Colonial discourse in the United States has tended to criminalize, pathologize, and depict as savage not only Native Americans but Mexican immigrants, indigenous peoples in Mexico, and Chicanas/os as well. While postcolonial studies of the past few decades have focused on how these ethnicities have been constructed by others, Disrupting Savagism reveals how each group, in turn, has actively attempted to create for itself a social and textual space in which certain negative prevailing discourses are neutralized and rendered ineffective.
Arturo J. Aldama begins by presenting a genealogy of the term “savage,” looking in particular at the work of American ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan and a sixteenth-century debate between Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de las Casas. Aldama then turns to more contemporary narratives, examining ethnography, fiction, autobiography, and film to illuminate the historical ideologies and ethnic perspectives that contributed to identity formation over the centuries. These works include anthropologist Manuel Gamio’s The Mexican Immigrant: His Life Story, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, and Miguel Arteta’s film Star Maps. By using these varied genres to investigate the complex politics of racialized, subaltern, feminist, and diasporic identities, Aldama reveals the unique epistemic logic of hybrid and mestiza/o cultural productions.
The transcultural perspective of Disrupting Savagism will interest scholars of feminist postcolonial processes in the United States, as well as students of Latin American, Native American, and literary studies.
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- PART I Mapping Subalternity in the U.S./México Borderlands
- 1. The Chicana/o and the Native American ‘‘Other’’ Talk Back: Theories of the Speaking Subject in a (Post?)Colonial Context
- 2.When Mexicans Talk, Who Listens? The Crisis of Ethnography in Situating Early Voices from the U.S./México Borderlands
- PART II Narrative Disruptions: Decolonization, Dangerous Bodies, and the Politics of Space
- 3. Counting Coup: Narrative Acts of (Re)Claiming Identity in Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
- 4. Toward a Hermeneutics of Decolonization: Reading Radical Subjectivities in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa
- 5. A Border Coda: Dangerous Bodies, Liminality, and the Reclamation of Space in Star Maps by Miguel Arteta
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
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