Date: Sat, 11 May 1996 11:21:39 -0400 (EDT)
From: Radhika Gajjala <rxgst6+-AT-pitt.edu>
Subject: concluding part of speech 


      I have kept in reserve the question of Ollantay, because
it is directly connected to this last issue in a way that is
strikingly different than Jose Gabriel's claim to be the Inca in
the Genealogia.  In some ways, Ollantay is in fact the most
derivate and "European" of the three texts, combining as it
does the baroque allegorical model of state theater--as in
Calderon's La vida es sueno--with what came to be known as
the comedia tierna in the Spanish Enlightenment--Jovellanos'
El delincuente honrado is the best known example of the genre,
which anticipates bourgeois melodrama.  The play is based on
an Inca legend set in the period before the Spanish Conquest
about a commoner, Ollantay, who is one of the leading generals
of the Inca army and who falls in love illicitly with the
daughter of the Inca and has a child with her.  When the Inca
learns of this, he reacts by imprisoning his daughter and
forcing Ollantay to flee to his native province.  There Ollantay
raises an army to challenge the Inca's authority and recuperate
his wife.  In the course of the war, the old Inca dies and is
replaced by his son, Tupac Yupanqui, the brother of Ollantay's
wife.  Ollantay's army is eventually defeated, however, and
Ollantay himself is brought in chains to Cuzco to stand trial for
treason.  In the legend, Ollantay is put to death for his
transgression; in the play, however, he is (partly through the
mediation of his daughter, Yma Sumac) forgiven by Tupac
Yupanqui and appointed as, in effect, a sort of vice-Inca (he
will rule in Tupac Yupanqui's place when the latter is away),
and reunited with his wife and child.
      If we were to read the Ollantay in the same spirit as the
Memorias of Juan Bautista, that is as a "national allegory"--in
the sense Fredric Jameson uses this term--anticipating the Wars
of Independence of the early nineteenth century, the hero's
frustrated love affair and eventual rebellion against the old
Inca would symbolize the dissatisfaction of an emergent creole
class with the still dominant structures of power of the colonial
ancien regime, represented by the Bourbon dynasty and its
viceroyalties.   What is interesting about the Ollantay for our
purposes here, however, is 1)that it was written in Quechua--
and therefore for all practical purposes was inaccesible to a
creole audience--and 2)that, despite its reliance on the formula
of the Spanish comedia, its models of cultural and political
authority are ultimately Andean, rather than European.  While
the representation of the old Inca against whom Ollantay rebels
can certainly be read as a symbol for the Spanish Bourbons, it
might also have suggested to the local audiences who saw the
play in 1780, as the Tupac Amaru rebellion was spreading, the
more immediate and not at all "symbolic" possibility of
restoring the Inca state as such.  With an important twist,
however: the new Inca state suggested at the end of the
Ollantay is no longer based on a principle of strict caste
authority such as dominated the traditional Inca system; it is,
rather, a state that allows precisely for the accesion to power
of non-aristocratic subjects like Ollantay.  
      Is it a case here of the infiltration into or contamination
of a "purely" Andean conception of the state by proto-
democratic ideology or the European idea of enlightened
despotism (which itself was based historically in part on
Enlightenment concepts of the Inca state)?  Ollantay may be
seen as a case of transculturation, since it involves at both
aesthetic and ideological levels an explosive combination of
Andean and European elements that could only have been
stabilized into the cultural expression of a new national-popular
had the 1780 rebellion succeeded.  But it is important to see it
as involving a transculturation from below that embodies
ultimately not so much the ways in which an emerging creole
"lettered city" is adequate, or becomes progressively more so,
to the task of representing the interests of the indigenous
population, but rather how that population appropriates
aspects of European and creole literary and philosophical
culture to serve its interests.It is important to note that
it is not a question of the distinction between a project that has
a concept of "nation" articulated in literature and print
culture, as in Benedict Anderson's well-known hypothesis, and
one that does not, that is simply tribal or community-based, or
regional, precisely because it lacks the representational capacity
to project an "imagined community" beyond those limits.13 
It is a question, rather, of different conceptions of the subject-
form of the nation (and of different types of intellectuals and
intellectual culture).  Steve Stern explains that:

      In Peru-Bolivia, in the late colonial period, peasants did
      not live, struggle, or think in terms that isolated then
      from the emerging "national question."  On the
      contrary, protonational symbols had great importance
      in the life of peasants and small-holders.  *Yet these
      protonational symbols were tied not to an emerging
      creole nationalism*, but to notions of an Andean- or
      Inca-led social order.  Andean peasants saw themselves
      as part of a wider protonational culture, and sought
      their liberation on terms that, far from isolating them
      from an overarching state, would link them to a new
      and just state (Stern 1987, 76; italics mine)  .

      To see texts like the Genealogia or the Memorias as
adequately representative of the interests at stake in the Tupac
Amaru rebellion, then, not only obscures the fact of the
production by an indigenous peasantry of a sense of the
national-popular that, while it may have involved elements of
European culture, did so in a way subordinate to its own
struggle for hegemony.14  It also amounts to an act of
appropriation which excludes that peasantry as a subject
conscious of its own history, incorporating it only as a
contingent element of another history (of the modern nation-
state, of the Enlightenement, of Peruvian literature), whose
subject is also an Other (creole, Spanish-speaking, letrado,
male).
      I would like to move from the Tupac Amaru rebellion
at this point, however, to consider briefly a contemporary text
about indigenous resistance and rebellion in the Americas that
I have already had occasion to mention more than once here, 
I, Rigoberta Menchu15.  As you know, Menchu's narrative
begins with a strategic disavowal of both literature and the
liberal concept of the authority of private experience that
literature can engender ("My name is Rigoberta Menchu.  I am
twenty three years old.  This is my testimony. I didn't learn it
from a book, and I didn't learn it alone."), and any number of
subsequent passages imply a critique of what literacy and books
represent in the power systems that affect the narrator's
possibilities of liberation or even survival.  At the same time,
however, it is clear that Menchu constructs her account not
only from an oral, "non-Western," pre-capitalist model of
story-telling (of the sort Walter Benjamin portrayed in his
wonderful essay "The Storyteller").  In narrating her own
testimonio, she is clearly also drawing on her experience as a
lay catechist, whose function (which involves the Book of Books
of Western culture, so to speak) is to dramatize and allegorize
the biblical stories she tells in order to provoke discussion
about their present-day relevance to the lives of her
congregation.    
      I have argued elswhere that it would be yet another
version of the native informant of classical anthropology to
grant testimonial narrators like Rigoberta Menchu only the
possibility of being witnesses, not the power to create their own
narrative authority and negotiate its conditions of truth and
representativity.  "This would be a way of saying that the
subaltern can of course speak, but only through the
instituitionally sanctioned authority--itself dependent on and
implicated in colonialism and imperialism--of the journalist or
ethnographer, who alone has the power to decide what counts
in the narrator's 'raw material' and to turn it into literature
(or 'evidence')" (Beverley 1993, 97).
      What a text like I, Rigoberta Menchu forces us to
confront is the subaltern not only as a "represented" subject
but also as agent of a transformative project that aspires itself
to become hegemonic.  In terms of this project, which is not
our own in any immediate sense and which in fact involves
structurally a contradiction with our position of relative
privilege and authority, the testimonial text is a means rather
than an end in itself.  In particular, becoming a writer,
producing a literary text, reading and discussing that text in a
classroom cannot be in themselves the solution what Rene Jara
calls the "situation of urgency" that generates the testimonio
requires, whether or not these things actually happen.  That
solution has to be something other than the testimonio's
circulation as a written text within what Alberto Moreiras calls,
on the model of Said's idea of Orientalism, academic
Latinamericanism. In other words, it is not only our purposes
that count in relation to a testimonio like I, Rigoberta Menchu.
      The key thing to understand in this respect is that the
subaltern does not want to be subaltern: it wants to be
dominant or at least equal.  Since the subaltern is constructed
discursively in the first place as the "other" of the dominat
culture, however, such a desire must of necessity involve a
negation or radical inversion of the authority of that culture. 
This recognition is what distinguishes our project from one
which would seek simply to "represent" the subaltern or
register its presence in social history, and it is here in
particular where we confront directly Florencia Mallon's
carefully argued observations on the implications of a
subalternist perspective for historical method and technique
(Mallon 1994).  Where Mallon sees subaltern studies as a new
way of doing social history, now more capable of registering the
presence and influence of subaltern groups, we are more
inclined to see it as involving (among other things) a critique of
academic history itself, of its pretension to represent the
"other" adequately without questioning its own institutional
involvement in structures of power/knowledge that are directly
implicated in the production of the elite/subaltern distinction in
the first place.  In this sense, the argument of Mallon's recent
book on peasants and the state in Mexico and Peru seems to us
to "suture" unduly the people/nation opposition in Latin
American social history, by claiming to establish the effective
presence of the subaltern in the conformation of the local and
national state.  We prefer to leave this gap open or to widen it
even more.  
      I also need to differentiate the Subaltern Studies
proposal from the larger project of a Latin American Cultural
Studies, within which we initially inscribed it.16  It is not only
that cultural studies perpetuates, as I suggested earlier (see note
3), an understanding of cultural agency still dominated by the
idea of transculturation.  Although animated--via the model of
the Birmingham School--by a real concern with subaltern
agency as materialized in popular culture, and by theoretical
and political inputs coming from the New Left, feminism,
marxism, deconstruction, anti-colonial struggles and the like, in
its eventual institutionalization within the academy and the
foundations cultural studies more and more seems to have
taken on a purely descriptive relation to the emerging
"scapes"--to borrow Arjun Appadurai's term (as in
technoscapes, demoscapes, culturescapes, etc.)--of global culture
it seeks to map.  It is one thing to move beyond the unhappy
synthesis of dependency theory and Frankfurt School-style
anxiety about the bad effects of mass culture that dominated an
earlier phase of Latin American cultural critique, but in its
present incarnation--I take Canclini's Culturas hibridas to
represent the state of the art-- perhaps cultural studies confuses
adequate description of cultiural change with the forms of
subaltern cultural agency as such.  As such, I would argue that
it risks becoming a new form of academic costumbrismo.  I
think we are all beginning to understand that what we do in
critical theory, communications and cultural studies, new
historicism, subalternist historiographies, postcolonial critique,
and the like, can be--according to the logic of what Bordieu
calls "effects not desired"--complicit in producing discursively
what I sometimes call a transnational postmdernist sublime. 
The phrase is only partly ironic: the function of such a sublime-
-as a new sensorium or aesthetic-cognitive remapping--would be
to adjust the humanities and the field of culture generally to
the new patterns of domination, exploitation, and immiseration
produced by globalization, just as the Romantic sublime of
Kant and company did for an earlier stage of capitalism in the
nineteenth century.  The trajectory of Appadurai's own work
and of the transnational cultural studies journal he co-edits,
Public Culture, is itself symptomatic of this danger, as is in a
different way something like the Benetton ad campaign that
used testimonial and documentary material drawn from
subaltern situations to persuade affluent transnational
consumers to buy that company's clothes. 
      Cultural studies may or may not have political
consequences, depending on how it is articulated (its capacity
to draw the left away from what Garcia Canclini calls a
"Gutembergian" concept of cultural agency is salutory, in my
opinion).  By contrast, the subalternist project is necessarily a
partisan one, something like a secular version of what
Liberation Theology calls a "preferential option for the poor,"
and it shares with Liberation Theology the essential
methodology of "listening to the poor," to use Gustavo
Gutierrez's phrase.17  Here I am speaking only for myself;
other members of the Group aren't comfortable with this
comparison, mistrusting with good reason a rhetoric that relies
even metaphorically on the claim of organized religion to speak
for the poor.   What we do agree about, however, is that
subaltern studies is--to quote our Founding Statement again--"a
question not only of new ways of looking at the subaltern, new
and more powerful forms of information retrieval, but also of
building new relations between ourselves and those human
contemporaries whom we posit as objects of study"  (Beverley
et al. 1995, 121).18
      We do not, in this sense, claim to represent the
subaltern; we register instead the way in which the knowledge
we construct and impart as academics is structured by the
absence or difficulty or impossibility of representation of the
subaltern. This is to recognize, however, the fundamental
inadequacy of this knowledge and of the institutions that
contain it, including the university, and therefore the need for
social change in the direction of a more radically democratic
and non-hierarchical social order.