Atopic Peripheries: Rhetoric, Hybridity, and Latin American Resistance

Abstract

This dissertation is about the category of hybridity in the discourse of Latinamericanism. In particular, it undertakes a critical interrogation of mestizaje as the grounds for the thought of politics in Latinamericanist critical thought. It advances a set of analyses centered on my claim that mestizaje was never the felicitious grounding of politics it was once thought to be. And given that perhaps the most widely circulated and cited form of Latinamericanist thought today, decoloniality, is premised upon the terms and conditions of mestizaje, this is indeed a timely subject for critical reflection. The central argument of Atopic Peripheries is that Latin American rhetorical and cultural criticism has fundamentally misread the narrative of race across Latin America, and as such, has developed an understanding of the concept of politics that subverts itself. It is widely presupposed that the originary event of colonialism—the clash of Amerindian and European groups in the 15th century and the process of cultural and racial miscegenation that unfolded from this clash—obtains in an identity that is inherently resistant to what Walter Mignolo, for example, has identified as the matrix of modernity/coloniality. This process of cultural, racial, and conceptual mixture, or hybridization, is often identified by writers and critics as mestizaje, an exceptionally unique form of Latin American hybridity. The figure of the mestizo, and the process of mestizaje, is the figure of this mixture between incommensurate ethno-racial groups and the source material for a politics of counter-hegemony. This project attempts to develop a preliminary response to the thinking of politics at the limits of identity. In chapter 1, I suggest that the question of non-Western difference has come to feature prominently across the field of comparative rhetoric, where it is often presupposed that an irreducible difference separates Western from non-Western rhetorical and cultural production. It is from this presupposition that critics have established a politics of comparative inquiry, whereby restituting the pure consciousness of a non-Western subaltern subject is understood to subvert the hegemony of Western thought. I examine the recent turn toward Latin America to argue that this presupposition serves as a constitutive topos—that the object of Latin America is invented rhetorically in the very act of comparison—and that this presupposition obtains in an impasse that the field has yet to think through. I draw upon recent work in Latin American studies to argue for a rearticulated notion of subalternity as a methodological approach for dealing with this impasse. In chapter 2, I return more explicitly to the question of hybridity by arguing that the way critics think the site of the US-Mexico border as the grounds of an identity of resistance produces the very same problems concerning mestizaje that I briefly outlined above. In chapter 3, I continue my reading of mestizaje through Emma Perez’s The Decolonial Imaginary. I conclude with a reading of Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s performance art as a posthegemonic thought of politics at the limits of the category of identity.