South (Western Capitalist powers versus emerging Third Worldism). In sum, the aftermath of the 1898 SCAF war the road to U.S. hegemony also marked the path from the Age of Europe to the Age of America as the politico-economic center of the west and the ultimate articulation of the discourse of modernity. Each of the three hegemonic cycles of historical capitalism defined "the spatial core of a new modernity" (Taylor 41). There is a correspondence between empire-building, world hegemony and the dominant definition of what modernity is in a given historical moment. In this register modernity is defined as "the management of the planetary center" (Dussel, "Beyond" 13), and the hegemon becomes "the most modern of the moderns" (Taylor 31). Hence, each moment of world hegemony in the modern/colonial world-system supposes a hegemonic transition that involved a restructuring of the systemic cycle of capitalist accumulation (Arrighi 1999), a process of inter-imperial competition and intense historical social struggles (including wars and revolutions), and a "dynamics of cultural change" (Sherman) that included struggles for cultural hegemony and over the "modernization of modernity" (Beck). 38 Cooper and Stoler analyze empires as differentiated and contradictory formations that acquire particularity and according to particular logics (e.g., accumulation, class, gender, sexual, racial, cultural-idelogical). Also see Kale, McClintock, and Pratt.

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Paradoxically, the American empire, a colossal global Leviathan, a many headed hydra with the versatility of being: territorial and virtual, formal and indirect, coercive and hegemonic; had never, properly speaking, been able to achieve hegemony in the Americas, its immediate sphere of influence. One of the main legacies of 1898 is the ideological formation of a great divide between the two Americas, a hemispheric split that configured an imperial field at the same time that set the stage for an arena of anti-imperial struggles. The decline of U.S. hegemony after the antisystemic moment of the sixties and the world-systemic crisis that began in the 1970s, had given birth to a new hegemonic transition, or hopefully the emergence of a post-hegemonic condition. Throughout the Americas the current systemic crisis had given rise to another crisis of representation that now challenges the very modern/colonial categories of empire and nation, and their class, racial, gender, and sexual forms of domination. Now, the historical challenge is to step forward beyond the legacies of 1898, to move the agenda beyond Occidentalism, to transform Marti's plea for a second independence into a struggle for a second decolonization.

W O R K S CITED

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THE RETROACTION OF THE POSTCOLONIAL: THE ANSWER OF THE REAL AND THE CARIBBEAN AS THING ( A N ESSAY ON CRITICAL FICTION) Iris M. Zavala

[that] misty idealism of the Northerns who at the smallest encouragement dream of nothing less than the conquest of the earth. Joseph Conrad

That archipelago known as the Antilles or the Caribbean Islands uninterruptedly is in a sense inseparable from a past, which could also include the abandonment to ordinary chronological sequences. We must first consider the subject, the Caribbean —more than fifty islands, plus the upper part of the South American continent, Central America and portions of Mexico— as a totality with different identities. Those islands of light, islands in the stream of history have moved backwards and forwards, with distinct places and time. The real story, which goes back to 1492 in the beginning of the Modern era, has created primordial dissonances to the present; dissonances within repetitions of forms of colonialism; retroactively the postcolonial condition of many islands indicates that cultural identity is an empty place functionally. Theoretically postcoloniality allows an identity by and for subjects, if a subject is understood as a name for the possibility of assigning a referent to the person distinguished by the language —saying "I," "we," "they" in context.

CONTINGENT AND HISTORICAL CATEGORIES

As a preliminary to reconsider theoretically the paradoxes of the concept of postcolonialism, it is important to review Latin American historic opposition to different forms of colonialism, since "postcoloniality" is neither a biological nor a transhistorical event, but a contingent discursive construction. My perspective will be to briefly detail the "heritage" of colonialism and its weight in each culture; and if we are focusing on Latin America, we are truly facing an upheaval and chasm of differences and heterogeneities (what I have called elsewhere a "simultaneity of heterogeneities"). The first task is to recall the constitutive inconsistency and contingency of the name itself: Indies, America, and then, in the ear-

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ly stages of conception and formation of nations in the modern sense, Our America, Hispanoamérica, Iberoamérica, "América Latina," Latin America. They are all contingent and historical categories; the notion of "América Latina" was adopted as a heteronomous definition of desire (I might say), in opposition to North America, and Latin America is adopted to consolidate the incorporation of Brazil within a continental perspective. The complexities of the Caribbean —topic of our pursuit— has forced international institutions to employ the controversial expression of Latin America and the Caribbean, simultaneously both integrating and respecting the distinction and autonomy of the floating heteronomies called the Antilles. The complexity is made more distinct if one takes into consideration the internal impediment that divides some parts of the Latin American continent from itself: the aboriginal cultures and civilizations which define a realm of transgression, that one could very well define as the social symptom (the Marxist concept re-accented and redefined by Lacan): the fissure, asymmetry, imbalance which subverts the universal foundation of Latin America. The "Zapatista" upheaval in Chiapas forces us to detect the point of heterogeneity, which prevents an ideological field of Mexicanity to achieve its closure. An ellipsis is now necessary. The Wars of Independence —that is, the signifying formation of Latin American "postcoloniality" first emerged in Haiti in 1803 against the French (the island —shared with the Dominican Republic— was baptized by Columbus as Hispaniola in 1492, and can be considered the first colony of the so called "New World," as well as the first postcolonial nation). The Wars of Independence are an event, and antagonistic impossible relationship with the colonial powers; soon followed Argentina, Venezuela, Central America, Brazil; they culminated in the emancipation of Bolivia in 1825 and of the Dominican Republic in 1865, while the turn-of-the-century designates the AngloSpanish struggle over the Caribbean (Cuba and Puerto Rico). We must observe that the chronotopes of modernity and modern were linked to a Utopian process allegorized in progressive romanticism, and a tradition of civic literature, which emphasized social need. This emancipatory process (or processes) was a signifying formation penetrated with enjoyment; it was a binding enjoyment. Wars of Independence against Spanish rule made clear the paradoxes upon which modern democracies are constructed—liberty and equality, which modernity placed on the horizon of legitimacy. On the level of ideological meaning, the different caudillos succeeded in uniting in the same discourse elements which were hitherto regarded as incompatible. What these discourses presuppose is a bricolage of heterogeneous elements: the whole domain of fantasies on which racist enjoyment feeds. The paradox is that the racism inherent to liberal democracy produced in most Latin American nations what can be called "totemic societies," ruled by tutelary powers (for further development see Zavala "Tiresias Paradox"), where justice was to be distributed, with the desire to dispense "charity and hu-

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manity" to carry modernity forward. The logic of the paradox allows us to understand the contradictory positions of the caudillos, and of the societies founded on a non-recognition of their own contradictions. The paradoxes soon made themselves evident. Differences in temporal rhythms, ethnic differences, language diversity, with tensions created by lalangue (or the non-communicative aspects of language) in each segment of society and each culture within each hegemony (Latin American and the Caribbean are no exceptions, similar cases abound in Africa, India just to mention the more obvious examples) ensure the failure of defining postcolonialism as a universal (what comes after), and in a linear temporality. These premises involve a noticeable difficulty in dealing with that "saco de gatos" that turbulence as it were, and kernel of colonial paradoxes. In the Antilles, this network of intersection of languages and cultures, conceptualization is more complex, since —and such is the thrust of my argument— politically and economically speaking there is the possibility of sharing, like Tiresias, of two contrary forces: if Tiresias was converted into a woman, and therefore knew of the enjoyment of being a "non-all," some islands can be colonial or neocolonial simultaneously, and at the same time, share the dilemmas and enigmas of a postcolonial subject, since I do not understand postcoloniality within the chronology of time, nor as linear concept, or as a reference to temporality. On the contrary, postcoloniality can be understood as "logical time" (in Lacanian terms); as a precise dialectical structure with a tripartite structure, with three moments: 1) the instant of seeing; 2) the time of understanding; 3) the moment of concluding. By means of a sophism (the story of the three prisoners found in Écrits), Lacan shows how these three moments are constructed not in terms of objective chronometric units but in terms of an intersubjective logic based on a tension between waiting and haste, hesitation and urgency. Logical time is thus "the intersubjective time that structures human action" (Lacan Écrits, 75). Change is thus not seen as a gradual move along a continuum, but as an abrupt shift from one discreet structure to another. Or, more paradoxical, subjectivities can belong to neocolonial status, but recognize themselves as members of different collectivities. One must place emphasis on the question of identification as the transformation that takes place in the subject as she or he assumes an image, in Lacanian terms. To "assume" an image, however, is to recognize oneself in the image, and to appropriate the image as oneself. The final moment of identification is conceived by Lacan as the "destitution of the subject": a moment when the subject's identifications are placed under question in such a way that these identifications can no longer be maintained in the same way as before (The Four Fundamental 273). Is not this Lacanian notion of "destitution of the subject" a way to explain the paradox of postcolonialism?

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THE MOMENT OF ANTICIPATION

Still, other paradoxes are bound to appear. If to change language is to change culture, language plays an important role. I wish to stress that to be able to discern the possibilities opened up by the tradition into which an agent is thrown, one must already acknowledge one's engagement in a project; the movement of repetition retroactively reveals (and thus fully actualizes), that which it repeats. The point is that the future has a primacy —the après coup of retroaction and anticipation. The terms refers to the way that, in the psyche, present events affect past events a posteriori-, what matters in our perspective is Lacan's argument on the complete restitution of the subject's history, understanding history not simply as a real sequence of past events, but "the present synthesis of the past" (Freud's Papers 12). If retroaction affects the past, anticipation refers to the way the future affects the present. Anticipation is also important in the tripartite structure of logical time; the "moment of concluding" is arrived at in haste, in anticipation of future certainty. Postcoloniality —as it entails the subject and subjectivization— is always about to arrive or will have already arrived at some later time. The subject is thus forever suspended in a future anterior; this assumption, however, entails an ethic responsibility, or as Lacan claims, "one is always responsible for one's position as subject." There are far-reaching implications, since the symbolic order (the law, language) is characterized by retroactive causality, it is always rewriting its own past, including past signifying traces in new contexts which retroactively change their meaning (Zizek "The missing," 39). Postcolonialism is precisely a rewriting of the symbolic order, of its own past, and the assumption of an ethical responsibility in the position as subject taken. The emergence of the subject with the dialectics elaborated in Lacan's explanation of logical time suggest that subjectification can occur in the midst of colonialism, in the "monster's entrails" to quote Marti. Abstract and paradoxical as this may sound, postcoloniality's proper dimension is not that of reality but of "truth," or borrowing from Lacan: "it is the effect of full speech to reorder past contingencies in giving them the meaning of necessities to come, such that the little bit of freedom through which the subject makes them present constitutes them" (Écrits 48). Lets us now take another step in trying to encircle such a paradoxical concept as postcolonialism. In recent years the Caribbean islands have become the paradigm of posmodernity within a logic of closure and openness forced by the plantation structure and a slave society. But language and what Lacan calls lalangue, as mentioned above, the non-communicative aspects of language, by playing on ambiguity and homophony, give rise to a sort of jouissance (Encore). I wish to stress that, in my reading, lalangue is a kernel of differences, as it represents the primary chaotic substance of polysemy, to such an extent that, when paying special attention to this substrate (jokes, puns, sexual allusions) cultural differences,

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vanish into apparent homologies. A case in point is the Caribbean or the Antilles —each island. (But the same holds true for all cultures, since lalangue pinpoints the variations, and makes language even less transparent, and is the stuff great texts are made of— let us think of Shakespeare, for example, which Bakhtin had already identified with the profound layers of language). Lalangue decentres unified identifications and identities as symbolization has been a forced choice. The crux, the turning point, in this history has been the primordial act of decision / differentiation that opens up the gap between the inertia of the prehistoric Real and the domain of historicity, of multiple narrativizations aiming at erasing their fixed placed as Thing, which, as we know, is the psychoanalytic name for death drive. Apolonia, my relentless Antillean, is ready to theorize once again, speaking the forked tongue of the not-all, reminding us of the 'nodal point' or master-signifier which has totalized reality into a coherent field. All forms of colonialism, she is apt to repeat, have created forms of sinthome, that is, the way in which each subject enjoys or organizes jouissance, a kernel of enjoyment which is immune to the efficacy of the symbolic (it is evident that I am referring to the late Lacan of the 1970's). Apolonia insists that the sinthome has exerted powers of fascination, of pure private jouissance, which lalangue shows in its utter stupidity, as a meaningless fragment of the Real, as a sticky excrement. Taking a risky step, she shakes me and sternly reminds me that melting a dialogic and symptomatica! reading would enable us to discern what is unbearable socially, as well as the marks of social antinomies. In the face of a symbolic public order (which materializes in non-written laws, norms and rules) such an interpretation underscores the vulnerability of all systems. With her Mona Lise smile she pinches my arm to remind me that postcolonialism in this gallery of echoes is a conflictive series of traces, merely a multitude of occurrences, and that as a concept it includes its own designation. The symbolic designation 'postcolonialism' is part of the designated content itself —drawing from Zizek (The Ticklish 137) in another direction. Thus, the described content is not merely a multitude of occurrences caught in the network of social determinations, but a multitude of positive occurrences available to knowledge which is retroactively opened up. The concept is useful only if understood as an Event (in Bakhtinian terms), since it relates to symptom of an engagement in struggle; or in other terms, postcoloniality is perhaps better described as the traumatic encounter with the Real (in our precise terms, the historic event of revolutionary emancipation).

A SYMPTOMAL READING

Heterogeneity and heteroglossia as surplus of signification remain to me a fine image to describe the Caribbean: a baroque-echo game, in which the echo, itself

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quite literally a free play of sound, is harnessed to dramatic meaning as answer (Zavala "The Caribbean"). A common discourse is sustained by a structure of local markets, agriculture, music (within its diversity), religious cults (the hybridity of espiritismo, vodoo, santería), while regional differences in habitat, economy, population mix, language, political history, and status enforced by capitalism and Westernization (understood as an ideological discourse whose meaning is over-determined by the European rational machine of instrumental reason). In the symptomal reading I am suggesting (and Apolonia's smile has turned into a grin), the ideological universality of both postmodernism as paradigm of the Antilles, and postcolonialism as the after-effect of colonialism, necessarily gives rise to a particular. As such there is an antagonism, a struggle inscribed in the very heart of the 'thing itself'. Or explained from another perspective, discourse reduces the problem to the different nominal definition of the term. Three aspects can be distinguished, and differences can be found in the very agent who accomplishes the operation; therefore, the assumption in which the concept of postcolonialism depends in never questioned. The theoretical lesson to be drawn from this is that the concept must be disengaged from an immanent definition in order to discern the particular antagonism or tension which provoked the concrete mechanism of its emergence. By way of simple reflection, we can distinguish three forms of the social antagonism inherent to postcolonialism: whether independence was acquired through revolutionary struggle, by suffrage, or by the ruling colonial political decision (a recent case which comes into mind is Timor, granted freedom by the Portuguese, recolonized by the Indonesians, and after a long revolutionary struggle, recovered independence through suffrage). It seems clear that each of them render the logic of postcolonialism an ambiguous an paradoxical term. Relations of domination and exploitation cause a particular distortion, which vary according to what in Lacanian terms is known as individualization through secondary identification (family, community), as well as through the use of language (the difference between French and Creole, for example), customs (understood as the space of our social freedom), and the relation to the big Other. To enhance the complexity of the paradox, colonization creates a sort of second nature, that still relevant "portrait of the colonized preceded by the colonizer's" described by Memmi (9). I wish to underline once again what is evident: that the Caribbean is composed of plural societies, in which no master discourse can be used for understanding self, society and the world. Although as a unit the islands share conditions of colonization, immigration, and problems stemming from pre- and post-slavery social integration patterns, conditions of uneven modernity impose limitations to ambitious historical and economic models based on all encompassing terms, as, for example, postmodern theory. No one theoretical master discourse can be useful without undertaking a mapping of the changing conditions of each society. At

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its simplest, since some islands are simultaneously post-colonial and neocolonial, the emergence and transformation of political identities plays a major rule. Concepts should, then, be problematized, and postcolonialism as a nodal point which will totalize and include all floating elements in the series of equivalences seems both an operation of language and accounts for the failure of language in its attempts at reference. The failure of the concept is further problematized as we face the truly traumatic core of The Caribbean: the proliferation of forms of colonialism —and thus societies— by which the line of demarcation between colonialism and 'postcolonialism' is blurred: some islands can be defined retroactively as 'postcolonial' as an effect of a series of rhetorical devices which remain deeply ambiguous, since in the network of power relations they have gained emancipation from a decaying dominant political power (Spain's imperialism in the Caribbean is paradigmatic), as they become the victims of aggression of USA intervention (Puerto Rico is an excellent example, or 'change hands', like Saint Thomas). The exact extent of Puerto Rican anti-imperial struggle is still under discussion; however, it is now clear that the North American invasion favored sugar-cane landowners who hoped for open markets, since from the end of the eighteenth century the United States had been the principal buyer of sugar on the island (Zavala Colonialism). Therefore, after 1898 not only did the sugar-cane owners accept annexation, but this alternative was also popular among the Creoles and laborers. It is evident that modernity (in its economic and social dimension), and modernism as the 'logic of unmasking' are in the Caribbean area forms of neocolonialism. However, the three mechanisms of emergence I have described render both modernity and neocolonialism contradictory in the background of different social and discursive conditions. These differences underline one of Lacan's teachings: that grammatical language and images merely produce the illusion of a consistent universe (Lacan Ecrits, The Psychoses). If language —he writes— is infiltrated by the notion of object as Real, then fiction may have the structure of truth, but is not truth. We all live behind the wall of language —Lacan's structure of alienation— unaware that we retrieve words at the expense of a lack that constitutes us as speaking beings. To proceed without relinquishing a critical stronghold, we must return to the concept of Real, and to the place of the Real in the symbolic network. If the Real —in Lacanian term— is a dimension which is always missing, but which at the same time always emerges, it always exceeds society's grasp. In this sense —and I follow Salecl (The Spoils) in another direction— it is an alien, traumatic dimension in the core of every society which prevents the necessary psychosis from avoiding confrontation with the blind, contingent automatism which is constitutive of the symbolic order (in Lacanian terms). It is this Real, it will be recalled, which triggers narrations about each country; this fantasy, in turn, is linked to the way people

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organize enjoyment, and it functions as a scenario that conceals the ultimate inconsistency of society. The relation between the Real and the forms of modernism and colonialisms I have been pursuing indicate that in the fantasy structure of homeland (country), the nation or national identification (Caribbeanness, for example) is the element that cannot be symbolized. It is an element which is in us 'more than ourselves'; it defines us, but is at the same time indefinable, it cannot be specified nor erased. It is precisely this traumatic dimension that fills out the empty place of the nation in the symbolic structure of society, as Salecl reminds us (The Spoils 15). Caribbeanness, in this sense, is the fantasy structure, the scenario, through which society perceives itself as a homogeneous entity. Elsewhere I have made use of the Tiresian paradox of jouissance to consider problems of identity, nation and gender for the millenium (Tiresias Paradox"). All three concepts present privileged domains of explosions of jouissance in the social field, in the way subjects of given ethnic communities organize their enjoyment through national myths, and sexuality, a pressing subjective and, thereby, political problem of our time. We can go so far as to say that these notions, as part of our political imaginary, are disintegrating. Identity as a concept has suffered major transformations before our eyes, and it entails questions on particularism and universalism (Laclau): whether they are seen as complementary, mutually exclusive or as creating tensions. The problem can be formulated in terms of pure difference, or pure particularism doing away entirely with universal principles. Against this conception of difference, my proposal is a difference that is worked out through a relation to others, and which emerges once our appeals to the Other (the symbolic, the law) have been abandoned. The implications of accepting that 'there is no Other of the Other', that nothing guarantees the Other's certainty, consistence and completeness, that the Other possesses nothing to validate our existence, has fundamental implications for the forms of colonialism I have outlined.

LALANGUE AND FANTASY STRUCTURE

If the aim of colonial powers is to breakdown the fantasy structure of the country, the return of the Real guarantees consistency. While the aggressor tries to destroy the way the subject perceives itself, its national myths, beliefs, language to dismantle its identity, in the Caribbean islands lalangue helps sustain the fantasy structure of homogeneity and identity. Some examples come to mind —papiamento, creóle, or the tones and innuendos of the English, Spanish or French. It is now pertinent to distinguish between language and lalangue. We all are accidentally born to language, which is a formal system and also the Other and the Symbolic order. We struggle continuously with language as words that continually slip through ref-

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erence. Lalangue indicates the tensions and conflicts of the non-communicative aspects of language which, through ambiguity and homophony, give rise to a sort of jouissance. It is like the substrate of polysemy out of which language is constructed. Through lalangue the Real is reinforced, and the 'radical evil' (in Kantian terms), or evil constructed as a duty —which is the stuff imperialisms and colonialisms is made of— is placed out of joint. What Lacán called 'The Thing' in one of his seminars, is both the colonized and the colonizer, both distorted by the 'wall of language' in their prototypical representation. If the USA has been Das Ding ("The Thing") in the Caribbean area —one must remember the invasion of both Puerto Rico and Cuba in 1898, the invasions of Nicaragua and of Mexico, the reoccupation by North American troops of Santo Domingo, the various involvements in Haiti since 1791, the recent invasion of Grenade, the demonization of Castro's Cuba— represent that 'radical evil' of ethical duty of the 'manifest destiny', which has transformed North American politics as agent-instrument of historical will in the area. In short: for both the USA and for the Caribbean person the colonial and imperialistic experience has been a shared history since the Monroe Doctrine's policy of 1823 to 'exclude foreign powers in the Caribbean', to the extent that the Caribbean is not our sea, and is often called the 'American Mediterranean'; 'American' connoting the primacy of the United States in world economy. However, the general theoretical lesson to be drawn is to recognize the working of language: in its imaginary dimension, the wall of language which interrupts, distorts and inverts the discourse of the Other works both ways: the Caribbean is 'The Thing' inasmuch as North America is 'The Thing,' which is both the lower limit of all subjectivity and an internal threat to the psychic cohesion of the subject. That is the paradox of forms of colonialism. Or formulated in Lacanian terms; "language is as much there to found us in the Other as to drastically prevent us from understanding him" (The Ego 244); it is thus an anamorphic view. This images the colonized as one, a kind of universal class, and on the level of fantasy it has created —for evident historical reasons— the division between 'us' and 'them,' which is in the core of artistic expression. The irreducible horror, this evil which snaps the subject from within until uprooting it from its own sense of coherence has been since the turn-of-the century the nodal point, in its paradoxical existence. US antagonism changes in each situation and condition; if the early modernists of both Cuba and Puerto Rico felt that their language, culture and history would be suppressed (Rubén Darío's swan series is a forceful expression with the enigma of the swan's neck: "Y tantos millones de hombres hablaremos inglés?" [And will so many of us speak English?], still in the 1980's and 1990's the whole Caribbean (in various languages and lalangues) express a resistant, political, oppositional postmodernity (Zavala "The Caribbean," "When the Popular"). Tropes reconnect some parts of the Americas

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with shame and redirect and ethically proper violence against a history of defeat by imperialist powers originating five centuries ago. This shame signals a recognition of the half-hidden narratives of colonialism's success in the unequivocal sign of neocolonialism (and its formless 'commonwealths') on the eve of the next millenium. Art —sublimation— as Lacan states in his seminar on ethics, tames, colonizes, vehicles Das Ding in the Real, but at the same time it vehicles jouissance (Lacan The Ethics).

F O R M S OF JOUISSANCE

It would be difficult to find a better metaphor for forms of this jouissance —this 'us', or 'surpl-us', that is 'more than ourselves,' a growth of enjoyment— than popular music and popular religious forms. However, many indications lead us to connect music and lyrics to cultural identities, specifically to the notion of Caribbeanness (Zavala "When the Popular"). Be it the lyrical-erotic bolero —a modernist offspring of courtly love (and we shall return to this point), the carnivalized guaracha, the disruptive merengue or the theatricalized son, all are part of the vernacular and of this libidinal enjoyment. Songs traditionally situate themselves at the very edge, to struggle against complacency and conformity and to reconnect shame in the sense I have given to this term. Apolonia, my bolero singer, is always prone to assert plurality and heteroglossia, cautioning the audience against a postmodern celebration of pluralistic, schizoid identities. Hers is a vision of displacing imperialism's dominating system of knowledge, and of locating the internal interrogations of those engaged in developing a critique from both inside and outside its social and cultural hegemony. The inscription of heterogeneity and heteroglossia —with lalangue, which is the exact contrary to globalizations and universals— will allow for a new relation to ethics. The bolero — which I will use as a synecdoche of Caribbeanness— details the plurality of cultures that coexisted in turn-of-the-century Cuba, whence it migrated, and in its double voice, referred speech and heteroglossia, shows traces of the linguistic dimension of class struggle. The bolero strives to deploy the canonical high culture, transferring them from the pantheon of models, re-accentuating the subversive ideological contents of emotions and feelings. A zone of encounter between orality and writing, the lyrics assimilate the significant verbal relations of emotional memory canonized by ideological systems. I would like to stress a paradox: the lyrics of the bolero may be described as 'postcolonial' in their responsiveness, as they are expressions of the black and mulatto population of Cuba, and simultaneously they arise in 'colonial' societies, with Afro-Caribbean polyrhythms. Its multiculturalism is not only an expression of difference, but — more important— a difference that is worked out through a relation to others, and

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which emerges once our appeals to the Other (the symbolic, the law) are being questioned. It is important to stress that it emerges around the 1880's and 1890's —we are referring to the highest peak of anti-colonial struggle in Cuba, the 'Cuban War', at it is known in the metropolis. It reveals lalangue of this black and mulatto population just freed from slavery, and inverts the discourse of the Other. I have elsewhere (El bolero; "When the Popular") underlined the heteroglossic struggle among competing languages which the bolero composer decentralizes: from the modernist swan trope, to the Madonnas and Venuses of the Renaissance, and the amatory tongue of courtly love. Taking now a Lacanian stand, it expresses a modernity which is not out of date, in its reaccentuation of courtly love, whose structure can still be detected in sexual relations today (Zizek The Metastases). The Lady of the bolero is far from a sublime object, but a remote impassive figure who imposes arbitrary tasks; she is inaccessible. If courtly love is linked with masochism, the lyrics of the bolero often theatricalize the masochistic contract. But also, the Venuses and princesses of the bolero are also a name for the Real that continually evades the grasp. She is pursued precisely because she is forbidden (drawing but departing from Zizek in Wright & Wright 1999). The survival of the courtly love structure proves the continuing male attempt to compensate for his reduction of the woman to a mere vehicle for his fantasy, while the woman comes to inhabit this fantasy as her 'femininity', thus deprived of her own particularity as a woman (Wright & Wright 150). No wonder many lyrics describe an inscrutable Otherness in the woman, the princess may well be an uncanny, monstrous character. The Real could very well be Cubanness, as well as class struggle, which continually evades the grasp of this post-slavery population. In this debate, I present tempestuously and quick as lightning one issue that I consider crucial: subjects and historical institutions, or in pre-Lacanian terms, cultural identity. It is evident that we are referring to symbolic identities, which I will now address from the specific angle of the syncretism of religious practices, in particular 'santería' and 'espiritismo', which are at the core of common discourse (employing Lacanian coinage) or everyday ideology (in Bakhtinian terms). From the postcolonial perspective —with all the paradoxes we have been tracing— such practices translate the value of culture-as-sign: that present that is struggling to find its mode of narration. These practices — which traverse classes and ethnicities— occur in most cultural texts from the Antilles, and in some Mesoamerican and Mexican narrations (Rulfo and García Márquez, Miguel Angel Asturias, my own novels — Apolonia expressively reminds me)— they present mischievous accounts uniting Homer and Changó in Baroque proliferations. How identity is constructed through these rhizomes is predicated with life and death — how desire (evidently in Lacanian terms) is constructed, and how in

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its metonymic movement it deals with something Beyond the Pleasure Principle; that is, death. I present for discussion of this enjoyment or jouissance two points, as fast as the lightning of Superwoman, if there ever was a lightning. 1. Hysteria. In a close reading, these forms of religious syncretism are forms of 'hystericization' of Christianity (a form of Baroque decentering), thus making the radical externality of the Other the place where the truth of the subject is articulated. If the unconscious is outside —as Lacan suggests— this externalization exhibits the subversive character of these cultures with Christianity. They make visible the hysterical scandalous core of Christianity. The point needs further development, however; the task is to locate the subject with whom the 'hysteric' must identify to be able to reach her / his own desire. I am, of course, referring to the important four discourses Lacan develops, which have far-reaching implications. Lacan suggests that the hysteric is, in a sense, the divided or split subject; but the point is that by 'hystericization', an ordinary, carnal, passionate Christ is shown, who cannot come to terms witn his interpellation, to the extent that the meaning of his 'temptation' lies precisely in the hysterical resistance to God's mandate (I draw on but depart from Zizek The Sublime). 2. Psychosis. Given the central status of this syncretism in relation to the symbolic order, one has to draw a radical conclusion: the only way not to be deceived is to maintain a distance from the symbolic order...to assume a psychotic position, since psychotics are not trapped by the symbolic order. Decentring, eccentricity are —in my reaccentuation and reappropriation— psychotic positions, which differ from traditional cultural expressions by a certain surplus. If an analogy can be drawn, they exempt themselves from the sphere of the struggle for power. At the same time, they make it clear that their aim is more radical: what they are striving after is a fundamental transformation of the entire mode of action and belief, a change in the life paradigm affecting our most intimate attitudes. For example, an attitude toward nature as dialogic interplay. We are now in a position to specify more clearly these contours: a strong historical tradition (socialism, Marxism, anarchism, and the philosophical 'death of god'), has identified religion with the ideological apparatuses, while, at the same time, some forms of religious cultures have been interpreted as forms of rebellion (Haiti, to be precise, but Franz Fannon also refers to this form of delegitimization). My suggestion brings us to the radical dimension of discourse, understood as the types of social bond or four possible articulations of the network regulating intersubjective relations: what Lacan describes toward the end of the 1960's (Encore) as his theory of the four discourses —master, university, hysteric, analyst— suggesting that the matrix of each discourse is a possible position in the intersubjective network of communication. I refer to only two of those discourses: discourse of the master, where a certain signifier (SI), represents the subject

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(barred S) for another signifier, or for all other signifiers. This operation leaves some disturbing surplus (objet petit a): all discourse is an attempt to come to terms with this surplus. While the discourse of the university produces subjects by an implantation of knowledge (a neutral knowledge where one can always see the gesture of the master), the discourse of the hysteric is a question addressed to master about the 'founding word' (the act of conferring a symbolic mandate that, by naming, establishes the place in the symbolic network. Lacan's parodie examples are 'You are my master, my wife, my king...'. The hysteric articulates the experience of a fissure between the signifier that represents each of us (the symbolic order that determines our place in the social network), and the non-symbolized surplus of being there. Now, if the field of communication is structured like a paradoxical circle in which the sender receives from the other her / his own message in a reverse form (a form of anathropy), the decanted Other decides the true meaning in the network of communication. Finally —and this is a crucial point in my argument— the effort to establish distinctions between communication and meaning, led Lacan to introduce the objet petit a (which is very different from the sinthome already defined). The term indicates the ultimate support of the subject's consistency: the bond of enjoyment that simultaneously attracts and repels us. It can also be defined as the object of desire, that which is in you more than you, the object of desire we seek in the other. It is both a surplus of meaning and a surplus of enjoyment, and was inspired by Marx's concept of surplus value: the excess which has no use value, but persists as enjoyment. Since the objet petit a sets desire in motion, it can also be equated to the drive, which Freud describes in Totem and Taboo —the ambivalent desire which he links to the rites and ceremonies involved in taboos, and in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, to desire in its relationship with death. All these baroque rhizomes are drawn to suggest the link between 'santería' and 'espiritismo' with what I will call identification with the sinthome. We could say that the ambiguity inherent in it overlaps the two opposed meanings of the term existence; for our purpose, if existence is understood as a 'judgment' by which we symbolically affirm the existence of any entity, it is synonymous with symbolization, integration into the symbolic order. Only what is symbolized fully exists. And, in its opposite sense —existence as the impossible-real nexus resisting symbolization. If both cultural-religious expressions we are trying to define help identify with the sinthome, it means that each helps isolate the core of enjoyment, which is immune to symbolic efficacy, the operating mode of discourse. The 'pathological' singularity (in the Kantian sense) of this place allows us to recognize the element that guarantees our consistency. It means that the only way to get rid of the element that hysterizes us is to identify with it. Finally, in the field of culture, this identification with the sinthome we have been describing,

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allows to traverse and subvert the fantasy that determines the field of social meaning, the ideological self-understanding of a given society. The symptom is then no longer the disturbing intrusion of something alien, but the point of eruption of the hidden truth of the existing social order. The remainder takes us back to the beginning in spirals: lalangue, that something which exceeds not only the speaker; it is a storage, or "the collection of traces which other 'subjects' have left, i.e. that, with the help of which, let's say, each subject inscribed its desire into language, since the speaking being has to have a signifier to be able to desire; and desire in what? in its fantasies, i.e. again in signifiers" (Salecl, (Per)versions 124). The role of lalangue, then, should not be neglected in our theorizations about postcolonialism. The 'treasure of signifiers' which is language, and lalangue from that universe of contradictions and paradoxes, helps us delineate quite another notion of the postcolonial, or as Apolonia interrupts to say in Lacanese: the different modes of subjectivization, the way the individual lives his / her subject position, leaves as a remainder a void, a lack. And more paradoxically, the failure of its representation is the only way to represent it adequately. I listen and wonder.

W O R K S CITED

Jacques. Encore, 1962-1963. Paris: Seuil, 1 9 7 5 . Ecrits: A Selection. London: Tavistock, 1977. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. London: Hogarth Press, 1977. Freud's Papers on Technique. 1953-1954. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. — The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960. London: Routledge, 1992. — The Psychoses, 1955-1956. London: Routledge, 1993. LACLAU, Ernesto, ed. Making of Political Identities. London: Verso, 1994. — "Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity." The Identity Question. Ed. John Rajchman. London: Routledge, 1995. 93-108. M E M M I , Albert. Portrait du colonisé précédé du portrait du colonisateur. Paris: Payot, 1979. SALECL, Renata. The Spoils of Freedom. London: Routledge, 1 9 9 4 . — (Per)versions of Love and Hate. London: Verso, 1998. WRIGHT, Elizabeth and Edmond WRIGHT. The Zizek Reader. London: Blackwell, 1999. ZAVALA, Iris M. El bolero. Historia de un amor. Madrid: Alianza, 1991. — Colonialism and Culture. Hispanic Modernisms and the Social Imaginary. Indiana: Indiana UP, 1992.

LACAN,

— — — —

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— "The Caribbean: A Common Discourse? Or the Burden of Amontillado (An Essay in Critical Fiction)." Latin American Postmodernisms. Ed. Richard A . Young. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1977. 127-139. — "When the Popular Sings the Self: Heterology, Popular Songs, and Caribbean Writing." A History of Literature in the Caribbean vol. 3. Ed. A. James Arnold. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1977. 187-199. — Tiresias Paradox in the Third Millenium. Key-Note Address, Interdisciplinary Conference at the University of San Francisco, Hispanics: Cultural Locations. October, 1997. ZIZEK, Slavoj. "The missing link of fantasy." Analysis 3 (1991): 36-49. — The Metastases of Enjoyment. London: Verso, 1994. — The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1998. — The Ticklish Subject. The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 1999.

O N FEMINISMS AND POSTCOLONIALISMS: REFLECTIONS SOUTH OF THE RIO GRANDE R. Aída Hernández Castillo

In these times of globalization characterized by fragmentation —of the productive process, of political struggles, of the collective imaginarles— the critical sectors around the world, whether in activist movements or in academia, face the challenge of building alliances and micro-politic equivalence link-chains to confront a globalizing neoliberal project that uses ideas, images and weapons to wield its power. In this effort to build alliances it is a priority that those of us who carry the struggle from the so-called Third World —or what some have called the Two-Thirds World (Esteva and Prakash)— establish a dialogue and share our experiences. The Mayan women of the agro-ecological movement in Chiapas, with whom I have worked, would have much to share with the women of Garhwal in the Himalayas, who have defended their woodlands and opposed the transnational wood industry through an eco-feminist movement called Chipko (see Shiva). Unfortunately, people and information do not move as easily from South to South as capital and labor (when required to do so) move from North to South, and South to North, respectively. Political and intellectual exchange between Latin America, Africa, and Asia has been limited by language barriers and the precariousness of our publishing industry and our scientific and educational institutions. The ideas of African, Arab, or Indian intellectuals have reached us through the United States or Europe. It has been the migration to the North which has made it possible for these two-thirds of the planet to meet, and often it has been the political, economic or political immigrants who have become bridges between political and intellectual debates. This is the case of the academic output of the group known as postcolonial theoreticians, a heterogeneous and trans-disciplinary group composed mostly of intellectuals from the Middle-East and Southeast Asia linked to universities in the United States and England. This body of literature has been known in Latin America mainly through Spanish-speaking academics living in the United States, who, whether they are adopting these theoretical proposals (See Grupo Latinoamericano de Estudios Subalternos; Rodríguez; Coronil "Naturaleza," "Más allá;" Mignolo Local Histories, "Posoccidentalismo;" Mendieta; Castro-Gómez "Latinoamericanismo;" Moreiras) or confronting them (Achugar, Moraña, Richard, Verdesio), have incor-

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porated their ideas to the Latin American debate on the crisis of modernity.1 However, the lack of recognition on the part of postcolonial theoreticians to the ground Latin America has covered in the processes of de-colonialization of knowledge has hurt some people's feelings and has perhaps influenced the rejection of their ideas as irrelevant to our geographic or historical context (see Dussel, Verdesio), or as illegitimate for being the product of a new intellectual fad generated by North American academia or a globalizing theoretical avant-garde movement (see Richard, Morana). The work of a group called the Subaltern Studies Group, which originated at the end of the 1970s in Southern India, has had an equally contradictory response.2 The academic work of this group of social historians, under the leadership of Ranajit Guha, set out to cleanse India's historiography of colonial leftovers and to recover the historical agency of the subaltern, whose subordination had been reproduced and perpetuated by official historiography. It was not until the late 1990s that their work became available in Spanish and began to be debated by Latin American historians; its presence in the curricula of our universities, however, is still weak. 3 1 believe it is time to rise above the arguments of whether the intellectual de-colonization process was discussed in Latin America before postcolonial studies were popular or whether Alfonso Reyes and Edmundo O'Gorman were way ahead of Edward Said in the analysis of how Latin America was constructed or invented by European thought. I believe it is time to establish more constructive dialogues between intellectual traditions so that we are able to recover those theoretical and more importantly methodological proposals in our epistemological and political search. Theoretical proposals from postcolonial feminists have received even less attention, in spite of the fact that their questioning of feminist ethnocentrism and their theoretical proposals to historicize and contextualize the analysis of gender inequality could be very useful to those of us who, from academia or political activism, are pushing for a transcultural feminism

1 The debates about the crisis of the Enlightenment Project in Latin America and the critique of the colonialism of knowledge can be found in three excellent anthologies that offer a general perspective about the different views on the subject: Teorías sin disciplina (ed. Castro-Gómez y Mendieta), Pensar (en) los intersticios. Teoría y práctica de la crítica poscolonial (ed. Castro-Gómez et al) and La colonialidad del saber (ed. Edgardo Lander) 2 Although these authors' output is considered part of the literary body of Postcolonial Studies, this term includes a wider collective of intellectuals from different countries and disciplines that do not constitute a consolidated work group as is (or was) the group of Subaltern Indian Studies. For a reflection on the links between Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Studies, see Gyan Prakash. 3 The first translations of the work by the Group of Subaltern Studies were published in Bolivia in 1997 in an anthology compiled by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Rossana Barragán. Two years later several of these translations were re-printed and complemented with other works in a new anthology edited in Mexico by Saurabh Dube. The same year an issue of the magazine Historia y Grafía 12 (1999) published by the Universidad Iberoamericana de México was dedicated to the Subalternists.

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or a feminism of diversity (feminismo de la diversidad) that recognizes the plurality of contexts in which we Latin American women construct our gender identities, live in relationships of inequality, and develop our strategies for struggle. As part of this effort to establish constructive dialogues from South to South, to create interfaces and confront political fragmentation, I intend to approach the theoretical production of postcolonial feminists by reading their contribution from my own geographical and historical point of view, and through the political and cultural realities that women live South of the Rio Grande.

A SPOT ON THE MAP IS ALSO A SPOT IN HISTORY... AND A PERSPECTIVE ON KNOWLEDGE

I adopt the words of Chandra Mohanty ("Under Western Eyes") to remember that our place of enunciation determines the way we live and conceive relationships of domination, and that in order to expose the networks of power that are hidden behind the facade of neutrality and universality of western scientific knowledge it is necessary to remember that our discourse production and our worldview are marked by geopolitics. I think therefore it is important to place myself on the map and in history, to explain the way in which the theoretical proposals of postcolonial feminists echo my own political and epistemological search. I would like to situate my knowledge, to recognize the historical and social context from which I perceive reality and develop my intellectual work. Echoing the proposal of feminist anthropologist Donna Haraway, I believe it is important to substitute patriarchal objectivism with situated knowledge that recognizes where we are speaking from, while at the same time neither rejects the possibility of knowing, nor makes relative, the ethical and explicative value of any knowledge.4 My personal history and my place on the map have influenced the fact that three conceptual proposals developed by postcolonial feminists have not only been useful to me in my academic work, but also invaluable as political tools: thinking about identities and borders, the proposal to think of colonialism not as a historical stage but as a relation of power between different types of knowledge, and the call to reconsider our feminism through the recognition of diversity.

4 On the issue, this author says: "But the alternative to relativism is not totalization and single vision, which is always finally the unmarked category whose power depends on systematic narrowing and obscuring. The alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology. Relativism is a way of being nowhere while claiming to be everywhere equally. The 'equality' of positioning is a denial of responsibility and critical enquiry. Relativism is the perfect mirror twin of totalization in the ideologies of objectivity; both deny the stakes in location, embodiment, and partial perspective; both make it impossible to see well. Relativism and totalization are both 'god-tricks'

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BORDER IDENTITIES

The first time I read the postcolonial feminist critiques of cultural purism and ethnic essentialism I identified with the way in which they confronted or negotiated with anti-imperial or anti-colonial nationalisms that at once gave them spaces for resistance and subordinated them and colonized their bodies in the name of identity and tradition (see Chatterjee The Nation, Nationalist Thought; Narayan, Anzaldúa).5 The gender analysis these theoreticians make of the national postcolonial projects and/or the contestatory nationalism of ethnic minorities revealed for me the importance of complementing the analysis of the worldsystem (Wallerstein) with a gender perspective in order to understand the complexities and contradictions of political and identity spaces that seemed to me before to be clearly contestatory. Their analysis of the way in which national narratives subordinate women to make them into the "guardians of tradition" and "mothers of the nation" reminded me of the old Latin American revolutionary song, which I once sang uncritically: "A parir madres latinas, a parir más guerrilleros, ellos sembrarán jardines donde había basureros." ("Give birth, Latin mothers, give birth to more guerillas, for they will be the ones who plant gardens where once there was garbage").6 In spite of the identity essentialisms that demand our loyalty to a Mexican or Latin American identity, our reality often puts us at the crossing of frontiers, whether they be geographical or metaphorical. Gloria Anzaldúa, a postcolonial Chicano feminist, describes us in what she calls the new border identities, and points out: "Because I am in all cultures at the same time, a soul between two worlds, my head buzzes with contradiction. I am disoriented by all the voices speaking simultaneously." By defining herself as the "New Mestiza," Anzaldúa questions any criteria of authenticity and cultural pluralism, reminding us that nothing is static, that even ancient traditions have become ancient because someone re-signified them and claimed them as such. Border identities not only con-

promising vision from everywhere and nowhere equally and fully, common myths in theories surrounding science. But it is precisely in the politics and epistemology of partial perspectives that the possibility of sustained, rational, objective enquiry rests" (Donna J. Haraway 183-201). 5 Although the term postcolonial feminism has been used mainly to refer to the output of African (Arab and Sub-Saharan) and Southeast Asian feminists, it has been appropriated by some Chicano and Black feminists who have questioned the colonial discourse of white feminism. For a justification of their inclusion in Postcolonial Feminism see John, Hurtado and Shutte. 6 In the 1970s the feminist rock band "Las Leonas" was already criticizing the patriarchal perspectives of the left, parodying the revolutionary song in the following terms: "A abortar madres latinos, a abortar impunemente, para no parir soldados que maten a tanta gente" ("Abort Latin mothers, abort freely, don't give birth to soldiers that kill so many people") I thank Olivia Gall, ex-member of Las Leonas, for sharing this information.

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front cultural traditions, but the very way in which "tradition" is defined: "I am a mixture, I am the very act of mixing, uniting and combining, which has produced not only a creature of light and a creature of darkness, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings" (81). As a feminist, Anzaldúa rebels against the machismo of Chicano nationalism and its limited and "disciplinary" definitions of tradition; at the same time, as a Chicana she questions the ethnocentrism of Anglo-Saxon feminism, and as a lesbian she questions both the homophobia of Chicano nationalism as well as the heterosexist perspective of the feminist movement. From her own experience she shows us the limitations of those identity politics that are based on criteria of exclusion and authenticity. She does not propose to create a general theory of identity, nor does she claim that identities are always experienced as multiple and contradictory, but simply that, in the new global context, there are many subjects such as she who live their identities as a mixture and whose heads buzz with contradiction. Like Anzaldúa, I place the genesis of my identity perspective in my border experience. I was born and raised in the North of Mexico, just an hour away from San Diego, California, the main U.S. Naval base. I grew up and lived thinking of the border not only as a geographical space, but as a life experience marking my encounter with Mexico as a nation and with the imperialism of the United States. My father, a fisherman, mechanic and electrician, came to the border attracted by the promises of the "American Dream," but after several encounters with the migra (U.S. immigration authorities), he decided to live in Ensenada, where he stayed until his death. He kept his crossings of the line to an absolute minimum and always prided himself on "not owing anything to the gringos." Through him (he was a freemason, a free thinker, and was anticlerical) I came into contact with anti-imperialist nationalism, and read about "México Indígena," whose discourse vindicated post-revolutionary nationalism. The exaltation of the image of the dead Indian —symbolized in the cult to the Aztecs and represented in murals by Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco— was in stark contrast with the discrimination and marginalization of living Indians. Mestizaje was the keystone of the official discourse on national identity: "we are the result of the fusion of two races," the text books repeated, once again bestowing on women's bodies the "patriotic" duty of giving birth to the mestizo.7 7 The discourse on Mestizaje diminished the political action spaces available to the Living Indian and led to a formulation of his presence as a national "problem" to whose solution Mexican anthropologists dedicated themselves, creating a current called "Indigenismo." Its principal exponent, Manuel Gamio, was a student of Franz Boas at Columbia University and is recognized as a pioneer in modern anthropological practice in Mexico. His book, Forjando Patria [Making a Nation] set the ideological basis for official nationalism. For an analysis of the transition from Mestizo Mexico to Pluricultural Mexico in the representations of the nation and the policies towards the indigenous populations, see Hernández Castillo and Ortiz Elizondo ("Constitutional").

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While my enthusiasm grew for what Guillermo Bonfil Batalla would later call "Profound Mexico" (1987), the Mixteco indigenous migrants started arriving in the agricultural valleys of Baja California and were regarded with disdain, or in the best of cases, with condescension, by the local population, who saw them as a necessary evil for the benefit of local agriculture. My father's nationalism contrasted with the family's daily reality, in which we followed with interest the Hit Parade, spoke a colloquial Spanish full of Anglicisms, celebrated both Halloween and Day of the Dead and called all our activities to a halt when the Dodgers —our household's favorite baseball t e a m faced "away" teams. My mother —cook, hairdresser, tarot and Spanish card reader— strove to raise seven children while keeping active in an informal economy that barely served to complement the household budget. Her longings as a consumer were marked by "the other side" —to have cars like the ones "they" had, to live as "they" did, and to be able some day to retire as "they" did. Caught between a border culture that placed me close to the United States and an ideological resistance that distanced me from it, I chose to study anthropology in Mexico City. I was the only one of the seven children to leave home, against my father's authority, to find the roots of the "true Mexican culture" that was obscured for me by the border context. It was the beginning of the 1980s, and at the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH) discussions about culture and power were dominated by Marxism. The success of the Sandinista Revolution and the struggles for national liberation in Guatemala and El Salvador kept socialist Utopias alive, always conceived from a Latin American perspective in which peasantry played the lead role. Anthropology took me to the Southern border, and it was with a mixture of Northern nationalism and faith in the potential of a peasant Utopia that I first approached the realities of the indigenous communities of that region. However, my first encounters with the darker face of Mexican nationalism, arising from my contact with Guatemalan refugees, led me to question many of the premises about that imaginary community we call Mexico. The stories told about the northern border —of abuse on the part of immigration agents, of racism, of the trafficking of humans, of the absence of human rights in that strip of no-man's-land— are not very different from the realities faced by Guatemalan immigrants in the Southern Mexican border. After three generations born on Mexican soil, many Maya peasants are still afraid to speak their indigenous "Guatemalan" language, or to claim their family links in the areas around the Tacana Volcano for fear of losing rights to their land or being deported to the neighboring country. At the Southern border my northern nationalism was no longer a space of resistance; in this context it had a different connotation, and a very thin line sepa-

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rated my "Mexican pride" from the official discourse by which the cultural rights of border indigenous peoples of "Guatemalan" origin were being denied. Questioning my own nationalism led me to search in the voices of the Southern border for a critique of cultural purism, of ethnic absolutism, and of the homogenizing and exclusive discourses and practices. My experience while living for several years among the Mam people, a Maya group whose history has been marked by border crossings, helped me to understand identity from a historical perspective that questions the limitations of cultural essentialism. Mam peasants crossed national borders between Guatemala and Chiapas, geographical borders from the mountains to the jungle, religious borders from traditional Catholicism to Liberation Theology and from Presbyterianism to Jehovah's Witness, as well as cultural borders by identifying themselves as both mestizo and indigenous in different historical periods. The essentialist discourses that seek the roots of indigenous identities in ancient cultures are of little use to represent the border realities lived by these Mayan people. To base the political recognition of indigenous peoples on them would eventually legitimize new exclusions in the name of "authenticity." 8 After moving from one Mexican border to the other, the words of the feminist anthropologist Anna Lowenhaup Tsing gained new meaning for me: "Border experiences are those which undermine the safe territory of cultural certainty and essential identities" (225). The border ceased for me to be a line separating two nations, and became instead an identity space, a way of being, staying and changing.

COLONIALISM / DECOLONIALIZATION / POSTCOLONIALISM

Although I claim the importance of the concept of border identity as a tool with which to confront cultural essentialism, I also recognize that it is easier to renounce "essential identities" when one is in a culturally privileged position, and that this is a position that as a Mexican mestizo I hold over the indigenous population. As a non-indigenous woman, of dark skin and European facial features, I grew up assuming and claiming a mestizo identity which to a great extent reproduced the biologic discourses of official nationalism and at the same time made me part of an "unmarked" identity in the Mexican context. In the United States I could perhaps be considered "Native American" because I descend from the Mayo indigenous peoples of Sinaloa, "Chicano" if I were the child of Mexican immigrants, or "Woman of Color" due to my phenotype. In a Mexican context, 8 For a detailed analysis of these "border-crossings" and their identity implications, see Hernández Castillo (La otra frontera, "Entre el etnocentrismo"). The debate about political limitations of ethnic essentialism in the Mexican context can be found in Hernández Castillo ("Indigenous Law").

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however, I am part of the "norm" —that which is assumed as invisible, unmarked and even universal, what Anglo-Saxons are in the U.S. or England, or what men are in the European project of modernity. I am part of that "National Average" that is assumed in the Federal Code of Penal Procedures (article 220b) when the right of an indigenous individual to anthropological expert opinion is granted in order to account for their cultural difference: "When the accused belongs to an ethnic indigenous group, an effort shall be made to procure expert opinion to better understand the individual's personality and to estimate the cultural difference from the national average" [my italics]. The privilege that I have in belonging to this national average was not evident to me until I lived in Chiapas, a racist and racialized society in which relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous individuals continue to reproduce hierarchies of a colonial origin. The persistence of the right of "pernada" (not recognized by law, but socially accepted), which allows the employer or the family's son to make "sexual use" of the indigenous servant, the fact that there exist "family girls," indigenous girls adopted by mestizo families to serve for life and who often receive no other remuneration than a roof over their heads, food, and padrinazgo, are just a few examples that allow us to understand the concept of colonialism in operation in the Latin American context. Parallel to this, the way in which indigenous peoples are still being constructed by academia, the media, and the law as "different," "pre-modern," and "opposed to the values of progress" makes necessary an analysis of the discursive strategies of subordination that are being used to perpetuate these colonial relationships. More specifically, I consider that the concept of internal colonialism, developed in Latin American social sciences (see Stavenhagen, González Casanova), continues to be very useful in understanding the insertion of indigenous peoples into the modernizing projects of the mestizo elite. In spite of the constant migratory flow from rural areas to the cities, indigenous people — whether living in urban centers or not— remain marginalized and in relationships of economic exploitation and cultural colonialism. The concept of colonialism is thus not alien to Latin American realities, nor has it lost its explicative usefulness after the consolidation of post-independence nation-states. Quite the opposite is true: the concept of decolonialization is central to the contemporary struggles of the Latin American indigenous movement and to the theoretical production of its intellectuals (see Bonfil Batalla, Utopía-, Cojti). Regarding the concept of postcolonialism, those of us who use the term to refer to Latin American social processes have been accused of using it out of context, given the scant relation it bears to our colonial and modern history.9 Critics 9

This criticism of my book La Otra Frontera: Identidades Multiples en el Chiapas Poscolonial (2001) was made by Xóchitl Ley va at the event in which the book was presented.

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point out that the term refers to cultures that emerged from British or French imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and respond to domination models that have little to do with those established by Spanish colonialism four centuries earlier. They maintain that the institutions, the system of economic organization, and the cultural policies of the British and French Empires, among other issues addressed by postcolonial studies, were very different in the Spanish imperial era between the fifteenth and eighteenth century. They apply the term 'postcolonial' only to the historical and political moment of which some theoreticians of this intellectual current write, not to their epistemological proposal to de-colonize knowledge and reveal the way in which textual representations of those social subjects constructed as the "others" in various geographical and historical contexts are converted into a form of discursive colonialism that not only narrates but also constructs reality. Colonialism as a historical moment of European expansion (extending from the fifteenth to the mid-twentieth century) is relevant insofar as it marks the genesis and consolidation of Western ways of knowing that are established as part of the colonial system of capitalism. Postcolonial theory confronts the epistemological foundations of these forms of knowledge, which have been hegemonic as much in Latin America as in Southeast Asia, in spite of the differences between the Spanish and British colonial projects. In this sense, producing insight of a postcolonial perspective is a challenge as pertinent in Latin America as in the ex-colonies of the Commonwealth. Walter Mignolo (Local Histories) and Fernando Coronil ("Naturaleza," "Más allá") do not aim so much to point out the differences in historical moments as to emphasize the different discursive strategies that were used to subordinate America and the East. Without completely rejecting the, proposals of postcolonial studies, they set out to further their critiques from a Latin American specific, substituting the term postcolonialism with post-Westernism (posoccidentalismo). These authors point out that, in contrast to the processes described by Edward Said for the East, the colonizing strategy in the case of Latin America did not consist of "exoticizing" it or constructing it as an extreme "otherness," but of integrating it as part of the Western Hemisphere and in this way negating its cultural specificity and its own civilizing processes. Based on this formulation there are three main intellectual responses to the crisis of European modernity: postmodernism in European and North American territories; postcolonialism and postOrientalism respectively in India and the North European colonial territories in Asia and Africa; and post-Westernism in the Spanish colonial territories of Latin America and the Caribbean. The notion of "post-Westernism" would thus be the most adequate to refer to Latin American postcolonialism (Mignolo Local Histories). This proposal, although it may have a cohesive and identifying effect for Latin American intellectuals, does not recognize the specific ways in which

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the indigenous populations of our nations experienced their incorporation to the project of modernity. The post-independence Latin American States established different kinds of relationships with their indigenous populations, and although in many historical moments the acculturating integrationism leveraged denial of difference as a subordinating mechanism, at other times the discursive strategies for representing indigenous peoples wielded exoticism and the construction of an extreme "otherness" (what Said would call Orientalization) to allow modern national societies to construct their identities through constant confrontation with the "savage in the mirror" (Bartra). In the case of Mexico, the continued existence of these strategies was evident in the recent Congress debate about a new Act of Indigenous Rights and Culture, whose detractors, both in academia and politics, represented indigenous peoples as antidemocratic and backward, going so far as to argue that if given autonomy the indigenous could go back to "human sacrifice" (see La Jornada, March 4,1997).10

TRANSCULTURAL FEMINISMS OR FEMINISMS OF DIVERSITY

If my experience at the Mexican borders influenced my theoretical perspectives on national identities, and if my privileged identity as a mestizo sharing daily experiences with the indigenous population influenced my appreciation of the theories on colonialism and postcolonialism, my placement as a woman in a deeply patriarchal and misogynous society and as an anthropologist in an openly antifeminist academia marked my prioritization of gender perspective and analysis of power." During my undergraduate studies, my Marxist education at the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH) gave priority to class over gender as analytical tool to explain social processes. Like many other female Marxist students, I considered feminism a bourgeois, alienating ideology which divided the "people." It was not until the late eighties, when while living in Chiapas I found myself face to face with patriarchal violence that I began to consider gender relationships as formative of the structures of dominance that Marxism sets out to transform. It was a time of political effervescence, in which a significant

10

For an analysis of these discourses and of the obstacles that the indigenous movement has had

to face in its struggle for autonomy, see Rus, Mattiace and Hernández Castillo ( M a y a n

Lives).

" Even today important sectors of Mexican Social Sciences consider feminism as an ideologizing position that hampers objective analysis of social processes. A n example of this way of thinking is the response of well-known philosopher Alejandro Tomasini to an article written by me on Feminism and Postmodernism (see Hernández Castillo in press), in which he asks " I f in effect the content of feminism is as accurate as its proponents want it to be, why does it lack popularity? W h y does it fail to sway the masses? There is only one answer: the failure in practice implies the failure in theory" (to be published in the anthropological journal Desacatos

).

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peasant movement gathered indigenous populations from different parts of the state with demands for land distribution, credit availability, support for commercialization of their products, and an end to state repression of their leaders.12 My stake in helping raise the consciousness of the "people" was to participate in the popular education of Guatemalan refugees and Mexican peasants. Along with murder and kidnapping, rape was used as a tool of repression against several coworkers who worked in productive or educational projects with peasants and indigenous populations. When rapists were identified as members of the police forces, and the ineptitude and indifference of the authorities as well as the limitations of the law in use at the time were demonstrated, we were motivated to begin a fight against sexual and domestic violence through an ethnically and socially diverse organization, of which I was an active member for ten years.13 Arriving at feminism through the back door —that is, through the provinces, through political activism in response to a very concrete situation, as opposed to theoretical and academic reflection— allowed me to stay at the fringe of the academic debate between the proponents of a feminism of equality and a feminism of difference that dominated the Mexican feminist movement at that time. However, many of the popular educational materials and materials of psychological and legal aids for victims of sexual and domestic violence that we used with the indigenous and peasant women who came to our center had been created by urban feminist organizations, which in turn drew on the experiences of North American liberal feminism in the struggle against violence. Located as we were in the Highlands of Chiapas, in the heart of the Tzotzil-Tzeltal zone of the Mayan region, we nevertheless failed to consider the cultural context as an important element in our fight against violence. The exclusion and involuntary silencing of the particular experiences of the indigenous women in our organization eventually led to their breaking away from the collective project.14 In the same way, many of the indigenous users of our center found neither in our psychological support groups (which were in Spanish) nor in our legal battle with the state authorities a solution to the problems of violence that had originally led them to seek help with us. We assumed that our concepts of self-esteem and empowerment were shared by all women, that we understood how patriarchal oppression operated in every

12 For an analysis of the peasant movement in Chiapas during the 1980s, see N. Harvey; Collier and Lowery Quaratiello. 13 A history of the women's group that with time came to be known as Grupo de Mujeres de San Cristóbal las Casas, and from 1994 was re-named COLEM (meaning "free" in Tzotzil), and its origin, goals and limitations can be found in Freyermuth and Fernández. 14 This was not the shared perception of the majority of the organization's members, who gave different, personal explanations for the division of the group. A critical analysis of the relationship between counselors and non-indigenous feminists with indigenous women can be found in Garza and Toledo (forthcoming).

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context, and we thought we had the key to undoing its subordinating mechanisms. In reality, we "limited the meaning of gender to the presuppositions of our [own] practices, and established exclusive gender norms within feminism, often with homophobic [and in our case, ethnocentric] consequences" (Butler 9). Getting to know the work of postcolonial feminists as a graduate student in the United States helped me to improve the articulation of this critique and to reformulate the need, within and beyond academia, for a feminist practice that is more inclusive and considers the plurality of experiences that mark gender identities. Several postcolonial feminists have coincided in pointing out that academic feminist discourses reproduce the same problems as modernist meta-discourses when, through an ethnocentric and heterosexist perspective, they apply the experience of Western, white, middle-class women to the experience of women in general. (See Alarcon, Alexander and Mohanty, Mohanty "Under"). These 'sisterhood'-promoting meta-narratives debilitated feminist struggle by excluding the experiences of other women, and, by focusing all their attention on gender as the main axis of domination, failed to create the necessary conditions to establish other kinds of political alliances. It is in response to these critiques that several theoretical proposals emerge from feminist perspectives recognizing cultural and historical differences. Even though these critiques have been recognized in academic debate,15 they have yet to make their mark on the strategies of the Latin American feminist movement —a situation discussed in greater detail below.

CONTRIBUTIONS OF POSTCOLONIAL FEMINISMS TO LATIN AMERICAN FEMINISMS

By including in this article part of my own story of political and theoretical searching, I aim not only to situate my knowledge, but also to show that turning around to look at the thoughts and proposals of the feminists of the "Third World" who speak to us from their native countries or from their experiences of diaspora is more than just an "intellectual fad that de-contextualizes theoretical frameworks," as some critics of postcolonial studies would have it. In fact it is an effort to establish constructive dialogue and to learn from similar searches and experiences that allow us to go beyond the repetition of schemes to the construction of our own paths and projects and to the possibility for a South-to-South joint struggle. 15 The Mexican magazine Debate Feminista dedicated in 2001 a special issue to the subject of racism, and included the work of Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa; the University Program for Gender Studies of the UNAM, has also translated the work of several postcolonial feminists in its collection Debates Feministas Contemporáneos.

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I would like to emphasize some methodological reflections from postcolonial feminism that seem relevant to me for our own academic and political practice as Latin American feminists.

HISTORICIZING AND CONTEXTUALIZING THE FORMS THAT GENDER RELATIONSHIPS TAKE TO AVOID FEMINIST UNIVERSALISM

The diverse group of feminists gathered under the term Postcolonial Feminists (a group that, to mention only a few, includes women of such varied origins and histories as the Arab writers Fatima Mernisi [Morocco] and Nawal al-Sa'dawi [Egypt], whose work ranges from literature to theory; India's anthropologists like Mary E. John, Kamala Visweswaran, and Chandra Mohanty; Chicano writers and critics like Gloria Anzaldua and Norma Alarcon; and activists and cultural workers like Michelle Wallace and bell hook) nevertheless have one thing in common: in one way or another they have all contributed to exposing the ethnocentrism of Western feminism. In their critiques, postcolonial feminists confront the universalizing discourses of some academic feminists who have established a generalizing perspective of gender relationships based on the experiences and needs of white women in the First World, and as a result have silenced or exoticized those women whose experiences of subordination are marked by race and class. These postcolonial feminists have responded to the universalizing discourses about "women" and "patriarchy" with historically situated anthropological work (see Mahmood, 2001,2003, Abu-Lughold 1986, Mani 1998), with historical research (Chatterjee, The Nation; Hatem), and with literary production (Mernissi, AlSa'dawi, Anzaldua). Their work confronts the binary and simplistic conception of power in which men are dominators and women are subordinated which until very recently hegemonized feminist perspectives in European and North American academia. In their criticism of essentialist feminism, postcolonial feminists show us that these universalist perspectives of patriarchy and women go beyond making "inaccurate representations" of women who do not share the characteristics of the presumed "gender norm," to actually colonizing women's lives with the power effect of their discourses. Chandra Mohanty, in her already classic article "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholars and Colonial Discourses" (first published in 1985 and re-printed many times both in English and in translation) shows how this discursive colonialism works, by making an account of different academic papers that have contributed to construct "Women of the Third World" as an undifferentiated block. Many of the works she analyzes assume that the category of women is something constructed and inherently homogeneous, independent of categories such as class, race and ethic group. This implies a concept of gender

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based on sexual difference. These strategies of discursive colonization tend to construct the Third World Woman as circumscribed to domestic space, victim, ignorant, poor, and bound to tradition —the alter-ego of the feminist scholar, who is liberated, modern and educated, who makes up her own mind and has control over her body and her sexuality. The tension between Westernism as a discursive strategy that integrates by silencing specificity (Mignolo, Local Histories) and Orientalism, which exoticizes and excludes the "other" as alter-ego of the modern subject, are manifest also in Latin American feminist literature. To mention a few examples, texts such as Mujeres e Iglesia: Sexualidad y Aborto en América Latina (Women and the Church: Sexuality and Abortion in Latin America) by Ana Maria Portugal, published by Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir (Catholics for Choice ) (1989), or Los Intereses de las Mujeres y los Procesos de Emancipación en América Latina (Women's Interests and Processes of Emancipation in Latin America), by feminist Virginia Vargas (1993), still assume that all women in Latin America face the same reproductive health problems (in the first example) and that we all understand the same thing by "emancipation" (in the second example). In other spaces I have analyzed how orientalism has worked in the ethnographical representation of "the indigenous woman" in Mesoamerica, pointing out the victimizing emphasis that has characterized much feminist ethnography (see Hernández Castillo "Entre el etnocentrismo"). The problem with these representations is that they translate into exclusive politics that fail to integrate the specific needs of black or indigenous women to the feminist movement's agenda. 16 The history of the Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encounters, which since 1981 have been convened in various nations of our continent, is a history of exclusions and silencings (Bogota, Colombia [1981]; Lima, Peru, [1983]; Bertioga, Brazil [1985]; Taxco, Mexico [1987]; San Bernardo, Argentina [1990], Costa del Sol, El Salvador [1993], Cartagena, Chile [1996]; Juan Dolio, the Dominican Republic [1999] and Playa Tambor, Costa Rica [2002]). The Afro-Dominican feminist Sergia Galván has documented these exclusions and has been one of the few who have dared to point out the racism that permeates Latin American feminism: The feminist movement, like other social movements, has been configured according to racial prejudice. Racism permeates every aspect of our lives, both in the macro-structural dimension and the personal sphere, and to attempt to deconstruct it is very difficult. It is easier to deny it than to make a fuss and a problem of it. That is why

16 1 believe this is not the case for lesbian women, who have played an important role in the movement and have managed to integrate their interests in a more effective manner into the feminist movement's agenda.

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the f e m i n i s t m o v e m e n t f e e l s threatened w h e n racism is m e n t i o n e d . D e f e n s i v e arguments are promptly w i e l d e d , w h i c h explains w h y there is such a fierce opposition to Afro-centrist f e m i n i s m . (4)

This situation led Afro-Latin American women to create their own political spaces, and to organize the First Encounter of Black Women in Latin America in the Caribbean, held on July 1992 in the Dominican Republic. The pressure had some effect, and succeeding encounters featured some panels and workshops where the problem of racism was discussed.17 At the seventh Feminist Encounter, which took place in Chile in 1996, for the first time one of the main three themes of the encounter was a discussion around "The discriminatory dimensions hidden in feminism: indigenous women, black women, women living in poverty and lesbians... among us." However, the differences and tensions between the self-defined autonomous feminist current and currents defined as institutional dominated the whole encounter and brought Latin American feminism to the verge of schism.18 Once again, the issue of racism was pushed to the back burner and remains today a pending matter in Latin American feminism. A worse exclusion has been that of indigenous women, whose participation at feminist conventions has been practically nil, often being represented there by their organizations' advisers. Like black women, they chose as of 1995 to construct their own spaces: the first Continental Convention of Indigenous Women was celebrated in Quito, Ecuador; the second in Mexico City (1997); the third in Panama (2000); and, enjoying a larger attendance from indigenous women from other continents, the Americas Indigenous Women Summit, in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2002. Based on these conventions, the Continental Coordinator of Indigenous Women was formed by indigenous women from Latin America, the United States, and Canada. These new voices have made the exclusions of the Latin American feminist movement more evident and have obviated the urgent need for re-thinking the organizational structures and political agendas from a perspective that can articulate the various struggles of women on our continent.19

" These workshops, however, have had little attendance. On this subject see the reflections of Silvia Marcos about the Taller sobre Feminismo y Diversidad Cultural at the VIII Congreso Latinoamericano y del Caribe, in Marcos ("La Otra mujer"). 18 For a description of autonomous and institutional feminist positions and the implications of these divisions, consult the excellent accounts of the encounters, written collectively by Sonia Alvarez, Elisabeth Friedman, Ericka Beckman, Maylei Blackwell, Norma Stoltz Chinchilla, Nathalie Lebon, Marysa Navarro and Marcela Ríos Tobar (Alvarez). A more descriptive history of the feminist movement in Latin America can be found in Vargas Valente ("Los feminismos"), the specific case of the Mexican Feminisms can be found in Marcos ("Twenty Five Years") 19 Examples of these new voices of Indigenous Feminists can be found in Delgado Pop, Pop Bol, Willis Paau, Sánchez Nestor, Duarte (forthcoming).

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CONSIDERING CULTURE AS A HISTORICAL PROCESS TO AVOID CULTURAL ESSENTIALISM

At the same time, as postcolonial feminists warned of the dangers of universalism, they have also recognized that the concern to recognize and respect difference can lead to cultural essentialisms that frequently serve the patriarchal interests within national and ethnic collectives. The a-historical representations of cultures as homogenous entities of shared values and habits free from power relations gives entrance to cultural fundamentalisms that see any effort on the part of women to transform the practices that affect their lives as a threat to the collective identity of the group. Historicizing cultural practices such as the sati (the immolation of widows on the funeral pyre of their husbands) (Mani, Oldenburg Veena) or infibulation or genital mutilation (Koso-Thomas, Mama, Tripp) have allowed postcolonial feminists to show that many "traditional" practices that affect and violate women's lives have changed with time, that they often have their origins in colonial contexts and that their modification or elimination does not affect the group's identity continuity. These studies have shown that when the transformation of certain traditions affect the interests of the power sectors, the arguments about the dangers of cultural integrity are brought out, as was the case in the debate about women's rights to land in Africa and in several countries of Southeast Asia, where the argument in "defense of tradition" has been used to delegitimize women's demands for land (see Tripp, Agarwal, Khadiagala). To confront the uses of the cultural argument proposed by Uma Narayan that Anti-essentialist feminism can counter this static picture of culture by insisting on a historical understanding of the contexts that Eire currently taken to be "particular cultures" came to be seen as defined as such ...Thus an anti-essentialist understanding of culture should emphasize that the labels that "pick out" particular "cultures" are not simple descriptions we employ to single out already distinct entities. Rather, they are fairly arbitrary and shifting designations, connected to various political projects that have different reasons for insisting upon the distinctiveness of one culture from another. (87)

Deconstructing the way in which certain traits (and not others) are selected as representative of a culture or an integral part of identity allows us to see the network of power behind the representation of difference. The same author points out that the historical perspective of identities allows us to appreciate the way in which certain traits in a culture change without anyone considering such a change a threat to cultural integrity (for example, the incorporation of cars, agricultural technology, communications media...), while others are selectively chosen as cultural losses: "Feminist attention to such aspects of cultural change can help call

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attention to a general process that I call 'selective labeling', whereby those with social power conveniently designate certain changes in values and practices as consonant with 'cultural preservation' while designating other changes as 'cultural loss' or 'cultural betrayal'" (Narayan 89). From the point of view of anthropology, the cultural relativism of some thinkers who validate "cultural survival" has contributed to the idealized representations of indigenous peoples and has left out the voices and questionings of women within those groups. The power groups of these collectives have used these representations to legitimize their privileges. At the other extreme of this perspective are those who reject all the institutions and practices of these collectives based on their colonial origin, stereotyping their cultures through "selective labeling." These two perspectives have been present in the debate over the cultural rights of indigenous peoples in Latin America. On one side there are those who from academia or political struggle have represented indigenous cultures as homogeneous entities independent of power relations and have asserted the need to suspend any judgment of value regarding their cultures, and at a political level have often idealized their practices and institutions (reminiscent of Rousseau's Good Savage, which the West still looks for in its ex-colonies). At the other end there are those who through liberalism deny the right of indigenous peoples to a culture of their own and reject autonomic demands justifying acculturation and integration through a discourse of republican values of equality, assumed as universal. These polarized visions, the first essentialist and the second ethnocentric, leave indigenous peoples with few options to construct their future and re-think their relationship with the nation-states. Nevertheless, there are others who, from political practice and everyday resistance are trying to break free of this bond and are proposing more creative ways to re-think ethnic and generic identities and build a policy of cultural respect that is able to consider diversity within diversity. In the context of Mexico, an incipient indigenous women's movement has assumed the job of confronting both the idealized and the stereotyped excluding visions of their cultures. In the struggle for the recognition of the autonomic rights of indigenous peoples, women have played a key role by defending the collective rights of their groups at the same time as they claim their specific gender rights. Through their participation within the national indigenous movement a new definition of autonomy based on a critique of ahistorical visions of indigenous cultures and a rejection of the veiled racism of universalizing liberalism has gradually begun to take shape. Before the State, indigenous women have questioned the hegemonic discourse that still holds the existence of a monocultural national identity, and at the same time, before their own communities and organizations, they have expanded the concept of culture by questioning static conceptions of tradition and working to re-invent tradition (see Artía Rodríguez; Hernández Castillo, "Entre el etnocentrismo").

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The proposals and experiences of organized indigenous women, together with the intellectual output of postcolonial feminists, give us a few tips on how to rethink the politics of cultural recognition from a gender perspective, a proposal that goes beyond a liberal universalism that in the name of sameness denies the right to equality, and of a cultural relativism that in the name of difference justifies the exclusion and marginalization of women.

RECOGNIZING THE WAY IN WHICH OUR LOCAL STRUGGLES ARE INSERTED IN

GLOBAL

PROCESSES OF CAPITALIST DOMINATION

Although one of the criticisms made of Postcolonial Studies has been precisely that their emphasis on the narrative strategies of power has neglected the material level of domination, many postcolonial feminists have replied to their critics by distancing themselves from the postmodern relativism with which they are some times identified (for the use both make of deconstruction and discourse analysis) and positioning themselves in reference to strategies of anti-capitalist struggle. In a recent article published by Chandra Mohanty in which she revises her arguments against the ethnocentrist feminism she developed in "Under Western Eyes" in 1986, the author explains that at that moment she considered it important to warn against the dangers of feminist universalism, a view she still holds. But at the present moment, her warning has been very well developed by postcolonial feminism and, in her opinion, it is now necessary to work not only at the deconstructive stage of discourses but also at the constructive stage of struggle strategies. She says: N o w I find myself wanting to reemphasize the connections between local and universal. In 1986 my priority was on difference, but now I want to recapture and reiterate its fuller meaning, which was always there, and that is the connection to the universal. In other words, this discussion allows me to emphasize how differences are never just difference. In knowing differences and particularities, w e can better see the connections and commonalities, because no border or boundary is ever complete or rigidly determining. T h e challenge is to see how differences allow us to explain connections and border-crossings better and more accurately, how specifying differences allow us to theorize universal concerns fully. It is this intellectual m o v e that allows f o r my concern for women o f different communities and identities to build coalitions and solidarities across borders" ( ' " U n d e r Western Eyes': Revisited" 505).

I consider this call by Chandra Mohanty to build coalitions and alliances beyond the borders through an anti-imperialist feminism to be particularly pertinent

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at times such as this, when economic globalization and the civilizing project of a few is being imposed by the use of force. Military powers have not only massacred hundreds of children, women and elderly Iraqis, but is endangering the survival of humanity by unleashing an arms escalation in the name of disarmament, by trampling over any international form of legality in the name of democracy, and by legitimizing the use of violence in the name of peace. The link between discourse and power that postcolonial feminists have emphasized is especially relevant in this context, in which language, through the media, is becoming an important weapon to mask murder and impunity. This is a war being fought also in the area in which social scientists have extensive experience. All of us who participated in this book earn our living writing and teaching, and have enough weapons to counter the global discourse that tries to convince the world that justice means revenge, that democracy means authoritarianism, that war is the previous stage to peace, that freedom means submission. This is about the "collateral damage to language" which John Berger describes as one of the consequences of military aggression against Iraq and the "war on terrorism" unleashed by the United States after the events of September 11. The English writer points out that we are witnessing a loss of meaning of words that leads inevitably to a diminishing ability of the skill to imagine, and that imagination needs solid and precise categories in order to be able to jump from one to the other and not over them (Berger). The discourses on Absolute Freedom, Infinite Justice, Enduring Freedom and Axis of Evil are emptying the concepts of meaning and damaging the ability to imagine; these "collateral" damages also impact the ability to imagine other possible futures. In contrast to the simplistic visions that are held about deconstruction as a methodological tool that necessarily implies total relativization and demobilization, in contexts such as the present, in which globalized discourses are colonizing our bodies and minds, language and deconstruction become important political weapons. But I think it is important to go beyond the reduced spaces of academia and the obscure weavings of theory to recover the trenches of language by creating bridges of communication between us and the people on the streets. It is of outmost importance to give meaning back to words, to remember that when "accidentally launched missiles" kill forty-six people in a neighborhood of Baghdad, this is not "collateral damage," but a massacre; that when children die of dysentery because a missile has damaged the waste water treatment system, it is not the "enemy's infrastructure being destroyed," but murder. That when American citizens, many of them the children of Latin American immigrants, die for the economic interests of their governments, it is not victory, but crime; that when military action of allied forces is mentioned, it is not in reference to an international coalition such as the one that defeated Hitler but to Anglo-American aggression.

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Postcolonial feminists, who have made language their fighting trench, and who have a long experience revealing the textual strategies of power, can bring important contributions to stop these deadly global discourses. Leaving behind the stage of intellectual exclusions and working to build communication bridges South-to-South is a fundamental step towards building the networks of solidarity that are needed if our local struggles are to have a more profound impact on global powers. Translated by María Vinos Edited by Juliet Lynd

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POSTCOLONIAL REPRESENTATIONS OF THE N E W WORLD (B)ORDER 1 Silvia Nagy-Zekmi

Hoy todas las culturas son de frontera. Néstor García Canclini Existen muchas fronteras. Demasiadas. Guillermo Gómez Peña

The borderland in the postcolonial imaginary challenges the binary classification deployed in the construction of the Other. Contesting culture's equation with a location of an identity leads to the recognition of the validity and uniqueness of hybrid cultures. The disjuncture between the nation state and the location of (its) culture is not simply displayed in the forms of cultural resistance, or in the presence of counter-cultural elements, but it requires a deeper scrutiny of the interaction between culture and nation, that is to say, the role of nation in shaping the culture and the role of culture in sustaining the nation-state. This relationship is not 'natural,' it is historically produced and traceable in the cultural practices of the population. I intend to explore the multiple meanings of borders, movements around and through borders, and the possibilities of representing the borderland, the various forms of displacement and migration, in literary works. The border as a textual construct in the U.S. Latino (particularly Chicano) imaginary will be my focus, because their collective identity has been determined by migration and cultural hybridity. I will follow the transformation of fixed notions of identity into a set of complex cultural loyalties that unite and also divide local communities.

' My sincere thanks to Gustavo Geirola for his generous suggestions to this article.

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BORDERS Entre tu pueblo y el mío hay un punto y una raya. La raya dice no hay paso, el punto, vías cerradas y así, entre todos los pueblos raya y punto, punto y raya. Con tantas rayas y puntos el mapa es un telegrama. Caminando por el mundo se ven ríos y montañas, se ven selvas y desiertos, pero no puntos ni rayas, porque estas cosas no existen, sino que fueron trazadas para que mi hambre y la tuya estén siempre separadas. Arribal Nazoa - Juan C. Núnez. "Punto y raya" (song)

A point and a line drawn, "un punto y una raya" to quote the song in the epigraph, a border marks the place where adjacent state jurisdictions meet as a consequence of the states attributing to themselves a right to property (Balibar 72). But as a consequence of globalization the functions of the nation-state are more and more troubled, its primary functions regarding borders shifted from the control of its territory (whether it be national or colonial) in time of war to the self-protection from mass migration of what is perceived as economically inferior masses. In this context border society is "an abstract concept compounded of ideas about the sovereignty of nation-states, the intensification of commerce and social discourse, and strategies of cultural representation" (Cadaval). Yet border society does not exist merely on and around the borders, it manifests itself in big cities, in airports and other spaces of transition. Borders are artifacts of history and are subject to change over time as it is their meaning. When borders shift, lands and peoples are subjected to different sets of rules; this creates opportunities for exploitation, conditions of hardship, and motivation for migration.

MIGRATION: EXILE, DIASPORA, DISPLACEMENT

The territorial forces of (neo)colonialism are now counterbalanced by a reversed flow of deterritorialized human masses driven by economic or political necessity. Even though the displacement of humans has reached extremes never seen before, the phenomenon is nothing new. Todorov reconstructs the genealogy of the exile, one of the most common forms of displacement, in The conquest of America'. Today it is the e x i l e w h o b e s t e m b o d i e s , turning aside f r o m its original m e a n i n g , the ideal o f H u g o d e San Victor, w h o formulated it in the f o l l o w i n g w a y in the 12th century: ' T h e m a n w h o finds that his o w n h o m e l a n d is s w e e t is nothing m o r e than a s o f t n o v i c e ; for h i m w h o finds that e a c h soil is like his o w n is already strong; but the perfect m a n is h e w h o finds that the entire w o r l d is like a f o r e i g n country' (I, w h o a m

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Bulgarian and live in France, take this quote from Edward Said, a Palestinian who lives in the United States, who had found it from Erich Auerbach, German, an exile in Turkey). (259).

Among the reasons for migration (exile, diaspora, displacement) Abril Trigo mentions "the unequal socioeconomic development within the interrelated geographical zones between complex regimes of expulsion and attraction" (273). It should be added that this unequal development has been a direct consequence of the European colonization and attempts at neocolonization. Thus, the question of migrancy may be approached from a postcolonial perspective that identifies colonialism and globalization as the root causes of migration. Guillermo Gomez Pena relates frontier identity with postcolonial existence and he connects both notions in his work. "In my art I explore the labyrinth of identity, the intersections of language and the precipices of nationality" he comments in "Colonial Dream and Postcolonial Nightmares" (80). Literary representations of migration by various authors who think of themselves as migrant beings point to cultural hybridity and to a réévaluation of categories used by the language of modernity that fueled the colonizing ideology and colonization itself as a "civilizing mission." Salman Rushdie, for example, in Imaginary Homelands (1992) positions himself as a Muslim Indian who emigrated to England and despite the scandal stemmed from the publication of The Satanic Verses (1989), he still considers himself a Muslim even though he is not a believer. In many of his works he assumes a so-called Western position that emphasizes individualism and exceptionality "as the greatest and most heroic of values" (Imaginary 425), but the possibility of irony should not be excluded as the motivation for doing so. Rushdie states that migratory experience is a fundamental part in the formation of his frontier identity2 (as he puts it) that permits him to circulate in cultural terms, although not physical3, between the East and West. Gayatri Spivak also claims to have a 'frontier identity' which she defines as non-fixed and constructed from various elements in dynamic interaction and constant movement (67-94). Behind all types of migrancy is the idea of home (be it in the physical or in the cultural sense), the origin, from where one parts, which is impossible to reencounter. The impossibility of this reencounter may fuel Martin Heidegger's argu2 Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf is another author who discusses hybrid identity which he sees as the only solution to the contradictory relationship between East and West in his essay, Les identities meurtrières, particularly in the chapter entitled "Apprivoiser la panthère." 3 The fatwa (religious decree) pronounced by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 against Rushdie accuses him of having purposely committed desecration of the Qur'an in his book, The Satanic Verses (1989). As a consequence of the fatwa Rushdie's life was in danger until 1998 when —after Khomeini's death- the Iranian government stopped perusing the fatwa, although it could not be officially revoked because it "would be an insult to the memory of Khomeini." (BBC News, Internet)

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ments in his essay about Holderlin's poetry, "Return to the homeland." He claims that there is no primary home, we are all transients. The primary home would be a place where one can "return to selfhood" by means of a dialogic encounter of a language that expresses the essence of ego. That is why for Heidegger displacement is not possible, or rather; continual displacement is the only possible way to conceive existence. In addition to Heidegger's idea of home that he characterizes in psychological terms, a geographic dimension may also be perceived in which the home can be (re)defined as constituted by hybrid, and even contradictory signs. (The physical home on the one hand, and the articulation of the idea of home — origin 4 , on the other) The displacement is more obvious in border areas where the identity — which is intimately related to the origin and language — is highly problematic. Chicanos form the cultural entity on which I intend to focus, without creating a direct link between culture and space, because this would manifest the essentialism that I am trying to avoid. "Challenging culture's equation with a location of an identity may enable us to think about the possibilities of politics which recognizes the positivity or singularity of the other" (Grossberg 169). Exploring the cultural hybridity in this 'contact-zone' may yield some important keys in the scrutiny of the border as a postcolonial space due to the fact that hybridity shows not only the genealogy of cultural origins, but it may also subvert the discourses of dominance.

HYBRIDITY AND TRANSCULTURATION

L'identité n'est pas donnée un fois pour toutes, elle se construit et se transforme tout au long de l'existence. Amin Maalouf.

In his discussion of hybridity Homi Bhabha suggests that hybridity is articulated in cultural systems from what he calls "the third space of the statement" (37). In this way hybrid cultural identity materializes from this ambivalent and contradictory space that, according to Bhabha, is instrumental in the elimination of cultural exoticism. Hybridity, where new cultural meanings can be located, emerges in cultural crossroads, such as the borderland, emanating from this "in-between"

4 The idea of the origin is discussed by Derrida in Monolingualism of the Other (1998) in terms of the language that reveals the complex interplay of psychological factors that provides the subject with an identity, with the desire to recover a "lost" language of origin.

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third space that opens up in the dynamic interaction of cultures based on difference. Many critics utilize this concept: "third space" (Bhabha, Moreiras), or similar ones: "in-between-ness" (Rosaldo "Ideology") or "contact zone" (Pratt) in order to deconstruct the prewritten notions of culture. José David Saldivar makes use of Rosaldo's "cultural in-between-ness" to advance the idea of "borderland cultures" that by definition is hybrid. In this heterogeneous space the Chícanos can recuperate their agency that houses the shared memory with Mexico and the continuous cultural (economic and political) influence of the United States. "Mexican identity (or rather, the many Mexican identities) can no longer be explained without the experience of the 'other side,' and vice versa" (Gómez-Peña, "Danger Zone" 178). Many critics (Saldivar, Rosaldo, Gómez-Peña) theorize about the frontier zone as a place of "cultural visibility and cultural invisibility" (Gómez-Peña 176). However, Saldivar adds that in the global borderlands "composed of historically connected postcolonial spaces" (153) it is difficult to theorize about the frontier existence and identity, because the theory today is not conceived from a "critical distance" but from an 'in-between' space where subjectivity is being created as a form of resistance. The Latin American precedents to the notions about hybridity may be traced back to Fernando de Ortiz' coining of 'transculturación' ,5 one of the first attempts to go beyond the binary models in theorizing about the hegemonic imposition of and resistance to cultural change that includes the elements of mutual influence and fluidity.6 The importance of transculturation (the term) is explained by Moreiras (264-65) as a phenomenon that arises due to the coincidence of its conception with the emergence of the national-popular state in Latin America at the time, culminating in Angel Rama's work about narrative transculturation that provides an explanation based on this ambivalent space of enunciation that comes close to being Bhabha's "third space." The quest for an idea that expresses this in-between space of enunciation that would be able to circumvent the stalemate of binary oppositions would resurface in the concept of heterogeneity developed by Antonio Cornejo Polar (1994b). Heterogeneity is embodied in the resistance to the homogenizing forces of colonialism, and to the equally Eurocentric ideologies of the nation-state.

5 The term first appeared in Fernando de Ortiz's Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (1940). 6 For a more detailed elaboration on transculturation see Nagy-Zekmi.

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CHÍCANOS, PACHUCOS, AND THE FRONTIER

The Chícanos,7 "la raza," the "sleeping giant [that] slowly rears its head" —as González portrays them in his seminal poem, "Yo soy Joaquin" —continue to live at a cultural crossroads. In spite of the undoubted achievements of the civil rights movement, are still subject to diverse forms of marginalization in the U.S., and also rejected (called 'Pochos') 8 by the Mexicans9. Their identity crisis has evolved into a continuous state, a modus vivendi. In this junction multiculturalism is not a possibility, because it is rejected by both the intransigence of the culture of origin and by the cultural and racial intolerance of the place of residence. One of the most powerful manifestations of the search for resolving this conflict is the creation of an active subject position of agency embodied in the Pachuco who (with his clothing, language, etc.) personifies difference from both cultural entities, while belonging to neither. This identity is articulated from the "third space" (Bhabha 36) where the "others" are able to engage in a dialogue with the "us," in order to affirm "their" presence as members of a community. The Pachuco manifests the cultural hybridity of the borderland by its mere existence. If gender construction is carried out in a gesture of performativity by mimicking societal markers of gender, the critical articulation of cultural identity might have something to gain from Judith Butler's theory. Butler uses performativity in order to answer her own critique of feminism stating that the stable (inflexible?) category of woman, in whose interest feminism is supposed to be working, in fact, excludes and even oppresses those who don't fall into its definition: "the internal paradox of this foundationalism is that it presumes, fixes and constrains the very subjects' that it hopes to represent and liberate" (189). In the same way, the Pachuco appropriates the social markers of a culturally non-specific, exaggerated physical identity as a sign of intentional exclusion from both the Mexican and the Anglo-American appearance, as a sign of non-identification with either one. The expansion of the categories of cultural identity - instead of the binary opposition of Anglo vs. Mexican — would express (perform) the cultural hybridity of the borderland. "[T]he importance of hybridity" — says Bhabha - is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity ... is the 'third space' which enables oth-

7 Tino Villanueva affirmed (in 1984) that the term chicano has been used in a pejorative way. However, some critics (cf. Bruce-Novoa 227) point out that as time passes the term encapsulates a dual strategy, it unites an 'imagined community' distinguishing its members from the Anglo Americans, but also from the Mexicans within Mexico. 8 José Antonio Villarreal was the first Chicano writer to portray the cultural conflicts of the borderland in his novel Pocho (1959). 9 "To be Mexican outside of Mexico converts one into an exile or expatriate distanced from the source of authentic national culture" (Bruce-Novoa 226)

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er positions to emerge. This 'third space' displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives" (210). From this position operates the Pachuco's self-expression is an exile of all cultures and places that is found outside of the family that, according to Richard Rodriguez,10 often imposes Mexican values and the use of Spanish over a culturally and linguistically estranged 'other', and outside of U.S. society, because of the effects of racism and hegemony on the Chicano population. It offers the possibility of articulating identities without the intrusion of 'purity' in either culture. In spite of concepts, such as Kristeva's citoyen-individu" that depoliticizes cultural conflicts, in the milieu of cultural and economic domination by the U.S., borderland culture in the Southwestern US border emerges from constant conflict where reconciliation or harmonious coexistence is a rather remote possibility at best. The articulation of a hybrid identity is possible because cultures are "symbol-forming and subjectconstituting, interpellative" practices (Bhabha 210.) However, these practices are often misunderstood. The first chapter of Laberinto de la soledad (1950) by Octavio Paz is one of the most eloquent examples of the incomprehension of the Pachuco phenomenon for he sees it as a cultural degradation. On the other hand, Luis Valdez's seminal work, Zoot Suit (1992) explores the evolution of the Pachuco identity in function of a limited event whose problematic and historical complexities, ethnic, national and social dimensions are articulated through a dramatized version of the "caso Reyna" and the Zoot suit riots of 1942 and 1943 that created a war-like atmosphere in Los Angeles. War was a key element in the deterritorialization of the Chicanos. At the end of the so-called Mexican war —as stipulated in the Guadalupe Hidalgo treaty (1849) - Mexico lost nearly half of its territory to the U.S. Contrary to popular belief,12 the population living in that territory formed the human substratum of Chicanos in the U.S. Cultural deterritorialization was one of the dyer consequences of this treaty.13

10 In his autobiographical Hunger of Memory (1988) the author explores language as both the locus of cultural convergence and the principal fundament of identity. 11 Kristeva depoliticizes the question of cultural conflict by introducing the concept of the 'citoyen-individu'. "Mais c'est peut-être à partir de la subversion de cet individualisme moderne, à partir du moment où le citoyen-individu cesse de se considérer comme uni et glorieux, mais découvre ses incohérences et ses abîmes, ses étrangetés en somme, que la question se pose à nouveau: non plus l'accueil de l'étranger à l'intérieur d'une système qui l'annule, mais de la cohabitation de ces étrangers que nous reconnaissons tous être" (11 ; my emphasis). 12 It is widely believed among some Anglo-Americans that most Chicanos are recent immigrants, or descendants of immigrants. 13 Because my focus is not the synthesis of the history of Mexican population of the Southwestern United States the limits of this article do not permit me to include the history of the continuous migration during the Porfiriato and the Mexican Revolution.

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In terms of representation, deterritorialization first appeared in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature coined by Deleuze and Guattari as a key characteristic of "minor" literatures. The definition of minor literature for these authors is not based on the geographical area of origin, or the language in which the work has been written, but instead on the fact whether it is included in the established canons of "major languages." The theory of "minor" literature has been refuted by such critics as Renato Rosaldo. What counts for him it is not only the fact that the texts of "minor" literature continue to be created, but also the way in which these texts construct identities and how these identities, in turn, construct the texts. In his book Cultura y verdad (1991), Rosaldo analyzes three texts of three different periods by comparing "identidades de frontera," the ever changing articulations of Chicano identity.

RETERRITORIALIZATION BY MEANS OF LITERATURE

Gloria Anzaldúa accentuates the coexistence of Mexican, Indian and AngloSaxon elements in the frontier identities of Chícanos. According to Anzaldúa the "frontier culture" is produced by those who cross the limits of "normality," that can be national, ethnic, and racial or gender related. Her Borderlands / La frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) manifests all the signs of transculturation. Jane Hedley remarks: "In reading her text, we are forced to confront the difficulty of bridging differences of language, cultural background and class location that divide us from one another" (37). Applying a hybrid textuality Anzaldúa attempts reterritorialization, but not on a national level (as many others propose it), but by creating "imaginary communities" (Anderson) that, different from the nationalists, are not based on a common mythical past. The "mestizaje espiritual" is the solution that Anzaldúa proposes to reconcile the different textures of cultural hybridity: "My spirituality I call spiritual mestizaje, so I think my philosophy is like philosophical mestizaje where I take from all different cultures — for instance, from the cultures of Latin America, the people of color and also the Europeans" (238). The cultural and linguistic hybridism manifests itself in Anzaldúa, just like it does in the majority of works by Chicano authors. Elizabeth Jones comments on these linguistic peculiarities: "Anzaldúa uses a unique blend of eight languages, two variations of English and six of Spanish. In many ways, by writing in 'Spanglish'14 she creates a daunting task for the non-bilingual reader to deci-

14 The use of Spanglish is fundamental to Anzaldua, so that she can articulate her position from this 'third space' she matches the ethnic and linguistic identity: "Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself. Until I can accept as legitimate Chicano Texas, Spanish, Tex-Mex, and all the other languages I speak I cannot accept the legitimacy of

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pher the full meaning of the text." No doubt, Anzaldúa enjoys the irony that manifests itself in the difficulties of the monolingual / monocultural reader of her texts, the frustration caused by cultural and linguistic inaccessibility that is precisely one of the fundamental reasons of differentiating the Chicanos. The hybrid of the two languages amplifies the semantic and cultural field, thus knowledge of only one of the languages (or cultures) will not result in the comprehension of the text. The linguistic hybridization equals cultural hybridism (or even ethnic hybridism, as Anzaldúa states (7). Like Anzaldúa (and Saldivar, see below), Norma Alarcón also uses the construction of a "conciencia mestiza" to explain the re-appropriation of the iconic figure of the La Malinche. Alarcón describes the way in which the Chicanas retell her story to confront previously constructed ideologies (for example, Octavio Paz's "hijos de la chingada"). Borrowing Chela Sandoval's phrase, "conciencia nómada"15 Alarcón states that by deconstructing the opposition Malintzin / Guadalupe lodged in the Mexican imagery and by inserting a 'subjective tactic' in the retelling of the story a new image of the Malintzin will emerge. The result is a hybrid image of the fundamental feminine figure in the frontier conscience. The territories from one side of the frontier in postcolonial imaginary offer the security of the seemingly homogeneous, but as Said comments: "can also become prisons and are often defended beyond reason or necessity" (355). To experience an identity constantly challenged in the intersection of histories and memories (individual and collective), to live simultaneously in the interior and the exterior requires the revision and reexamination of that identity through continuous discussion based on sporadic historical inheritances and a heterogeneous present (Chambers 6). The hybrid cultures, as Garcia Canclini points out, are consequences of economic de/re-structuration, the new global patrons of production, distribution, consumption and communication, as well as migration processes that produce new social configurations.

myself. Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without always having to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather then having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate" (207). 15 Sandoval also speaks of a "conciencia nómada," a phrase that comes from Rosi Braidotti originally defined in the following way: "explore and legitimate political agency, while taking as historical evidence the decline of metaphysically fixed, steady identities" (Braidotti 5). In Methodology of the Oppressed Sandoval speaks as much of "womanism" as "nomadic consciousness." All these forms of subjectivities are characterized by having multiple identities, experiences of marginalization and resistance to the transnational cultural domination.

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WORKS CITED

Norma. "Conjugating Subjects: The Heteroglossia of Essence and Resistance." An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands. Ed. Alfred Arteaga. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. ANZALDÚA, Gloria. Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987. — "How to Tame a Wild Tongue?" Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. Eds. Russel Ferguson, Martha Grever, Trinh Minh-ha, and Cornell West. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990. 205-214. BALIBAR, Etienne. "World Borders, Political Borders." Trans. Emily Apter. PMLA 117, 1. (2002): 71-78. BBC News. (August 2002). BRAIDOTTI, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. BRUCE-NOVOA, Juan. "Dialogical Strategies, Monological Goals: Chicano Literature." An Other Tongue. Ed. Alfred Arteaga. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 225-245. BHABHA, Homi. "The Third Space." Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1 9 9 0 . 2 0 7 - 2 1 . BUTLER, Judith. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge, 1 9 9 0 . CADAVAL, Olivia. "United States-Mexico Borderlands/Frontera." Smithsonian Institute 2002 (August 2002). CHAMBERS, Iain. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London: Routledge, 1994. CORNEJO POLAR, Antonio. "Mestizaje, transculturación, heterogeneidad." Revista de Crítica Literaria XX. 40 (1994): 368-371. DELEUZE, Gille, Felix Guattarí. Kafka, Towards a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minessota P, 1986. DERRIDA, Jacques. Monolingualism of the Other or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. GARCÍA CANCLINI, Néstor. Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad. México: Grijalbo. 1989. GÓMEZ-PEÑA, Guillermo. "Danger Zone: Cultural Relations between Chícanos and Mexicans at the End of the Century." The New World Border. San Francisco: City Lights, 1996. 169-178. — "Colonial Dreams/Postcolonial Nightmares." The New World Border. San Francisco: City Lights, 1996: 80-110. GONZÁLEZ, Rodolfo (Corky). A Message to Aztlán. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2001. GROSSBERG, Lawrence. "The Space of Culture, the Power of Space." Eds. Iain Chambers, Lidia Curti. The Post-Colonial Question. London: Routledge, 1996. 169-188. HEDLEY, Jane. "Nepantilist Poetics: Narrative and Cultural Identity in the Mixed Language Writings of Irena Klepfisz and Gloria Anzaldúa." Narrative 4.1 (1996): 36-54. HEIDEGGER, Martin. (Heimkunft/An die Verwandten) [1944] Saggi sulla poesia di Hölderlin. Milano: Adelphi, 1981. 10-31. JONES, Elizabeth. "Voices from the Gaps: Gloria Anzaldúa." (August 2002) ALARCÓN,

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NOTE ON THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

EDITORS

A. JÁUREGUI is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. He was awarded the Premio Casa de las Américas, Ensayo, in 2005 for his book Canibalia. Canibalismo, calibanismo, antropofagia y consumo en América Latina (second, revised edition Iberoamericana / Vervuert, 2008). His work covers the fields of colonial and contemporary literature and cultural studies. CARLOS

is William H. Gass Professor of Arts and Sciences at Washington University, St. Louis, where she teaches Latin American cultural theory and directs the Latin American Studies Program. She is the author of several books on colonial and contemporary Latin American literature, including Viaje al silencio. Exploraciones del discurso barroco, Políticas de la escritura en América Latina, and Crítica Impura, and the editor of multiple volumes on Latin American Cultural Studies. MABEL MORANA

CONTRIBUTORS

is Distinguished Professor of Spanish American literature and civilization at The Graduate Center and The City College of the City University of New York (CUNY). Chang-Rodriguez is the editor of Beyond Books and Borders: Garcilaso de la Vega and La Florida del Inca (Bucknell University Press, 2006) and Franqueando fronteras: Garcilaso de la Vega y La Florida del Inca (PUCP, 2006), a collection of essays appearing simultaneously in English and Spanish. Her most recent book is La palabra y la pluma en Primer nueva coránica y buen gobierno (PUCP, 2005). In 1992 she founded the prizewinning journal Colonial Latin American Review. She was the recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and is an Honorary Associate of the Hispanic Society of America and Profesora Honoraria of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima. RAQUEL CHANG-RODRIGUEZ

is Associate Professor of Literatures and Cultures of Latin America, Portuguese at the Ohio State University. Her publications include Research in African Literatures. Lusophone African and Afro-Brazilian LÚCIA HELENA COSTIGAN

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Literatures (forthcoming), coedited with Russell Hamilton, Diálogos da conversao: missionários, indios, negros e judeus no contexto ibero-americano do período barroco (2005), and A sátira e o intelectual criollo na colonia: Gregorio de Matos e Juan del Valle y Caviedes (1991). is Professor and research fellow at the Center of Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology in Mexico City. She has carried out research projects in different regions of the state of Chiapas. Among her recent publications are Histories and Stories from Chiapas, Border Identities in Southern Mexico (2001), published in Spanish as La Otra Frontera: Identidades Múltiples en el Chiapas Poscolonial, and The Other War. Women and Violence in Chiapas (2001). She has co-edited with Jan Rus and Shannan Mattiace Mayan Lives, Mayan Utopias. The Indigenous Peoples of Chiapas and the Zapatista Rebellion (2003), and published various articles on ethnic identity, gender, legal anthropology and religion. In 1997 she won the National Journalism Prize for an essay on the impact of the war on indigenous women and the Fray Bernardino de Sahagún National Prize for social anthropology research. ROSALVA AÍDA HERNÁNDEZ CASTILLO

AGUSTÍN LAÓ-MONTES is Professor in the Department of Sociology at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has co-edited with Arlene Dávila Mambo Montage: The Latinization of New York (2001). His research interests include race, ethnicity, and nationhood, latinidad, cultural politics and social movements.

is Professor of Spanish and Spanish American literature at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. She is the author of Transición y transacción. La revista cubana Casa de las Américas 1960-1976 (1996), and has edited several volumes on Latin American and Comparative Literature such as Constellation Caliban. Figurations of a Character (1997, with Theo D'Haen), and Zorro & Co (2002, also with Theo D'Haen) on popular postcolonial heroes. NADIA LIE

is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches literary and cultural studies in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures. He is the author of The Impure Imagination. Toward a Critical Hybridity in Latin American Writing (2006). He has recently written on race, nation and protest in modern Mexico, social capital theory, and exceptionalism. He is currently editing a collection of essays on the work of Gilberto Freyre.

JOSHUA LUND

is Professor at the Center for Modern Thought and Hispanic Studies, University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He has taught at University of Wisconsin-Madison, Giessen (Germany), Emory and Duke. He has published La ALBERTO MOREIRAS

N o t e o n t h e E d i t o r s and C o n t r i b u t o r s

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escritura política de José Hierro, Interpretación y diferencia, Tercer espacio: Duelo y literatura en America Latina, The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies, and many essays on contemporary Latin American fiction, cultural and subaltern studies, and literary theory. He is co-editor of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. His present teaching and research interest center on 19th and 20th century political philosophy, Spanish imperial reason, and the postculturalist notion of the literary. SILVIA N A G Y - Z E K M I teaches Latin American literature and is the chair of the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures at Villanova University. She published widely on issues of postcoloniality and cultural studies, in addition to such topics as indigenous (mostly Andean) culture and writing by women. Her publications include Paralelismos transatlánticos: Postcolonialismo y narrativa femenina en América Latina y Africa del Norte (1996), and Identidades en transformación: El discurso neoindigenista de los países andinos (1997).

is Professor of History at the Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil. He was a visiting professor at the universities of Princeton, Michigan (Ann Arbor), and Brandéis. He is the author of Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (1993), and Death is a Festival: Funeral Rites and Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (2003). JOÁO JOSÉ REÍS

DE SOUSA SANTOS is Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics, University of Coimbra (Portugal) and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. He was awarded the Premio de ensayo Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, 2006, for his book La universidad en el siglo xxi. Para una reforma democrática y emancipadora de la universidad. He is Director of the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra and Director of the Center of Documentation on the Revolution of 1974, at the same University. He has published widely on globalization, sociology of law and the state, epistemology, democracy, and human rights in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian, French and German. BOAVENTURA

M. ZAVALA has taught in American and European Universities, and has received various honors and awards for her work: Lazo de Dama del Mérito Civil, in Spain, Medal from the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, Medal of Honor from the Ateneo de Puerto Rico, as well as two Pen Club prizes for her creative work. She has also received two Doctorates Honoris Causa, from the University of Puerto Rico, and the University of Málaga, Spain. She has worked with both Spanish, Comparative and Latin American literatures, and has done theoretical IRIS

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work on Bakhtin and Lacan with special focus on modernity, modernisms, colonial and postcolonial problems. Her publications include Historia social de la literatura española, with Julio Rodríguez Puértolas y Carlos Blanco Aguinaga (1981), and Rapto de América y el síntoma de la modernidad (2001).