Gender and Allegory in Transamerican Fiction and Performance

260 Pages·2008·1.09 MB·English

by  Katherine Sugg

PPL-US_GA-Sugg_FM.qxd 8/29/2008 1:25 PM Page i
Gender and Allegory in
Transamerican Fiction and
Performance
This page intentionally left blank
PPL-US_GA-Sugg_FM.qxd 8/29/2008 1:25 PM Page iii
Gender and Allegory in
Transamerican Fiction and
Performance
Katherine Sugg
PPL-US_GA-Sugg_FM.qxd 8/29/2008 1:25 PM Page iv
GENDERANDALLEGORYINTRANSAMERICANFICTIONANDPERFORMANCE
Copyright © Katherine Sugg,2008.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States -
a division ofSt.Martin’s Press LLC,175 Fifth Avenue,New York,NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK,Europe and the rest ofthe world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan,a division ofMacmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England,company number 785998,ofHoundmills,
Basingstoke,Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint ofthe above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom,Europe and other countries.
ISBN-13:978-0-230-60476-6
ISBN-10:0-230-60476-5
Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sugg,Katherine.
Gender and allegory in transamerican fiction and performance / by
Katherine Sugg.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-230-60476-5 (alk.paper)
1. American fiction—Minority authors—History and criticism.
2. American fiction—Hispanic American authors—History and criticism.
3. American fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 4. Mexican
literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 5. Caribbean
literature (Spanish)—History and criticism. 6. Minorities in literature.
7. Group identity in literature. 8. Feminism in literature. I. Title.
PS153.M56S85 2008
809(cid:1).897—dc22 2008007165
A catalogue record ofthe book is available from the British Library.
Design by Macmillan India Ltd.
First edition:November 2008
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States ofAmerica.
PPL-US_GA-Sugg_FM.qxd 8/29/2008 1:25 PM Page v
Contents
Preface: Gender and Allegorical Pedagogies in the Americas vii
Acknowledgments xvii
1 Cultural Politics in Transamerica:Identity,Narrativity,and
Allegory 1
2 “The Ultimate Rebellion”:Political Fictions ofChicana
Sexuality and Community 39
3 Apocalyptic Modernities:Transamerican Allegory,
Revolution,and Indigeneity in Almanac ofthe Dead 67
4 Allegory and Transcultural Ethics:Narrating Difference in
Rosario Castellanos’s Oficio de tinieblas 101
5 Encrypted Diasporas:Writing,Affect,and the Nation in
Zoé Valdés’s Café Nostalgia 135
6 Performing Suspended Migrations:Novels and Solo
Performance Art by U.S.Latinas 163
Notes 195
Bibliography 217
Index 229
This page intentionally left blank
PPL-US_GA-Sugg_FM.qxd 8/29/2008 1:25 PM Page vii
Preface: Gender and
Allegorical Pedagogies in the
Americas
The snakes say this:From out ofthe south the people are coming,like a
great river flowing restless with the spirits of the dead who have been
reborn again and again all over Africa and the Americas,reborn each
generation more fierce and more numerous.Millions will move instinc-
tively;unarmed and unguarded,they begin walking steadily north.
(Almanac ofthe Dead)
Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac ofthe Dead imagines a hemispheric revo-
lution that begins in “the South”and moves inexorably northward.Taking
a cue from Silko’s prophetic remapping of the Americas, Gender and
Allegory in Transamerican Fiction and Performanceworks to trace a few key
circuits of political desire and vocabulary that traverse the Americas.For
example,a vehement critique ofneoliberal social formations and political
norms has emerged in contemporary Latin America.At more or less the
same time,indigenous social movements across the Americas increasingly
adopt the rhetoric and human rights paradigms ofethnic identity.1These
exchanges of social and political languages,ideas,and activism illustrate
the “trans”in transamerica.Gender and Allegory explores such manifesta-
tions ofcultural exchange and influence as they appear in aesthetic cultural
production,particularly in narrative forms—in the stories that people tell
about themselves and to which audiences.As Silko also proclaims,particu-
lar stories and images have the power to generate “an immense energy that
arouse(s) the living with a fierce passion and determination for justice”
(520).Gender and Allegory is especially interested in what such stories can
teach us,both about local contexts and about the role and status ofartistic
and political endeavors in transamerica at the beginning ofthe twenty-first
century.
Understanding how narratives travel through the Americas requires a
methodology that is able to articulate their pathways across temporal
and geocultural borders—preferably without doing too much violence to
PPL-US_GA-Sugg_FM.qxd 8/29/2008 1:25 PM Page viii
viii PREFACE
locally specific narratives, scenarios, and vocabulary in the process. Like
many interdisciplinary and transnationally oriented scholars,I often dis-
cover my own way into these pathways by tracing common hauntings that
link practices, peoples, and regions and suggest patterns of contestation
and intensity.Sara Ahmed has said that she likes to “follow words around,”
and some of what I do here echoes that Foucauldian cultural studies
approach.I find remarkable,for instance,the words a woman in the Texas
borderlands chooses to express her outrage and exhaustion in dealing with
the U.S.Department ofHomeland Security,exclaiming,“Ya basta! Enough
is enough!”
In January 2008,this protest by Rosie Molano Blount (“Ya basta”roughly
translates as “enough already”) consciously “cites”the popular slogan from
the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas,Mexico (Norrell).That Blount,an
Apache tribal member and U.S.citizen in Del Rio,Texas,has so viscerally
absorbed both the revolutionary rhetoric and political lessons of a remote
indigenous underclass at the outskirts ofsouthern Mexico suggests circuits
and affective links that profoundly intrigue me,and preoccupy this book.
Though the protest perhaps says as much about the globalization ofmedia
and the commodification ofsocial movements discourse,Blount’s outburst
also denotes a transnational affiliation in collective resistance to state prac-
tices ofcontrol and totalitarianism,like those ofthe U.S.government at the
U.S.-Mexico border.In marking the extension of these forms of injustice
and state power in U.S.society,as well as the transnational networking of
modes of collective resistance,Blount articulates the kind of hemispheric
connections that are already being made “on the ground”in the Americas
and that I hope to highlight and contextualize for my readers.
I place special importance on the ways that gender operates in such cir-
cuits,particularly because the figure of“woman”has so often functioned as
an index ofcollective desires and anxieties at any given historical and geo-
cultural site—as the paradigmatic discourse of “La Malinche” so clearly
teaches.2The figuring ofgender in politics,art,and ideology tends to offer
a material as well as an epistemological tracking ofthe flows and recombi-
nations ofdiscourses and ideologies ofcollectivity and history,both hege-
monic and contestatory (Mirzoeff).What can be most illuminating about
this tracking are its unexpected flashes of insight and uncomfortable con-
nections.Performance art and theorizations ofperformativity have further
helped shift discussions away from the ruts ofpositivist identity theories in
order to enable alternative modes of thinking about, experiencing, and
challenging the status quo of contemporary sociality. Sometimes these
challenges require their own optic,or at least a suspended frame of refer-
ence,to fully comprehend the multiplicity ofideas,affects,and representa-
tions being deployed.
PPL-US_GA-Sugg_FM.qxd 8/29/2008 1:25 PM Page ix
PREFACE ix
Cultural theorist and performance artist Coco Fusco illustrates how art
can provide these new optics in her 2006 performance work,“A Room of
One’s Own:Women and Power in the New America.”In this piece,Fusco
fashions a small and succinct artistic grenade that she throws out into lib-
eral politics,exploding customary discussions of identity,technology,the
female body, and its cultural work. This performance exemplifies Diana
Taylor’s notion of a “scenario” that disrupts narrative’s linear modes of
understanding and historicizing social information and illustrates the rad-
ical potential of performance art.“A Room of One’s Own” elaborates a
harrowing yet sadly plausible occasion in which a female U.S.military per-
sonnel (Fusco) appears alone on stage to offer the audience an inspira-
tional speech about the empowering opportunities available to women in
“today’s military.”As her character “The Interrogator”explains to the audi-
ence, “The War on Terror offers an unprecedented opportunity to the
women ofthis great country.Our nation is putting its trust in our talents,
and is providing the support we need to show the world that American
women are the linchpin in the worldwide struggle for democracy”(Fusco
2006).
Among other things, Fusco spotlights the language of feminism, the
status of language more generally,and the vulnerability of both to being
co-opted into an authoritarian nation-state project ofpolicing and terror-
izing certain populations and persons.Staying in character throughout the
“lecture-performance,” Fusco’s Interrogator is a graduate of a military
intelligence school and advocate of both the “fight against terrorism”and
the use offemale military personnel in “de-patterning”detainees through
the use ofsexual innuendo and threat during interrogations.She explains,
“The struggle for democracy is being waged by women plying their trade
in rooms just as Woolfimagined.These are simple rooms,furnished with
nothing more than a desk and a couple ofchairs.And in these sanctorum
ofliberty,American women are using their minds and their charms to save
American lives”(Fusco 2006).Yoking the genealogy of modern feminism
to the liberalist discourses of “liberty” and “choice,”“A Room of One’s
Own”simultaneously implicates the uses of gender and sexuality and the
language of“American freedom”in projects ofinterrogation,policing,and
torture.
The Interrogator appears on stage along with a video monitor that
shows a detainee being prepared for interrogation.Every now and then
Fusco interrupts her speech and disappears from the stage,reappearing
on the monitor in the cell of the male detainee (actor Eliyas Qureshi).
Since questions of sexuality,power,and gender politics are being ironi-
cally posed behind the foregrounded language of Western feminism,
these scenes are both counterpoint and illustration to the Interrogator’s