Abstract
Recent theorizations of the ‘race’ concept in Latino Studies are improvements over earlier social theories of race as ethnicity, class, or nation. Yet, theorizing race as hybrid, diaspora, difference, or other often reproduces the central limitation of defining race through metaphorical and tangentially related signs. Each of the four theories often shifts the discussion on race away from the interpersonal and institutional processes of racism. A plausible alternative is the notion of cultural racialization that rests upon the processes of racist practices, ideas, discourses, and institutions. The experiences of Latina/os as racialized groups provide the basis for this proposed reconceptualization. Responses to racism on the part of aggrieved Latina/o communities are seen as distinct from race, and best captured by conceptualizing new ethnicities coupled with the re-making of ancestral connections.
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Notes
I use the shorthand “postality” to refer to divergent philosophical movements associated with postmodernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism.
Culture is shorthand for lived experiences but also signaling a conceptual approach embedded in the origins of British cultural studies and their attempt to grapple with class and culture, and later by Stuart Hall with race, nation, and coloniality. Racializations include both race and racism in the active and variable process of constructing groups for the purposes of conferring privilege to those who deem themselves superior and subjugating those groups deemed inferior by their imputed characteristics of biological, cultural, religious, linguistic, citizenship status, or other markers.
“Ancestries” refer to connections to the past that are constantly remade and reinterpreted in the expression of new ethnicities. The culinary aspect is how food histories are embedded within this relationship between past and present.
I would reiterate the criticism Omi and Winant (1994, 2, emphasis in original) made in reference to the existing sociological paradigms on US race relations. “Most theories are marked by a tendency to reduce race to a mere manifestation of other supposedly more fundamental social or political relationships such as ethnicity, class, [or nation].” In each of the metaphors I will explore, none enable us to study the specific dynamics of racism.
The idea that the hybrid results in a wholly new set of representations is how scholars most often refer to thirdspaces. A related concept, liminality, has a much broader application from cultural anthropology to transnational studies but both concepts attempt to define those who inhabit the interstitial places and identities.
The article “Cultural Studies in/of New Worlds” is by far the most lucid and readable categorization of the recent theories of identity, difference, and racialization. I am heavily indebted to Grossberg’s formulations in this respect and appreciate his effort to make sense of this literature that seems to pride itself on self-referentiality and masked philosophical subtexts in the name of constructing the new vocabulary of postmodernity.
Soja’s second book is in fact titled Thirdspace. He sees spatial continuities in the work of Lefebvre, Anzaldúa, Lugones, Gómez-Peña, Spivak, Said, Foucault, hooks, and Bhabha in that all “try to open up our spatial imaginaries to ways of thinking and acting politically that respond to all binarisms, to any attempt to confine thought and political action to only two alternatives, by interjecting an-Other set of choices” (1996, 5). Like Bhabha and some of these authors, Soja combines perspectives on identity as hybrid, other, and difference and does not distinguish between terms or processes.
Traveling, according to Herman Gray (1996), is an apt metaphor for understanding how British cultural studies has been received in the United States, Australia, Canada, and increasingly throughout the globe. As Grossberg (1997, 343–344) posits the key questions of the general applicability of cultural studies: “How should cultural studies travel? How should it locate itself in the relations between its local speaking position and the increasingly dense and intense lines connecting these positions?”
The Black Atlantic transcends the nation-state due to the active intention of Black cultural workers like W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, Martin Delaney, Frederick Douglass, and the Jubilee Singers. These authors and the works they produced crossed the borders and set sail on "ships" to explore the transnational ties that unite Blacks in Europe, Africa, Caribbean, and the United States in the process of the cross-fertilization of identity formation. “Ships immediately focus attention on the middle passage, on the various projects for redemptive return to an African homeland, on the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the movement of key cultural and political artefacts: tracts, books, gramophone records, and choirs” (Gilroy, 1993, 4).
Gilroy (1991) refers to “Black Americans and other minority groups” in his first book but his interest is rooted squarely in the Black-White racial dichotomy. In addition, a good deal of work by African-American intellectuals seems to assume that race is a Black/White issue. Regardless of whether one seeks to look historically or at the contemporary scene, this position perhaps seems to be a bit myopic. I would not claim that the oppressive experiences of African-Americans are the same as those faced by Chicanos, Latinos, Native Americans, or Asian Americans but when one defines race solely in terms of Black and White, it negates the racisms experienced by other groups.
Latinidad refers, in this usage, to the lived embodiment of Latino identities that transcend imposed definitions of “Hispanic” from above but also the separate national origins that internally divide. Most often a political project to align power through coalition building and shared interests, it also refers to emerging Latino communities where what it means to “be Latino” is experienced on a daily basis where no one national origin group presides.
My criticism is rooted in more than semantics or simple word choice; it stems from my view that any talk about ‘race’ must employ the terms racism and discrimination to understand what race is. How ironic, in a struggle to define ‘race’ as “a social, historical and variable category” that authors divorce race from the system of oppression that has as its basis – racism (both at the institutional and interpersonal levels). It is when this system articulates with other systems (capitalism, patriarchy, homophobia, ageism) that we begin to understand the reason why racial inequality, domination, and even relations exist in the first place.
Similarly, Bonilla-Silva’s (2001, 2006) notion of “racialized social systems” avoids the metaphors of the new race theories while identifying that: “This term refers to societies in which economic, political, social, and ideological levels are partially structured by the place of actors in racial categories or races” (2001, 36).
The term, as deployed by legal scholars working in the Critical Race Theory and LatCrit traditions, identifies the exceedingly small but grinding forms of everyday racism that include the deployment of stereotypes but also include the normalization of White privilege and taken-for-granted denigration of non-Whites.
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Mize, R. Critically interrogating the elusive sign: The new ‘race’ theories and a plausible alternative for understanding cultural racializations of Latino/a identities. Lat Stud 11, 341–365 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2013.16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2013.16