Appropriating the ‘Textual Attitude’ in “Ethnic Writing/Writing Ethnicity”

“A text purporting to contain knowledge about something actual, and arising out of circumstances [in which the author has shown him or herself to be correct] is not easily dismissed. Expertise is attributed to it. This authority of academics, institutions, and governments can accrue to it, surrounding it with still greater prestige than its practical successes warrant. Most important, such texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe. In time such knowledge and reality produce a tradition, or what Michel Foucault calls a discourse, whose material presence or weight, not the originality of a given author, is really responsible for the texts produced out of it.”
---Edward Said, _Orientalism_ p. 94

Dean Franco, in writing about how “Chicano ethnicity is formed, codified, and institutionalized in Chicano criticism,” notes that “race and genetic makeup, though undoubtedly significant for the ethnic subject, cannot be the defining category for ethnicity. Thus, he must search for some other way to define the Chicano/a subject, grounding it in resistance, particularly considering the complexities of the contested boundaries and borderlands that the Chicano/a subject must negotiate, especially in reference to the subject’s history as Hispanic, Mexican, Tejano (or Texano), American, Chicano, etc. Franco invokes Said’s ‘textual attitude,’ remarking that “mental formations and cultural constructions (the codes, beliefs, rites, and rituals) are palpably performed in imaginative literature of the most diverse ethnic provenance as well as in nonfiction, including academic discussions of the field.” Text as history may seem acceptable, perhaps even necessary (to the theorist, anyway, who believes that the only history is to be found in representations of history) for formation of ethnic subjectivity, but please note from the section taken from Orientalism (above) that Said was not at all a proponent of the ‘textual attitude.’ Said argues that the textual attitude is one that allows an ‘expert’ to define something that readers subsequently believe to be true and accept as fact. Readers then will not test this ‘knowledge,’ either because they have no other knowledge against which to test (or any other knowledge they have is also ‘textual’ and therefore will likely agree), or because the writer has been ‘proven’ an expert and therefore is a credible source. And therein lies the danger, according to Said, for the ‘knowledge’ is nothing more than subjective discourse—especially when ‘the lion’ of Said’s example—or the culture, since what he is exploring is the textual attitude that formed 19th century beliefs of and toward the Orient—cannot talk back.

I’m fully aware that what Franco is doing is, in a sense, ‘talking back’ by appropriating the textual attitude so that the Chicano/a writes his or her own ethnicity. What is odd, though, is that rather than writing Chicano/a ethnicity so that the colonizer learns what comprises Chicano/a subjectivity, Franco asserts that writing ethnicity is the way in which the Chicano/a subject learns his or her ethnicity. He notes that “[ethnicity] is readable” and that not only does the writer read the “self as the ethnic subject” but also the Chicano/a reader reads the self as ethnic subject. However, because of the negativity Said attaches to the idea of textual attitude, it seems useful to examine this idea further.

Why was Said so strident about the destructive nature of the textual attitude? In part because it gave the power of definition to the writer, in part because it allowed the culture to be categorized metonymically (if that’s not a word already, it is now), and in part because it, in a sense, froze the culture. Clearly Franco’s reasoning for appropriating the textual attitude is concerned with the first reason, and I fully understand and support that. A culture should have the power to write / read itself. But ought any one culture to be the only voice about itself? Textualized representations create a scenario in which, unless one wishes to be labeled ‘colonizer,’ one must be of the certain ethnicity in order to write about the culture. However, this seems to present its own set of dangers. For example, what if the only writers allowed to write colonial American culture were white? Oh, yes, that’s right, for a while that was the case, though it didn’t go over very well, and rightfully so. Why? Because, as Holly told us last week, the writers chose to depict certain aspects of what they considered their culture (like it or not, colonial America DID consider itself a culture), including the Native Americans as savage, simple, childlike, etc. Notable here is the fact that colonial writers felt the need to describe Native Americans, which suggests that they needed something against which to define themselves. But if one can only write one's own culture / ethnicity, there can be no Other, for the moment one begins to show 'difference' (read Franco's use in italics, which I can't reproduce here), what the difference is necessarily includes the / an Other, which has been summarily dismissed. Moreover, when the only ones writing / reading a culture are members of a specific culture, aspects of a culture are certain to be elided or glossed over. Neither one of these situations is in any way to be considered the ideal. I don’t think any one perspective should be given complete authority—primacy, perhaps, belongs to a member of a culture, but I do believe that other (read as different and ‘Other’) perspectives have a place, as well. For the truth, if there is one (and plenty would disagree), is to be found somewhere in between the lines of all representing perspectives.

I think a small example will help to show what I mean. Franco discusses a novel written by Cherrie Moraga, _The Last Generation_, in which the writer “engage[s] in mediating and negotiating between two cultural systems, constructing a cultural and feminist identiy as she works to deconstruct the predominantly male cultural paradigms that have worked to suppress a female perspective within Chicano criticism.” Franco gives this excerpt to support his contention:
We are no Moses, no Malcolm, no Queztalcoatl, but we are all our own
Gods. And our liberation won’t happen by some man leading the way and
Parting the Red Sea for us. We are the Red Sea, we women. (114)
Franco notes in this passage that Moraga has “st[olen] the trope of resistance from traditional power-holders (men, Anglos)”; however, it seems to me that she has conflated Chicana with Anglo (at least women) by the use of a shared Judeo-Christian religious tradition, for certainly I as an Anglo can relate to her use of Moses and the parting of the Red Sea. Thus, she has created unity between us not only as women but also as Chicana and Anglo, and that, I believe, is constructive.

Writers, it seems, seek to break down walls, celebrating 'difference' by writing a specific ethnicity while at the same time making connections with other cultures, while theorists want to claim ethnicity as a product of one culture—with no connections to any O/other. Inherent in this desire is the necessity of definition or description of a culture, which according to theory can only be accomplished against the gaze of an Other, but by doing this, one eradicates any possibility of unity or shared experience between cultures. And honestly, I’m not aware that there is any theorist who can find a culture that doesn’t have shared experiences with another culture, for even Franco finds himself in territory difficult to negotiate when he tries to posit the shared experience of the “Mexicans living in the Rio Grande valley [who were] subject to the same ethnic gaze of the other—the Anglo oppressor” Now, aside from the fact that once again the Anglo is the Other, which calls to mind the question of what exactly other cultures would do if the Anglo culture, which they deride regularly, didn’t exist (for then who would cultures define themselves against?), the ethnic gaze of the Anglo Other / oppressor not only is a shared one as demonstrated by Moraga’s novel, it is also a shared one based on the fact that Mexicans living in the Rio Grande valley were themselves once colonizers and oppressors of the indigenous cultures of Latin America. Thus, what Franco frames as singularly Chicano/a ethnicity is actually a shared experience between Chicano/a and Anglo. Certainly there is 'difference,' but there is unity as well.