Artic le Reconquista : I lan Stavans and multicultural ist Latino / a discourse
Ilan Stavans constructs a multiculturalist framework for understanding the US Latino/a experience. By reading The Hispanic Condition (1995) alongside Stavans’ discussions of the Latino/a literary canon in the introductions to his anthologies, New World (1997) and Lengua Fresca (Augenbraum and Stavans, 2006), and his articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education, I argue that this multiculturalist approach is based on an equation of culture with language. Through this linguistic formulation of Latinidad with the Spanish language as its defining facet, Stavans privileges a colonialist rendering of Latino/a history, tracing the ancestral lineage of Latino/as in terms of solely Western European culture. By valorizing Spanish colonization, Stavans glosses over sites of violence in order to highlight a linguistic inheritance and formulates US Latino/a identity in opposition to American indigenous cultures. Uncovering the way in which Ilan Stavans positions the indigenous as Other in his multiculturalist approach to Latinidad is essential to understanding the colonialist and conservative underpinnings of how Stavans structures the Latino/a literary canon. I will consequently address how Latino/a Studies critics have wrestled with Stavans’ influence on the field and the ways in which Stavans’ vision of US Latino/a Studies resembles or reflects its institutional orientation and disciplinary locations. Latino Studies (2009) 7, 410–434. doi:10.1057/lst.2009.42
The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post/Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity
the relation between cultural production and political struggle, and between the aesthetic and the material as expressions of social relations, are absolutely central themes within caribbean studies in all of its disciplinary and interdisciplinary guises. A key question for the field as a whole is what role it might play in generating new approaches to “cultural political economy,” which is emerging as an effective bridging concept at the intersections of anthropology, sociology, economics, political theory, and literary and cultural studies. Both of the books reviewed here navigate the distinctively caribbean confluence of two theoretical traditions: a class-centered tradition of anticapitalist political theory and praxis and an aesthetics-centered tradition of anticolonial cultural theory and praxis. Joy Mahabir describes her approach as “historical materialist” while shalini Puri describes hers as grounded in “Marxist cultural theory.” Both also incorporate questions of racial, gender, and sexual hierarchies. each book engages with a wide range of cultural objects and sites: literary and theoretical texts, musical lyrics and performance, carnival and public festivities. thus while focused mainly on literary studies, these texts contribute to the increasingly prevalent transdisciplinary caribbean cultural studies methodology that encompasses high art and popular culture, performance and politics, theory and history. Indeed, the very relation between the aesthetic and the political is at the core of each author’s concerns.
Hispanics in the United States : an agenda for the twenty-first century
Hispanics in the United States represents a collective exploration providing a basic foundation of the information available to understand Hispanics in the United States and create an effective policy agenda. Hispanics are projected to be the largest minority group in the United States in the twenty-first century. The contributions define an agenda which will be useful for students, scholars, service practitioners, political activists, as well as policy makers. The opening essays define the diversity of the Hispanic experience in America and put each of the other essays within a larger context. This edition adds a new introduction by the editors incorporating and evaluating the implications of the results of the national 2000 census. The book is organized into two sections: the first establishes the historical, demographic, religious, and cultural context of Hispanics in the United States. The second describes the major issues facing this population in the American social structure, specifically the areas of health care, the labor market, criminal justice, social welfare, and education. The work concludes with a discussion of the role played by Hispanics in the political life of the nation. The contributors, all of whom are scholars with demonstrated competence in the areas, include: Teresa A. Sullivan, David Maldonado, Melissa Roderick, Barry Chiswick, Michael Hurst, Zulema Suarez, Alvin Korte, Katie McDonough, Cruz Reynoso, and Christine Marie Sierra, as well as David Engstrom and Pastora San Juan Cafferty. Together they have produced a book which will be extremely useful to anyone developing public policies and creating social interventions at either the national or local levels during the coming decade. This new edition is a valuable contributor to discussions about the issues defining the population that will be the largest minority group in the United States in this century.