theory has changed, too. Having confronted the internal contradictions of humanism, scholars now explore the posthuman. The planetary consciousness of the anthropocene, cyborgs, technoculture, and the formal utopias of object-oriented ontology are all philosophical domains where race, ethnicity, and inequality appear to have little purchase.
Alongside these political and intellectual attempts to render raced bodies invisible or insignificant, the number of Latinx bodies in the United States has been steadily increasing. In 2014 Latinxs accounted for 17.3 percent of the total US population, compared to just 6.5 percent in 1980 (Stepler and Brown). Latinxs are currently the largest minority group in the United States, and by 2060 the US Census Bureau expects Latinxs to make up 28.6 percent of the total US population (US Census Bureau). This population growth, moreover, has since the early 2000s been fueled more by US births than by immigration, inflammatory rhetoric notwithstanding. Latinxs are a constitutive and increasingly unavoidable segment of the US population, and they are overwhelmingly (63.9 percent) of Mexican origin (Stepler and Brown).
These statistics have, since the 1980s, motivated a range of projects—political, commercial, and intellectual—aimed at generating knowledge about this growing population. The data motivate me as well and illuminate my approach to untangling the questions raised by Díaz’s observations about Latinx identity and the stakes of Latinx cultural production. Data show both that there are many Latinxs in the United States and that our numbers will continue to grow. We must, therefore, pay attention to Latinx voices, and, comprising the significant majority they do, in the general population if not in academia, Chicanx voices can be taken as illustrative, if not exemplary, of broader Latinx trends.3 Beyond pure numbers, though, the historical, social, and political connections between the United States and Mexico condition twenty-first century latinidad. I am thinking here specifically of the militarization of the US-Mexico border, which I turn to in the fourth and final chapter of this book, and the structural impact it has had on what it means to be Latinx (not just Chicanx) in the United States, regardless of national origin. If for no other reason than this, it behooves us to attend to Chicanx voices in particular. But how can we listen if, as Díaz contends, Chicanxs and Latinxs are speaking at inaccessible frequencies? How do we—and why should we—attend to the invisible and the inaudible?
Problems
Our current strategies for reading literature by people of color do not directly answer this challenge. In The Social Imperative, for example, Paula Moya argues that textual analysis is key to racial understanding. In her introduction she describes being “challenged by faculty colleagues working in the social and natural sciences to demonstrate how literary criticism might contribute to an understanding of” race and gender, and even to explain “the value of literary criticism for the production of knowledge generally” (1). This she connects to a general sense of the humanities in crisis, especially in literary studies, where scholars struggle with increasing doubts that “literature or its criticism can provide the keys to our liberation” (5). In response to this crisis Moya proposes a return to basic principles, asserting the value of close reading “in the context of a changing American society in which literacy about race and ethnicity will be needed more than ever” (5). Close reading, she argues, is key to understanding how “race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality structure individual experience and identity,” and this, in her final analysis, is why it is important to read and study literature (6).
Moya believes that literature has ideological impact because close reading influences a reader’s perception of the worlds and peoples represented in a text. While scholars of Chicanx and Latinx literature may not all share Moya’s faith in close reading’s ability to promote “racial literacy” (6), they do tend to share her assumption that literature represents things in the world and that one of its primary functions is to communicate these things to readers.4 This is what I mean when I refer to “reading representationally” or “reading for representation,” and in Racial Immanence I argue that such an interpretive mode marks a division between reader and text that can preclude meaningful engagement.
While Moya asserts that race must be represented in order to be understood, Mel Chen argues the opposite. In Animacies, a study of the “alchemical magic of language,” Chen shows how language forms, hierarchizes, and coerces matter (23). “Words more than signify; they affect and effect,” writes Chen (54). Language, that is, does not just reflect the world; it makes, breaks, and shapes it. In a parallel theoretical vein, both Walter Benn Michaels and Jodi Melamed see representational reading as an impediment to social change. To read as Moya suggests performs a version of what Michaels in The Beauty of a Social Problem calls “neoliberal aesthetics,” which he defines as a way of looking that reduces art to its subject, to “hierarchies of vision” that occlude their underlying economic conditions (63). Melamed makes a similar argument in Represent and Destroy when she notes that “liberal terms of difference have depoliticized economic arrangements” by shifting the meaning of race away from material inequalities toward representational otherness (xvii). As Michaels links this to developments in aesthetic theory, Melamed similarly associates this formal anti-racism with literary multiculturalism as practiced in US universities that, she argues, destroys the potential of anti-racist knowledge (xi).
These pitfalls notwithstanding, I believe that we can attend to race without destroying it. To do so, however, we must reimagine the relationship between bodies, words, and the world. In any given moment of reading, texts are doing so much more than representing experiences, the appreciation of which will produce better, more empathic citizens. Reading for representation anticipates learning what we already think we know. By contrast, the works I bring together in Racial Immanence gesture rather than represent, and gestures, as Juana María Rodríguez reminds readers, “are where the literal and the figurative copulate” (4); gesture “highlights intentions, process, and practice over objectives and certainty” (Rodríguez 5). The bodies encountered in Racial Immanence gesture; they do not look, behave, or signify as anticipated. In these deviations they disrupt the temporality of expectation; they force a lingering that redefines politics as “something we await” rather than “something we arrive at,” to borrow Sandra Ruiz’s formulation (337).
In the following pages, for example, I read race as the unseen, unheard, and ineffable unifier that Díaz describes. The artifacts I explore are less interested, however, in the visible, external signs of race and more in the materiality of race as a physical condition of experience. My interest in matter continues a lively conversation around the multiple significances of race and ethnicity begun by Michael Omi and Howard Winant when they first published Racial Formation in the United States in 1986. As they make abundantly clear in their now classic and foundational study, race is both a process and product of modernity. It is, they assert, an idea, a “fundamental concept that has profoundly shaped, and continues to shape, the history, polity, economic structure, and culture of the United States” (106). In their third edition Omi and Winant admit that “the body was largely under theorized in our earlier accounts” (viii), but their more recent attempts to foreground the racial body rely on the ocular dimensions of race, on how the visual differences between bodies acquire social meaning through racial projects (109). While I concur with Omi and Winant that race is as pervasive and consequential as the air we breathe, I am not content to see bodies as passive and inert objects of racial formation. Omi and Winant understand bodies as “visually read and narrated in ways that draw upon an ensemble of symbolic meanings and associations” (111), but I prefer to grant the body and biology more active agency in the making of race.
For many years, though, and for good reason, scholars have operated under the assumption that race is not biological. It is a slippery slope from materiality to colonial eugenics, as Omi and Winant remind readers (24). To navigate that slipperiness, I take inspiration from Michael Hames-García, who wonders “what race might be beyond a means for oppression and exploitation” (331). Taking as a starting point the assumption that the body “is an agential reality with its own causal role in making meaning,” Hames-García explores the mutual constitution of biology and culture in order to argue a biological theory of race as a temporally variable phenomenon that emerges from the interplay of matter and socioeconomic
