Not sucking
I just did a dramatic reading–as in, I read it dramatically, not as in, I read it in costume in a Cockney accent–of the first four and a half pages of my thesis. And it doesn’t suck. Or at least it doesn’t sound like it sucks. A taste:
Mestiza/o hybridity, at least in Anzaldúa’s manifesto, is nearly agentive, and, in practice, resistant. Anzaldúa’s identity was not simply a byproduct of violence, but also, using Roseberry (1996), a language of contention, created by the border, for the border, by the mestiza/os, by necessity, for both the Americanos and the Mexicanos, for both Mexico and the United States. As Wilson and Donnan write, “[t]he new politics of identity is in large part determined by the old structure of the state. In fact, the new politics of representation, redefinition and resistance would be nowhere without the state as its principle contextual opponent” (Wilson and Donnan 1998: 2). Much has been made about the deterritorialization of economies, polities, and identities in our postmodern world; nearly every study of transnationalism and border experience begins with a description of ironic juxtapositions of local and global imagery (a sushi bar in Sao Paolo, a Peruvian mango farmer wearing a Disney “Pocahontas” t-shirt, Sisqó’s “Thong Song” playing in cab parked outside the Hagia Sofia). But rather than the aesthetics, or humor, of floating signifiers and postmodern discourse, it is the territorialized—the localized—effects of this cross-pollination that matters to human experience and, perhaps just as importantly, to the political ramifications of that experience. Despite rumors to the contrary, the state is alive and well and doing everything it can to perpetuate itself, its power, its hegemony. Hybridity is just one way that capitalism’s discontents can contend.
Please don’t steal this idea, because it’s all I’ve got going for me right now. Um, yeah, like anyone would steal that. Ha.
I can’t wait for the musical!
I’d love to see you do something in costume with a cockney accent 🙂 Hmm…maybe a speedo? 🙂
Ironic juxtapositions is so 2005.