Abstract
This study discusses the literary and theatrical portrayal of corpses in Cuban-American Roberto G. Fernández's Raining Backwards, Puerto Rican Esmeralda Santiago's When I Was Puerto Rican, and Miguel Piñero's Short Eyes. In dialogue with various critics of communitarian and nationalistic thinking (Nancy, Balibar, Joseph, and Anderson), the author reflects upon the problematics of community, its sense of project and destiny, its vehement impulse toward domesticating difference, and its program for hegemonizing subalternity. From this perspective, the cadaver is discussed as an ontological void in Latino/a communitarian articulation and as a recurrent topos in this group's cultural production. This study proposes that the dead body needs to be considered critically in order to disrupt meta-narratives of hybridization that guide Latino communitarian thinking and the production–consumption dynamics within the US multicultural nation. “Cadavers encountered” advances a model for critically un-reading more commercial/hegemonic Latino products and for underscoring counter-pedagogic thinking in less commercial/alternative ones. In the process it suggests a variety of cultural commodities that could be studied in fashions similar to the work of Fernández, Santiago, and Piñero.
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Notes
Benedict Anderson has famously argued that the Nation imagines “a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time” as each member “has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity” (1991, 26).
The validity of this discourse has been cogently brought to task by Jean Luc Nancy in The Inoperative Community, Giorgio Agamben (1993) in The Coming Community, and Julia Kristeva in Strangers to Ourselves (1991) and Nations without Nationalisms (Kristeva, 1993), among others, who shed light upon its problematic philosophical underpinnings, questionable ethical substance, and grave potential for reproducing oppression.
Miranda Joseph, in Against the Romance of Community, problematizes the ethnological reasoning that supports collective identities and exposes the link between capitalism, modernity, and a hegemonic notion of community. She homes in on practices of consumption and production that reify capitalism's logic and become the dominant vehicle for asserting, reproducing, and renegotiating communal identities. She cautions that “fetishizing community only makes us blind to the ways we might intervene in the enactment of domination and exploitation” (2002, ix). The crux of this precarious construct, nonetheless, is linked with the rise of capitalism and modernity: “capitalism and, more generally, modernity depend on and generate the discourse of community to legitimate social hierarchies… . [Identity] is a false name in that communal participants are not identical and many of those to whom an identity is attributed do not participate in communal activities … . [C]ommunal subjectivity is constituted not by identity but rather through practices of production and consumption” (Joseph, 2002, viii).
4 Our critical project is in line with a broader consideration of cultural miscegenation as hegemonic discourse, and of symbolic laboring within a subaltern-hegemonic dyad that purports to explain away the inevitable tensions within the multi-cultural nation. In considering the strategic pause of a discourse on hybridity, our work dialogues with Gareth Williams's recent The Other Side of the Popular in which he makes difficult “transculturation” as a model for renegotiating difference within Latinamericanism: “transculturation is not just another name for the anthropological phenomenon of cultural miscegenation between dominant and dominated cultures. It assumes a fundamental legitimating function inside the nation-state, as well as in the relation between the state and the popular/elite cultural spheres” (Williams, 2002, 24).
Although present space constraints inhibit my exploration of additional intellectuals, it would be of interest to consider a wider spectrum of ideological and critical positions in the work of cultural critics such as Juan Flores, José D. Saldívar, Frances Aparicio, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Ilán Staváns, and to extricate, from an otherwise complex critical and ideological entanglement, the repetition of the narrative of hybridization.
For shrewd discussions on the administrative logic of the State that mediates the formation of need-based identities, see Flores and Yúdice (1993), “Living Borders/Buscando América: Languages of Latino Self- Formation”; Suzanne Oboler (1995), Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives; Carl Gutiérrez Jones's Critical Race Narratives (2001); and Ian Haney López's (2003) Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice. Similarly, Paul Gilroy (2000), in Against Race, has criticized the pervasiveness of racial thinking even in progressive anti-racist intellectuals and artists.
As Jean Luc Nancy forcefully states: “Community is revealed in the death of others… because death itself is the true community of Is that are not egos… . [Community] assumes the impossibility of its own immanence, the impossibility of a communitarian being in the form of the subject” (1991, 15). Death becomes, in the philosopher's reflection, locates an ontological lack and stresses the ethical substance of communal articulation. It repeals a sense of collective project or destiny, or individual identities.
One need only think of Rembrandt's “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp” (1632), Andreas Vesalius anatomical theater woodcuts (in De Humani Corporis Fabrica, Vesalius, 1543), Étienne de la Riviére's curious portrayals of dissected bodies in social settings or in live positions (in La dissection des parties du corps humain, de la Riviére, 1546) to ascertain not only the fascination with the human corpse, but more importantly the symbolic density of cadavers in European Renaissance. Of note is the Internet exposition Dream Anatomy, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, which reproduces digitally the work of Vesalius and de la Rivieére.
Jessica Hodge explains that dissection paintings where a type of group portrait “representing a number of men in terms of a common role or function … . The basic problem with this type of representation was to combine a number of portraits of equal individual distinction – each subject paid a proportion of the fee and therefore expected equal prominence – into a coherent whole” (Hodge, 1995, 13). What is of interest in this practice is that a morbid scene becomes a commodity and that it simultaneously addresses aesthetic, academic, social, and economical matters.
Cf. Lee Miller's (1945) “Cordwood Piles of Corpses, Dachau.”
In Powers of Horror, Kristeva declares: “if what remains of a sacrifice can be called abject, in another connection consuming the leavings of a sacrifice can also be the cause of good rebirths and can even lead to finding salvation” (Kristeva, 1982, 76).
The publishing venues that mediated the production and reception of these indicate a broad desire to procure Latino cultural commodities and a concomitant narrative of consumption that relates to the mediation of commercial or independent publishers. It would be of interest to further meditate on how historical injuries and death become commodities.
Santiago's major works, When I Was Puerto Rican (1993), Almost a Woman (1998), America's Dream (1996), and The Turkish Lover (2004) have been sponsored, distributed internationally, and swiftly translated into various languages by major publishing conglomerates. Santiago is a veritable Latina literary star, and her production has achieved an elevated commodity value. Very few Latina writers have a comparable status: Ana Castillo, Julia Álvarez, and Cristina García. The highly commercial nature of her literary endeavor must be seriously taken into account, and similarities with other Latina stars (such as Jennifer López) should not be ignored.
For a scholarly consideration of corporate mediation in the construction of the Latino community, see Arlene Dávila's (2001) Latinos Inc., where the cultural critic studies how market forces support particular notions of latinidad in a multi-cultural society and a globalized economy.
In Stuart Hall's framework of production and consumption, this un-reading of dominant narratives would be called an “oppositional code” (1993, 103).
It is, at this point, unavoidable to consider this inter-generational conflict without making reference to Rubén G. Rumbaut's memorable formulation of the “one-and-a-half generation” (Rumbaut, 1976), which is at the core of Pérez Firmat's Life on the Hyphen, discussed earlier.
It is now impossible to discuss the literary representation of the mutilated, Latina cadaver without bearing in mind the real murderous violence that is directed particularly and systematically at women along the US–México border. Although my present interrogation is more concerned with disrupting an uncomplicated narrative of Latino hybridization, I consider it necessary to point at the symbolic and real violence articulated by dominant culture, the specific reiteration of said violence against the female subject, and the social, historic, and geographic uniqueness of violent incidents and episodes. It is also of value to consider that real violence is never symbolically or ideologically neutral, and that the cadavers become powerful signifiers that have immense organizing force to bring together a community that mourns its deceased member.
Deleuze and Guattari define the Body without Organs as “what is left when you take everything away. What you take away is precisely the phantasy, and significances and subjectifications as a whole.” They suggest a program that prescribes unfettered individual (intellectual, physical, psychological) experimentation instead of psychoanalytic interpretation: “Where psychoanalysis says, “Stop, find your self again… we should say … Let's go further still, we haven't found our BwO yet, we haven't sufficiently dismantled our self” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1998, 151).
It is of great importance to recognize two primary levels in discussing cultural production. One deals with the commercial value of cultural works as they become more or less profitable to cultural enterprises. In this regard, Santiago's literary products exist in highly commercial circuits of production; they enjoy greater exchange value vis à vis Fernández's and Piñero's lower profitability. On a second level, production and consumption deal with ideology and knowledge. More commercial products generally circulate in hegemonic circuits and reproduce dominant ideology and knowledge. In this regard, Santiago's work, again, functions in a different sphere and mostly reproduces dissimilar orders of knowledge and ideology. At present, it is essential to underscore the divergent circuits of culture in which the products discussed exist; and to recognize the contradictory ideological values they convey.
Piñero himself would never muster sufficient cultural capital to enjoy more than a cult following, make some acting appearances in Kojak and Miami Vice (where he was also a script doctor), and see his master-work turned into an independent film (directed by Indy movie's luminary, Robert M. Young). Leon Ichaso's (2002) film on Piñero's life, though an interesting highlight in his post-mortem career, further underscores the marginal status of the Nuyorican writer.
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Irizarry, G. Cadavers Encountered: Identification and Community in US Latino/a Cultural Production. Lat Stud 5, 104–122 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.lst.8600239
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.lst.8600239