Tinsley negative at: Black Queerness

***Cap Links***

Transculturation and hybridity risk reification of dominant ideologies  capitalism

The reflections in this article derive from concerns about the current condition of thinking about transculturation in relation to Latin America. In much recent work on the region, particularly in metropolitan cultural studies, the terms transculturation and hybridisation have become frequent touchstones, and there has developed a striking productivity associated with them. As with any term or concept there is a danger that overuse will degenerate into orthodoxy and so produce a devaluation, which may be but one step away from obsolescence. I wonder if we have not advanced some way through that process, particularly as, in the case of transculturation, those using it frequently do not trouble to define it, often making no more than gestural references to it. 2 Hence, it seems opportune to ask what need is being answered by recourse to notions such as transculturation and hybridisation, why discussion tends to gravitate towards them, and what job they are being asked to perform in relation to global or regional cultural politics.

Fundamentally these terms are now used to articulate a postcolonial stance of political resistance, a will both to highlight movements of or the capacity for opposition within Latin America and to question the perspectives of official or dominant thinking about the region. It is not always clear whether resistance is simply uncovered – that is, revealed to exist as undeveloped potential – , or whether the ‘ right ’ analytical method is required to construct it. But such a stance has a history that can be traced back to the beginnings of modern Latin American Studies in the 1950s and 1960s, when analytical positions were taken up against capitalism, the technocratic pursuit of modernization and the ravages wrought by them. The cause was autonomy and selfdetermination, the means rigorous (and usually radical) academic analysis, the unanswered question the degree of impact of the latter on the former. While some political realities may have changed since then, it remains clear that the global position of Latin America, and above all many of its economic realities, cannot overall be said to have improved much. Nor can Latin American countries be said to have followed the paths and resistance which radical analysis tended to propose, which may provide food for thought about a response to that unanswered question.

The terms that I am focusing on might be seen as the latest tools deployed in the Humanities to prise open the snare in which Latin America has been trapped, whether in political, cultural or identity terms. They seek to exercise some critical leverage on the hierarchical binaries of imperialism/neo-colony, centre/periphery, identity/otherness, which apparently hold Latin America in their iron grip. The sense is that what is produced by transculturation or hybridisation does not fi t within neat binaries, that it straddles, mixes and disrupts. Though by no means exactly synonymous, the nexus of terms from transculturation and hybridisation to heterogeneity and mestizaje all manifest the will to subvert, transgress, undermine, oppose or obstruct the workings of metropolitan and internal elite power and authority. But my point is that these terms acquire their own authority; sooner or later all of them come to obey a logic that consolidates their impact into the domesticated authority of a now mainstream cultural studies, however much qualified as postcolonial. And, perhaps shattering even that compromised condition and emphasising the sheer difficulty of resistance, we should bear in mind Terry Eagleton’s observation: ‘ No way of life in history has been more in love with transgression and transformation, more enamoured of the hybrid and pluralistic, than capitalism ’ ( Eagleton, 2003: 119 ). On this view, one might wonder whether the pursuit of hybridisation and transculturation was ever more than a sanctioned option. Hence, my purpose is to examine some of what is in play with these terms and to propose some thoughts in sceptical counterpoint to mere acceptance of them.

WHITENESS K LINK

The notions of multiracialism and hybridity take an approach that only focuses on confronting whiteness – that dooms the 1AC to just reifying whiteness and causes an erasure of other identities, particularly so with blackness.

Sexton 2008 [Jared, associate professor of African American studies and film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine, “Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of multiracialism” 191-198 http://en.bookfi.org/book/1089005]

The epigraphs for this chapter dispute the multiracial project by remarking the destabilization of political criticism by the temporal force of historicity and the peculiar display of desire revealed by the structural dynamics of psychoanalytic experience. Insofar as multiracialism speaks of "the end of race," the multiracial personality prides itself on causing trouble for the white supremacist rage for order, an ostensible violation of racial discipline, a threat to enshrined notions of racial purity. Multiracial identity is elusive and cannot be fixed, captured, or tethered. However, a troublesome, fugitive presence has its consequences. For Linda Alcoff (1995), "A self that is internally heterogeneous beyond repair or resolution becomes a candidate for pathology in a society where the integration of self is taken to be necessary for mental health" (261). The multiracial is convoluted by internal heterogeneity-"beyond repair or resolution"-but pathologizing the radical otherness of "micro-diversity" (Zack 1995 a) has always required the political labor of articulation. That link can be broken and reworked if the criteria of well-being are sufficiently scrutinized, or it can be affirmed and upheld by a scripted debate within the prevailing terms of "mental health," driven by a conservative desire for repair and resolution. As we have seen, multiracialism is defined by the latter approach, a decision that ramifies on some of the largest political questions of the present moment. The constituency of the multiracial "occupies quite literally a 'pre-post'erous space where it has to actualize, enfranchise, and empower its own 'identity' and coextensively engage in the deconstruction of the very logic of 'identity' and its binary and exclusionary politics." The abdication of this double duty promises that multiracialism will "result in the formation of . . . yet another 'identical' and hegemonic structure" (Radikrishnan 1990, 50). As we have seen, the empowerment of multiracial identity intensifies antiblack racism to the extent that it retrenches concepts of biological race, espouses the social value of nonblackness, and normalizes the field of sexuality-all to suggest the recent emergence of "oppressive black power." Pressing the multiracial project on some of its most basic tenets, then, may complicate its heroic search-and-rescue mission. In Libidinal Economy, Jean-Francois Lyotard (I993) asserts, amid an extended analysis of historical capitalism, the following provocation: "capital cannot form a body." The upshot of capitals unformed, misshapen body-its lack of bodily integrity being no less than the proliferating bodies whose unending labor constitutes its "nontotalized system"-is the production of "two divergent movements always associated in a single vertigo." They are distinguished as, on the one hand, "a movement of flight, of plunging into the bodiless, and thus of continual invention, of expansive additions or affirmations of new pieces . . . a movement of tension" and, on the other, "a movement of institution of an organism, of an organization and of organs of totalization and unification--a movement of reason." The crucial point, for Lyotard, is that "both kinds of movement are there, effects as force in the non-finito . . . of capitalism" (102). The obvious parallels between Lyotard’s schematization of capitals "divergent movements" and Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattaris (l987a, 1987b) heterodox theorization of capital "schizophrenia"-its simultaneous production of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, decoding and recoding, and so on-is deliberate insofar as the former book is offered as an affirmative elaboration of the latters earlier intervention. I draw from each the attention they bring to this double movement of dispersion and regulation, but with more specific respect to the system of global white supremacy (Mills I998) or what is better described as the antiblack world (Gordon l995a), both being inextricable from but irreducible to the history of capitalism. In its attention to racial formation in the United States, the critique of multiracialism proceeds from an understanding of antimiscegenation as a fundamental feature of antiblackness. The following comments are offered as a rejoinder to the cliches of racism against which the multiracial movement and the field of multiracial studies currently stage their political and intellectual battles. My contention is that multiracialism fails to appreciate, or refuses to acknowledge, the suppleness of racial whiteness-its elasticity and expansiveness; its affinity for ambiguity, impurity, and complexity; its vital dependence on the transgression of borders, continual alteration, and the incorporation of novel elements. This has been the historical case, but its implications have become ever more apparent with the reconfiguration of the color line in the post-civil rights era: from white/nonwhite to black/nonblack. I begin by rephrasing Lyotards maxim this way: whiteness cannot form a body Despite this inability, or perhaps because of it, it continually attempts to do so. In a sense, whiteness is the very attempt to form this body, to manufacture a particular type of delimited body. Racial whiteness can be understood as "a means for mastering the trauma of an experience without categories and without unity, which has no positive content" (Shaviro I990, 3), a traumatically uncategorized, incoherent that I call "the event of miscegenation"--an abject scene of excessive passion and violent upheaval operating beyond or beneath the semblance of racialized order. We feel its pressure dimly as the outside of racialization: a pure exteriority, "a movement of flight . . . a movement of tension," the unbinding force of schizophrenia, the peregrinations of desire. It is a trauma wrought by the sense that "we are all of mixed origin" well before any empiricist tabulations about the sameness of humanity, the knowledge that categories of racial difference obtain only in the force of convention, a pernicious and deadly cover story for the formation of power. The event of miscegenation highlights the fundamental insecurity of racist reasoning and indicates the centrality of its restriction for the preeminent fictions of Western modernity (Memmi 1999).' Some qualifications to bear in mind as we proceed: miscegenation as man should not be confused with miscegenation as interracial sex act: or the presence of multiracial people. The latter are lures produced as components of the fiction of racial whiteness--refractions of a restricted economy that are mirrored and reinforced by multiracialisms loyal opposition. Miscegenation as event is what cannot be represented, conceptualized, or apprehended in either the interracial sexual encounter or the multiracial personality, but rather is that which prevents either appearance from attaining a discernible image or a fixed and stable meaning, whether as object of desire or aggression or both. I am attempting to supplement commonplace understandings of race as a social category that, however unsuspectingly, reassert the myth of race as biology. I am not interested in how the empirical history of sex across the color line or the demographic profile of multiracial people might somehow trouble naive fantasies of racial purity or the social recognition of discrete racial categories. That framing of the debate merely extends the interlocutory life of racist reason without undercutting its presumptions or dislodging its principles of organization. I am talking in a more radical sense about what undermines or dislodges the fantasy of interracial sexual transgression and the attendant fantasy of the subversive multiracial. I am interested in what wards against our thinking of interracial sex or multiracial people as things in and of themselves. In discussing miscegenation and antimiscegenation under such revised terms, I am objecting to that "psychological phenomenon that consists in the belief that the world will open to the extent to which frontiers are broken down" (Fanon 1967, 2 l). In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon (1967) makes two fascinating statements about the construction of racial categories and the existential phenomenology of the bodies supposed to represent those categories. He says first, "In the white world, the man of color [sic] encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity" (110). This argument from the famous fifth chapter, "The Lived Experience of the Black," is only mistakenly familiar. Many read Fanon's observation as a straightforward (and silly translatable) lament about the deprivations of colonial domination: the pain of a denial of access to the idealized self-images enjoyed by the white world, of having to identify instead with images of monstrosity, incompleteness, and lack. Certainly, there are passages in I-'anon that would support this reading. For example, his dramatization of the psychic violence he when arrested by the look given him by the young, white, French girl who utters those searing, infamous words: "Look, a Negro!" The language of castration is profuse: The corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema. . . .1 was given not one but two, three place . . . I existed triply: I occupied space. I moved toward the other . . . and the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappearedNausea. . . . What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood? . . My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, re-colored, clad in mourning on that white winter day. (1 I2) Fanon goes on to speak of a desire to refuse this disassembling force of the white look, to avoid the mournful shroud of blackness, a conservative desire for repair or resolution. "I did not want this revision," he says. "All I wanted was to be a man among other men." That is, to participate in the honorable world of whiteness, to not be deemed animal, bad, mean, or ugly. A desire to not be slashed, dissected, cut to slices. But just as it seems Fanon is situating whiteness on the side of plentitude, wholeness, security, and integrity, he offers a second qualifying statement: "At the extreme, I should say that the Negro, because of his body, impedes the closing of the postural schema of the white man-at the point, naturally, at which the black man makes his entry into the phenomenal world of the white man" (160). The white man too has trouble with the solidity of his body, the demarcation of its boundaries of inside and outside. Whereas the white look tears the black body apart, the lacerated black body, in turn, intrudes upon the corporeal territory of whiteness, disturbing its function, throwing its coordinates out of alignment"at the extreme." What are we to make of this bizarre scenario of interpenetration? How are we to think of the white look as both dissecting and, as Fanon suggests, as fixing, as both scattering and imprisoning, dislocating and objectifying? How to contain a body, an object, that is flung about, ripped to shreds, existing in triplicate? Within the universe of antiblackness, the social and historical forces that materially and symbolically invent the black body also seek to destroy it. The forces that seek to destroy the black body also seek to maintain it, to insist that it be there in its place. As Fanon says, "within bounds . . . classified . . . tucked away." The very thing that grants whiteness its social existence, blackness, is the very thing thatat the extreme, the edge, the verge of race-prevents it from enjoying a stable life, that "gives . . . its classification as seeming."-' In light of even a cursory history of racial formation in the United States, it goes without saying that, as Cornel West (1990) writes: "'Whiteness' is a politically constructed category parasitic on 'Blackness'" (29). The material and symbolic elaboration of racial whiteness as a cultural formation and a historic bloc is based firmly upon the domination-precisely, the captivity--enforced through racial blackness. It is rooted in the maintenance of blacks in the "position of the unthought," fungible objects of accumulation and exchange, socially excluded but symbolically central (Hartman 2003). That said, we restate that whiteness does not and cannot exist in its own right; it cannot form a body. There is no concept of whiteness that is calm, fully present, and self-referential; there are no positive qualities of whiteness, only differences between whiteness and its racial others, blackness in the paramount case. As Jacques Derrida's (1984) much cited essay has it, One is but the other different and deferred, one differing and deferring the other. One is the other in differance, one is the differance of the other. This is why every apparently rigorous and irreducible opposition . . . comes to be qualified at one moment of another, as a "theoretical fiction." (I8) Perhaps Fanon prefigures this insight about the indeterminate play of racial difference in his own analysis when he warns: "We shall go very slowly, for there are two camps: the white and the black. Stubbornly we shall investigate both metaphysics and we shall find that they are often quite fluid" (1967, 8). However, there are a number of ways to specify the often fluid metaphysics of race within the Manichaean delirium of the antiblack world. Again, it is not my desire to rehearse axioms of deconstruction. Such sensibility is necessary but insufficient to a social theory of racialization, and I believe Fanon points a way forward, contrary to reductive images of his work as exhausted by the rhetoric of binary conflict. Despite decontextualized glosses on fantasies of violent reversal ascribed to Fanon (and recall here that he is often accused of prescribing such when he is attempting to describe and to critique various political tendencies), he is among those thinkers who help us to understand the complex entanglement of terms in any seeming opposition. "In an age when skeptical doubt has taken root in the world," he writes, "when . . . it is no longer possible to find the sense of non-sense, it becomes harder to penetrate to a level where the categories of sense and non-sense are not yet invoked" (9). We must attend precisely to this level of analysis-discerning "the sense of non-sense"-if we are to unhook ourselves from the oppositional dynamics of the law and a transgression that remains passionately attached to it.' In order to map out the countervailing forces of antiblackness, we must traverse an affective terrain ontologically prior to the conceptual dichotomy, before the either-or distinction, where there are not yet objects, only processes that produce the one in the other. We must, to mention Deleuze and Guattari again, seek out the traces of multiplicity, the smooth spaces of becoming that antiblackness "striates" in attempts to capture the social forces of desiring-production, instituting race as an order of being.' To this end, I discuss the following points: first, the law of antimiscegenation as the founding gesture of racial whiteness; second, the complicit transgression of this law, referred to alternately as multiracialism, meztizaje. or "anti-antimiscegenation"; and third, the event of miscegenation as that which enables and exceeds both antimiscegenation and the political project of multiracialism.

Directory: rest -> wikis -> openev -> spaces -> 2014 -> pages -> UNT -> attachments

Download 0.59 Mb.

Share with your friends: