Considering the Formation of the 'Transnational Subject": Studying Contact Zones, Multilingual Exchanges, and Cross-Cultural Interactions

This is nothing new, nothing that we haven’t heard before. Being ethnic in the US is simply being foreigner, even though for most of us America has always been our home. Take the example of Puerto Rico, which in the Downes vs. Bidwell case of 1901, the infamous Justice Edward Douglass White declared that “while in an international sense Porto Rico [poor man couldn’t pronounce his ues] was not a foreign country, it was foreign to the United States in a domestic sense.”

—Victor Villanueva, “Papers, Please: Theorizing Border Discourses after Arizona SB1070 & HB2281 Conference” University of Arizona. 13 September 2013. Keynote Address.

           

           As I read through the articles for this week, I kept thinking about the idea of what it means to reconstruct a geo-historical literature of nation that offers a more accurate and inclusive vision of events. I also thought about the risks in reconstructing from a hemispheric perspective which in many ways has already benefitted from the shared and “established” history of imperial conquests, leaving according to Walter Mignolo in The Idea of Latin America a “colonial wound” (2-8, 17).  However, Moya’s and Saldivar’s concerns for understanding the formation of the “transnational subject” of the Americas seems adequate in the current national climate on questions of Latinos senses of belonging in the United States. An American Literature, or Americas’ Literature, shift towards a more comprehensive study of hemispheric contact zones, people’s movements, and their identities does appear to offer a step away from what Moya and Saldivar identify as “binary thinking” (17). Moving away from binary thinking can help in amending inconsistent notions of belonging such as the one cited in the epigraph above. In the epigraph included, Villanueva critiques the idea that ethnicity in the U.S. has always been part of the dichotomy of foreigner and native. He demonstrates that such notion abstracts the reality of Puerto Rican citizenship and relationship to the U.S., as documented in the literature.

Moya’s and Saldivar’s interest in presenting studies which explore the transnational subject are not only appealing because they allows for a more in-depth understanding of diverse peoples in relation to the US, but also because they also call for an exploration of cross-language interactions and their influences on the production of culture and American texts. The move to a “trans” approach calls for a closer look at how cultural influences have travelled back and forth across borders and hemispheres, and have produced the contact zones of the Americas. The production of cross-cultural texts may be seen in Annette Kolodny’s study of the Yaqui Testamento, which as she explains contains a mixture of Spanish, Yaqui, and “inflections from Latin and Hebrew” (3). The close study of texts such as the Yaqui Testamento highlights the multilingual beginnings of American identity and can help strategize through current notions of linguistic universality. It can as Kolodny suggests, produce a “frontier” mindset which may claim multiple identities and dispositions in relation to the land and state, such as the linguistic attitudes demonstrated by Gloria Anzaldúa’s code-switching in Borderlands/La Frontera. In addition, a frontier mindset can add to the current scholarly orientation towards translingual exchanges and literacies in writing.

Lastly, as can be seen in Timothy Marr’s trajectory of Islam in the US, the Americanists' move to a hemispheric and global approach allows for unconsidered beginnings for the U.S. and ways to analyze how  identity can become solely a performance. Marr provides the example of Ira Aldridge, a black man who performs the performance of Arab identity and consequently erases his black identity. He demonstrates that although Aldridge is able to freely travel abroad (during the time of slavery) and gain socio-economic standing, it is at the cost of his identity (531-533). Thus, through Aldrige’s example, Marr eloquently shows how Islam has permeated much of the history of the U.S., either by its imaginative or actual presence, but like in Villanueva's case has been part of the dichotomy of foreigner and native subject.