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Engaging Cross-Cultural Communication

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Engaging Cross-Cultural Communication How to Hear the Unspoken: Engaging Cross-Cultural Communication Through the Latin American Testimonial Narrative by Elena Flores Ruiz-Aho A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Liberal Arts Department of Humanities College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Major Professor: Ofelia Schutte, Ph.D. Charles Guignon, Ph.D. Madeline Camara, Ph.D. Date of Approval: April 27, 2006 Keywords: Testimonio, Latin America, Rigoberta Menchú, Subalternity, Spivak © Copyright 2006, Elena Flores Ruiz-Aho Acknowledgments I wish to thank the many individuals who have contributed towards the genesis and fruition of this project, both on a personal and a professional level. For their invaluable academic guidance and support, I wish to thank Dr. Charles Guignon, Dr. Madeline Camara and Dr. Stephen Turner. Above all, I extend my gratitude to Dr. Ofelia Schutte, whose capacities to nurture openings where a student may think freely, beyond the limits of convention, are the bedrock of my successes. For cultivating those successes through patience and a willingness to hear, I thank my partner, Kevin Aho. For Kevin, without reasons. Table of Contents Introduction..............................................................................................................1 Chapter One: Cross-Cultural Communication and the Principle of Incommensurability...................................................................10 Chapter Two: Letting Context Be: The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy..............20 Chapter Three: Bearing Truthful Witness: David Stoll and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans..............................................................40 Chapter Four: The Small Voice of History: Subalternity and the Latin American Narrative........................................................................52 Chapter Five: How to Hear (for) the World of the Other: A response to the Problem of Cross-Cultural Communication ........................62 Notes ......................................................................................................................71 Bibliography ..........................................................................................................77 i How to Hear the Unspoken: Engaging Cross-Cultural Communication Through the Latin American Testimonial Narrative Elena Flores Ruiz-Aho ABSTRACT This project seeks to address issues in cultural politics brought on by difficulties in cross-cultural communication, particularly as these problems manifest themselves in twentieth century Latin American testimonial narratives. By developing a critical line of questioning drawn from Gayatri Spivak’s influential article “Can the Subaltern Speak,” one aim herein is to analyze and describe the ways in which the narrative, Me Llamo Rigoberta Menchú y Así Me Nació la Conciencia, translated into English as I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, exemplifies the incommensurable nature of cross-cultural discursive attempts. This is done through a twofold method: one, by placing heavy emphasis on the role of the reader as constitutor of meaning in a (textual) discursive transaction between culturally-different agents, and two, by drawing attention to the role of historically-determined interpretive frameworks in the reception and interpretation of Subaltern ennunciative acts. The latter, I argue, is necessary for gaining an adequate understanding of receiving and conveying meaning within cross-cultural paradigms. To this end, as an example of the problems, contextual and methodological, that arise in such communicative attempts between cultures, I take up the academic controversy stirred up by the publication of David Stoll’s Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. Lastly, I investigate the socio-political implications of such failures in intercultural communication, giving rise to secondary lines of questioning such as finding ways to create favorable conditions for the possibility of genuine cross- cultural dialogue. One possibility, I suggest, is adopting a method of reading/listening which, borrowing from phenomenology, is continually on the way, always unfinished, and lets the life of the subaltern emerge by remaining open, not just to what is said, but to what is left unsaid. ii INTRODUCTION The question at the heart of this thesis is this: If, as the postcolonial critic Gayatri Spivak has proposed, the rejoinder to the question “can the subaltern1 speak,” is no— because if she2 could speak in a way that mattered to us she would cease to be subaltern—then how can we, as readers of subaltern texts, ever hope to hear what the Other is saying? In other words, how can we understand subaltern speaking practices as they are expressed from the point of subalternity without necessarily having to decode such practices through our own conceptual orthodoxies (and in so doing, distort the message in our own image)? For what will be taken as having been ‘understood’ then, to be sure, will bear far more resemblance to the worldview of the listener than to the speaker or, for our purposes, to the Western reader than the subaltern narrator. To this end, if the meaning of subaltern discursive acts cannot be heard as such, but are always refracted through the lens of the interlocutor’s culture (often in disproportionate ways), how is equitable dialogue between cultures possible? This is the all-embracing predicament of my research. Instead of a fixed answer, I propose that the first step towards a continual, regenerative understanding of the question of cross cultural commensurability lies in grasping the very inescapability of our own interpretive frameworks, or what Heidegger refers to as “our hermeneutic situation.”3 In short, the way we engage other worlds, in an effort to understand them, is at all times colored by how we already make sense of our own world. Where ‘world’ is seen as the socio-historical background that we grow into, we pre-reflectively graft this background or sense of intelligibility onto the cultures we seek to understand, despite points of incompatibility or incongruity. This interpretive reflex, in turn, has far reaching social and, more importantly, political ramifications insofar as it precludes the possibility of “genuine” dialogue between cultures, especially when it is deployed by Western cultures in the form of what Weber calls “instrumental rationality.”4 However, in disposing with the fiction that a detached, completely “neutral” position exists which can yield something like controlled “objective knowledge,” one curative reply to cross-cultural incommensurability is to simply let be; to become aware of our hermeneutic prejudices, from which we cannot escape, and to open ourselves up, as readers, to a kind of receptivity which requires paying very careful attention not to what the narrator is saying (for as subaltern, it is incommensurable) but to what she cannot be heard as saying because our ears do not yet know how to reach for this ‘silence’. In short, we must learn to hear for the differences that make a difference (as in divergent historical traditions), grapple with the anxiety this loss of meaning provokes— an anxiety that emerges when we don’t ‘know’ what is going on – and reconnect the 1 nexus of relations lost through instrumental encounters with texts. We may do this, as the title suggests, by hearing carefully for the unsaid that is at all times nested in the Said: for the circumstantial patterns of the social fabric which let meaning emerge in culturally distinctive ways. Thus, in order to hear how it is the Other relates to herself, it becomes necessary to point to those narrative descriptions of everyday phenomena indicative of the subaltern’s way of life. In so doing, we can begin to familiarize ourselves with the color, texture, and length of the threads used to weave narrative tapestries together; tapestries that express how social and historical patterns are entwined into a cohesive ‘life story’ one already makes sense of. Broadly speaking, then, this thesis takes up issues in cultural politics brought on by problems in communication, specifically between cultures stratified by the Colonial encounter (as in the creation of economically maldeveloped ‘Third’ and modernized ‘First’ worlds). It was forged, not as a response to, but as an applied effort to provide a concrete example of what Spivak meant in her landmark essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”5 Yet Spivak’s provocative response – that no, the Subaltern cannot speak— is often misunderstood, even by her own account6, by many critics to suggest political paralysis rather than a deepening of the question of subaltern agency and communication. It is easily misinterpreted, in part, because it is grounded on a difficult, even more primordial question of how intelligibility is possible in the first place. In other words, what makes it possible (or shows up as a barrier to the possibility) for the subaltern subject to speak is predicated on what makes it possible for the ennunciative acts of any human to effectively count as speaking, where speaking is seen as the ability to convey and receive meaning. The problem comes when subaltern subjects, under conditions of historical duress, attempt to speak to other cultures in an effort to preserve life. As Spivak has shown, it is often “the inaccessibility of, or untranslatability from, one mode of discourse in a dispute to another,” 7 that results in points of intelligibility— nodes in the linguistic
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