Overview

Colonial discourse in the United States has tended to criminalise, pathologise, and depict as savage not only Native Americans but Mexican immigrants, indigenous peoples in Mexico, and Chicanas/os as well. While postcolonial studies of the past few decades have focused on how these ethnicities have been constructed by others, Disrupting Savagism reveals how each group, in turn, has actively attempted to create for itself a social and textual space in which certain negative prevailing discourses are neutralised and rendered ineffective. Arturo J. Aldama begins by presenting a genealogy of the term ""savage,"" looking in particular at the work of American ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan and a sixteenth-century debate between Juan Gines de Sepulveda and Bartolome de las Casas. Aldama then turns to more contemporary narratives, examining ethnography, fiction, autobiography, and film to illuminate the historical ideologies and ethnic perspectives that contributed to identity formation over the centuries. These works include anthropologist Manuel Gamio's The Mexican Immigrant: His Life Story, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera, and Miguel Arteta's film Star Maps. By using these varied genres to investigate the complex politics of racialised, subaltern, feminist, and diasporic identities, Aldama reveals the unique epistemic logic of hybrid and mestiza/o cultural productions. The trans-cultural perspective of Disrupting Savagism will interest scholars of feminist postcolonial processes in the United States, as well as students of Latin American, Native American, and literary studies.

Full Product Details

Author:   Arturo J. Aldama
Publisher:   Duke University Press
Imprint:   Duke University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.10cm , Length: 22.80cm
Weight:   0.635kg
ISBN:  

9780822327516

ISBN 10:   0822327511
Pages:   277
Publication Date:   23 November 2001
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Out of stock  
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Preface Part I: Mapping Subalternity in the U.S./Mexico Borderlands 1. The Chiana/o and the Native American “Other” Talk Back: Theories of the Speaking Subject in a (Post?) Colonial Context 2. When the Mexicans Talk, Who Listens? The Crisis of Ethnography in Situating Early Voices from the U.S./Mexico Borderlands Part II: Narrative Disruptions: Decolonization, Dangerous Bodies, and the Politics of Space 3. Counting Coup: Narrative Acts of (Re)Claiming Identity in Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko 4. Toward a Hermeneutics of Decolonization: Reading Radical Subjectivities in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldua 5. A Border Coda: Dangerous Bodies, Liminality, and the Reclamation of Space in Star Maps by Miguel Arteta Notes Selected Bibliography Index

Reviews

Disrupting Savagism offers a theoretically nuanced reading of the struggles over representation that have been waged by marginalised inhabitants of the United States-Mexican border zone. With its remarkable breadth of examples, the book carefully unfolds the thoroughgoing legacy of racial violence in the colonised Southwest. - Carl Gutierrez-Jones, author of Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Culture and Legal Discourse

Author Information

Arturo J. Aldama is Assistant Professor of Chicana/o Studies at Arizona State University.

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