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AS THE United States recognizes as subject citizens peoples and individuals who either themselves or whose ancestors hail from parts of the globe other than Europe, there has ensued a growing debate on the construction and meaning of the nation’s memory as it is taught in history and literature courses, to mention only two of the disciplines charged with the construction of national identity. The link between literature and the nation has been amply studied in recent years by scholars such as Bill Readings, Pierre Nora, and Benedict Anderson. The high correlation between literature and liberalism has also been widely accepted. For instance, Jacques Derrida observes that “literature and democracy belong to the same constellation” (37). Readings argues that literature has been constituted as the key discourse in the production of subjectivity and national cultural identity (85), and he suggests that with the rise of women’s, postcolonial, and cultural studies, “the reign of literature as the organizing discipline of University’s cultural mission” seems to have entered into decline (87).
Debates in the United States over the intimate and mutually constructive relation between the state and literature date back to the culture wars of the 1960s. During that long history, often fought in the trenches and borders between strictly literary studies and cultural studies (see Greenblatt and Gunn), African American intellectuals as well as Native American and Chicano scholars and artists redefined the problem not just in terms of majorities and minorities in an always already “universal” but also in terms of another history and alternate, “other” forms of subjectivation. However, the question of the construction of another subject or, rather, the deployment of other forms of subjectivation has not yet led to a different mapping of the literary as historicized by the axis of another time line and as rendered into a literacy that expresses the inevitable mutual construction of literature, the citizen, and the state.
I want to approach the question of literacy in a multilingual and plurotopic society from the perspective of the more recent debates on the construction of time lines, periodizations, forms of spatialization, and other modes of negotiating the dynamics of memory and identity. It is important to ask how policies of inclusion and exclusion into the canon, for instance, either provide or impede understanding. How do such policies respond or obstruct the creation of learning environments that would, in fact, correspond to the dynamics of a multilingual and multiethnic society? In what follows, events that occur in the ill-defined and poorly theorized field of Spanish provide the frame of reference. I am aware that Spanish cannot truly be said to be a field of study in a theoretical sense, but because it is institutionalized as such in departments that organize, manage, and evaluate subjects of knowledge and objects of study, it can be treated as a field of study in this discussion. The epistemological problems of Spanish start at its inception. The name it bears corresponds to the imperial act that made Castilian (one of the several Romance languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula) a national language.
This reflection is prompted by a twin set of concerns. On the one hand, I want to consider the generalized revision of what is designated as the field of colonial studies. This revision began with the work of the Mexican philosopher Edmundo O’Gorman, who presented a decisive challenge to both the historiography established by the conquistadores in the sixteenth century and the positivist historiography that reaffirmed them since the Enlightenment. This challenge to the universalization of European culture eventually converged with the questions raised by both postmodern and postcolonial theorization. On the other hand, there is an increasing discomfort with and problematization of the scholarly work and pedagogical practices of specialists in Latin American culture and literature in the North American academy and more specifically in departments of Romance languages and Spanish. In part this is due to the epistemological differences found in the construction of the object of study. The intellectual tradition in Latin America and about Latin America differs widely from the set of scholarly practices that established Spain as a nation and as a literature in the anglophone academy.
Two situations frame this discussion. The first concerns the dearly held idea that colonial literatures are texts best studied under the interpretative practices and epistemological assumption devised for so-called Golden Age literature. The basic premise of this position is that colonial texts are written in Spanish mainly by Spaniards and for Spaniards. Whatever intervention there may have been from Amerindians in the production of these texts or from the fact that the texts deal with events taking place in the Americas would seem less relevant than the play of rhetoric in Spain at the time. In this narrative Indians did not write anything. Everything was taken down by the chroniclers.
The second situation involves a more formal policy concerning the idea that courses—that is, intellectual work—in departments of Spanish and Romance languages have to be offered “in the language.” This means that all texts must be in the language and that the professor and the students must only speak in the language. The logic of this policy sometimes means that the work of theorists such as Michel Foucault or Derrida is read in Spanish translation. For a course in colonial studies, which by definition is interdisciplinary, it means that what we have termed pre-Columbian texts must be read in Spanish only, not in the original Maya-Quiche and not in English translation, as if Spanish were the original language in which they had been composed and “written.” This stand thus affirms the idea that translation into Spanish is authentic and appropriate, perhaps even natural, for a pre-Columbian text. It is as if moving from the Maya-Quiche in the sixteenth century into Spanish were a problem-free cultural and political act. Beyond a colonialist perspective, “Spanish only” in the classroom underscores an uncritical approach to the huge problems of linguistic and cultural translation and cultural theory. The critical blindness implicit in this policy, itself a symptom of the unexamined legacy of philology, is part of the problem at hand. No less worrisome in this imperial Spanish-only venue is that all scholarly work relating to the so-called pre-Columbian texts is circumscribed to what is available in Spanish, thus leaving out the outstanding scholarship in English, French, and German.
The two situations represent entrenched and powerful ideas about what literature is, what writing and culture are, and, above all, what learning is. The roots of this disciplinary stance regarding that which is not expressed in a European language but is nevertheless allowed in its canon, only to be repressed again in the classroom, can easily be dated back, as Walter Mignolo has shown (Darker Side), to the imperialist thrust of Antonio de Nebrija’s language ideology (Gramática de la lengua castellana, 1492). In a way, this monolinguistic emphasis also represents a perversion of the philological method that founded the language departments in modern universities. Michael Duttun discusses the problems inherent in philology’s emphasis on the word and the connection philology established between language and human activity to sustain the “homology between language and knowledge” (513). This linguistic imperialism reenacts the construction of the colonial difference—that is, the space in between Europe and its others (Mignolo, “Acosta’s Historia” 453)—by simultaneously accepting and denying coevalness.
The ideological struggle underpinning the construction of the Spanish canon and the position of Spanish as a language of instruction that is itself the portal to Spain and Latin America in the North American academy merits a series of monographs. For the moment it can be said that the demand for Spanish expands “naturally” the colonial difference established in the work of the Spanish cronistas, whose affiliation with the imperial state and the law has never been in doubt. The reinsertion of the colonial difference into the North American academy grows more troublesome every day as it restricts the scope of free critical inquiry beyond Spanish and reduces Latin America and its study to a necessary relation to Spanish as an exclusively Iberian language and culture.
In this power-knowledge struggle it is important to make visible the disavowed contradictory set of relations that at once connect, disconnect, and disrupt the “pre-” in pre-Columbian. It is also important to distinguish the genealogy of the postmodern from the pre-Columbian genealogy to map out the different kinds of epistemological work that these two prefixes perform on culture and literature. I argue that these temporal prefixes are not of the same order and have substantially different effects on the construction of a new literacy map for United States citizens in a globalized setting as understood by Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg (46–52).
At first glance these prefixes connote a time line that on the one hand acknowledges monumental change but on the other insists on some type of continuity. The directional arrow of the time line in the “pre-” would not seem to be unlike that of the “post-” in postmodern. It is not that modernity is over with but rather that we have moved beyond certain of its key faces. However, we are living more intensely certain other tendencies already inscribed in its Janus-like face. This aperture in the “post-” allows for the incorporation of even newer forces and dimensions: globalization of capital and technological culture, the human and cultural diasporas. But on a closer look, we find that the two prefixes belong to entirely different orders of understanding and theories of change and continuity over time. Placed next to each other, as items in a series, they begin to appear incompatible. Their dissonance echoes in the chamber of periodization.
When the nineteenth century privileged Columbus’s name as a place in which to locate the cultural divide between Europe and the aboriginal cultures of this hemisphere, it accomplished several tasks. With the pre-Columbian label it homogenized time both in a North-South and East-West axis. The center became the Columbian moment. From that vantage point, on this continent things could be past, over with, and fossil (neither written nor legible), or they could be present (readable and intelligible). Present cultural objects (Aztec pictographic “books”) became ancient and mysterious objects that now faced “early” European scrutiny. Once constituted as objects of European learning, they could enter the flow of time. As themselves, they could enter neither the flow of history nor the realm of literature, for these two forms entailed a level of self-consciousness denied, by definition, to pre-Columbian cultures and peoples. Still, their disturbing presence, even if in translation or as part of obscure or secret private collection, would, centuries later, be the occasion for the creation of new discursive space. In time, they were to constitute the objects of anthropology and archaeology. However, in both instances, objects such as the Popol Vuh ([?] c. l555) had to wait until they were either translated—that is, found a proper European form that would express them—or curated in museums before they could enter into the now universal never-ending flow of the present-future that the transformation of European languages into imperial languages inaugurated for the globe. Those things that did not submit to translation fell by the wayside. They went into the sack of the primitive, the diabolical, offering testimony to the idea that translation always implies the translation of difference.
This logic appears to inform the reception late in the twentieth century of the Popol Vuh into the Spanish literature teaching canon. Various developments coming from anthropology, ethnohistory, and myth studies affected the reading of the Popol Vuh. It was allowed into the canon and the Spanish classroom with the implicit understanding that its identitarian and proper mode of existence would always be in Spanish translation, for it is the scope of that imperial cultural matrix that claims it for its colonial archive. Even when destined for English native speakers, the “same” text is not allowed in English translation in the Spanish classroom. As a text in English it is banned even in the masterful translation by Dennis Tedlock, a book that provides an invaluable interdisciplinary introduction and an ethnohistorical glossary and notes. The Tedlock edition has no equivalent in Spanish.
Thus the “pre-” in pre-Columbian performed dual maneuvers: it homogenized time by establishing differences, and it established asymmetrical dimensions of a before and an after. All the before, if it was to survive, had to be poured into the vessels of the language and the culture of the imperial powers, thus giving to the “pre-” a sort of anticipatory quality inasmuch as the full forms and meanings of its cultures could not be known until they entered the imperial archives. The pre-Columbian time line acts then as a silencing device, for it subjects the world on the “pre-” side of the divide to Eurocentric interpretative categories such as authorship, reception theory, plot, and genre. This phenomenon can clearly be seen in the linguistic and cultural translation performed by the anonymous Aztec intellectuals who worked for Fray Bernardino de Sahagun’s rendition of Aztec cosmology and language arts (Historia general de las cosas de nueva España, l578).
To interpret the Popol Vuh as oral literature is yet another way of silencing it. The notion that the Popol Vuh can better be understood as a performative piece does equal violence to the fragments that we know now as the Maya-Quiche Book of Council. To make it accessible by deploying these translational categories is not only to distort the text, which is not a text, to decontextualize it because of the exigencies of a literary reading, but also to bury it once again, to hide it under the glare of the light of a misunderstood postmodern progressivism of inclusion and multiculturalism. Once in translation and put in place as pre-Columbian literature under the microscope of a postmodern lens, the text is set adrift in the powerful currents of imperial languages in literature departments. To counter this problem it becomes necessary to relocate the text back into a set of incommensurable Maya concepts, such as categories of time and space and the human-divine mutuality. This interdisciplinary armature is necessary to keep the text from evaporating under the heat of interpretative categories. In short, the operation of reading the Popol Vuh in a literature class in a Spanish department subjects the text to a series of linguistic and unexamined epistemological translations that by and large are not acknowledged in the reading apparatus brought to bear as the text is made to yield its literary and cultural value. As Walter Benjamin taught us, what remains in translation is the capacity of the language into which the original is translated to produce a powerful text whose relation to the original will always be problematic.
The “pre-” in pre-Colombian reaffirms the cultural hierarchies that colonialism constructed and modernity expanded. Its homogenizing power levels all Amerindian cultures into a nameless and featureless mass relegated to a silent past without possibilities of transformation, continuity, or agency into the present. It is appropriate, then, to ask, Why then retain a nomenclature that, like “Indian,” the “colonial period,” the “barroco de Indias,” deploys the logic of colonialism and empire as a means for organizing scholarship and pedagogy in the postmodern university?
The dangerously limiting power of the prefix pre- can be cracked in two simple ways. The names of Amerindian cultures past and present can take the place of the “pre-” everywhere, thus restoring the heterogeneity of the Amerindian world and also moving beyond the single time of the pre-Columbian into the multiple spatiality of the globe. It is a bit more work but not impossible to speak of contemporary Mixteca texts, classical Maya texts, or Andean antiquity, as we already do of Greek and Roman antiquity. We must always be aware that as interpreters we occupy a translational space fraught with problems. In this regard, the terms preconquest and postconquest are preferable, for they reference more accurately the endless violence and cultural destruction that war brought onto the peoples of this continent with the arrival of Columbus. Although more painful and humiliating than the state of being “pre-,” conquest does not mask and it serves as a memory aid, for it disturbs reading operations that forget the provenance of the pre-Columbian texts. In the classroom the Popol Vuh and the Huarochiri narratives (Hombres y dioses de Huarochiri [(?) c. 1598]) can indeed command a place of discovery and pleasure, provided it is understood that the text before us is in translation—with all the caveats attached to translation—and the instructor has chosen the English, French, or Spanish translation for scholarly reasons, reasons that are made part of the debate and that do not follow the logic of empire. This kind of pedagogy would be more in tune with the “fluent interdisciplinarity” that Davidson and Goldberg propose as part of a new manifesto for the humanities (57).
Abandoning the “pre-” opens the way for a North-South axis for a different time line that would perhaps start not in Egypt and Mesopotamia as the cradle of civilization and leading up to the Renaissance and the trans-Atlantic ships but rather with Caral, the ancient (3000 BC) cities of the coastal Andes (see Gugliotta). The Caral urban complex might at some point be seen in relation to the ancient and present worship of Pachacamak, the lord of cosmic creation and destruction, refigured as “El Señor de los Milagros” by his colonial and contemporary devotees in Lima and New York. Mapping five thousand years of urban dwelling and creation in the Americas could be part of a postmodern literacy endowed with the capacity to understand and call on multiple epistemologies. Perhaps then “Latinos” would be associated less with the language of conquest than with the ethnic past that makes them visible as “other than European.”
Postcolonial analysis, as it interrogates anew the discursive making of world empires—the occupation of territories, the constructions of human and cultural hierarchies that enable some to dominate others, the maintenance of sovereign and subaltern subject positions—has entered and disrupted most of the previously established disciplinary boundaries. Although not alone, this “post-,” together with other forces for overhauling our received modernity, has repositioned the role played by culture in the making of history. In this context the “post-” begins to look quite different from the “pre-.” What is in the “post-” that is not in the “pre-” has to do with the epistemological shift that postmodernism brings about as it challenges the master narratives; the integrity, both philosophical and ethical, of the sovereign subject; the transparency of language; and, above all, the crisis of representation.
As it turns out, the “post-” is not really about chronology. It does not disturb the fact that Spanish America won its independence from one European power in the first quarter of the nineteenth century only to fall again under the commercial expansion of Great Britain and later the United States. But it does highlight the need for an inquiry into why the lettered city (ciudad letrada) of colonial origins continues well into the present. The epistemological shift embedded in the “post-,” not unlike the epistemological forces configuring cultural studies, opens the way for a subversion of the various binaries that organize the hierarchy of the colonial difference (colonizer/colonized, Spanish / no other literary language). It introduces a new flexibility that, in conjunction with already existing inquiries in ethnohistory in Spanish America, stimulates a keen questioning regarding the structures of understanding that had configured the past so as to destabilize the very notion of a “colonial period” or “Spanish.” In short, the “post-” in postmodern theorizing and postcolonial analyses destabilizes the imperial construction of the past and allows us to enter in its midst from the vantage point of the colonized, both at home and abroad. It enables us to consider the question of literacy as an operation always already bound by specific time-space axes and therefore subject to change.
One can conclude that the “pre-” of pre-Columbian and the “post-” of the various postcolonial approaches to culture and imperialism are not items in the same series. They are, in fact, poles apart, for the work they do stands at contrary purposes. The “pre-” marks a hierarchical difference that designates what is before as other and devoid of self-representation, knowledge, or consciousness. The “post-” stands, in general, for a critical retrospective on Western philosophy and modes of knowing that loosens the bonds tied by the coordinates of empire, decenters discourses and values, and opens the gates for a reconfiguration of knowledges, among which periodization, canon formation, and translation cry out for immediate critical attention and practice changing.
The critical decentering implied in the “post-” not only allows us to think of another time line, let us say a new American TimeLine, but also provides for the possibility of a critical perspective on the literary and cultural canon. That is, should literacy in the multilingual and multiethnic United States not consider a North-South perspective? A thus repositioned “American” national literacy and temporality would not posit Latinos as new peoples on the American scene but rather would be attentive to an old and vibrant, living Latino culture, one that requires abandoning the notions that the “pre-” entails and takes seriously the opening for thinking anew that the “post-” in both postmodern and postcolonial imply. Perhaps the ultimate and most radical step would be to set aside the Eurocentric Latino and Hispanic nomenclature with its reference to the old East-West arrangement of space and time and begin to think of the people migrating from the South as Mexicans, Central Americans, or South Americans, but, above all, as old Americans.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, l991.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. 69–83.
Davidson, Cathy N., and David Theo Goldberg. “Engaging the Humanities.” Profession 2004. New York: MLA, 2004. 42–62.
Derrida, Jacques. “This Strange Institution Called Literature.” Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992. 33–75.
Dutton, Michael. “Lead Us Not into Translation: Notes toward a Theoretical Foundation for Asian Studies.” Nepantla: Views from the South 3 (2002): 495–537.
Greenblatt, Stephen, and Giles Gunn. Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literacy Studies. New York: MLA, 1992.
Gugliotta, Guy. “Earliest Urban Society in America Found in Peruvian Sites.” Washington Post 23 Dec. 2004: A8.
Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, Colonization. Chicago: U of Michigan P, 1995.
———. “Jose de Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias: Occidentalism, the Modern/Colonial World, and the Colonial Difference.” Natural and Moral History of the Indies. By Jose de Acosta. Ed. Jane E. Morgan. Introd. and commentary by Walter Mignolo. Trans. Frances Lopez Morillas. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. 453–518.
Nora, Pierre, ed. Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia UP, l997.
O’Gorman, Edmundo. La invención de América: La universalización de la cultura occidental. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, 1958.
Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996.
Tedlock, Dennis. Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings. New York: Touchstone, 1985.
© 2005 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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