Eros Ideologies: Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial
304
Eros Ideologies: Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822369387 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/11/2019 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE SOCIAL BODY OF LOVE
Crafting Decolonial Methodologies
THE ARTS ARE AN important part of constructing the social imaginary — the space from which we imagine, and then become; a space we inherit, reproduce, and inflect with the difference of our beings. Suffused with the poetic, the arts can be revolutionary language or vital energy, midwifing mental and shared social spaces beyond colonizations of unjust power.
The poetic, like desire, is not a language of certainty. It is the self-conscious refusal to define what is either beyond our comprehension or changing or changeable. It refuses the bluff or delusion of certainty behind denotation, opting instead for the greater truthfulness of connotation, of suggestion, of comparison — in short, of the act itself of striving for meaning, understanding, and expression.
My work has long and increasingly been concerned with crossing scholarship, the poetic, and theoretical reflection with each other as a performance of a more integrated form of knowing, speaking, being, over and against the dictate that art and scholarship, creativity and the critical mind are at odds with each other. Rather, I see them as being two routes that can and do cross and, in so doing, hybridize and enrich each other continuously.
As someone who studies the arts and writes, form is not mere surface to me. Neither is it a modernist obsession, nor an outdated literary or art criticism Formalist school concern. Form is a language in and of itself. It is the walk of the talk.
Perhaps this is why it has always struck me as contradictory to read or hear so-called revolutionary or radical thinking about how to change society expressed in an authoritarian, dry, pretentious, arrogant, or boring style that betrays an anxiety to be approved by the same ruling cultures that have produced the inequities being denounced, in performances that reveal having been mastered by the master culture.
A brief anecdote: I once wrote a paper in Spanish that I read to my mother. I spoke of patriarchy, globalization, neocolonization, and transnationalism in telling the story of a new friend and her community's plight as traditional Aymara-Quechua people in racist La Paz, Bolivia. I was fired up and glad to be able to share my work in Spanish with my mother. But as I glanced up after my introductory paragraphs, she exclaimed: "Ay Dios, hija, ¡como que estás masticando piedras!" ("Dear Lord, my girl, it's as if you are chewing rocks!") I do not think, nor did I then, that all writing is for everyone, of course, but I did begin to deeply reflect on how scholarly and theoretical discourse and the proper disciplinary form that we are rewarded and punished for are practices that shape and misshape us.
Why is it that graduate school and the world of higher education can feel and indeed be so dehumanizing to those of us who are supposedly its adepts? And isn't it true that building love, joy, and creativity into our lives, here as anywhere else, is a profoundly liberating and decolonizing practice? As a thinker I want to think through various media, including art. As a writer, I want to create through various forms of thought — especially those from which I have been warned off — as part of the search for reintegration, as part of my own being true to my inner compass. But I also want to consciously dis-obey, to dis-order, to refuse the dictums that reserve creativity exclusively to the realm of the arts rather than to thought proper. I do not want to reproduce the kinds of knowledges and paths that are part and parcel of the mechanisms of silencing, marginalizing, misrepresenting, and rationalizing social, economic, gender, sexual, racialized, and other inequities — and that begin such work within me in a personal way.
Cross-dressing, performativity, and disidentification are three useful concepts based on "doing" being differently. Marjorie Garber (1997) points out that class-, racial-, and gender-based cross-dressing are alarming to some and liberating to others because they induce a crisis in our social categories: they scramble up assumptions around what is normal or desirable. Philosopher Judith Butler (1990, 1993) argues that gender is a learned social performance normalized through repetition. More broadly, the concept of performativity allows us to think about all behavior as learned and, therefore, as potentially unlearnable. Disidentification is a concept borrowed through various routes from psychology, and retheorized in the work of José Esteban Muñoz (1999) to describe queer performance artists of color, including drag queens who perform social identity differently, injecting undomesticated gender performances and desires into the social landscape against the pulls to reproduce heteronormative, "racial," or cultural homogenization.
How might such reflections benefit us in an effort to decolonize the production of knowledge as we know it, as it is represented to us from the halls of academia and its disciplines that are deeply embedded within the colonial adventures, and so complicit with the subjugation of negatively racialized peoples and their cultures, of women, of queer genders and sexualities, of the differently abled, of the poor? If postindustrialism and economic neoliberalism have shown the limits of enfranchisement of even college-educated Euro-American men in a period of heightened corporate greed with few nationalist loyalties, such a stripping away of external power also shows the spuriousness of the privileges of gender, sexuality, so-called race, and shared ethnic culture of the colonizer. It shows, as Chela Sandoval (2000) argues in conversation with Fredric Jameson's pessimistic analysis of the seeming impossibilities of the Left under postmodernist social and economic conditions, that we can form coalitions across historically deep and policed differences on the basis of common interests against a neoliberal capitalist globalizing politics. This is so because we are all increasingly experiencing dehumanization and social disempowerment. It feels like the possibilities of real social and personal change are rapidly shrinking for too many.
Born in 1915, one hundred years old at the time of her passing, and trained as a Hegelian philosopher (PhD 1940), Black Power movement activist, and social and economic theorist, Grace Lee Boggs argues in The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (2011) that power is not something that is given to us. It is something we become aware of, claim, protect, enact — that is, power begins with us. We are literally the change for which we have been waiting. As the feminists of the 1960s and 1970s theorized, the personal is political, through and through. And the path of self-awareness, self-knowledge, and attunement of one's inner being with one's outer social practice are no longer matters to be pursued esoterically by lonely aspirants but rather a human necessity at large, for our human collectivity is as vastly in crisis as the environment. Therefore, the decolonial cannot only attend to outer social, cultural, economic, and political measures, laws, and policies. Practices that intend decolonial effects, I propose, must attend to the fertile ground of our psyches and our bodies, where the historic ideologies of colonization reseed and reproduce themselves hauntingly within us. If by the colonial and neocolonial at the level of the psyche we mean to indicate some sort of origin of the hierarchy of -isms that plague us as individuals and as a society, as Frantz Fanon indicated long ago regarding the internalization of racism among the colonized in Black Skin, White Masks (2008; Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952), then decolonizing practice must in some way be eros ideological, increasingly self-conscious, boundary-crossing performances, and disidentificatory acts of being rooted in a politics of respect for self and other, as modes of both immediate and lasting change.
The psyche, as Carl Jung called the soul (following the ancient Greeks), the mind, and the body, are key sites of different kinds of colonization, I want to argue. One of the key alienating features of the present is the assertion that the mind, body, and spirit (by whatever name we refer to the last) are split by nature rather than as a consequence of historically specific and nonuniversal human ideologies. This fracturing of what is ultimately the enigma of self and therefore of a more complex way of knowing beyond obvious deduction and rationalism is disempowering of the self as individual and social being (Jung [1933] 1965, [1945] 1953, [1961] 1989, 1990).
In Lak'ech is a Mayan concept that translates on one level as "you are my other me": tú eres mi otro yo (Martínez Parédez 1960, 1973; Macias 2017). It is not a metaphor but a seemingly paradoxical concept that expresses as statement of fact the interconnection of all being, and thus a deep, essential identity as living beings on this planet. For myself, it has become a window into another politics of performing individual and social being: an invitation to know yourself through me, the seemingly irreducibly other with respect to you, and vice versa. Rather than me as not-you, me as your otheryou. The you, that like the many me's inside of me, I do not yet fully understand or even begin to vislumbrar, or perceive.
What does it look like to give up performances of having the upper hand when the day is done, or performance of resentful negations of inferiority, as Mariana Ortega (2006, 2016), María Lugones (2003), Chela Sandoval (2000), Trinh T. Minh-ha ([1989] 2009), and Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1987), alongside other U.S. women of color before (e.g., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color [Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981]), have asked? What does it look like to get off the seesaw of the expectation of binary truths that ultimately rest on the false assumption of essential differences from each other and from the rest of the natural world?
What about difference and unity, difference and identity as paradoxical, coexisting truths? And I do mean truths plural, without ironic quotation marks. What about our joint humanity and the basic script of living our differences and cultural specificities as unique and constantly varying manifestations? Why "must" we think in either/or? Why not be-ing as ellipses, as points of suspension, as markers of the unfinished or inarticulate ending of the plot in the making that is our individual lives and our social lives together as national and global communities?
Tú eres mi otro yo. But coalition across differences cannot mean I write for the dominant, that is, the dominating cultural other, to understand me by translating my different points of view into preexisting terms that would erase the initially "foreign" parts. And when I speak of cultural differences I am not only referring to the differences that we inherit from our different ethnic forebears; I mean as well the different family cultures that constitute our ways of understanding, and expressions of affection, remorse, disappointment, and so on, that we so often misrecognize because we read from our own horizon of emotional registers. This means we are first and foremost our own project — a project of immediate social and political consequences — and one that depends on our own mental health and well-being as the most solid basis of social and political action.
Decolonization is a concept and a practice that refers to analyzing the histories of domination of one nation or state over another and the myths that were necessary to rationalizing political, economic, and social subjugations by claiming that the cultures and humanity of the colonized were inferior. But colonization and newer forms of colonization are always a dehumanization of the dominators as well, who project onto others the parts of which they were taught in family and they, from the larger culture(s), to be ashamed, to repress, to uproot, to deny, to destroy. Although we may have learned to be cynical about it, the golden rule of countless religions and spiritual worldviews is to treat others as you wish to be treated. But a precondition of being able to do so sustainably, over time, and in the face of lack of reciprocity is self-love — not egocentric self-aggrandizement but affection, care, and compassion for the self. Because, alas, the footprints leading to and from fear, dislike, and hatred of difference and otherness circle the humble hut of our own being. The good news is that care of the self is an ancient, cross-cultural, truly universal human guide to living, a How to Live for Dummies. From a holistic perspective of mind, body, and spirit, we have a natural need to unfold, to become, to be tended, to be supported, parenting or gardening ourselves into greater and deepening integrity, self-realization, wholeness. Self-care is thus a prerequisite of a caring society and its government.
Decolonization is a process of attempting to be, from a place where we strive to be aware of and to rethink into new directions the historically received social constructions of identity, such as those of gender, "race," class, ability, and sexuality that we have incorrectly been schooled to believe are natural. I propose that the decolonial is the effort to discover ourselves, to uncover ourselves from beneath the layers of "do this," "do not do that," "those kind of people are x," and "we are y." The decolonial is the effort to be real to ourselves, to have integrity, unity, and wholeness with respect to our own desires and heartfelt beliefs. This cannot help but be the heart of the decolonial process because the decolonial process is the reclamation of our humanity against dehumanization, whether at the hand of others or our own internalization of those "(neo)colonial orders," full of sadness, shame, rage, and the desire to "mete out justice."
To midwife the process of "making face, making soul," as Gloria Anzaldúa puts it, following an ancient Mesoamerican expression, in ixtli, in yollotl, is fundamentally creative work. It is the potential power of art making to the degree it concerns itself with the artist's own truth-telling, sometimes against hegemonic ideologies. Ancients across the globe are said to have considered creative intentional production, whether material or mental/conceptual, what today we commonly reduce to only "art," as a means of harmoniously attuning, helping in the constant transformation toward self-realization, guided by the higher purpose of balanced coexistence, toward which humans and all life-forms naturally tend. But as we know, artists and straight-up political ideologues, whether overtly or subconsciously, can also work toward inequity, parasitism of one group over another, and the construction of a compliant, frightened, guilt-ridden, and self-policing semi-citizenry. After all, it is we, accompanied by the ghosts of our ancestors, who create human society and its ills.
Face, heart, face, soul, body spirit, body as inspirited, spirit as embodied.
For after all, the body performs, does it not, the mind or the soul?
Body as mediator,
as laboratory,
as neighborhood,
as community,
as theater,
as prison,
as bedroom,
as attic,
as closet,
as heaven,
as hell.
As spring fall winter summer.
As ...
Equal?
Equivalent?
Like?
In space-place of?
As difrasismo. Diphrasm, two different beings yoked by comma and invoking a third.
Tú, yo. You, me.
Body itself as my other me. As your other you.
As therefore the first cell of re(ignited)evolutionary action for change.
For individual, necessary (r)evolutions.
How about the body in different conjugations, not as the individualistic, atomized, alienated, socially love-starved home of the hungry ghosts called me, myself, and I? Different equations ... through and with and in and because of my body as mind and spirit too and as changing as life itself is, in continual transformation, permutation, hybridization, death, rebirth ... To practice the body differently.
To practice the mind as the body the spirit as the body,
the body as poetic writing on the social landscape.
Me the pen, you the paper, then next time, me the paper, you the pen.
Knowledge through the body in the body from the body.
The circuit gains importance from personal experience to abstraction to reason to objectification and generalization and back again. This circuit, with all of it meaningful, all of it having social and political and, if you wish, spiritual effects, is one of interdependence.
Politically, ideologically, the practice of interdependence and coalition is countercultural in a positive creative way if it involves constructing our own sense of what is decent, ethical, and correct against norms of so-called appropriate behavior that have ensured the hierarchical domination of groups of people against others and parts of the human psyche, such as the materialist and rationalist over other parts of the psyche.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Eros Ideologies"
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations xiPreface xv
Acknowledgments xxi
1. The Social Body of Love: Crafting Decolonial Methodologies 1
2. Eros Ideologies and Methodology of the Oppressed 17
3. Long Nguyen: Flesh of the Inscrutable 24
4. Hidden Avant-Gardes: Contemporary U.S. Latina/o Art 27
5. Freedom and Gender in Ester Hernández's Libertad 34
6. 'Ginas in the Atelier 40
7. The Poetry of Embodiment: Series and Variation in Linda Arreola's Vaguely Chicana 52
8. Art and Museums 56
9. The@-Erotics in Alex Donis's My Cathedral 70
10. Con o sin permiso (With or without Permission): Chicana Badgirls: Las hociconas 77
11. Maestrapeace: Picturing the Power of Women's Histories of Creativity 82
12. Decolonizing Self-Portraits of Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta, and Yreina D. Cervántez 91
13. Undead Darwinism and the Fault Lines of Neocolonialism in Latina/o Art Worlds 112
14. The Inviolate Erotic in the Paintings of Liliana Wilson 126
15. The Performance of Spirituality and Visionary Politics in the Work of Gloria Anzaldúa 133
16. Daughters Shaking Earth 147
17 Fashioning Decolonial Optics: Days of the Dead Walking Altars and Calavera Fashion Shows in Latina/o Los Angeles 155
18. On Jean Pierre Larochette and Yael Lurie's Water Songs 174
19. Prayers for the Planet: Reweaving the Natural and the Social: Consuelo Jimenez Underwood's Welcome to Flower-Landai 179
20. "Undocu Nation," Creativity, Integrity 192
21. Writing with Crooked Lines 201
Notes 211
References 245
Index 263
What People are Saying About This
“Laura E. Pérez renews the precepts of 1950s Third World liberation and extends the contemporary politics of women-of-color freedom fighters into the future. She speaks with many voices—the learned scholar, the analyst, the teacher, the maker of new aesthetics, the poet, the dreamer, and the guide—and offers her readers a multitude of routes for crossing academic and subjective terrains to find new possibilities for thinking, doing, and being. An outstanding work of decolonial writing by one of the great Chicana feminist philosophers of our time, Eros Ideologies is exactly the book I have needed to best teach my undergraduate and graduate students.”
“Laura E. Pérez’s newest book is a tour de force that integrates the mind-body-spirit through a series of writings that weave together the theoretical and poetical within the context of decolonization. She explores the works of artists like Gloria Anzaldúa, Ester Hernández, and Consuelo Jiménez Underwood as she crosses disciplines to bring the embodied psyche to bear on questions of the erotic and the spiritual.”