Scott Michaelsen

Department of English
Michigan State University
smichael@pilot.msu.edu

 

José David Saldívar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies.Berkeley: U of California P, 1997.

 

It was not colorless, nor was it of any one uniform color--presenting to the eye, as it flowed, every possible shade of purple, like the hues of a changeable silk... we perceived that the whole mass of liquid was made up of a number of distinct veins, each of a distinct hue; that these veins did not commingle; and that their cohesion was perfect in regard to their own particles among themselves, and imperfect in regard to neighboring veins. Upon passing the blade of the knife athwart the veins, the water closed over it immediately, as with us, and also, in withdrawing it, all traces of the passage of the knife were instantly obliterated. If, however, the blade was passed down accurately between the two veins, a perfect separation was effected, which the power of cohesion did not immediately rectify. The phenomena of this water formed the first definite link in that vast chain of apparent miracles with which I was destined to be at length encircled. (Poe 194)

 

This miracle, which takes place at the end of Chapter 18 of Edgar Allan Poe’s racial tale, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), is perhaps the nineteenth-century analogue for the miracle now taking place in our midst, in the realm of post-colonial criticism. It is the miracle of hybridity. Here is the potentially utopian, boundary-shattering figure of the hybrid: that which is a conjunction of the many makes its appearance as a changing flow, as a swirl of shifting color, such that it is neither “colorless” nor “uniform,” such that it embodies “every possible shade” without being any particular shade. And here is the miracle: that which is so conjoined can always be reduced to “a perfect separation.” Each element of the hybrid can be cut “athwart”; that is, the “veins” of the multiple elements can be cut open, exposed to one another, as indeed they must have been innumerable times before, and yet the singular veins always maintain their essential characters. And the individual veins can be exposed and analyzed in all of their singularity by simply passing a blade “between” them. Which is to suggest, as Poe’s extended metaphor certainly does, that the appearance or the effect of hybridity is phantasmatic–a trick of light and motion which, finally, is founded upon strands each of which is an unchanging essence. This episode in Pym, then, can be read as a polygenist response to the seemingly incontrovertible, visible fact of racial intermixture. The integrity of the individual strands puts the lie to any claim regarding hybridity.

 

Poe’s brief text, perhaps, should serve as a warning to certain forms of post-colonial criticism concerned with hybridization. The warning takes this complex form: hybridity cannot really be hybridity–cannot really be a mixture and confusion of categories, types, bodies–if it is still possible, in the end, to identify the individual elements that compose the hybrid. If the hybrid were truly a hybrid, it would subvert the possibility of locating its individual parts, of producing an analytic which might chart the contributions of origin. A hybrid which can be disarticulated, then, is a compound without mixture, not a hybrid. When recent post-colonial criticism both marks approvingly the existence of hybrids, as a sign of utopian powers and potentialities, and determines the individual elements which make up the hybrid, it is in danger of fully recapitulating the logic of nineteenth-century racial studies. It falls, in short, into Poe’s trap.

 

José David Saldívar’s recent volume, Border Matters, is entirely organized around the logic of the hybrid. He contends that “any examination of some of the key theoretical turns in cultural theory has to contend with [Néstor] García Canclini’s Culturas híbridas” (Saldívar 29).¹ Hybridity, Saldívar claims, is the large fact of the modern Mexican-U.S. borderlands–a fact pregnant with possibility. “What changes,” he asks, “when culture is understood in terms of material hybridity, not purity?” (19). The answer is at least all of the following: a certain “playfulness of form” is evident (33); a certain subaltern agency is made possible in the “shifting and shifty versions of border culture” thereby produced (35); a certain sort of “deconstruction” takes place, of the “monological desire of cultural nationhood” (5-6)²; a certain “crossing, circulation, material mixing, and resistance” takes place such that contestation of power is possible and the “multiple-voiced” or inherently dialogic emerge (xiii, 13-14). In short, the borderlands is figured as “now only liminal ground, which may prove fertile for some and slimy for others” (21).

 

Saldívar’s account, then, is one of material fertility, and of the political powers that accrue under such conditions. But Border Matters, at every turn, would be subject to Poe’s critique. To cite just one example, Tish Hinojosa’s music is described as a hybrid music; she “plays an eclectic blend of U.S.-Mexican border styles, mixing elements of corridos, cumbias, folk, rock, and country and western lyrics and lilting melodies” (188). Saldívar’s descriptions of hybridity amount to a taking account of individual cultural elements. To listen to Hinojosa productively is to be able to identify the point of origin of each contribution–to determine cultures and their products. Saldívar writes that Hinojosa’s “simple power” lies in her ability to “disentangle the segregated musical boundaries that divide the mass-mediated music industry,” which is a curious formulation (188): Why is it that hybridic desegregation is premised, then, on the act of disentanglement, rather than an entanglement of that which is culturally segregated? The answer is that the form of hybrid analysis which is practiced by Border Matters is entirely commensurate with Poe’s water streams.

 

Border Matters occasionally but consistently is organized as an argument with anthropology. In pages on the nineteenth-century “soldier-ethnographer” John Gregory Bourke, for example, Saldívar writes:

 

Culture in this light is the nimbus perceived by one group when it comes into contact with and observes another one. It is the objectification of everything alien and weird and exotic about the contact group. (166)

 

This is a rather all-encompassing and generalized critique of anthropology and the anthropological project, and Saldívar sustains it elsewhere–for example: “forms of imperial dominion have often been concretized in the personas and functions of the traveler, especially the missionary and the anthropologist” (139). And yet, of course, Saldívar’s crucial term of art, hybridity, belongs entirely to the history of colonial anthropology–a fact that goes unremarked in Border Matters.

 

The nineteenth-century concept of the materially fertile hybrid, as the key figure in the wars between racialist monogenists and polygenists, was designed, as Robert J.C. Young reminds, to operate in precisely the manner in which Saldívar forecasts: “Hybridity… is a key term in that wherever it emerges it suggests the impossibility of essentialism” (Young 27). This, perhaps, is now well known. What has gone unnoticed, however, is the strange journey of the hybridity concept in nineteenth-century U.S. thought.³

 

In the first place, hybridity is advanced by the so-called monogenists, and this “beginning” should give one pause, because if those on the side of hybridity can only announce the existence of hybrids in the name of The Unity of the Human Race, as hybridity theorist John Bachman’s 1850 book title has it, then hybridity can only be the logic of incest; it cannot be the logic of the “heterotopic,” as Saldívar would have it (14), but rather the thought of the singular. When Saldívar announces his intention, at the end of his “Introduction,” “to unify a rhetoric or stylistics of the border” (14), he places himself in line with those nineteenth-century figures who reveal the wild card of hybridity only to always already keep it in its place, to announce a kind of impossibility of hybridization in the face of unification.

 

The crucial nineteenth-century U.S. debate over hybridity took place between the Reverend Bachman and Samuel Morton in the early 1850s. Bachman was minister of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Morton was a medical doctor whose fascination with the measurement of human skull size yielded Crania Americana (1839) and Crania Aegyptiaca (1844)–perhaps the two most crucial American texts for the development of a scientific racist perspective. Bachman’s three works from 1850 on hybridity–each produced as a combination of scholarship and personal attack on Morton–prompted a searching investigation on Morton’s which lasted the whole of the next year, until his death in May of 1851. His contemporaneous biographer Henry S. Patterson comments:

 

Never had Morton been so busy as in that spring of 1851.... His researches upon Hybridity cost him much labor, in his extended comparison of authorities, and his industrial search for facts bearing on the question. (Nott and Gliddon lvi)

 

The texts Morton produced in this last year of his life are quite fugitive–stray paragraphs toward a response to Bachman, for example, in the pages of the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, for example, and unfinished pages, or what his literary executors call “inedited manuscripts,” toward a full-scale revision of Crania Americana. What one learns from these pages appears to be counter-intuitive. One learns that Morton, rather than simply rejecting the test of hybridity, or denying its ability to produce non-degenerate persons, incorporated hybridity into his account of the races, incorporated it in such a way that the very idea of distinct races rests upon a foundation of earlier hybridizations of what one might call proto-races. The crucial moment comes on September 10, 1850, when Morton, President of the Academy of Natural Sciences, reads a short paper from the chair to those in attendance “on the value of the word species in Zoology” (Morton 81). While Morton defines “species” as a “primordial organic form” in a perhaps entirely conventional polygenist manner, his further comment, clearly influenced by Bachman’s attack, says otherwise:

 

It will be justly remarked that a difficulty presents itself, at the outset, in determining what forms are primordial.... My view may be briefly explained by saying, that if certain existing organic types can be traced back into the "night of time," as dissimilar as we see them now, is it not more reasonable to regard them as aboriginal, than to suppose them the mere accidental derivations of an isolated patriarchal stem of which we know nothing? Hence, for example, I believe the dog family not to have originated from one primitive form, but many. Again, what I call a species may be regarded by some naturalists as a primitive variety... (Morton 82)

 

Here is what Morton has done: Bachman’s evidence of hybridization among what Morton treats as the five basic races has now been taken into account. The possibility of, say, black-white mixtures in the world, does not refute an “aboriginal” racial thesis, but merely demonstrates that at a more “primitive” moment, a much larger and more complex network of “forms” intermingled, producing five distinct races but retaining traces of their interrelationship. Morton therefore does not do battle directly with Hybridity, but rather swallows it whole, adopts it as his foundational historical gesture, uses it to undergird a theory of now relatively stable races that can at least be differentiated in terms of talents and possibilities in the last instance, if not prevented from certain sorts of hybridization given primitive “proximate” or “allied” relations (Morton 82).

 

One can, of course, read this definition of “species” as “variety” as an act of desperation, of logical confusion, or as a misunderstanding of what hybridity threatens in relation to narratives of racial difference. But it is perhaps best not to move too quickly in adopting this perspective, and to take seriously the fact that 1850 stages the great debate between essence and hybridity, produces a concept of hybridity to undermine essence, then locates hybridity as the ground of essence. The very idea of hybridity undergirds, belatedly, but, finally, in the first place, the idea of different entities–guarantees their space, their properties. Its every attempt to calculate original, non-binary relations produces the conditions for impermeable borders, restructures cultural geography in a manner akin to the “redlining” of real estate districts.

 

Nothing is quite what it seems in this great hybridity debate. The existence of hybrids is announced in the name of a worldview–monogenism–which seemingly would preclude the possibility of absolute differences among human bodies, of therefore the very possibility of the “hetero.” The announcement is issued from the old slave South, in the pages of the Charleston Medical Journal, in order to do battle with a Northerner who publishes his great works of scientific racialism in Philadelphia, the home of American liberty. And Bachman, finally, sided with the South on the question of secession, a week before South Carolina’s official decision to leave the union: “I must go with my people,” he announced from his pulpit, leaving one to wonder precisely who one’s “people” might be in a world of nothing but kin (qtd. in Shuler 216).

 

Given this complex and problematic history, one might finally wonder in what way a reinvigorated notion of hybridity might do battle with racial and cultural essentialisms at the end of the millennium. Saldívar’s sixth chapter, “Tijuana Calling,” is useful for such a purpose. It is here that Sald�var surveys a number of commentators on Tijuana as a border flashpoint, as a sign or a token of a new hybrid world being born. Saldívar dismisses New York Times writer Beverley Lowry’s travel writing on Tijuana precisely because it “is [not] sympathetic… to the material hybrid and heteroglossic (sub)cultures of Tijuana” (134); praises Rubén Martínez’s The Other Side (1992) because it can hear Tijuana’s “noisy music of intercultural bricolage” (144); and in general weighs a number of writers by the standard of whether they have managed to attend to the existence of hybrid cultural formations.⁴ One of the key texts in Saldívar’s account is Richard Rodriguez’s Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father (1992). He concludes his Tijuana chapter with Rodriguez (and performance artist and writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña) “because their work provokes both celebration and disdain,” and, indeed, the highly visible Rodriguez for years has been vilified by progressive Chicano studies scholars for writing against such matters as “affirmative action and bilingual education” and for support of the “English-only movement” (146, 151).⁵ Over five remarkable pages, Saldívar concludes that Rodriguez, in Days of Obligation, has discovered hybridization and that, therefore, Rodriguez has undergone a “sea change”: his “mandarin” views have been transformed, and he has converted into a figure who “seems to want to put behind [him] the earlier polemics” (149, 151). In essence, Saldívar suggests that Richard Rodriguez has moved from an anti-Mexican, anti-Chicano viewpoint to “the Mexican point of view” through acknowledgment of his identity as a gay man and a Mexican man, through acknowledgment that he himself is a hybrid figure shot through with determinations that include both Anglo and Mexican elements (150). Hence Rodriguez’s newfound ability to use hybridity as a weapon against essentialism; Saldívar reads Rodriguez as concluding that “the South is in the North” and that “Mexico… is ready to spill over across the wire into the North and take up the whole enchilada” (149). Saldívar welcomes Rodriguez into the fold of those who have converted to hybridity analysis, to the “undoing [of] hegemonic readings of Baja and Alta California” (150). Rodriguez is now one of us, then, a figure who, through discovery and celebration of the forces of Americas’ hybridity, has re-entered and repositioned himself within the battle over identity politics on the left-progressive side.

 

To intervene at this moment in Saldívar’s text is, in one sense, easy, and in another, complex. It is relatively easy, for example, to document that Rodriguez himself has undergone no political conversion, has not “put behind” him any of his former political beliefs. Rodriguez in 1998 is giving major public lectures in which he proclaims that “multiculturalism is loony” and that “the ideological premises of affirmative action are dying” (qtd. in Miller 1). The difficult part is the reconciliation of Rodriguez, the public lecturer, with the claims Saldívar makes concerning Days of Obligation. What must first be said is that Rodriguez’s discovery of hybridity–material hybridity–has enabled his polemic against affirmative action, multiculturalism, and the like. The fact that “we are finding more kids like Tiger Woods who don’t identify with a single racial identity,” for example, is a sign of the bankruptcy of claims to particular identities (qtd. in Miller 1). Now that “we” are all hybrids, according to Rodriguez, it is no longer possible to imagine coherent claims to racial-cultural heritages. At the level of the genes, of bodies, Rodriguez has produced an at least coherent (although deeply problematic) narrative of hybridity–one that takes account of Poe’s polemic and suggests that hybridity implies a mixture without recourse to origins and elements.

 

But when one examines Rodriguez’s Days of Obligation, one is doubly struck by the force of the attack on narratives of racial-cultural persistence (particularly in the opening chapter, “India”), and by the powerful advocacy of persistence narratives of what one might call national-religious cultures. For Rodriguez, America is two stories: Anglo-Puritanism and Spanish-Catholicism. The first is “comedy,” and the second “tragedy” (Rodriguez xvi). The first is hopeful optimism (represented by the dream of Anglo California), and the second tends toward “cynical conclusions” about the world (xvii). The first is maternal and seedy, the second paternal and quasi-fascist.⁶ When Saldívar highlights Rodriguez’s conversion to the “Mexican point of view,” he highlights a conversion to what Rodriguez calls a truly Augustinian vision of the inevitability of “human unhappiness” (26), of a community of suffering without sentimentalism.⁷

 

Saldívar’s dating of Rodriguez’s conversion to his moments of “coming out” as both gay and Mexican misses entirely Rodriguez’s own conversion statement: in the wake of Martin Luther King’s death, the rise of “hack radicals” like Stokely Carmichael and César Chávez (purveyor of pastoral-victimization narratives, and who was and remains “irrelevant to Mexican-American lives”) transformed him from a Protestant optimist to Mexican pessimist (Rodriguez 189, 67, 70). As for Rodriguez’s gay identity, a close reading of Days of Obligation’s key chapter, “Late Victorians,” indicates that Rodriguez seeks to distance himself, at every turn, from the culture of gay life, which he characterizes as fully Protestant or “Victorian” in its quest for wealth, taste, artificiality, and the like. The chapter’s repeated trope has Rodriguez sitting alone in his room, ruminating on gay street life outside his door, and Rodriguez identifies himself not as “gay” (there is no “coming out” in these pages) but as a person with a deep “unwillingness to embrace life” (43). “Late Victorians” tacitly affirms the results of the AIDS epidemic because it potentially will force San Francisco gay men to embrace a Catholic community of resigned suffering.

 

As a final point, Saldívar has completely misunderstood Rodriguez’s Tijuana chapter, “In Athens Once.” Tijuana, in Rodriguez’s view, is fundamentally an Anglo-Protestant city: an “optimistic city,” a city whose fundamental character is revealed by the supermarket which has “Everything!” (93, 104-5). Rodriguez’s logic is that post-AIDS California is turning Catholic, that North American religion is turning Catholic,⁸ that border-Mexico has turned Protestant, and his vision, then, of Tijuana invading the North is an image of the re-Protestantization of the North: “silent as a Trojan horse, inevitable as a flotilla of boat people, more confounding in its innocence, in its power of proclamation, than Spielberg’s most pious vision of a flying saucer” (106). Rodriguez’s vision of Tijuana engulfing the North is a deeply ironic one, and hardly celebratory, as Anglo-America uncannily bears witness to a vision of its former self reconquering it in the name of Protestant commerce and individuality.

 

José David Saldívar, then, has misunderstood everything of importance in his readings of hybridity–absent the bare fact that Rodriguez’s book concerns his own hybridity⁹–and this must be weighed in all seriousness. One: Rodriguez, on matters of “culture,” is absolutely monolithic and essentialist. His vision of national-religious-cultural hybridization is one that Poe precisely unmasks, but such unmasking is unnecessary because Rodriguez has no interest, here, in an account of hybridization which might be put to work against essentialisms. And Two: Rodriguez, on matters of “culture,” is absolutely not a late convert to liberal politics of inclusion and rights. He remains a bitter foe of liberalism in all of its guises, and advocates, in Days of Obligation, a return to original Catholic “relief from loneliness” in this world through “the Catholic knowledge of union, the mystical body of Christ” (198, 196). “Novelty should not come from within the Church,” Rodriguez warns: “I am not prepared to watch the Catholic Church stumble over a Protestant issue like multiculturalism” (190, 194).

 

The presumption, then, on the part of Saldívar, that the very recognition of hybridity is inherently democratic, dialogic, subversive, deconstructive, and the like, is what is at stake here. It is that presumption, in virtual reduplication of the strange shape of the nineteenth-century Bachman-Morton debate, which permits Saldívar’s Border Matters to validate Rodriguez’s text and thus affirm the hybrid’s participation in Rodriguez’s Mother Theresa-like rapture over the suffering, failed body. Border Matters, finally, represents a certain crisis of reading in post-colonial, ethnic, and border studies, in which the assumed value of a network of concepts overrides the possibility of seeing what is literally placed right in front of one’s eyes. Border Matters, then, is an act of faith: faith in a deep anthropological vision which has, however, failed “us” at every instance, and in the last instance.

Notes

 

1. Originally published in 1990; now translated as Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995).

 

2. This phrase is Saldívar citing David Lloyd approvingly.

 

3. Young’s interesting book is the latest attempt to read the epochal debates over race in the nineteenth century. Other important works in this line include Stanton, Gossett, Bieder, and the two works by Horsman. The section of my text which follows is a too-short summarization of a reading of these debates which diverges from this tradition, and which I am preparing for publication.

 

4. Saldívar, it should be noted, uses other criteria at times to render judgments: often he searches for writers who utilize standpoint theory and reflect critically upon their own social subject positions. Thus, Luis Alberto Urrea’s Across the Wire is “trapped in the antinomy of the missionary and the ethnographer,” and it would have been “conceptually stronger if he [Urrea] had reflected more on the evangelist-anthropological processes themselves” (140, 139). Such standpoint reflection has been criticized on a number of grounds, not least of which because it does nothing but reconstitute a transcendental subject, despite its best efforts.

 

5. Rodriguez has long courted social conservatives, in the pages of American Scholar magazine, and in his first book, Hunger of Memory.

 

6. Rodriguez writes, pointedly, “Protestant trains smell better than Catholic trains and they run on time” (183).

 

7. See, particularly, Chapter 9, “The Latin American Novel.”

 

8. See page 197: “As Latin America turns Protestant, North America experiences the dawning of a Catholic vision–‘the global village’–an ecology closer to medievalism than to the Industrial Age.”

 

9. See Rodriguez xvii.

Works Cited

 

• Bieder, Robert E. Science Encounters the Indian, 1820-1880: The Early Years of American Ethnology. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1986.
• Gossett, Thomas F. Race: The History of an Idea in America. 1963. New ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.
• Horsman, Reginald. Josiah Nott of Mobile: Southerner, Physician, and Racial Theorist. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1987.
• —. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981.
• Miller, David. “Author: Multiculturalism ‘looney,’ race irrelevant.” The State News 9 April 1998: 1, 10.
• Morton, Samuel. “September 10th.” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 5 (1852): 81-82.
• Nott, J.C. and Geo. R. Gliddon. Types of Mankind: or, Ethnological Researches, Based Upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and Upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological, and Biblical History, Illustrated by Selections from the Inedited Papers of Samuel George Morton, M.D., (Late President of the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia,) and by Additional Contributions from Prof. L. Agassiz, LL.D.; W. Usher, M.D.; and Prof. H.S. Patterson, M.D.: 1854. Ninth ed. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1868.
• Poe, Edgar Allan. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. 1838. Ed. Harold Beaver. New York: Penguin, 1975.
• Rodriguez, Richard. Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father. New York: Penguin, 1992.
• Shuler, Jay. Had I the Wings: The Friendship of Bachman and Audubon. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1995.
• Stanton, William. The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America 1815-59. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1960.
• Young, Robert J.C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. New York: Routledge, 1995.