KELLY WRITERS HOUSE
Michelle Angela Ortiz
SURVIVING THE ENCOUNTER:
Exploring Movement
and Contradiction
through the Passage
of
Remembrance
CURATOR STATEMENT
By Peter Schwarz
Surviving the Encounter returns attention to a geographic
locale that is in danger of being displaced by the discourse of
"globalization"—a perceived Western, capitalistic paradigm often
allied with or identified as neo-colonialism—and subsumed by current
destabilizing forces of the impending war with Iraq and America's "war on
terrorism", the post-Cold War flood of American-style capitalism across
the world, and the reaction throughout much of the world against America's
cultural pervasiveness. Heavily mediatized and academically-strangled,
non-economic "globalization" is a euphemism for a process that existed
during the age of ancient Greece, during the age of imperial Rome, during
the age of Islamic expansion, during the age of European colonialism.
Presently, America is the accused progenitor of "globalization", sparking
often vehement protests in the streets wherever the IMF, World Bank or
other Western economic meetings occur (Seattle, Washington, Philadelphia,
Genoa), and contentious debates among academics and intellectuals across
the ideological spectrum that, in general, is setting the stage for
another factional culture war within the American academy. While the
global influence of American culture has been migrating across the world
since America's entrance into colonial competition with Europe after the
Spanish-American War the "globalization" debates, especially those
operated by a generation of leftist academics who, as discontented and
alienated youths, committed themselves to the revolutionary movements of
the 1960s and 70s, have been shifting away from the American historical
narrative.
Postcolonial America never quite existed except within the
academy, within the comparative literature and foreign languages
departments that disseminated the ideas and works of European colonial
societies, many which belatededly discovered the socialist struggle for a
new world order freed of a centuries-long European domination and the
return of their identity, if one could be rediscovered. The transformative
actions of colonialism—interruption of continuity with a society's
past, destruction of memory and the creation of a distance from accessing
that past, the imposition of a foreign (alien) culture—would set the
stage for a new drama acted out across much of the world except within
America. Although it is inarguable that America has pursued colonial
ambitions, having participated vigorously in the slave trade and having
practiced an internalized form of colonial expansion vis-à-vis North
America's indigenous populations during settlement of the New World, the
postcolonial struggle largely bypassed America. For instance, Anglophone
postcolonialism focuses primarily on the relationships between Britain and
her colonies minus what she had already lost two centuries before.
Certainly, the American civil rights movement was allied in determination
and solidarity with the more violent struggles of African
self-determination while American feminism similarly manifested itself
during this period of revolt and recognition. If America ever participated
in postcolonialism it was as witness and conduit despite the very nature
of America as an immigrant society governed by a white, European-descended
hegemonic order that established itself and its values as the core of
American society. Perhaps this contradiction is what led to the emergence
of American multiculturalism, potentially viewed as either a schism within
postcolonialism or as an American version of postcolonialism considered
more suitable to our own dynamics. Either way, from the 1980s to the
present, American multiculturalism has attempted to define the process of
recognition and redress—in theory, that is—for marginalized or
otherwise suppressed minorities who might be considered as "internal
colonial subjects". American multiculturalism, however, has failed to
provide the necessary reconciliation between action and grievance that has
marred American history, and as the world experiences "globalization" the
American immigrant or minority experience is being lost as a new
generation of multiculturalists, perhaps better described as
anti-anti-globalists even if the term sounds ridiculous, shift much of
their focus and energies towards the Other beyond the horizon.
Although American multiculturalists succeeded in challenging the cultural
mechanisms through which the white, European-descended authority wielded
power—the Western canon of philosophy and the classics of literature
and art and their educational dominance—and while political
multiculturalists succeeded in achieving the affirmative action program to
redress deeply-rooted discrimination, what has also re-arisen and
entrenched itself in the American consciousness is the pre-Civil Rights
"separate but equal" mentality or a cultural/social segregation. Hardly
enforced by the writ of law as its original incarnation, today's
multiculturalist "separate but equal" is a pervasive form guided by
several factors: political correctness, the leftist concept of
"implication", and coercion internal to the specific group.
Multiculturalism in this form, which is its present stage, creates the
ethno-racial fragmentation that is a larger tenet of postmodernist
cultural politics and when this dynamic merges with the more philosophical
postmodernist value of futility what results is the collapse of
multiculturalism's original, perhaps utopian, aims.
Politics appears as the only workable solution in which the judiciary
asserts itself. American multiculturalism refines itself through political
exigency, purging itself of its history in an ironic process that embraces
history while then proceeding to exorcise the past via the celebration of
cultural pride. From this perspective, pride, long established in ancient
Greek philosophy and subsequently absorbed into Christian theology,
evolves from a mortal sin into a sought-after encounter whose achievement
supposedly guarantees a release from the turmoils of prejudice, hate,
repression, and even murder. However, what results instead is a divorce
from history; pride as connoted as a positive can only touch upon the
negative in a superficial manner so as to borrow credence for the
justification of the celebration of pride, to legitimize the necessity and
validity of the multiculturalist enterprise. The supposed exorcision of
the past's demons does not occur on the level of redress and purgation. In
certain instances such as the celebration, or the glorification,
something is achieved at the expense of something else. In
this respect, German communist playwright Bertold Brecht's opposition to
Aristotle's catharsis is sacrificed, catharsis returns as the form of
purgation, and the Brechtian "capacity for action" peacefully dissipates
into either politically-emasculated pleasure or a safety-valve experience
that short-circuits a radical critique of historical experience.
These dynamics allow for the emergence of a cultural amnesia
co-extensive with cultural schizophrenia, an experience that is all the
more ideally achieved in an immigrant society such as America's. The
symbol and the story become the complex navigational passages from one
culture into another, further complicated by the role of language and the
identity of a language. In this situation, lingua franca—in
this context, Spanish—transforms from its definition of a primary
linguistic currency in certain circumstances such as associational
transactions during a particular moment (i.e. family, friends) or within
an ethno-racial enclave (New York's Spanish Harlem) into a subversive
linguistic currency that subverts both the dominant language, English, as
well as the Spanish-speaker. In this hemisphere Spanish is a colonial
language: the language of the conquistador and the missionary, it
supplanted indigenous dialects and thus represents the linguistic aspects
of European cultural colonialism. Today, Latin Americans displaced into
the North and set within a culturally schizophrenic society access their
own cultural heritage via their historical colonizers' language which
signifies the inability to reject in a revolutionary fashion the
mechanisms of colonial oppression and reveals the contradictions inherent
to the New World narrative that have neither disappeared from a continuing
postcolonialism nor diminshed in importance of consideration.
The works of Michelle Angela Ortiz examine these relations
and challenge the prevailing model of cultural experience and encounter as
celebration and entertainment masqueraded as a false sense of pride;
rather than "recover" a heritage in a purely political act as occurred
within the Afro-American community during the 1980s and early 90s (the
popular marketization of African and ancient Egyptian symbols, both by
academics and business interests), Ortiz seeks to re-engage that heritage
and to re-animate the dynamics that would compose a postcolonial critique
or examination more attuned to the American historical narrative as it is
developing today, more so than what multiculturalism has achieved, and she
reinvests history with its memory. In this regard, Ortiz' depiction of the
Latin American mythical figure, Maria Leonza, exists as a powerful
symbol of the trans-cultural encounter and experience. Many versions of
this myth co-exist in competition, from the woman's possible identity
based upon an indigenous girl with blue eyes, to an illegitimate offspring
between a chieftain's wife and a Spanish soldier, to a Spanish noble
woman. In all versions Maria Leonza is sacrificed either because the color
of her eyes symbolize impending catastrophe—principally interpreted
as the indigenous populations' imminent encounter with the Spanish and
Portugese—or because she wanders off to fulfill the prophecy of the
reflection in the lake and the abduction by or subsequent transformation
into a snake. History counterbalanced, or contradicted depending upon
perspective, against the present, Markings and the Energia
series depict the struggle of maintaining a possession of identity and
heritage and what exists beneath the façade.
© 2002 Peter Schwarz
NEW WORLD