The Dialectics of Our America represents a strong contribution to one of the most politically urgent and intellectually challenging cultural battles of the moment: the one surrounding the genealogical legitimacy of noncanonical cultural traditions. José David Saldívar offers polemically engaging readings of José Martí and Roberto Fernández Retamar, Rolando Hinojosa and Arturo Islas, Ernesto Galarza and Ntozake Shange, George Lemming and Cherrie Moraga, among others. His objective is to show their common affiliation to what the author himself calls “the School of Caliban”: a program for postcolonial cultured emancipation developed by Caribbean thinkers, to which Saldívar now adds certain U.S. minority and other Latin American writers insofar as their work focuses on the oppositional practices of cultural emancipation.
The production of hegemonic regimes of truth, aesthetic and ideological, always takes place at the expense of alternative possibilities. Saldívar deploys a revisionary tactic of canon formation, the main purpose of which is to provide Chicano writing, as well as African-American magical realism, with a critical genealogy that has, for the most part, remained concealed, even unexpressed: a Caribbean– Latin American genealogy.
This is a controversial gesture because it implies that mainstream Latin American authors, such as Gabriel García Márquez, might prove more relevant for the history and development of Chicano writing than canonic U. S. authors like William Faulkner or William Carlos Williams. On the other hand, the gesture opens a wealth of possibilities, not just hermeneutic but prescriptive. It allows the reconstitution and remapping of U.S. minority literary history on a transnational, hemispheric level, and it legitimizes the claim that a common literature of the Americas is to be found not in elite writing but in oppositional writing. Provocatively, Saldívar’s position also raises the possibility that what we might call U.S. border writing, in the sense of the writing appearing at the fringes of the U.S. mainstream literary and cultural traditions, is to be analyzed from perspectives and categories that, although they have been naturalized for a number of years in the Latin American critical tradition, have not been recognized as relevant for U.S. writing before; for instance, magical realism, to which Saldívar devotes one of his best chapters.
Saldívar has written splendid pages on Chicano writing. That, and the far-reaching cultural-theoretical implications of his position, are the book’s center and its most important contribution to current discussions. The Latin American texts he chooses to study, however, such as Martí’s “Nuestra América,” Fernández Retamar’s essays, and García Márquez’ novels, seem to receive rather superficial critical commentary.
This may not be just a matter of insufficient attention on Saldívar’s part. I suspect that a more radical engagement of those texts might have taken The Dialectics of Our America in directions potentially too complicated to manage effectively in terms of the book’s main contention. Let me offer just one question: What of the fact that José Martí and Gabriel García Márquez, for instance, are mainstream writers in the Latin American tradition? Would it not have been better, from the viewpoint of an oppositional cultural politics at the global level, to engage those Latin American authors who have also been excluded from their own traditions; who have actually constituted and continue to constitute a Latin American border writing of sorts? Are they not truly Calibanesque figures, and therefore the very figures who might offer a radically different genealogy for an emancipatory literary history? And yet, in the context of Latin America, can any literary history be truly emancipatory?
These questions might be excessive in the context of a critical appreciation of Saldívar’s book; they are, however, what comes next, if Saldivár’s rich proposal is to be taken as seriously as it deserves to be.
