Abstract
In her recent book An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012), Gayatri Spivak elaborates with special emphasis on different aspects of the role of language and translation in the construction of identities, above all in relation to the migrant subject, which seems to be the most prominent and elusive inhabitant of postmodernity.
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Notes
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[In English in the original, as are all instances of this term in the present book.—Tr.]
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[In English in the original.—Tr.]
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The anthropologist Gregory Bateson elaborates the theory of the double bind as a tool for understanding schizophrenia, understood as a state of internalized confusion for the victim who feels subjected to dilemmas that do not present any satisfactory, rational resolution. This state perpetuates the feeling of cognitive division and the fragmentation of consciousness. As Gayatri Spivak indicates (as does Homi Bhabha in elaborating his idea of the “Third Space”), in 1984, George Orwell describes “doublethink” as the type of “double thought” or double register which is necessary to function in repressive societies. In Orwell’s concept, however, an element of “bad faith” or hypocrisy obscures the use of this procedure, which Bhabha and Spivak conceive of (within their own theories) instead as a strategy of subaltern resistance. See, for example, the way in which Spivak explains her appropriation of the concept throughout An Aesthetic Education as well as Rutherford’s interview with Bhabha, in which they discuss these issues.
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These concepts have yielded diverse interpretations and critiques. Moreiras considers the notion of transculturation, for instance, to be an integrative formula that tends to dilute antagonisms. For example, in the 6th chapter of The Exhaustion of Difference, which is titled “The End of Magical Realism: José María Arguedas’s Passionate Signifier,” he says: “Transculturation is a war machine, feeding on cultural difference, whose principal function is the reduction of the possibility of radical cultural heterogeneity” (195–96). The function of hybridity, in turn, has resulted in the aforementioned concept of the “Third Space” developed by Homi Bhabha, which will be discussed later in the present study and which in many aspects is linked to the idea of the “double bind” reformulated by Spivak.
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Cornejo Polar approaches the theme of the “migrant subject” from this perspective in which he radicalizes a conflict that concerns, in reality, the Andean subject in its totality. He refers to the “bifrontal and—if one wishes to exaggerate—schizophrenic narratives” of “migrant discourse” (“Non-Dialectical Heterogeneity” 118). See also, “Indigenismo and Heterogeneous Literatures: Their Double Sociocultural Statute,” where Cornejo Polar more expansively discusses the concept of heterogeneity.
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Related to these topics, see the studies dedicated to the work of Cornejo Polar, particularly to the theme of heterogeneity and transculturation in Asedios a la heterogeneidad cultural, edited by José Antonio Mazzotti and in Antonio Cornejo Polar y los estudios latinoamericanos, edited by Fiedhelm Schmidt-Welle, as well as the essays included in my books Crítica impura and La escritura del límite.
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For different approaches to Vargas Llosa’s ideological and literary fluctuations, see, for example, Degregori, Rowe, and Kokotovic. On Vargas Llosa’s dissociation from the Cuban Revolution in response to the Padilla affair, see Kristal, “Política y crítica literaria,” which includes details of the polemical exchanges between Vargas Llosa and Cuban authorities (Fidel Castro and Haydée Santamaría, among others), as well as of his prohibition from returning to Cuba and the international repercussions of this chain of events.
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Moraña, M. (2016). Opening. In: Arguedas / Vargas Llosa. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57187-8_2
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