blog post 10

            For this week’s blog post, I’d like to spend some time explicating Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s definition of ‘Latino literature’ that she lays out for us in her piece “What was Latino Literature?” She titles her essay after Kenneth Warren’s provocative What was African American Literature to engage different works – especially the Norton anthologies- in the ongoing debates surrounding periodization and canonization of Latino literatures and African American literatures. She situates this debate historically, coming after the ‘push to establish ethnoracial traditions in the 1990s and 1990s.” Citing other scholars and schools of criticism, she gestures towards the use of anthologies as ‘apparatuses of orthodoxy.’ She situates the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature as being in a unique position, as it came without any preceding “literary-historical narrative with which to contend.” This is where she begins to map out her argument that “canonicity happens here without a clear sense of its relation to periodicity.” This, she argues, leads to a contradictory nature of the text that cannot decide properly on a transnational or a US-based perspective.

            Gruesz does a good job showing the confusing “chicken and egg” contradictory nature of the relationship between canonicity and periodicity. However, overall she seems to be arguing that the Latino Norton is too heavily focused on canonicity without having first fully established a literary history. She does this by contrasting the Latino Norton (NALL) with its model, the African American Norton (NAAL). She shows how the NAAL was consciously concerned with time-based concerns and temporality: “For Gates and McKay- writing fifteen years ago- periodizing the African American past was crucial, almost sacral, to the project; the anthology aimed not only to stake a black presence far back in the nation’s colonial prehistory but also to put pressure on the default period markers of mainstream American literature.” She then turns towards Stavans’ approach towards Latino literature as a contrast to this idea of time-based needs. She outlines Stavans approach to the idea of Latino literature with a more postmodern perspective, by characterizing it as being made up of a multiplicity that “allows Latinos  ‘to exist in a state of constant mutation’ and yet to see themselves ‘as independent from one another.’” So, basically, she shows the different schools of thought these scholars had towards African American and Latino literatures, respectively, in terms of periodization. Gates and McKay were extremely invested in positioning African American literature in a historical lineage, and steeping it American history and time. Stavans, on the other hand, wants to pull Latino literature away from this type of periodization. However, as Gruesz shows, Stavans is still tied to some type of chronology, as we can see in the table of contents/the dividing up of the NALL into “five periods that are familiar across the national literatures of the Americas: colonial; ninteteenth century; early and late twentieth century; contemporary.” He does this by asking readers to pay “equal attention” to the transnational nature of these texts. Gruesz also points out, though, how Stavans does not turn to any specific social project (such as slavery or Jim Crow segregation) that Latino literature could organize itself around. As she says, “if to be Latino is to exist in a ‘state of constant mutation,’ there is no developmental arc of latinidad.’”

            Another thing Gruesz stresses is the linguistic contradiction throughout the Latino Norton.  “While the intellectual backbone is clearly Latin Americanist, the Spanish language itself often disappears in translation (one-quarter of the material was originally written in Spanish) or gets relegated to the extensive footnotes.” Gruesz argues that this type of translation shows who the marketed audience is: English-language American literature classrooms that need the translations. However, she moves on from this to ask again, what is the NALL actually trying to do? “If it is indeed trying to “’seep into’ the national canon, it would have helped to include on the editorial board at least one scholar steeped in that tradition.’” So, in short, I think she is arguing that if the NALL really wanted to becoming integrated into an Americanist tradition, it needed to have more hooks/relationships to scholars in that particular field. But she then departs from this to discuss how Latino literature is so distinct and potentially radical because of its unfixedness to a particular discipline, or because it “refuses to become just an American minority.”

            Then, again bringing up the question of “what is the point of the NALL?” Gruesz turns towards the marketing of the anthology as a book that all “middle-class Latinos need” to prove that they have fully integrated into the mainstream of American society. She ends on this bizarre point: “It’s fascinating to consider that the last redoubt of the once elite, then middlebrow function of book objects as tokens of caste and respectability (‘a book that all middle-class Latinos need’) might lie in the ethnic literary tradition, the treasure of the past on the shelf.”