Abstract
Suspending the Desire for Recognition:
Coloniality of Being, the Dialectics of Death, and Chicano/a Literature
by
Jorge Manuel Gonzalez
Doctor of Philosophy in Ethnic Studies
and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory
University of California, Berkeley
Professor Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Chair
Writing, as Abdul JanMohamed posits in relation to Richard Wright's literature, is an alternative manner of negating negation. "Negating the negation" in this sense must be understood dialectically, as a methodology of the oppressed seeking to transcend social negation from a continuous colonial logic that seeks to alienate, exploit, and reify racialized existence. The function of writing for historically marginalized communities, then, is a symbolic gesture that often takes the place of the act of physical resistance seeking recognition -as the Hegelian master/bondsman or Marxist proletariat/bourgeoisie models would describe--from exterior dominating forces. The desire to be recognized is displaced by the desire to know and critique the capitalist world's oppressive forces, especially the forces of racial alienation and gender subjection. The turn to affirm the self from within is manifested in the novels, poems, and plays of people of color in the Unites States and former colonies around the world. This dissertation examines Chicana/o literature produced between 1968 to the turn of the century to deconstruct the process of racial alienation and the struggle for "dis-alienation" represented in the critical imagination of writers who occupy the position of what Ramon Grosfoguel (2005) has referred to as "colonial racial subjects." The objective is to articulate a philosophical, theoretical, and literary account of the extent and manner in which death (actual, symbolic, and social), violence, and the continuity of the logics/ethics of domination shape the existential horizon of the Chicana/o experience to establish a conceptual grounding for the "coloniality of Being."
This dissertation reads how the persistence of colonial logic and the West's monopoly on the meaning and value of `Being' has a dynamic relation with figurative renderings of racialized identity, alienated labor, death, violence, love, and war by Chicano/a writers whose literary production spans from the 1970s to the turn of the 20th century. Suspending the Desire for Recognition proposes that the existential concerns and the critiques embedded within Chicana/o literature are responses to the pathology of recognition endemic to modernity, the legacies of colonialism, and its persistent logic/ethic of domination in the modern era. Understanding literature as an important tool for the critique of society, this dissertation highlights the literary production of Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, Luis J. Rodriguez, and Cherríe Moraga, key writers within the Chicano Studies canon whose autobiographies, novels, and plays help us explain the way in which death and violence are fundamental to the existential crises of Chicana/os who have lived through the socio-political realignments of the late 1960s through the present. The dissertation pays particular attention to the existential and psycho-political implications of Chicana/os subjectivities sutured in a social context which claims that the violence of racism is a problem overcome in the Civil Rights Era while institutional repression continues to subjugate Chicana/os and a rise intra-community violence is particularly evident.
