Date: Tue, 7 May 1996 07:28:38 -0400 (EDT)
From: Radhika Gajjala <rxgst6+-AT-pitt.edu>
Subject: part 2 - J.B. Virtual speech



       Our Founding Statement explains in detail some
of the general historical and personal contingencies that
led us to re-evaluate our own work in the direction of
subaltern studies; we point there above all to the crisis
of the great left projects of the last two decades, like the
Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions, and the revisionary
or deconstructive effect on Marxism of new theoretical
perspectives coming from feminism and
poststructuralism, particularly the work on the nexus of
power and knowledge associated with Foucault.  What
was at stake in our move to subaltern studies was, in
other words, a growing sense of the inadequacy of the
models of intellectual and political protagonism in which
many of us were in fact formed. In the field of literary
and cultural critcism, which most of the intial members
of the Group come from, one of the most influential of
these models was undoubtedly the concept of
transculturation, introduced by Fernando Ortiz in his
ethnographic studies in Cuba in the twenties and
thirties, and then adapted in the sixties by Angel Rama
to the field of literature in the form of what he called
"narrative transculturation"--transculturacion narrativa
(Rama 1982).  If for Ortiz transculturation designated
a social process in which European and African
elements--food, customs, religious practices, manners,
dress, etc.-- became fused in Cuban everyday life, in
Rama's version--which was based on the conjunctural
coincidence between the literary practice of the boom
writers and the new political energies released by the
impact of the Cuban Revolution--transculturation
became something like an ideology for intellectual work
in general, positing a quasi-Leninist relation between a
"lettered" vanguard of social scientists, humanists,
artists, writers, critics, and a new type of politician--and
subaltern social classes and groups, in which the first
would serve as an agent of the second by representing
and/or constructing new cultural and political forms in
which the formative presence of the subaltern in Latin
American history and society could be made manifest. 
Pablo Neruda's claim to "speak for" a transhistorical
popular subject in Canto General (and the Popular
Front politics that it was the vehicle of), or the work of
the Peruvian novelist Jose Maria Arguedas at the
boundary between indigenous and European cultural
forms, and Quechua and Spanish, are exemplary of
transculturation in this sense, as is the earlier notion of
cultural mestizaje or creolization first advanced by
Pedro Henriquez Urena, the founder of modern Latin
American literary criticism, which underlies the writing
practices of both magic realism and the neo-baroque.3 
       What I think is wrong with the transculturation
model is that it is based on and continues to privilege a
fundamentally literary notion of the actual or potential
representational adequacy of intellectuals and elite
culture in relation to the subaltern--I mean
representational in both a mimetic and a political sense,
in the way Gayatri Spivak explains in her essay "Can
the Subaltern Speak?"  Subalternity is a relational
rather than an ontological identity, which implies that it
is a socially-constructed identity (or, since it is not one
thing, a set of constantly shifting identities).  What we
liked about the work of Spivak and the South Asian
group was its acute sense of the limitations of elite
discourse, whether historiographic, anthropological,
literary, colonial, liberal, or even marxist--limits
imposed, as the passage from Guha suggests, by the
inescapable fact that elite discourse and the institutions
that contain it, like the university and the disciplines of
history and literature, are themselves complicit in the
construction and maintenance of subalternity.