TCCL - TEORIA Y CRITICA DE LA CULTURA Y LITERATURA

INVESTIGACIONES DE LOS SIGNOS CULTURALES

(SEMIOTICA-EPISTEMOLOGIA-INTERPRETACION)
TK.KL THEORIE UND KRITIK DER KUL TUR UND LITERATUR
UNTERSUCHUNGEN ZU DEN KULTURELLEN ZEICHEN
(SEMIOTIK-EPISTEMOLOGIE-INTERPRETATION)
TCCL THEORY AND CRITICISM OF CULTURE AND LITERATURE
INVESTIGATIONS ON CULTURAL SIGNS
(SEMIOTICS-EPISTEMOLOGY-INTERPRETATI ON)
Vol. 5

DIRECTORES:

Borders and Margins

Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism
Fernando de Toro (EDITOR)
Alfonso de Toro (EDITOR)
Kathleen Quinn (EDITORIALASSISTANT)

Alfonso de Toro
Centro de Investigaci6n Iberoamericana
Universidad de Leipzig
Fernando de Toro
Center for Research on
Comparative Literary Studies
Carleton University, Canada

CONSEJO ASESOR: W.C. Booth (Chicago); E. Cros (Montpellier); L.

Dallenbach (Ginebra); M. De Marinis (Macerata); U. Eco (Bolofia); E.
Fischer-Lichte (Maguncia); G. Genette (Paris); D. Janik (Maguncia); H.-R.
JauB (Constanza); D. Kadir (Norman/Oklahoma); W. Krysinski (Montreal);
K. Meyer-Minnemann (Hamburgo); P. Pavis (Paris); R. Posner (Berlfn); R.
Prada Oropeza (Mexico); M. Riffaterre (Nueva York); Fco. Ruiz Ram6n
(Nashville); Th.A. Sebeok (Bloomington); C. Segre (Pavla); Tz. Todorov
(Paris); J. Trabant (Berlin), M. Valdes (Toronto)
CONSEJO EDITORIAL: J. Alazraki (Nueva York); F. Andacht (Montevideo); S. Anspach (Sao Paulo); G. Bellini (Milan); A. Echavarrfa(Puerto Rico);
E. Forastieri-Braschi (Puerto Rico); E. Guerrero (Santiago); R. I velic (Santiago); A. Letelier (Venecia); W. D. Mignolo (Ann Arbor); D. Oelker (Concepci6n); E.D. Pittarello (Venecia); R.M. Ravera (Buenos Aires), N. Richard
(Santiago); J. Romera Castillo (Madrid); N. Rosa (Buenos Aires Rosario); J.
Ruffinelli (Stanford); C. Ruta (Palermo); J. Villegas (Irvine).
REDACCION: C. Gatzmeier, R. Ceballos

Vervuert lberoamericana 1995

Table of Contents

This book has been published

with the assistance of the
Faculty of Arts at Carleton University

Preface: Borders and Margins or

the Paradigm of Inquiry in the West

Djelal Kadir, Excursus: What Are We After? ........................ iii

Alfonso de Toro, Post-Coloniality and Post-Modernity: Jorge Luis Borges:
The Periphery in the Centre, the Periphery as the Centre,
the Centre of the Periphery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Sara Castro-Klaren, Writing Sub-Alterity: Guaman Poma and Garcilaso, Inca . 45

A
UN:\':~.~;~:.1~
E~:!..:~1t::K
H:~~:LcL::3

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme

William Luis, Borges, the Encounter, and the Other:

Blacks and the Monstrous Races . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

Patrick Imbert, Post-Modernism, Monotheism, Polysemy, Econornism ....... 79

Jennifer Mackey, Foe and Robinson Crusoe: An Examination of Place,
Space, and Displacement in Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature . . . . . . . . . . 91

Borders and margins : post-colonialism and post-modernism./

Fernando de Toro (ed.), ... - Frankfurt am Main : Vervuert ;
Madrid : lberoamericana, 1995
y critica de la cultura y literatura ; Vol. 5)
ISBN 3-89354-205-1 (Vervuen)
ISBN 84-88906-23-4 (lberoamericana)
NE: Toro, Fernando de [Hrsg.)

103

(Teori'a

Vervuert Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995

lberoamericana, Madrid 1995
Apartado Postal 40 154
E-28080 Madrid
Reservados todos los derechos
lmpreso en Alemania

Maria Elena de Valdes, Mexican Female Imagery in

Como Agua Para Chocolate/Like Water for Chocolate ................. 121

~\Fernando de Toro, From Where to Speak? Post-Modem/

' Post-Colonial Positionalities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

H. Jill Scott, Loving the Other: Subjectivities of Proximity in

Helene Cixous' The Book of Promethea ........................... 149

Preface: Borders and Margins or the Paradigm of Inquiry in the West

Daniel Castillo Durante, Rethinking Latin America:

Post-Modernity's dumping grounds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

Penelope /ronstone-Caterall, Imagining the Other Among Us: Kathy Acker

Between New York and "Algeria" ............................... 169

Randolph Pope, Letters in the Post, or How Juan Goytisolo

Got to La Chanca . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181

Index ................................................... 193

Notes on Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

Fernando de Toro
Director
Centre for Research on Comparative Literary Studies
Carleton University
Alfonso de Toro
Director
Ibero-American Research Centre
University of Leipzig

Post is not only a word or a new trend or fashion of some clever academics, or
a new gimmick introduced for marketability or in order to concoct a "conspiracy"
against minorities of all sorts. Post, in fact, marks an end, and the beginning, of a
new field of inquiry which unsettles and undermines previous theoretical discourses
and forms of inquiry, while drastically providing an open-ended field of pos~ibilities.
The present volume is the result of the first year (out of three years, 1995-1997)
of a collective thought and research project which is centred on the question of PostModernism and Post-Colonialism, Post-Feminism, as the various articles collected in
this volume will show. In fact, both Post-Colonialism and Post-Feminism are part and
parcel of what we will call, Late Post-Modernity. It is under the umbrella of that
condition of Post-Modernism that the decentrement of the
totalizing/hegemonizing/universalizing discourses comes to a closure. It is here, then,
in this condition where these two discourses not only emerge but develop into a Post,
in the sense that theoreticians begin to incorporate forms of knowledge previously
rejected as "centrist", "white male", etc., forms such as those introduced by Michel
Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Jean
Baudrillard, etc. This "incorporation" has allowed these two Posts to challenge those
very forms of knowledges from within, in the process of appropriation and
subversion.
These new forms of knowledge are what have become so prominent, and so
abundantly fertile with possibilities, in the work of authors such as Homi Bhabha,
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Djelal Kadir, Judith Butler, Edward Said, Linda J.
Nicholson, Robert Young, Laura E. Donaldson, just to mention a few prominent
cases, and it is these possibilities we have attempted to explore in this first volume. 1
All the articles presented here problematize some of these issues: the questions
of Feminism/Post-Coloniality in such articles as those by Jill Scott, Penelope
lronstone-Caterall, Jennifer Mackey, and Marfa Elena de Valdes; or the question of
Othering in articles by Sara Castro-Klaren and Fernando de Toro; problems of deThe next two volumes will be published in succession, by Prof. Randolph Pope at Washington University
in SL Louis in 1996, and by Prof. Alfonso de Toro at Leipzig University in Germany in 1998.

Writing Sub-Alterity: Guaman Poma and Garcilaso, Inca

Sara Castro-Klaren

Johns Hopkins University

Porque en todo sea tragedia.
A Ios indios, mestizos, y criollos [de! Peru] el Inca Garcilaso de Ia Vega, su hcnnano,
compatriota y paisano: salud y fclicidad. (Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca, Comentarios reales 16091616)
.
Y no bubo conquista. (Guam<in Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva cor6nica y buen gobiemo
1615)
'

Preamble
The Post-Colonial perspective, as it emerges in the English speaking academy, is
situated in a specific historical conjuncture. First, it is important to note that it is an
inquiry which departs from, even though it also questions, the post-structuralist
challenge to epistemology and the subsequent decentring of the subject with its claims
to 'truth' and 'knowledge'. Second, it should not be forgotten that Edward Said's
Orienta/ism (1978) is generally acknowledged as having laid the theoretical bac;is for
the examination of colonial discourse, that is, the discourse modes in which Europe
has constructed its (oriental) others. Said's work has been extended and radicalized
in the hands of other former subjects of the English speaking empire and so the PostColonial perspective has come to be associated with the contemporary diaspora and
dispersal of Post-Colonial intellectuals and academics. Third, Post-Coloniality faces
the current crisis of self and national identity in an increasingly transnational world.
These three problems are made only more severe and paradoxical by a theory that
postulates a split subject always already given in the impossibility of discursive arrest.
Finally, this anxious subject of English speaking Post-Coloniality writes the world and
itself without awareness of a previous, major, if not modular, colonial period and
Post-Colonial experience which is enormously relevant to many of its concerns, the sub-altem subject, cultural translations, oral and written traditions, margin-centre
relations, the question of authenticity, modalities of excess, hybridization and
transgression. Only most recently, for example, has Bill Ashcroft in his "Excess"
(1994) stated that "post-colonialism does not mean 'after colonialism', that it begins
with the moment of colonization" (Ashcroft 1994: 34). He makes this statement
without any reference at all to the Latin American trajectory of writing, a writing
marked by the sign of resistance ab initio. What is more, this incisive essay, which
identifies the excess of insistence, the excess of supplementarity and the excess of
hybridity, as three interrelated modes in the phenomenon of Post-Coloniality, builds

46

BORDERS AND MARGINS

its argument in the absence of the long standing question of mestizaje in Latin
America as well as the recent work of Julio Ortega on the literature of excess.
Looking at parallels and divergences between Latin America and the English PostColonial retrospective will probably show that some of the ground being "theorized"
now has already been problematized before. This is so if we understand "theory" not
as philosophy or an abstracted system of rules but rather as a given position from
which a questioning of the foundations of the disciplines (power/knowledge) in the
humanities, a voicing of disjunctions with the basic assumptions of philosophy,
history and literature, is undertaken. In the case of Latin America such questioning
or contestatory position has sought to account not only for its own textual production
but has also established an "unremitting dialogue with the texts of the continental
world about them and with them" (Kadir 1993: 41). What is more, such self-conscious
texts have not, by definition, eschewed the ever-vexing problem of historical context,
the link between discourse and society and the examination of the mechanisms and
discourses of dominance which define colonial situations of all kinds. 1 Much to the
contrary, they have in fact dwelled in and sprung from such difficulty.
It is at the convergence of Post-Colonial theoretical preoccupations and the
question of the sub-al tern as the subject of another historiography, that a consideration
of Guaman Poma's intervention into the formation of colonial discourse, and
Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca's commentaries on the colonial repertoire that wrote the
ancient Americas into prime examples of barbarity and otherness, become pertinent.
I hope that bringing to bear these heterogeneous works on the present conundrum of
the sub-altem will prove illuminating, though I am aware of the current bias against
visualist language.
But first allow me a few more prefatory remarks. A distinction between colonial
texts and Post-Colonial theory needs to be drawn if not on theoretical grounds, at
least on the basis of important empirical time-space locations and historical identities.
Colonial discourse, as Said characterized it in Orienta/ism and as Peter Hulme has
used it in his Colonial Encounters, entails:
an ensemble of linguistically-based practices unified by their common deployment in the
management of colonial relationships [...] Underlying the idea of colonial discourse, in other
words, is the presumption that during the colonial period large parts of the non-European world
were produced for Europe through a discourse that imbricated sets of questions and
assumptions, methods of procedure and analysis, and kinds of writing and imagery, normally
separated out into discrete areas of military strategy, political order, social reform, imaginative
literature. personal memoir and so on. (Hulme 1986: 2)

Colonial discourse thus comprises the texts written for and consumed, in the main,
by Europe, in the process of production of the rest of the world as its other. Taken
this far the outline of the problem is incomplete. Once produced, those texts
For a lucid and helpful discussion on the relation ol poslStructuralism and iLs contribution IO a critical
theory capable of lhinking the relation between discourse and historical context see Poster ( 1989: 6-9 and

70-86).

WRITING SUB-ALTERITY

47

"deployed in the management of colonial relations" were also read in the colonized
localities, and their truth claims were received and interpreted in a variety of
modalities. The reception given to these colonial texts, in most cases, corresponded
to the class-race hierarchies that the power/knowledge of colonial discourse managed
as the colonial social order. For instance, when particular catechisms to christianize
specific colonial subjects (whose subjectivities were assessed in need of particular
explanations of Christian doctrine) were developed with the aid of local informants
and translators, something else and something more complex than the production of
Europe's others was at work. Something more than the elaboration of cultural
difference as a set of oppositional traits took place in the space of receptivity of the
colonial text. The very notion of a diagnosis of the signification requirements of the
prospective converts implied a search into the quiescent religious assumptions of the
friar in charge of evangelization. In facing and constructing the otherness of his
"inferior" and idolatrous charges, the friar also had to take a look, as it were, from
the "outside" at the naturalized superiority and singular truth of his faith. Such
moments of cultural alienation elicited different and contrasting responses. In some
cases the superior/inferior characterization of the difference became doubtful,
dissolved a little. In most, the very doubt engendered greater zeal. Fear intensified the
terms of the highernower, good/bad opposition with which the spiritual conquest
sustained the gains of the military conquest.
Such estrangement, of course, cuts both ways. The colonized, as we see in the
writings of Garcilaso, Inca and Guaman Poma, shocked by the version of themselves
that the furious workings of colonial discourse was implanting as the basis for future
rule, alienated from themselves by the otherness projected onto them, responded.
Their texts are the first to have been written back2 in the endless correspondence
between Europeans, indians, mestizos, criollos and mulattos that the history of Latin
America entails. Because texts like the Comentarios reales and El primer nueva
cor6nica write back, they cannot simply be rolled over with or under colonial
discourse as first and most usefully though insufficiently categorized by Said.
Two points ought to be stressed here. First, we have the need to draw a
categorical distinction between the texts elaborated by the colonizer, and the texts
produced by the colonized. This should be done not so much in regard to the more
or less European fracture of the text but rather in relation to the position of subalterity deployed by the subject of enunciation. Even though in "real life" such stark
opposition (Colonizer/colonized, sovereign/subordinate) could be almost infinitely
shaded and diffused, distinctions which account for the different positionality of the
subject are necessary in order to avoid extending theories over practices for which
they really cannot (yet?) account for. 3
For instance, if we were to agree that colonial discourse comprises "the variety
of textual forms in which the West produced and codified knowledges about nonmetropolitan areas and cultures, especially those under [formal] colonial control"
2
3

See Rabasa (1994).

See Mignolo (1989).

48

BORDERS AND MARGINS

(Williams and Chrisman 1994: 5) and critics such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
Homi Bhabha, Aijaz Ahmad, Ania Loomba, to name a few, are Post-Colonials, what
kind of relocations would we have to perform in order to understand the discursive
production of subjects born and settled in the territories known as Latin America?
Who, in the great list of "colonial" or "republican" writers would reenter as a colonial
or Post-Colonial author? Time-line unevenness such as this is, of course, the product
of a neo-colonial classification which pairs all English language products with the
First World (theory) and Spanish language products with the Third World (materials
for export?, relays of copies?). I would therefore say that the Post-Colonial
perspective could be of interest to the study of Latin America and of greater use to
the English Post-Coloniality itself if we were to decouple its theoretical explorations
from attempting new universalizing coordinates, and renewed focus were placed in
locating specific anti-colonial or decolonizing discursive projects. The general aim
would be, as Mary Louise Pratt and others have stated, to decolonize knowledge and
to attempt emancipatory mappings.
The second point has to do with the assumption of stationary and unbreachable
constitution of discursive practices in this colonial situation that produces Europe's
other. Almost by definition, such production takes place, as Bakhtin showed in his
study of the novel, in linguistic and social "contact zones", that is in "social spaces
where disparate cultures meet, clash, grapple with each other, often in highly
asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination" (Pratt 1992: 4). One of the
prob~ems witI:t Sa.id's Orientalism, a problem which he feels lies outside the design
of his book. 1s the absence of an engagement of and with the ideological struggle
~king place in the "contact zone". Restoring the terms of the response to colonial
discourse on the part of the colonized is not, as Said argues, yet another instance of
"orie?talism" or othering but rather an opportunity to understand more fully the
workings of the constructions of subjects in contexts of oppositional and or inbetween relations. Perhaps then we could move beyond the proposition that those cast
as "n~tives" or.sub-altern subjects cannot, theoretically, speak. Ifwe understand power
as S~d does, m terms of a strategic exercise given at all levels of society, and we
take m Foucault's view that "Where there is power, there is resistance (and] this
resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power" (1978: 95), then
we need to assume a paradigm of "colonial discourse" that provides a place for the
emergence of sub-altern subjects.
The study of Latin America has amply demonstrated that in the "contact zone"
-househol~s, haciendas: the confessionary, school rooms, universities, judiciaries,
commentanes and chrorucles- heterogenous negotiations of subject formation have
been made possible. Such exchanges have often been murderous as Fanon would
have it. But they have also been the occasion for the emergence ~f new twists and

WRITING SUB-ALTERITY

new namings in the arts of combat, translation, accommodation, resistance, rebellion,

mimesis, appropriation and sub-version.

1. Post-(Modem)Colonial critics have highlighted the question of the subject and

especially the impossibility of thinking an autonomous subject of agency. If the
bourgeois idea of the autonomous individual no longer holds and, if Marxism is seen
as just one of the several great master (teleological) narratives of the Enlightenment/
how can an autonomous subject of agency be postulated for the colonial-subordinates
who would appear to be doubly traversed. by the split subject and the crisis of
representation? As a matter of fact it is worth noting here that the same problem of
agency has plagued feminist theory even when it has most productively engaged PostModern theory.
Debates on the sub-altem by necessity border on debates on the constitution of
identity and cultural differentiation. In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion
of Identity (1990) Judith Butler has demonstrated the performative constitution of
identity so that we can no longer assume identity as either origin or referential
substance. Above all, such debate brings up the problem of the intellectual, his or her
relation or position in the historic block that he or she would represent, in his or her
genealogy. Urgent questions are being asked about classes of intellectuals, whether
they are posited as universal or local intellectuals (Foucault), traditional or organic
thinkers (Gramci), and the kind of knowledge that they attain, produce, disseminate,
authorize .. It seems that we can no longer assume that a sub-altem intellectual such
as Garcilaso or Guaman Poma, can ipso facto carry a transgressive or oppositional
weight to the imperial (colonial or neo-colonial) enterprise due to their insertion in
the all-encompassing terms of colonial discourse or the over-arching game of
language. From the Post-Colonial perspective, we do not seem to know to what extent
a sub-altem subject, one who is in the place of the subject but at a rank below, can
play a role in the constitution of a separate and contestatory identity.
The theoretical impossibilities of positing a sub-altem agency together with the
suspicion that such a problem might be just another "attempt to retain the position and
influence of global centrality" 6 on the part of Western intellectuals has been most
forcefully put to the question by Gayatri Spivak in the much quoted title of her article
"Can the Subaltern Speak?"
Here Spivak takes Deleuze and Foucault to task for stating that European
intellectuals can represent the voice of the oppressed. She indicates that the problem
stems from the practice of running together the twin meanings of representation:
5
6

To give just a few examples see for insiance: Siem (1982) and (1987); Alb6 and Bamadas (1984);
Concordo Morales (1965); Gruzinski (1993); Aguine Behr.in (1970); Farris (1984); Klor de Alba (1982:
345-66); Clendmncn (1987).

49

See Young (1993: 173). Young argues Uial Marxism is just one more strategy in Ille West's will to
domination. It disables lhe potential of olher knowledges. He feels lhat Marxism works for bolh Gayalri
Spivak and Fredric Jameson as anolller transccndcntalizing gesture to produce closure.
See Adam and Tiffin, eds. (1991: viii). Adam and Tiffin see PostModemism projects itself as a normative
"nco-universal to which 'marginal" cultures may aspire, and from which certain of their more f()(Ward
looking productS might be appropriaied and authorized'" (viii). This is a position that can be recogni1.ed
by many Latin American critics.

''

50

BORDERS AND MARGINS

representation as 'speaking for' and representation as in art or philosophy (1993: 70).

These two senses of representation (in the law and in subject predication) "are related
but irreducibly discontinuous" (l 993: 70). Therefore the "banality of leftist
intellectuals' lists of self-knowing, politically canny subalterns stands revealed
[because] in representing them, the intellectuals represent themselves as transparent"
(1993: 70). Therefore Spivak calls for a continued critique of the subject and agency
in order to keep us from "restoring the category of the sovereign subject within the
theory that seems most to question it" (1993: 73). More to the point, Spivak states
that Ranajit Guha's historiographic project, as delineated by Subaltern Studies,
expressed, as it is, in a post-representationalist vocabulary, hides an essentialist
agenda and a predicament different from the self-ascribed transparency of intellectuals
like Deleuze and Foucault (1993: 80).
Instead, she finds more promise in a micrological accounting of the texture of
power which calls for further theorizing on the ideology of subject formation (1993:
74). Such theories however, cannot afford to overlook the category of representation
in its two senses. They must note "how the staging of the world in representation the scene of writing [...] dissimulates the choice of the need for heroes, paternal
proxies, agents of power" (1993: 74). Therefore, we need to go back to the scenes of
writing in Garcilaso, in Guaman Poma, in Amaryllis, in the anonymous Tlaxcaltecas,
but in doing so we must weary of not telescoping the sovereign, transparent subject
onto the enunciatory functioning of the sub-altem. If sub-altern subjects are to
emerge, they cannot do so in a mimetic play with the sovereign subject.
In other words, we cannot continue to reduce or explain the heterogeneity of texts
authored by sub-altem subjects in order to make them conform to academically
institutionalized norms either of Renaissance, Modem or Post-Modern norms of
readability. And that is very difficult because to restore their agency means for us to
understand and to understand is an act that is all intertwined with the
power/knowledge distributions of the academy and society at large. We are still a
long way from reading in a realm outside or beyond "literature". Further,
understanding still comes easier in the representational mode.
In Spivak's theoretical considerations there is yet one more danger zone to
traverse for the desire to touch the consciousness of the sub-altem. In that perilous
zone there lies in ambush the spectre of psychoanalysis. In such dark murkiness, a
delirious interior voice, the voice of the other in us, plays the gamble of transforming
itself into the voice of the sub-altern. (This red alert reminds me of the confessor's
warning on the devil's council: one can always confuse one's evil intentions with
virtuous causes, for it is the voice of the devil within us that simulates desire and
clothes it in.the language of virtue). Thus the predicament of the intellectual who
would write the sub-altern is analogous to Freud's own use of woman as scapegoat
in his "continuing desire to give the hysteric a voice, to transform her into the subject
of hysteria" (1993: 92). And so, the conclusion Spivak leads us to is that the subaltern cannot speak. Representation has withered away, language -the other- is but
a ruse.

WRITING SUB-ALTERITY

51

2. But Spivak's weariness does not have to be taken as the final word on the matter.
Anthropologists too have had to come to grips with the crisis of representation.
Ethnography has seen its object of knowledge consumed in the pyre of PostStructuralism. Though ethnography has written whole cultures in whose "descriptions"
thousands of informers have participated, in contrast with the silence that Spivak
would keep in reference to the sati widow, Stephen A. Tyler sees the future of
ethnography in "evocation". Parenthetically, it should be remembered here that one
of the faults found with Garcilaso's "history" of the Inca empire is that it is too
evocative, not consistently factual, the sequence of "facts" is often interrupted by
evocations of landscapes, a blooming red hill of abancay on Inca Roca's way to the
conquest of Charcas, the flight of the pink flamingoes in the bay of Paracas, the toys
of Andean toddlers. Evocation is for Tyler no longer cursed with representation
(1986: 129). It does not symbolize what it evokes, it does not link two different
places in tim~ and space. It avoids the absurdity of describing non-entities. "Evocation
-that is to say 'ethnography' - is the discourse of the Post-Modem world, for the
world that made science, and that science made, has disappeared, and scientific
thought is now an archaic mode of consciousness surviving for a while yet in
degraded form without the ethnographic context that created and sustained it" (1986:
123).
Tyler chooses to emphasize the participatory and dialogic aspect of discourse in
order to free ethnography from mimesis. In evocation he sees the chance to avoid the
inappropriate mode of scientific rhetoric that entails '"objects', 'facts', 'descriptions',
'generalizations', 'experiments', 'truth"', all now rendered "into empty invocations"
(1986: 130). Once delivered from the burden of representation, ethnography no longer
needs to conform to the canon of realism
promoting, on the one hand, the absurdity of describing non-entities such as "culture" or
"society" as if they were fully observable [. . .] and on the other, the equally ridiculous
behaviorist pretense of "describing" repetitive patterns of action in isolation from the discourse
that actors use in constituting and situating their actions, and all in the simple minded surety
that the "observer's" grounding discourse is itself an objective fonn sufficient to the task of
describing acts. [This] is the failure of the whole visualist ideology of referential discourse.
(1986: 130)

Tyler goes on to remind us that in ethnography there are no 'things' out there to be
the objects of description. There is discourse and categories of discourse. And this is
so despite those who would locate, record and examine "native's" discourse on the
presumption that it represents unconscious patterns. Such a representation and
interpretation of myth, for Tyler, "recommits the crime of a natural history of the
mind" (1986: 131). Thus the referent (culture) is gone and the rhetoric that produced
the referent (representation) is also gone.
It follows that if we take Spivak's objections to Guha's historiographical project
and we put them next to Tyler's farewell to ethnography, we find that the crisis of
representation, coupled with the impossible relay of agency of the Subject to the subaltern subject, places on the grid of suspicion the very notions of culture as a thing

BORDERS AND MARGINS

52

out there and of cultural difference. This difference has been assumed to be the
ground from which any subject, sovereign or sub-altern, speaks. And it has been the
grounding gesture in the work of Garcilaso, Inca and Guaman Poma. Both have
sought to authorize their work on the basis of a knowledge that was different, greater,
fuller, about a world that was correspondingly different and which they knew from
the inside, in contrast with the Spaniards' mistaken and superficial appreciations of
the "things" they saw but did not quite understand.

3. The awareness of a profound general cultural crisis,7 a long lasting change in

episteme, if you wish, has probably occurred many times in the world before the end
of the eighteenth century in Europe and it has probably been concomitant with deep
and swift population movements. Conquest and diaspora took place on repeated
occasions before the English imperial expansion and the late twentieth century
movement of English ex-colonials who leave the margins for the metropolitan centres.
When, after the conquest of Mexico (1521) and of the Andes (1532), Spain became
an imperial power, historiography and what was later to be known as ethnography,
struggled to keep intact its biblical teleological sense of time and space to reject the
opening and possible diatopical understanding of the world. In order to do so it had
to produce a system of othering.
The recent quincentenary of Europe's conquest of this hemisphere has been the
occasion of an important revision of our knowledge about the opening of that contact
zone. Besides the emergence of the production of the ancient Americans as Europe's
modem other, as the product of the play of Europe's own archive, these studies have
confirmed and extended Hayden White's view of the "noble savage" or its inverse
"bestial other" as a fetish of Europe's prohibitions (1978). Comparatively speaking,
apart from a few brilliant studies, less has been done on the constitution of the subaltern subject. The field always cites the problem of the lack of adequate sources,
bonafide documents, absence of unsullied Indian verbal representations, and
untrustworthy Indian or mestizo voices, even when or precisely because these subjects
have mastered European systems of representation. The absence of alphabetic writing,
itself deployed at the time of conquest as the acid test to qualify for admittance to the
ranks of civilization, continues to dictate the direction of the field. The difficulty of
the task can be assessed by the enormous learning required, well beyond what is
ordinarily called literature, in the academy, in the making of books such as Martin
Lienhard's La voz y su hue/la (1989), Jose A. Mazzotti's doctoral dissertation
Subtexto andino y discurso sincretico en los Comentarios reales del Inca Garcilaso

"Science adopred a model of language as a self-perfecting form of close communication that achieved
closure by making language itself lhe object of description. But closure was bought al the cost of
descriptive adequacy. The more language became its own object. the less it had IO say about anylhing else.
So 1be language of science became the object of science, and what had begun as pecception unmedialed
by concepts became concep1ion unmcdiated by percepts" (Tyler 1986: 124).

WRITING SUB-ALTERITY

53

de la Vega (1993) the comprehensive and masterful Book of the Fourth World (1992)
by Gordon Brotherston, and Luis Millones' El retorno de las huacas (1990).
It is thus pertinent to any research on sub-altem subjects to consider the
conditions of impossibility under and with which two contemporaries, living the full
destructuring force of "spiritual" conquest in the seventeenth century, went about the
business of authorizing a self and a past (culture), which once (re)constructed could
take the place of an original matrix of identity. What follows is a brief recontextualization, in the light of some key issues in Post-Colonial theory, of Guaman
Poma, writing in his place of bio-cultural origin, and Garcilaso, marooned in the
metropolis, witnessing the daily naturalizingand solidification of his difference (skin
colour, slanted eyes, high cheek bones) into inferior rank and dispossession. In
singular ways, but also with similar approaches, both men take on the full deployment
of the oppressive powers of representational, colonial discourse. At times they
themselves write representations of their own (portraits, anecdotes, monarchy
successions, personal memories, autobiographical pieces) and for this readability they
have been commended. At times they force new counter-yielding pieces from the
rhetoric and genres of representation. When they do so they bring established modes
of writing to a crisis, they make visible the ideology and the rhetoric occluded in the
constitution of "writing" into a naturalized and hegemonic representation of memory
as a monotopical past (strange mixes of fragments of genres, questioning of the
subject of enunciation, simulating modes of authorization, insertions of other
representational modes). 8
Such counter-writing has more often than not cost them dearly in the esteem of
their Euro-american readers. At best Guaman Poma is relegated to a source, or
explained away as someone who misunderstood the uses of "re/aci6n", "senn6n", and
"history". Garcilaso has been interpreted as a clever, if elegant, practitioner of the best
the Renaissance had to teach him.
Writing representations, counter-representations and destructuring the established
conventions of genre by which meaning is produced, entails caution and profound
understanding, even when such analysis is not always brought to the level of
conscious and rational discourse. It is not just accident. One does not just stumble into
the critique of a whole episteme. It is not non-sense. It is a movement in
consciousness similar to the critique that the avant-garde produce in the face of spent
modes of representation. The singular achievement of the work of Guaman Poma and
Garcilaso is that their "authors", from a sub-altem and self-endangering position,
managed to produce a critique of European modes of representation when this
colonial discourse was in full power/knowledge ascendancy. Their counter-move takes
place not past the colonial period but ab initio. This is not a move that creates heroes
or patriarchies. It is folded right into the production of "colonial texts". This move
indicates a continuum in the production of counter-texts right to the present "PostModem" novel. It is a will to claim one's own otherness - regardless of its contents

See my book (1989: 159-176).

54

BORDERS AND MARGINS

and circuitry. It is a praxis of agency designed to achieve a shift in the positions of

domination and subordination. It is "un no dejarse".
The enterprise that the two Andeans took up, to counter-write self, world, and
culture, and the strategies visible in their texts, antecede and yet coincide with the
contestatory interrogating, the 'sly civility', the mimicry, the doubling of identity that
Homi Bhabha believes to be the discursive positions of the colonized subject (1994).
As is shown in the work of Jose Durand (1976) on the library that the Inca
Garcilaso left in his house at the time of his death, Garcilaso seems chiefly interested
in, and fully familiar with, the major debates in renaissance historiography. His
financial means to own so many books and to enjoy the leisure time to read and write
during the greater part of his adult life, together with his intellectual capacity to read
Greek, Latin, French, Italian and of course his two native languages -Quechua and
Spanish- cast doubts on the portrayal of this intellectual as a colonial subject and
certainly take him out of the box of the "natives". Moreover, despite the antiimperialist thrust of the content of his work, it has been the Spanish "literary critics"
and their hispanizing counterparts in Latin America who have exalted the classical
qualities of his clean and elegant prose. Though he struggles with controversial and
dangerous topics -Inca religion, Royal incest, strange myths of origin which include
four foundati.onal couples- which he sought to "domesticate" by astutely and
carefully finding them places of contiguity and analogy in the European archive where
he could. discuss them partially, at ~ slant, Garcilaso manages to keep a firm reign
over the mtertex~al web-Roman history, Greek mythology, Italian historiographythat he deploys m order to construct the history (evocation?) of his mother's side.
Unlike Guaman Poma, and always aware of the need to entertain his European
rea?ership and perhaps eve~ his_Andean readers, he does not allow the present -his
drums to royal favours, his prun at the news he hears about his motherland- to
overwhelm ~e ge~eral plan of the Comentarios reales. He holds tightly to his plan
to find the discursive apparatus by which to write a history of his Andean ancestry
capable of bridgin? past and ~resent and thus attenuate the rupture of the conquest.
Moreover'. Marganta Zamora m Language, Authority, and indigenous History in the
Comentanos reales de los Incas (1988) has shown in detail how Garcilaso chose
among th~ availabl~ histori~graphical debates and rhetoric and appropriated those best
fitted to ~s enterpnse. I~ hi~ choice of humanist theories of translation and exegesis
of the ancient Hebrew bible m order to authorize the Quechua language as the source
~or kn~wle~ge a~o~t the Andean civilization, Garcilaso reaches well beyond the
immediate 1mpenalist (oppressive) power and breaks out into the fresher fields of
Italian humanism. Therefore, this sub-altern subject is neither a naive, nor a confused,
uns~hooled, "authe~tic" nativ~, nor does he place himself in the scene of writing as
a rnmdless resp~nding other m th~ presen~ of his master. Displaying uncommon
agency, and making dangerous choices, Garc1laso opts for Italian Humanism and not
Spanish orthodoxy in his engagement with the field of discursive possibilities. Like
Guaman Poma, Garcilaso has sifted carefully the questions that need to be asked and
responded to, and the places where it is best to posit the subject that will engage
them.

WRITING SUB-ALTERITY

55

And yet Los comentarios reales, like El primer nueva cor6nica, is visibly marked
by gaps, moments of intense disarticulation, contiguities that defy all sequential logic,
silences, baffling insertions, contradictions. Above all, both texts, whose titles border
on legal (cr6nica) and historical genre (comentarios) open up with unaccustomedly
self-conscious narrators whose main objective would seem to be the constitution of
their own writing authority. The representation that Guaman Poma attempts of himself
remains incomplete to the very last page. Moreover, it is the incompletion of his
grand attempt, his lies about his true identity (Rolena Adorno has found a document
that proves that he came from a mitimae family), his pretention to be taken by his
interlocutor for a Prince, that somehow seed his text with the intense indeterminacy
that only an outsider could bring to the established modes of the power/knowledge
complex that subordinates him. As sub-altern self portrayals, Guaman Poma' s verbal
and graphic depictions of self answer questions with further questions. As the cr6nica
grows in topics, in illustrations, in the number of languages that it employs, in the
number of readers that it addresses, in the number of "uses" that it claims to offer its
heterogeneous public, more means less. More information precludes rather than aids
in the putting together, the fitting of Guaman Poma and his "world" into a totalizing
representation. The last page arrests the infinite flow of the signs which do not come
to closure for we know that the book will go beyond the pages, it will spill right into
the passage of historical time. Unlike Garcilaso's attempt to bridge one heroic past
to a heroic, though tarnished, paternal present, Guaman Poma's discursive
inconclusiveness bridges the present with the future because "no hay quien le ponga
remedio".
Removed from their place of origin by unexpected cataclysmic historical change,
Guaman Poma and Garcilaso sit at the cusp, at the point where two branches of a
curve meet, of cultural difference. Like a Janus, each of these men can look back
upon a past that is no more and can never be again. Nostalgia, "la memoria del bien
perdido" 9 and anger fuel, in part, the decision to write the past the way it was
understood, as horizon. Likewise, when looking ahead, their eyes set upon a myriad
uncertainties, a discursive order that at once denies them their past identity and yet
confirms them in the "knowledge" of their otherness from Europeans and from
themselves. Both choose a double, overlapping, palimpsestic plan of elaborating -not
recovering- an identity of "mezclas". By definition "mezclas" interrogate the unified,
pure subject of colonial discourse. Writing Andean culture, manipulating and
questioning colonial discourse within its own ethical claims to superiority, becomes
the foundation of the project. Therefore both men will claim a "Christianity" avant
la conquete for their respective ancestries. Both men would use the argument that: 'If
the emerging difference between US and THEM is Christianity, then demonstrating
that the core of their own "civilization" constitutes a praxis of a Christianity avant la
lettre should dissolve a claimed difference that in fact only legalises a hierarchy of
dominance'.

See the chapter on "idenlidad y conflicto; tetrilOrio de mezclas" in Hernandez (1991: 175-210).

------tI
I

BORDERS AND MARGINS

56

Both Guaman Poma and Garcilaso have been read as more or less reliable
ethnographic informants. At this level in the discursive hierarchy these sub-altems
have been found pretentious, naive, funny, cunning, genial, sly, tricky, astute, utopian,
confused, untrustworthy, and impossibly outstripped by European rules of knowledge
formation and accumulation. 10 Their accounts of Andean cultures --<>rigin, kinship
system, government, religion, daily life, fauna, flora, art- appear traversed by many
other preoccupations besides the representational requirements of establishing objects,
preceding to their description, listing, or speculating on their function and relating
them in an overall pattern of custom and belief. While both texts deploy and simulate
the discursive rules that allow the West to enter and examine another culture, by
producing it, in their case, it produces the paradox of an auto-ethnography. Mary
Louise Pratt has coined this most appropriate term and by that she means the
instances when "colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that
engage with the colonizer's own terms" (1992: 7). And as it has been shown above,
they also interrogate those very rules and presuppositions. Therefore, the polemical
bent of the texts produced at the very cusp of colonial discourse engages both the
contents of cultural difference as well as the rules of formation that enable the
invention of culture as difference.
In the "Proemio al lector" of the Comentarios rea/es Garcilaso states that his
purpose is not so much to contradict what the Spanish "historians" have written on
the Inca empire as to correct what they misunderstood and thus serve them as
commentary. Garcilaso could not announce more clearly his sub-altern position.
However, his commentaries, in as much as they include a full (idealized?) account of
the Inca monarchy (diarchy?), a full ethnographic report, a series of biographies, a
display of Andean landscape, etc., far exceed the limits of his obviously false
presentation. It is clear that by the use he gives to the term comentarios he never
intended to serve the Spanish chroniclers or historians. Quite to the contrary he meant
to make use (servirse) of their authority and their foibles (not knowing Quechua) in
order to write his own/other version. In this u-tum manoeuvre Garcilaso separates,
classifies and evaluates his sources (colonial discourse) into knowledgeable and
reliable 7 Cieza de Leon, las Casas- and untrustworthy "historians" such as
Fernandez de Oviedo and Lope de Gomora. This exercise of power/knowledge on the
part of Garcilaso is only part of what is required to authorize his knowledge of self
and cultural identity. The other is to go beyond commentary, to transgress the bounds
of that discursive mode as inhered from Julius Ceasar - commentary by participants
in current events. By assuming that the production of the past is coterminous with the
politics of the present, Garcilaso mounts a sly and very civil polemic on the
"knowledge" contained in his sources.
Under the guise of useful but almost inconsequential commentaries lies an
acerbic, long-lasting achievement of contestatory knowledge which on several key

IO

These perceptions of GuamAn Poma and Garcilaso bear an astounding similarity to Homi Bhabha"s
pwtrayal of the colonized man and the arts of mimicry (Dbabba relies on Fanon) and sly civility with
which he faces colonial master. See Dbabha (1993: 93-112).

WRITING SUB-ALTERITY

57

occasions has played a foundational role in the history of rebellions and independence
movements in Latin America (fupac Amaru II, Jose de San Martin were avid readers
of the Comentarios). However, more often than not, critics have rendered readable
Garcilaso's disjunctive organization, his lies about the Inca empire.1 1 and his
inexplicable silences and contradictions, by paying almost exclusive attention to either
his stated politics of reconciliation between the two nations, or his brilliant use of
Renaissance rhetorical practices. But closer attention to the constitution of a sub-altern
subjectivity could reveal a less smooth, grainier, more cunning and also confused
Garcilaso.
In as much as Guaman Poma also starts out by offering his idealized reader -the
king of Spain- his services, El primer nueva cor6nica inserts itself in the crevice of
the double sub-alterity of the colonized subject. But unlike Garcilaso's comentarios,
Guaman's services comprise mainly writing. He writes to the king, not only to
supplement the information his majesty is getting, but also to correct it and thus affect
the kind of knowledge from which the king and his laws proceed. But Guaman Poma
is no longer sure that the writing on which he has spent half a life can actually bring
about a change in the king's consciousness. To accomplish his purposes Guaman
Poma concludes that he must actually invert the relations of the subject of his writing
equation. The king must receive instruction, learning from Guaman Poma. The king
must occupy the position of the sub-altem and Guaman Poma should impart the
knowledge that the king does not possess. For the king to come into possession of
useful and complete knowledge, he must give himself over to the power/knowledge
of the Andean; only then will he "know" what questions to ask. At this point, the
illusion of representation, the world of things, the world of mimesis has come to a
complete halt. A new world is about to be born from the ground up in the dialogic,
see-sawing engagement between king and sub-altem subject. A sort of diatopic (PostModern?) learning would ensue from Guaman's call for new relations in the
constitution of knowledge.
But Guaman Poma does not get to this scene without having engaged, like
Garcilaso, in a polemic of his own with colonial discourse. Much more at the margins
than Garcilaso, with apparently a lot less financial means than the mestizo at Montilla,

11

Garcilaso's representation of primogenirure and orderly civil succession of Inca monarchs has come under
a great cloud of doubt since Marla Rostworowski persuasively developed the notion that in the Inca empire
it was the principle of duality that governed social organii.ations, including the highest positions in
leadership. In her Historia del Tahuantin.myo she writes: "lbe divisive wars between Huascar and
Atahualpa, which took place after the death of Huayna Capac, wece not isolated or unique evenrs in the
history of the Andes. On the contrary, the same circumstances were repeated at the end of each
govemmenL This anarchic situation was the result of succession practices and battles for. power which
exploded with varying intensities each time w1 Inca died. Tbe major reason for these uprisings was the
absence of a law regulating the succession of power. 1lle situation created by this absence was made even
more complex by the fact that several members belonging to the family of !lie dead Inca could a'pire to
rule and enjoyed equal rights and privileges. She adds, "the very chroniclers denied their affinnations
[regarding the right of primogeniture] and provided facts to !lie contrary with reference to specific cases
[translated by F. de Toro] (1988: 137).

58

BORDERS AND MARGINS

Guaman Poma too seems to have been an avid reader and consumer of all forms of
colonial discourse. Guaman Poma avoids, as much as possible, from naming his
sources. It has taken the painstaking work of Rolena Adorno to reveal the full extent
of the hidden polemics of this sub-altern subject. Adorno states that the "presence of
hidden polemic informs and explains the compositional principles of his discourse;
it is responsible for the respective roles that history writing, oratory and fiction play
in structuring his work" (1986: 6). In his polemics, drawing from Andean memory
and existing praxis, Guaman Poma flatly contradicts some of his Spanish sources. He
also rewrites them. For instance, departing from the Spanish claim that the Virgin
performed a miracle and stunned the Indians so that they would not fight against the
Spaniards, he proceeds to argue that "no hubo conquista". Therefore the Andeans
should not be treated under the law as if they had been vanquished inimici of Spain.
. What is more, the work of both men goes even beyond the polemizing with the
mis-representations made of Andean culture and Amerindians in general. Beyond
correction and commentary, the aim of both texts is to fill the empty space left by the
claims of difference and construct difference as they saw it. To write culture, they
needed to erase, reinscribe, overwrite and especially, they had to write from the
borders, from the edges. Their location, as Garcilaso readily metaphorized it with his
parental doubling (not duality), is the place in-between. In-between past and uncertain
present In-between languages. In-between symbolic systems. In-between identities,
themselves daily interrogated by the flux of social and ideological change. 12 Thus
the in-between elaboration of sub-altem subjectivities cannot be seen necessarily as
part and parcel of the Post-Modem period, nor is it, as it has been suggested for the
case of India, a counter-modernity or a Post-Modernity avant la lettre. To read such
subjectivities outside their specific historical conjuncture is to domesticate the specific
and genial edge of their response to Spanish colonial discourse, which was not
modem, and to blend their elaboration into the flattening venue of our PostModernity.
Finally, as fragmentary and palimpsestic texts both the Comentarios (1609-1616),
and EI primer nueva coronica (1615) continue, from their location, to question the
powers of representation and thus avoid a re-enactment of the relations of domination
which a require reliable, and full knowledge of the other which can take the place of
closure. Both men understood the deployment of culture in its duplicate and
duplicitous sense: representation and place of enunciation. Having understood culture
as an epistemological and enunciative problem, Guaman Poma and Garcilaso, as subaltern subjects, manage to speak, and to question us, from their interrogating position
even when surrounded by "theoretical" conditions of impossibility.

12

In The Location of C11//ure, reading from Guillermo Gomez.Pena rasquache tcxlS Homi Bhabba sees !he
relevance of lhe in-between IO !he study of sub-al1em subjectivities. "They provide the terrain for
elaborating strategies of self-hood" (1993: 6).

WRITING SUB-ALTERITY

59
Works Cited and Consulted

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Wheatsheaf.
Adorno, Rolena. (1986). Guama Poma. Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru. Austin: U of
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Aguirre Beltran, Gonzalo. (1970). El proceso de aculturacion en Mexico. Mexico City: Universidad
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Bhabha, Homi K. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
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Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca. (1976). Los comentarios reales de los Incas. Edited by Aurelio Mir6
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60
.,

BORDERS AND MARGINS

Borges, the Encounter, and the Other:

Blacks and the Monstrous Races'

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William Luis
Vanderbilt University
Para mis compadres Roberto y Enrique

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I speak of [... ] two cities, that is, two societies of human beings, of which one is predestined
to reign eternally with God and the other to undergo eternal punishment with the devil [... ]
Cain [... ] the first-born [... ] belonged to the city of men; Abel was born later and belonged
to the City of God [... ] Cain founded a city, but Abel, being a sojourner, founded none. For
the city of the saints is above. (SL Augustine)
It is easy for us who travel into remote countries, which are seldom visited by Englishmen or
other Europeans, to form descriptions of wonderful animals both at sea and land. Whereas a
traveller's chief aim would be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by
the bad as well as good examples of what they deliver concerning foreign places. (Jonathan
Swift, Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings)

The Western origin of the New World began with the coming together of Europe
and America; that is, of two continents with very distinct cultures, and whose people
attempted to understand and define the Other from their own cultural perspective.
Francisco L6pez de G6mera, Hernan Cortes' secretary, called the "discovery" "the
greatest event since the creation of the world". 2 But neither the Spaniards nor the
Amerindians really understood the events facing them, and many decades and even
centuries passed before anyone fathomed the magnitude of the encounter. Columbus
believed that he had successfully sailed to Asia. He looked for and even imposed
familiar concepts on a dramatically new experience. As it was to be expected, in the
First Voyage Columbus found Indians, regarded Cuba to be Cipango (Japan), and
heard stories which confirmed the existence of members of the monstrous races, as
Pliny the Elder and others had described. The Amerindians also misinterpreted the
events facing them; initially the Arawaks considered the Europeans to be from heaven
and treated them with divine respect. The history of the encounter between Europe
and the New World is based on a cultural misreading.
Five centuries after Columbus' journey, Jorge Luis Borges wrote "Doctor Brodie's
Report", a story written during the Argentine master writer's golden years and
towards the end of his literary career.3 The story is emblematic of the early narrations

2
3

Early ideas for this essay began with my participation in a fellows program on the "Transa!lan1ic
Encounlers: Tue 'Discovery' of !he New World and Old", sponsored by the Warren Penn Center for 1.he
Humanities at Vanderbilt University (1991-1992). I would also like 10 thank the American Council of
Learned Societies for providing me with !he time to complete !he essay.
Primera parte de la historia general de las lndias 156; cited by Phillips and Phillips (1992: 257).
See El in/orme de Brodie. For the purpose of lhis essay, I will cite from Doctor Brodie's Report.