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Introduction Between Recognition and Revolution 1 NOTES Introduction Between Recognition and Revolution 1. David A. Hollinger, “Obama, Blackness, and Postethnic America,” The Chronicle for Higher Education 54:25 (February 29, 2008): B7, http: //chronicle.com/free/v54/i25/25b00701.htm. 2. David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 3. Paul Gilroy, Against Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). The quoted phrase is a succinct summary of Gilroy’s project, and it appears on the inside jacket of the hardback book cover. 4. Katherine Q. Seelye, “Obama Wades Into a Volatile Racial Issue,” The New York Times (July 23, 2009), http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23 /us/23race.html. 5. Huma Kahn and Jake Tapper, “Newt Gingrich on Twitter: Sonia Sotomayor ‘Racist’, Should Withdraw,” ABC News ( M a y 2 7, 2 0 0 9 ) , h t t p : // abcnews.go.com/Politics/SoniaSotomayor/story?id=7685284&page=1. 6. The extent of this identity thinking is perhaps best represented in Time magazine’s question “Is Obama black enough?” that places more importance on the authenticity of Obama’s racial and cultural iden- tity than on his political policy. See Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates, “Is Obama Black Enough?” Time (February 1, 2007), http://www.time.com/time/ nation/article/0,8599,1584736,00.html. 7. I use the term “Man” in order to reflect Hegel’s language and also to point out the already apparent identity politics that inform his philoso- phy. Moreover, I employ capitalization for certain key terms that are meant to be absolute concepts capable of assimilating particular realities (very much in line with the identity thinking that Adorno critiques). 8. My use of terms like “Understanding” and “Consciousness” are grounded in Hegel’s philosophy but are equally informed by Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel. See Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980). 9. Georg W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). 10. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 220 NOTES 11. Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 12. Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political- Philosophical Exchange (New York: Verso, 2003). Hereafter cited as RR. 13. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1992). 14. Georg W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1991). 15. Karl Marx, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978). 16. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). 17. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989). 18. Slavoj Žižek, “Psychoanalysis and Post-Marxism: The Case of Alain Badiou,” The South Atlantic Quarterly (Durham: Duke University Press, Spring 1998). 19. Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977). 20. Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (New York: Continuum, 2004). 21. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005). 22. The following Hasse diagram is a visual representation of this principle. Any entity or group of entities x, y, z—despite their unique and appar- ent differences—shares the same originating point in the void of the empty set: {x,y,z} {x,y} {x,z} {y,z} {x} {y} {z} {Ø} As the diagram illustrates, although all the elements belong to Ø, Ø is not included in their respective individual or collective presentation. In fact, being uncountable, the empty set is repressed so that it does not NOTES 221 have to be included; its presence undermines the oneness of identity, highlighting the fact that being is always founded on non-being. 23. In the previous example of the university, such an event could be equated with the student uprisings in campuses across the world in 1968, from Mexico City to Paris. Such uprisings were made possible by students who embodied the void of those institutional situations; these students felt that they belonged to the university but did not count, and thus their protests interrupted the normal operations of the situation, calling into question the very purpose and function of the university. I examine the parallels between the 1968 uprisings and the Chicano/a revolutionary subject in Chapters 3 and 5. 24. Galileo Galilei, Galileo on the World Systems: A New Abridged Translation and Guide, trans. Maurice A. Finocchiaro (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 25. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2001). Chapter One Epic Aspirations: I Am Joaquín and the Creation of Chicano Subjectivity 1. Ernesto B. Vigil, The Crusade for Justice (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999). 2. Rodolfo Gonzales, Message to Aztlán (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2001). Hereafter parenthetically cited as MA. 3. Anaya Rudolfo and Francisco Lomeli, eds., “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” in Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989). 4. David Conde, “Rodolfo (Corky) Gonzales,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research, 1992). 5. Rodolfo Gonzales, I Am Joaquín / Yo Soy Joaquín: An Epic Poem (New York: Bantam Books, 1972). Hereafter parenthetically cited as IAJ. 6. Juan Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). Hereafter parenthetically cited as CP. 7. Cordelia Candelaria, Chicano Poetry: A Critical Introduction (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1986). 8. Wilson Neate, Tolerating Ambiguity (New York: Peter Lang, 1998). 9. Alfred Arteaga, Chicano Poetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 10. Page DuBois, “ ‘An Especially Peculiar Undertaking’: Alice Notley’s Epic,” in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 12:2 (2001). 11. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, ed. and trans. Vadim Liapunov, trans. Kenneth Brostrom (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 12. T. S. Eliot. The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1952). 222 NOTES 13. Elizabeth Jacobs, Mexican American Literature (New York: Routledge, 2006). 14. José Limón, Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems (Berkeley: University of California, 1992). 15. Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken Press, 1968). 16. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989). 17. Consider what Hegel has to say about Africans and their lack of higher understanding: “The characteristic feature of the Negroes is that their consciousness has not yet reached an awareness of any substantial objec- tivity—for example, God or the law—in which the will of man could participate and in which he could become aware of his own being. The African, in his undifferentiated and concentrated unity, has not yet suc- ceeded in making this distinction between himself as an individual and his essential universality, so that he knows nothing of an absolute being which is other and higher than his own self. Thus, man as we find him in Africa has not progressed beyond his immediate existence . All our observations of African man show him living in a state of savagery and barbarism, and he remains in this state to the present day” (Eze 127). See Hegel’s “Race, History, and Imperialism” in Emmanuel Eze’s Race and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1997). 18. Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 19. As Bruce-Novoa notes, the representation of Juárez is particularly selec- tive: “[This] image of Juárez is that of Mexican propaganda and popular tradition and is not factual. Juárez’s attempts to link Mexico and the United States, which he admired, are ignored, as well as the failure of his reforms. This is an excellent example of the poem’s uncritical utilization of standard Mexican nationalistic imagery, its appeal to the clichés of Mexican populism, perpetuating stereotypical imagery, while using it to establish a Chicano heritage” (Bruce-Novoa 56). 20. Theodor Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 21. Adorno considers this perpetual regress/progress dynamic between reason and barbarism to be the central unthought contradiction of the Enlightenment. Both Horkheimer and Adorno view modern civiliza- tion as participating in mythic practices, nowhere more apparent than in the fetishistic logic—a thinking characterized by a principle of inter- changeability-through-sacrifice—underlying commodity exchange: “Enlightenment is totalitarian. [It] has always regarded anthropomor- phism, the projection of subjective properties onto nature, as the basis of myth . For the Enlightenment, only what can be encompassed by unity has the status of an existent or an event; its ideal is the system from which everything and anything flows . The same equations gov- ern bourgeois justice and commodity exchange . Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reduc- ing them to abstract quantities” (4). See Max Horkheimer and Theodor NOTES 223 Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 22. Again, my argument is that the form of the poem relies on an identity thinking that is structurally characteristic of fascistic movements. This is not meant to suggest that Chicano nationalism was itself fascist, but rather that the identity thinking underlying the politics of the move- ment aligned it with an ideologically fascistic mentality. 23. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992). Chapter Two The Multicultural Turn: New Mestiza Subjectivity in Late Capitalist Society 1. Angie Chabram-Demersesian and Rosa Linda Fregoso observe that “authoritative movement discourses failed to acknowledge the partiality of representation, the fact that it is an artifice and a social construction, and that ‘Chicano’ representations did not even encompass the com- plexity of Chicana/o cultural and social identities.
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