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Finding the Center: Constructing the Subaltern Master Narrative

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Abstract

In clarifying the meanings of the notion in use, and in comparing Spivak's and Gramsci's use of the term, I wish to frame an expanded space within which a "subaltern master narrative" --that is, a broad intellectual perspective encompassing a theoretical grasp of the subaltern's social and historical context as it bears on the possibility of action-can be, and actually has been, constructed. I conclude that Gloria Anzaldúa's transculturated master narrative in its method of construction, in its substantive hybridization and fusion of European and indigenous cultural elements, in its representation of the lives and dilemmas of oppressed people--women, Mexican Americans, blacks, gays and lesbians--and in its valorization of the acts of reflexive sympathetic introspection and of representation, and, in turn, by its connection with social action, truly fulfills Gramsci's criterion of the construction of a new hegemony and the transformation of the subaltern as well as the standard of authenticity implied in Spivak's answer to her question. Yes, the subaltern can and does speak!
Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-
Knowledge
Volume 4
Issue 3 Re-Membering Anzaldúa. Human Rights,
Borderlands, and the Poetics of Applied Social eory:
Engaging with Gloria Anzaldúa in Self and Global
Transformations
Article 10
6-21-2006
Finding the Center: Constructing the Subaltern
Master Narrative
Glenn Jacobs
University of Massachuses Boston, glenn.jacobs@umb.edu
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Recommended Citation
Jacobs, Glenn (2006) "Finding the Center: Constructing the Subaltern Master Narrative," Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology
of Self-Knowledge: Vol. 4: Iss. 3, Article 10.
Available at: hp://scholarworks.umb.edu/humanarchitecture/vol4/iss3/10
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HUMAN
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Journal of the Sociology of Self-
A Publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics)
Can the subaltern speak? This is the
rhetorical question posed by Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak in her essay titled with
the same question (1988). From the essay’s
very beginning, it becomes clear that the
question is not simply one about the subal-
tern’s capacity to engage in articulate dis-
course on its own behalf. Rather, it is rhe-
torical, centering on the authenticity and
validity of Western intellectuals such as
Foucault and Deleuze to
represent
subaltern
people in the neo-colonial world and on
their home turf. Her position is that Fou-
cault’s and Deleuze’s afrmative answer to
her question is an empty gesture of afrma-
tion of the subaltern, of the oppressed as a
subject serving as a projection of their own
experience onto the oppressed, thereby en-
hancing the exploitation and oppression of
the latter by international capitalism. The
latter part of the essay focuses on how the
British and elite Indian interpretations of
widow suicide—self-immolation—was l-
tered and denatured by these interpreta-
tions, and in one case of an activist’s suicide
undertaken during menstruation, obscured
and rendered the intended meaning of the
suicide invisible, thereby providing a nega-
tive answer to Spivak’s question. Thus Spi-
vak’s and much of the Subaltern Studies
group’s focus, begun in the early 1980s, has
been on the issue of representation.
Glenn Jacobs is Associate Professor of Sociology at UMass Boston. His research includes the social contexts of the Afro-
Cuban religion, santeria, in Cuba and the United States. His recent book, Charles Horton Cooley: Imagining Social Reality
(University of Massachusetts Press, March 2006) is an indepth study of the life and works of Charles Horton Cooley as a
belletrist, i.e., a sociologist whose inspiration came from literature. Other recent writing has been on Latino students and
retention.
Finding the Center
Constructing the Subaltern Master Narrative
Glenn Jacobs
University of Massachusetts Boston
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
glenn.jacobs@umb.edu
Abstract: In clarifying the meanings of the notion in use, and in comparing Spivak’s and Gram-
sci’s use of the term, I wish to frame an expanded space within which a “subaltern master narra-
tive”—that is, a broad intellectual perspective encompassing a theoretical grasp of the
subaltern’s social and historical context as it bears on the possibility of action—can be, and actu-
ally has been, constructed. I conclude that Gloria Anzaldúa’s transculturated master narrative in
its method of construction, in its substantive hybridization and fusion of European and indige-
nous cultural elements, in its representation of the lives and dilemmas of oppressed people—
women, Mexican Americans, blacks, gays and lesbians—and in its valorization of the acts of
reexive sympathetic introspection and of representation, and, in turn, by its connection with
social action, truly fullls Gramsci’s criterion of the construction of a new hegemony and the
transformation of the subaltern as well as the standard of authenticity implied in Spivak’s
answer to her question. Yes, the subaltern can and does speak!
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The originator of the notion of the sub-
altern, the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci
(1891 -1935), used the term as a disguise for
the terms “proletariat” or “working-class,”
for much of his writing was done while he
was imprisoned by the fascists and thus he
needed to avoid the prison censor. As a re-
sult, the expression became more generic in
meaning and later was used by intellectu-
als to refer to peasants and to ethnic and ra-
cial minorities, that is, to historical instanc-
es of resistance to oppression excluded by
culture-bound followers and interpreters of
Marx who are hidebound to Western/Eu-
ropean conceptions of class struggle and
warfare.
In the
Prison Notebooks
(1971) Gramsci
optimistically alludes to the capacity of the
subaltern to represent itself by developing
critical awareness and class consciousness,
although he does not use the latter expres-
sion. He mentions that at a point in the de-
velopment of capitalism when the subal-
tern understands the divided interests of
the capitalist and ruling class in relation to
“the broader spheres of the national and in-
ternational division of labor,” the “subal-
tern precisely for that reason is no longer
subaltern, or at least is demonstrably on the
way to emerging from its subordinate posi-
tion” (1971, p. 202). Thus, it is clear from
this observation and from a reading of the
rest of this text that Gramsci’s project focus-
es on the connection and development of
the subaltern’s critical consciousness with
action
, that is, revolutionary action evoked,
inspired and leavened by heightened con-
sciousness and philosophical sophistica-
tion—
praxis.
In fact, his euphemism for
Marxism is “the philosophy of praxis.” He
is not—as a literal interpretation of the
above quote might conceive it—suggesting
that understanding or insight automatical-
ly dissolves or transforms subalternity into
something else: it does mean, as his phrase
“is demonstrably on the way” suggests,
that a signicant process whose ultimate
goal is liberation, has started.
Thus, while Gramsci hewed to a Marx-
ian line he expanded the purview of Marx-
ian analysis of the “superstructure” beyond
the relegation of thought and culture to ide-
ology. For Gramsci, therefore, the focus was
not on representation but on the develop-
ment of subaltern consciousness unto ac-
tion. This is not to denigrate the Subaltern
Studies group’s focus, nor Spivak’s. What
then is the point of my elaboration of the
meaning of Spivak’s question and Grams-
ci’s notion of the subaltern? In clarifying
the meanings of the notion in use, and in
comparing Spivak’s and Gramsci’s use of
the term (or shall we say, in comparing
their somewhat different emphases), I wish
to frame an expanded space within which a
subaltern master narrative—that is, a broad
intellectual perspective encompassing a
theoretical grasp of the subaltern’s social
and historical context as it bears on the pos-
sibility of action—can be, and actually has
been, constructed. By master narrative
then, I refer to a discursive rendition of the
social world which frames it from a totaliz-
ing perspective accounting for how it got
that way, offering a theory of the principles
underlying conduct, thought, and knowl-
edge, and presenting an account of the spir-
itual principles underlying human nature
and conduct. Hence, “master narrative” re-
fers to a theoretical center, if not an episte-
mologically absolute claim to truth, as has
customarily been the implication of the
term “master narrative.”
What I have in mind is the “new my-
thos,” called the
nepantla
of Gloria An-
zaldúa (1942 -2004), a cultural theorist and
creative writer, and a Chicana lesbian femi-
nist exponent of
mestizaje
, a fusion of indig-
enous and European cultures, whom I knew
nothing about prior to the deliberations of
UMass Boston’s Social Theory Forum com-
mittee, which decided to devote its annual
2006 conference to the themes of her life and
work. I read
Borderlands/
La Frontera
(1999)
and a catalytic process was evoked that en-
abled me to pull together intellectual mate-
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rial that I had been musing over for several
years, particularly material concerning the
connections between intellectual activity,
creativity and cultural development. Much
of this material was suggested by my work
on my book analyzing the sources of the
ideas of Charles Horton Cooley, whose con-
ception of the self, inspired by Adam Smith
and the essay tradition, conceived of it in re-
exive terms as a conversational center, and
whose aestheticism prompted him to view
the social process as an intrinsically creative
one. He literally viewed society as a work of
art, and characterized tradition as offering a
palette for social innovation as opposed to
barriers to societal development and
change (Jacobs, 2006).
Cooley’s innovative theories prompt-
ed me to search for novel ways of viewing
culture as more than a static thing and as
something better articulated through his
view of the creative social process. Here I
ran across the Cuban anthropologist
Fernando Ortiz’s notion of transcultura-
tion, of which I will have more to say below.
Secondly, I asked what signicance An-
zaldúa’s integration of the spiritual ele-
ments of her own background—the my-
thology of the native Mexican (e.g., Aztec,
Olmec, etc.) religion and Catholicism—
with her (multi)cultural linguistic (i.e.,
Mexican American Spanish and English)
and intellectual self and her gender and
sexuality (lesbian)—her
mestiza
conscious-
ness—held for an answer to Spivak’s ques-
tion. Here was a theorist who had con-
structed an understanding of social and
cultural change and development using
metaphors derived from her existential and
intellectual matrix as a chicana, a lesbian, a
writer. In short, she was a transculturator
who in seeking to globally and creatively
integrate her social, cultural, spiritual, per-
sonal-psychological, gender, sexual, activ-
ist and intellectual selves, produced a “nar-
rative of action” which organically coheres
(Turner, 1993, p. 47).
Ortiz’s notion of transculturation, ex-
pressing the “different phases of the pro-
cess of transition from one culture to anoth-
er…necessarily involves the loss or uproot-
ing of a previous culture,” and, in addition,
“carries the idea of the consequent creation
of new cultural phenomena, which could
be called neoculturation” (Ortiz, 1995
[1947], pp. 102-103). Ortiz’s genius lies not
in the stark enunciation of this notion but in
his personication of it through his narra-
tive of the lively counterpoint of tobacco
and sugar production and their associated
cultural elements in Cuba. Moreover, as the
contrapuntal musical metaphor suggests,
“This type of dialogued composition which
carries the dramatic dialectic of life into the
realm of art has always been a favorite of
the ingenuous folk muses in poetry, music
dance, song and drama. The outstanding
examples of this in Cuba are the antiphonal
prayers of the liturgies of both whites and
blacks, the erotic controversy in dance mea-
sures of the rumba, and in the versied
counterpoint of the unlettered
guajiros
and
the Afro-Cuban
curros
” (pp. 3-4).
By placing the material and symbolic
tale of Don Tabaco y Dona Azucar in a tran-
scultural frame Ortiz succeeds holding the
theoretical center ground, the ground of
popular culture and the people’s religion.
1
This is the vantage point—a space outside
the neo-colonialist shroud—from which
the subaltern can and does speak. This is
not to say that occupying a theoretical cen-
1
In his valorization of Afro-Cuban popular
and folkloric dance and music Ortiz under-
scores Gramsci’s declamation that every man is
a philosopher and that, in the case of his Cuba as
well as Gramsci’s peasant Italy, “This philoso-
phy is contained in 1. language itself [rumba is
nothing if not musical poetry] …; 2. ‘common
sense’ and ‘good sense’ [to wit, Afro-Cuban
folkloric wisdom]; 3. popular religion and,
therefore, also in the entire system of beliefs, su-
perstitions, opinions, ways of seeing things and
of acting, which are collectively bundled under
the name of ‘folklore’” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 323).
Gramsci thought it necessary that folklore, ex-
pressing “popular feelings be known and stud-
ied…and…not…be considered something neg-
ligible” (p. 419).
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ter guarantees the truthfulness of what one
says; it simply affords the
opportunit
y to
avoid the pall of domination through con-
sent—of hegemony.
2
The genius of Ortiz’s
idea lies in its understanding of culture and
its creation and development as a dynamic
and intrinsically creative process contain-
ing within it room for individual and group
agency.
3
I suggest that Gloria Anzaldúa’s
mestiza
consciousness” incarnated in her
attempt to construct a “new mythos,”
whether or not she is aware of the term
transculturation, grasps and applies Ortiz’s
notion to the creation of what I call her mas-
ter narrative. To wit:
In a constant state of mental
nepantilism, an Aztec word mean-
ing torn between ways,
la mestiza
is
a product of the transfer of the cul-
tural and spiritual values of one
group to another. Being tricultural,
monolingual, bilingual, or multi-
lingual, speaking a patois, and in a
state of perpetual transition, the
mestiza
faces the dilemma of the
mixed breed: which collectivity
does the daughter of a dark-
skinned mother listen to?…That
focal point or fulcrum, that junc-
ture where the
mestiza
stands, is
where phenomena tend to collide.
It is where the possibility of uniting
all that is separate occurs (1999, pp.
100-101).
In the preface to
Borderlands
/La
Frontera
Anzaldúa describes the border
crossing experience of transculturating the
new mythos: “Living on borders and in
margins, keeping intact one’s shifting and
multiple identity and integrity, is like try-
ing to swim in a new element, an ‘alien’ el-
ement. There is an exhilaration in being a
participant in the further evolution of hu-
mankind, in being ‘worked’ on.” Moreover
this carries the sense of participating in a
collective awakening: “I have the sense that
certain ‘faculties’—not just in me but in ev-
ery other border resident, colored or non-
colored—and dormant areas of conscious-
ness are being activated, awakened” (1999,
p. 19). Isn’t this the subaltern speaking?
Logically, it would seem that the height-
ened consciousness, the absence of dif-
2
Rodriguez-Mangual in her study of Lydia
Cabrera, for example, states that Ortiz did not
avoid this pall, but rather, “follows conventional
anthropological methods” and “he does not
open up a discursive space for informants them-
selves—the actors—to dialog about their own
culture and those who invent the means of its
representation” (2004, pp. 56, 57). Elsewhere (Ja-
cobs, forthcoming) I compare Anzaldúa with
Cabrera and dispute Rodriguez-Mangual’s “bit-
ing of the hand” that fed her and Cabrera, via in-
sisting that Ortiz hewed to the stance of the “dis-
tant observer who does not participate in the
culture he studies” (p. 47) whilst simultaneously
“setting the stage…for Lydia Cabrera’s ap-
proach to transculturation,” the very notion pio-
neered by Ortiz himself (p. 17). John Beverly
(1999, pp. 43-45) seems to share Rodriguez-
Mangual’s opinion of Ortiz, suggesting that
both Ortiz and Coronil manifest a somewhat oc-
cult anxiety that “racial and class violence from
below will overturn the structure of privilege in-
habited by an upper-class liberal intellectual like
Ortiz in a country like Cuba, where a majority of
the population is ‘black’…and, at least until the
revolution, overwhelmingly poor…(p. 45). I do
not wish to
dismiss
Rodriguez-Mangual and
Beverly here; rather I do want to qualify their
somewhat facile dismissal of Ortiz. In both cas-
es, might not these authors be manifesting
Bloom’s “anxiety of inuence” wherein they
evince a reluctance to acknowledge and ap-
plaud the creativity of a precursor such as Ortiz,
a male coming from an upper class background
and an easy target, who openly acknowledged
and recanted his earlier racism, and then went
on to develop landmark concepts and books ap-
preciative of the Afro-Cuban cultural heritage
(Bloom, 1997 [1973])?
3
Here I note as well the fact that culture is
not creative in a willy-nilly way, although it of-
ten may appear so. I simply want to say that it,
indeed, can, and often does, operate in such a
way as lay a “dead hand” on our consciousness
and behavior in putting us to sleep to the me-
chanical quality of our actions. Thus, it can zom-
bify us as well as make us creative and con-
scious participants in the social world, as, for ex-
ample, in our ethnocentric exclusion and
victimizing of the “other.”
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dence already have dissolved her subalter-
nity, but from the Gramscian standpoint,
this can be construed as the construction of
the new hegemony he envisions. As men-
tioned, Anzaldúa calls this new mythos a
“liminal in-between space”—
nepantla
(Keating ed
., 2000, p. 168).
Gloria Anzaldúa’s discussion of the
syncretization of
Coatlalopeuh
and La Vir-
gen de Guadelupe (in chapter three), more
than simply being a dry historical account,
is a genealogy of the creation, transforma-
tion and development of contemporary
chicano culture, and moreover, of its con-
stituent gender roles as that totality bears
on the development of a “new conscious-
ness.” There she carefully delineates the
trajectory of rst the Aztecs, then the con-
quistadores’, transformation of the Aztec’s
original female and serpentine pantheon
into “a synthesis of the old world and the
new [La Virgen], of the religion and culture
of the two races in our psyche, the conquer-
ors and the conquered,” wherein “
La
cultura chicana
identies with the mother
(Indian) rather than with the father (Span-
ish) (1999, p. 52). This genealogy, tracing
“The Loss of the Balanced Oppositions and
the Change to Male Dominance” and the
associated transformation of the image and
mythology of the serpent and
Cihuacoatl
,
the Serpent Woman represented, or incar-
nated in the contemporary (modern) split
consciousness of rationality and of the spir-
it,
is truly a masterful sociology of culture.
It
frames the dilemmas and the oppression of
chicanos and other people of color in the U.
S., gays and lesbians, accounts for the ori-
gins and operation of oppression and
points the way out by limning a new my-
thos, a self-conscious syncretism of extant
and avant-garde spiritual paths. As Gloria
Anzaldúa suggests, other syncretized my-
thologies (e.g. Vodun, Santería, shaman-
ism) embody and suggest similar narra-
tives (p. 59). She tells us:
Don’t give me your lukewarm
gods. What I want is an accounting
with all three cultures—white,
Mexican, Indian. I want the free-
dom to carve and chisel my own
face, to staunch the bleeding with
ashes, to fashion my own gods out
of the entrails. And if going home
is denied me then I will have to
stand and claim my space, making
a new culture—
una cultura mesti-
za
—with my own lumber, my own
bricks and mortar and my own
feminist architecture (1999, p. 44).
Here the architectonics of a master nar-
rative derived from subaltern culture(s) are
mapped. Being quintessentially interstitial,
its beauty lies in its non-exclusivity, its ad-
ditive quality making no claim to absolute
truth. As she says, “the future depends on
the breaking down of paradigms…on the
straddling of two or more cultures” (1999,
p. 102).
For Anzaldúa the serpent (“the mental
picture and symbol of the instinctual in its
collective impersonal pre-human [form]”)
represents the dark forces of the uncon-
scious—our deep inner selves. In an inter-
view she remarks that the “female body
and serpents are two of the most feared
things in the world, so I used the serpent to
symbolize female sexuality, carnality and
the body. Snakes used to represent to me
the body and everything that was loath-
some, vile, rotting, decaying, getting hair,
urinating, shitting, all the conditioning I’ve
had—that all people have—about the body,
especially the female body” (Keating ed.,
2000, p. 102). (From the standpoint of depth
psychology, these body sites and functions
represent loci or points of psycho-socializa-
tion trauma in the pre-adolescent life cycle,
and, with respect to psychic memory, re-
gression and xation and the anchoring of
neurosis.) Interestingly she connects this
with shame, her shame of having begun to
menstruate at the age of three, which was
accompanied by great pain and her and her
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parents’ shame of her abnormality (1999, p.
65).
4
For Anzaldúa the shame of her experi-
ence is connected with the symbol of the
mirror—the looking-glass self—“an ambiv-
alent symbol. Not only does it reproduce
images (the twins that stand for thesis and
antithesis), it contains and absorbs them.”
As such (here she uses language reminiscent
of Cooley and Mead), it represents, “Seeing
and being seen. Subject and object. I and
she” (1999, p. 64). Thomas Scheff (2003) calls
this connecting of self and the emotion of
shame “the Cooley/Goffman conjecture” or
current of the symbolic interactionist tradi-
tion in sociology. In the Anzaldúa master
narrative it thus represents the incorpora-
tion of a reexive component. She calls it
“the Coatlicue state” or descent into the un-
derworld of the self and the unconscious as-
sociated with the place of the dead: “When I
reach bottom, something forces me to push
up, walk toward the mirror, confront the
face in the mirror.” But she resists: “I don’t
want to see what’s behind
Coatlicue’s
eyes,
her hollow sockets,” for “Behind the ice
mask I see my own eyes” that will not look
at her. These aspects of the self include being
“a second-class member of a conquered peo-
ple who are taught they are inferior because
they have indigenous blood, believe in the
supernatural and speak a decient lan-
guage.” Exasperated, she asks why she has
to make sense of it all, for each time she
does, she must kick out “a hole in the
boundaries of the self” and drag the shed
“old skin along, stumbling over it.” None-
theless, the knowledge derived from the
process “makes me more aware, it makes me
more conscious” (1999, pp. 70-71).
Anzaldúa’s construction clearly con-
nects the self and the psychic realm with
blended sociocultural forms of native and
European mythologies and hybrid linguis-
tic elements, and uses these to engage in
struggle around issues of gender, race and
ethnicity in American society. Thus her
transculturation embodies reexive con-
sciousness-raising and the call to action—
praxis. A critical component of this linkage
of self and social action is Anzaldúa’s com-
mitment to writing.
C
ONCLUSION
: C
ONOCIMIENTO
,
OR
W
RITING THE SELF AND SOCIAL
ACTION
Anzaldúa resolves the issue of repre-
sentation, not through addressing the issue
directly, but through the act of writing, for
she does not quibble over whether the sub-
altern can or cannot represent or be repre-
sented. She is “street,” and “represents,”
taking the matter boldly into hand, pro-
claiming writing to be a part of the new
consciousness, and deriving its name from
the Aztecs’ words for the red and black ink
used in their codices: Tlilli, Tlapalli—The
Path of the Red and Black Ink. “They be-
lieved that through metaphor and symbol,
by means of poetry and truth, communica-
tion with the Divine could be attained, and
topan (that which is above—the gods and
spirit world) could be bridged with mictlán
(that which is below—the underworld and
the region of the dead” (1999, p. 91). This
includes creative, that is, the writing of sto-
4 In an interview she says of her premature
menstruation that doctors could not gure it
out: “it’s a very rare hormonal disturbance or
dysfunction. As far as I know only two people—
including myself—have ever been diagnosed
with it,” and she attributes it not only to a phys-
ical-medical cause, but to “some other entity or
spirit [which] had entered my body” which was
not used to incarnating in human bodies (2000,
pp. 19-20). The pain and trauma associated with
this condition, as Anzaldúa writes about and re-
fers to it in a number of places, should forestall
facile references to her sexuality as though she
were a kind of sexual athlete or acrobat. One
can, indeed, should, imagine, how such trauma
created obstacles and issues for her to work
through and struggle with her entire life. In un-
derscoring this I am not refuting or dismissing
Anzaldúa’s narrative, but noting the multilay-
ered aspects of pleasure and pain as these gure
in her complexity as a writer, thinker and activ-
ist.
FINDING THE CENTER 85
HUMAN ARCHITECTURE: JOURNAL OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE, IV, SPECIAL ISSUE, SUMMER 2006
ries, and discursive, writing. Here she en-
capsulates Gramsci’s adage about every
man being a philosopher side by side with
his proclamation of the value of folklore.
Gloria Anzaldúa is a conscious, but not
overly rationalized or rationalizing, agent
of transculturation whose testimony sha-
manically bridges the spirit world, the quo-
tidian realm and the darkness of the uncon-
scious:
When I create stories in my head,
that is, allow the voices and scenes
to be projected in the inner screen
of my mind, I “trance.” I used to
think I was going crazy or that I
was having hallucinations. But
now I realize it is my job, my call-
ing, to trafc in images. Some of
these lm-like narratives I write
down; most are lost, forgotten.
When I don’t write the images
down for several days or weeks or
months, I get physically ill. Be-
cause writing invokes images from
my unconscious, and because
some of the images are residues of
trauma which I then have to recon-
struct, I sometimes get sick when I
do write. I can’t stomach it, become
nauseous, burn with fever, worsen.
But in reconstructing the traumas
behind the images, I make “sense”
of them, and once they have
“meaning” they are changed,
transformed. It is then that writing
heals me, brings me great joy (1999,
pp. 91-92).
She tells us, “The writer as shape-
changer, is a nahual, a shaman” (p. 88). This
is in contrast to Western art, which is sim-
ply “’psychological’ in that it spins it ener-
gies between itself and its witness’ and is
sequestered from the people in museums.
As she puts it: “Tribal cultures keep art
works in honored and sacred places in the
home and elsewhere. They attend them by
making sacrices of blood (goat or chick-
en), libations of wine…The ‘witness’ is a
participant in the enactment of the work in
a ritual, and not a member of the privileged
classes” (p. 90).
Anzaldúa fulls Gramsci’s criterion of
the organic intellectual creating a “new cul-
ture” which “does not only mean one’s
own individual ‘original’ discoveries. It al-
so, and most particularly, means the diffu-
sion in a critical form of truths already dis-
covered, their ‘socialisation’ as it were, and
even making them the basis of vital action”
(Gramsci, 1971, p. 325). Speaking of the
conquistadores, she tells us, “Not only did
they completely reconstruct people’s iden-
tities but they also falsely constructed the
whole of America.” The task is for mestizas
and native women to “use the pen—or
should I say the keyboard?—as a weapon
and means of transformation,” thereby “re-
claiming the agency of reinscribing, taking
off their inscriptions and reinscribing our-
selves, our own identities, our own cul-
tures,” effectively using “the very weapon
that conquered America…against them”
(2000, p. 189). This represents a union of the
intellect with action: “Con los ojos y la len-
gua en la mano: you tie in the sensitive,
conscious political awareness with the act
of writing and activism” (p. 183).
I conclude that Anzaldúa’s transcultur-
ated master narrative in its method of con-
struction, in its substantive hybridization
and fusion of European and indigenous
cultural elements, in its representation of
the lives and dilemmas of oppressed peo-
ple—women, Mexican Americans, blacks,
gays and lesbians—and in its valorization
of the acts of reexive sympathetic intro-
spection and of representation, and, in turn,
by its connection with social action, truly
fullls Gramsci’s criterion of the construc-
tion of a new hegemony and the transfor-
mation of the subaltern as well as the stan-
dard of authenticity implied in Spivak’s an-
swer to her question. Yes, the subaltern can
and does speak!
86 GLENN JACOBS
HUMAN ARCHITECTURE: JOURNAL OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE, IV, SPECIAL ISSUE, SUMMER 2006
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Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1999 [1987]. Borderlands/La
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nois Press.
Beverly, John. 1999. Subalternity and Representa-
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Durham, North Carolina: Duke Univer-
sity Press.
Bloom, Harold. 1997 [1973]. The Anxiety of Inu-
ence: A Theory of Poetry. New York:
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Coronil, Fernando. 1995. “New Introduction.”
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Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections From the
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Jacobs, Glenn. 2006. Charles Horton Cooley: Imag-
ining Social Reality. Amherst, Massachu-
setts: University of Massachusetts Press.
Keating, AnaLouise, ed. 2000. Gloria E.
Anzaldúa: Interviews/Entrevistas. New
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Ortiz, Fernando. 1995 [1947]. Cuban Counter-
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Rodriguez-Mangual, Edna M. 2004. Chapel
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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the
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... This narrative -or more accurately narratives, as it is not a singular, coordinated, and consistent narrative but rather a multitude of mostly ad hoc narratives that share the same fundamental underpinning -is the story the settler tells themselves and the indigenous people that justifies colonisation. It is a story that portrays the settler institutions and wider culture as superior and seeks to rationalise the settlers' actions, putting any concerns about the total domination of another culture at ease (Jacobs, 2006;Jackson, 2004). However, in reducing any worry the colonisers may suffer it creates a powerful mechanism of ongoing traumatisation for indigenous peoples as it denigrates their cultural identity and damages their self-concept. ...
... In addition, I found provocative material on representation by subaltern and cultural studies writers inspired by Antonio , including Stuart Hall (1997a,b), Guyatri Spivak (1988), John Beverley (1998Beverley ( , 1999, and activist writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa Keating and López 2011). 1 Following Gramsci's notion of "the subaltern," these authors pursue the matter of representation, questioning the veracity of hegemonic representations of subaltern groups under the aegis of Spivak's rhetorical question: "Can the subaltern speak?" My working assumption was that the subaltern can and do speak, albeit in varied manners and ways (Jacobs 2006b(Jacobs , 2011. ...
Book
This book explores the contemporary relevance of Charles H. Cooley’s thought, bringing together scholars from the US, Europe and Australia to reflect on Cooley’s theory and legacy. Offering an up-to-date analysis of Cooley’s reception in the history of the social sciences, an examination of epistemological and methodological advances on his work, critical assessments and novel articulations of his major ideas, and a consideration of new directions in scholarship that draws on Cooley’s thought, Updating Charles H. Cooley will appeal to sociologists with interests in social theory, interactionism, the history of sociology, social psychology, and the sociology of emotions.
Article
Full-text available
This article reviews Cooley's idea of the looking glass self, and Goffman's elaboration. It can be formulated as a conjecture that links two concepts: shared awareness and the social emotions. Cooley named pride and shame as the social emotions, and Goffman added embarrassment and humiliation as shame variants. Word counts comparing Goffman's emotion lexicon in Presentation of Self in Everyday Life with other social science texts shows that it is dense with these four emotions and their cognates and derivatives. Goffman's development of the second concept, shared awareness (the degree of attunement) is also described. Like Cooley, Goffman may have realized that shared awareness is needed as a central concept in social science. The conjunction of shared awareness and emotion in Goffman's work might be a feature that attracts reader's sympathy. In concluding, two basic hypotheses are stated, and techniques that might be used to test or apply them. These hypotheses may point toward a general theory of cooperation and conflict: attunement/pride holds relationships and societies together, and lack of attunement/shame burst them apart.
Article
The original title of this paper was “Power, Desire, Interest.”1 Indeed, whatever power these meditations command may have been earned by a politically interested refusal to push to the limit the founding presuppositions of my desires, as far as they are within my grasp. This vulgar three-stroke formula, applied both to the most resolutely committed and to the most ironic discourse, keeps track of what Althusser so aptly named “philosophies of denegation.”2 I have invoked my positionality in this awkward way so as to accentuate the fact that calling the place of the investigator into question remains a meaningless piety in many recent critiques of the sovereign subject. Thus, although I will attempt to foreground the precariousness of my position throughout, I know such gestures can never suffice.
Gloria E. Anzaldúa: Interviews/Entrevistas
  • Analouise Keating
Keating, AnaLouise, ed. 2000. Gloria E. Anzaldúa: Interviews/Entrevistas. New York: Routledge.
Anthropology and Literature
  • Paul Benson
Benson, Paul, ed. 1993. Anthropology and Literature. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.
Experience and Poetics I Anthropological Writing
  • Edith Turner
Turner, Edith. 1993. "Experience and Poetics I Anthropological Writing." In Anthropology and Literature, ed. Paul Benson. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.
Charles Horton Cooley: Imagining Social Reality
  • Glenn Jacobs
Jacobs, Glenn. 2006. Charles Horton Cooley: Imagining Social Reality. Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press.