ART, REPRESENTATION, AND THE POLITICS OF CULTURE

November 8, 1999
Race Formation

By Jeremy Hockett

Over the last century the concept of culture and how it is approached has undergone a
striking transformation. Questioning the positionality and authority of an individual when
describing, defining and representing "other" cultures, anthropologists, ethnographers, and
cultural studies critics, have vied to assert the ascendancy of one cultural theory over another and
thereby justify their respective claims to knowledge. Thus, the debate has turned on an
epistemological axis.
Representation, identity, and, ultimately, epistemology are thoroughly considered in two
books with strikingly similar appraisals. Alicia Gaspar de Alba confronts these issues in the
context of the "Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation" (CARA) exhibition in her book
Chicano Art: Inside Outside the Master's House. She traces the history of the CARA project
from its inception at UCLA to its final showing in San Antonio through which is revealed a
multifaceted positionality, vis-à-vis identity politics and the politics of identity (which she
clearly distinguishes.) CARA constructs an "oppositional gaze," a "native ethnographic" gaze
that creates "a new way for alter-Native cultures to see and be seen," (p. 220) as the logo of
CARA indicates. Likewise, in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography,
Literature, and Art, James Clifford considers identity as seen through the lens of representation.
The identity (and the politics therein involved) of Western ethnography as a whole, and of
individual ethnographers in particular, emerge as Clifford describes the means and strategies
employed in the process of representing their "objectified" subject matter. Both authors are in
the end addressing an epistemological question: how to validate or justify the voracity of cultural
interpretation/representation as knowledge. Most notably, Clifford and Gaspar de Alba are
synthetic thinkers who combine theories and methods, reshape and re-calibrate them, and who
reject what David Couzens Hoy calls the
Whiggish assumption of the necessary superiority of later theories over earlier ones,
[which] shuns the scientific-realist view that this superiority results from the deliberate
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replacement of the earlier false theory by a later, true one in a cumulative progression
toward a clearer picture of things as they really are.

The twentieth century's Western epistemological crisis is masterfully exemplified by the

historiography of anthropology/ethnography in James Clifford’s Predicament of Culture, which
serves as a type of foundationalist account (or as a Foucauldian genealogy or archeology) of
present cultural studies discourse. It explicates discursive elements that have combined to
interrogate the authority one has to represent another, and thereby questions the whole concept of
knowledge, other than as fiction, in the process.
The "predicament" of culture distills down to a simple problem of epistemological
justification, of legitimizing one's claim to truth. How can we come to trust anything that is
presented as knowledge? Does knowledge have any secure footing from which to assert itself as
such? And, if these fundamental questions can indeed be answered, how do we go about
assessing the transmitters of knowledge? He writes that ethnography, “a hybrid activity, thus
appears as writing, as collecting, as a modernist collage, as imperial power, as subversive
critique.” (Clifford 1988, 13) Clifford’s text brings into question, while simultaneously
affirming, the project of seeking truth through a complex system of ever-evolving and creative
potential on the part of individuals undertaking such a task as describing and interpreting cultures
(their own or another’s). It also brings up some interesting paradoxes.
As Western humanism sanctioned the universalizing of humanity, anthropologists and
ethnographers asserted their authority as representatives, even saviors and redeemers, of what
they perceived as dying, primitive cultures. A similar difficulty emerges as contemporary
cultural studies scholars take on a position of authority to represent their own fictitious cultural
wholes, while, at the same time, criticizing traditional assertions of authority. Bell hooks for
example manufactures cultural wholes for which she becomes judge/advocate. Clifford places
himself most at odds with social critics like bell hooks, Cynthia Enloe, or Edward Said, and other
like-practicing essentialists and self-appointed representatives. Clifford thus severs the assumed
ties between individual interpreter of culture and the perceived cultural whole, casting critical
doubt on the authority of bell hooks to at one and the same time represent the insider’s or
initiate’s role of revealing secrets of a fictionalized cultural whole and the revolutionary outsider
“Occidentalizing” another fictive holistic other.
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This epistemological crisis in the “human sciences” (e.g. anthropology and ethnography)
is reconciled, in Clifford's and Gaspar de Alba's view, by a melding of theory and method
concerning the representation of self and other, of the whole and its parts. Clifford presents a
theory based on the variety of methodological approaches to the study of the “other” and
likewise constructs his methodology upon diverse and discursive theoretical models and schools.
His is also a project of reconciliation between the self and the other, and between experience and
text. He achieves this through an explication of the process by which the other is represented in
the writing of one’s own fiction. What is clearly made evident is the interdependence of human-
constructed reality, the dependence of a unified self on the multiplicity of others engaged and
experienced. The unified whole of the individual reconciled with the “other parts” is the
condition that made it possible to be constituted or conceived of as a unified self in the first
place. What is often missed in the humanistic conception of a unified self is 1) that the self is a
process developing until the death of the corporeal body, and 2) that it consists of experiencing
and interpreting “otherness.” In other words the unified self is never unified as it is never a
finished construction, and there is no self without another to give it shape and texture. Thus the
ideal of a unified self is patently unachievable, but is nonetheless worthy of being self-
consciously sought.
Western humanism has projected this ideal of a unified self onto humanity as a whole,
conceiving it as a unified diffusion of cultural commonality. In this process the objective social
scientist is supposed to become detached from the native culture to experience another’s. Sarris
writes that anthropology “stipulated that the social scientist could and should be objective, that
the social sciences presence, including culture-specific biases, could and should be put aside,
transcended during the “scientific” undertaking. (Sarris 1993, 108) Discourse becomes text, and
for “discourse to become text it must become “autonomous,” in Ricoeur’s terms, separated from
a specific utterance and authorial intention. Interpretation is not interlocution. It does not
depend on being in the presence of a speaker.” (Clifford 1989, 39)

Clifford devotes a fair amount of attention to analyzing the various modes of

interpretation that emerged in anthropology/ethnography. In a sense Clifford is writing into
being a modern ethnographic style (multiculturalism?) that integrates and acknowledges the
often-contentious claims to authority. Much of that conflict arose from competing synecdochic
discourse, definitions of wholes and parts, and notions of the relationship between them, which
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rely heavily on a highly developed conception of what culture is. The various
ethnographic/anthropological strategies of Malinowski, Griaule, Leiris, Mauss, etc., serve as
theoretical justification for their positions of authority and their claims to knowledge.
Bronislaw Malinowski, Trinh’s lambasted “Great Master,” was the classic
participant/observer. His studies of the Trobriand broke new ground in anthropological
respectability and authority. The whole, for Malinowski, was to be fashioned from a short but
intensive “communion” with the other, participating in the daily “parts” of life and rituals of a
given culture. Clifford compares him to Joseph Conrad in Africa (and his character Marlow in
Heart of Darkness) as a man of many worlds, as existing in a borderland between two (actually
three) cultures, a disjointed man who salvaged his unified self through the act of writing another
culture into being. Clifford’s exposé reveals a rift between experience and text, a tear in the
scientific fabric. Malinowski’s diary “displayed his ambivalence and frustration, consolidation
of fragments into a synthetic narrative… simultaneous artifice and necessity of cultural,
linguistic conventions.” (Clifford 1988, 96) Clifford ties Malinowski’s “rescue of self […] to the
process of writing.” (Clifford 1988, 107) Malinowski was torn by the “twinges of conscience”
resulting “from lack of integrated feelings and truth in relation to individuals” as his “ethics were
based on a fundamental instinct of unified personality.” (Clifford 1988, 103) As a result he
resisted the ethnographers role caught in what Clifford calls the “double ethnographic
movement.”
Unlike Malinowski, Marcel Griaule relished the drama of the ethnographer’s theater. He
saw his ethnographic investigation as somewhat like a military campaign, or perhaps
psychological warfare. He took an approach similar to Foucault’s, one of provocation and
antagonism, of beating history up a little. Clifford says his “ethnographic liberalism may be seen
both dramatic performance and a mode of irony,” Griaule playing the part of ethnographic
authority while surreptitiously ridiculing it. He constructed of the Dogon an “absolute subject,”
distilling the Dogon culture to create an African Metaphysic. (Clifford 1989, 58-60) Griaule’s
style is topographical fundamentalism, using the pan-optic power of the ethnographer to see
those things that cannot be seen simply by immersing oneself in the day-to-day activities of the
Dogon, the living present which they inhabit. Relying on an overstated documentary style, and
“initiatory knowledge” as key to a unifying representation, he used large specialized teams in the
field to produce a compendium of Dogon cultural truth over a period of decades, unlike
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Malinowski’s individual, quick and dirty endeavor of participant observation. (Clifford 1988, 65)
Griaule’s faith in a common essence of the black races which allowed him to establish his
African Metaphysic, and contrasts with Leiris’s concept of a fictive unity.
Michel Leiris, an early collaborator of Griaule “was the first ethnographer to confront
squarely the political and epistemological constraints of colonialism on fieldwork” which make
his views “more congenial” today. (Clifford 1988, 89) His early critiques as an interpretive
anthropologist viewed “cultures as assemblages of texts, loosely and sometimes contradictorally
united.” Seeing culture and ethnography as “endless autobiography and heterodox” (Clifford
1988, 90), Leiris “never stopped questioning the subjective conflicts and political constraints of
cross-cultural study as such” (Clifford 1988, 65), and “warned against definitions of authenticity
that évolués and the impurities of cultural syncretism.” (Clifford 1988, 89) “Henceforth neither
the experience not the interpretive activity of the scientific researcher can be considered
innocent.”
Equally as cautious as Leiris in his approach to, but as bold as Griaule in his faith in
ethnography was Marcel Mauss. Mauss believed in the distinction between fieldwork and
interpretation, and thus did almost no fieldwork himself. He relied on “series not panoplies,”
collected and interpreted by ethnographers in the field, that were again collected and interpreted
by him. However, Mauss, an extraordinary figure, was arguably the most influential
ethnographer of this century. He “gave no special status to the idea that a synthetic portrait of a
culture (something for him massively overdetermined) could be produced through the research
experience of an individual subject or built around the analysis of a typical or central institution.
His limiting notion of ‘total social facts’ led him rather to recommend the deployment of
multiple documentary methods by a variety of specialized observers.” (Clifford 1988, 63) Mauss
writes:
Because of the need that has always driven men to imprint the traces of their activity on
matter, nearly all phenomena of collective life are capable of expression in given objects.
A collection of objects systematically acquired is thus a rich gathering of admissible
evidence. Their collection creates archives more revealing and sure than written
archives, since these are authentic, autonomous objects that cannot have been fabricated
for the needs of the case and that thus characterizes types of civilizations better than
anything else. (Clifford 1988, 67)
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“Dead, decontextualized objects … can be restored to ‘life’ by surrounding ‘documentation’”

and the truth of the whole elicited from any one of its parts.” (Clifford 1988, 67). This leads
Clifford to a statement of caution.
If every “fact” is susceptible to multiple encoding, making sense in diverse contexts and
implicating in its comprehension the “total” ensemble of relations that constitutes the
society under study, then this assumption can serve as encouragement to grasp the
ensemble by focusing on one of its parts (Clifford 1988, 63)

This admonition applies well to the CARA exhibit, as Gaspar de Alba makes clear in Chicano
Art.
Art and aesthetics have perhaps remained the most entrenched of the Western
institutions, ostensibly protected as it were from the epistemological crisis inundating other arms
of cultural study by the presumed neutrality and objective criteria in establishing the "Quality"
threshold of artistic value and achievement. The Western conception of "art for art's sake" has
artificially severed the work of art from mere creative utilitarian productions. Art has been
elevated above craft, the artist over the artisan, elite culture over folk, form over content.
Consequently, museums primarily devoted to natural history - anthropological, archeological,
ethnographic - were deemed the proper place to display cultural artifacts created by "other"
peoples. These objects, however, were removed from the context in which they functioned.
Content, then, was for the most part diminished in the museum setting and by default
emphasized form. These newly "discovered" forms were then appropriated - typical of the
Western tradition - and refashioned into "authentic" works of art, a la Primitivism, artistic
specialists like Picasso and Gauguin. However static and rigid this distinction between "high"
and "low" culture might seem, what is considered worthy of the title "art" has continuously
evolved as cultural elites have been forced to re-evaluate the artistic merit of cultural productions
not borne of this dichotomous formula.
This type of cultural co-optation, of functional folk objects being re-inscribed into the
terms of elite or 'high' cultural forms, has long existed within a given homogenous group.
Western composers over many centuries, for example, have considered the folk a resource to be
mined, a raw cultural ore to be refined into the highest expressions of their collective cultural
achievement. The pastoral painters, like John Constable, of early 19th century industrial England
exalted the virtue and purity of rural life in their works, which was quickly being erased both
from the land and the memory by the march of progress. In a sense he appropriated scenes of
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common folk-life, a theme that would have been mundane fifty years earlier, objectified it
through the artistic gaze, and elevated its representation as a worthy subject of elite culture. In
the same way, Chicano/a artists appropriate folk and popular culture symbols and myths and
rework it into artistic representations and expressions of cultural unity.
In a move that seems to run counter to the American Studies displacement and rejection
of its obsolete Ur-theory, the myth-image-symbol school exemplified by Henry Nash Smith,
Gaspar de Alba revives and adapts it to the patriarchal meta-narrative of Chicano history and
identity as implicitly represented in the CARA exhibit. Ultimately, however, she does this in
order to undermine the power it wields in determining and controling the construction of
Chicano/a identity. She states in the introduction that her's is an "analysis of how the [CARA]
artwork manifests the politics, ideologies, and historical specificities of Chicano/a culture."(p.
18) Furthermore, Chicano Art, explores "multiculturalism" through ethnographic representations
of Chicano/as in the mainstream art world, what she calls the "Diversity/Discovery" paradigm.
In true American Studies form, Gaspar de Alba crosses the disciplinary boundaries of academia,
borrowing from many theoretical perspectives and arguing from a variety of positions to
complicate and interrogate the major aspects of the CARA exhibit, from organization to
installation to reception. She barrows heavily from Popular Culture studies, a little bit of Fiske, a
touch of Stuart Hall, some Gramsci, Solomon, Raymond Williams, and Nachbar; but she re-
inscribes them as they begin to inform and expose the dynamics of the CARA exhibition.
In the first chapter of her book, Gaspar de Alba begins the theoretical alterations
necessary to apply the "house" of popular culture to the "casa" of Chicano culture. In her
metaphor, the house of mainstream popular culture has been redesigned into the solar of "barrio
popular culture" emphasizing their contrasting values and beliefs. The sub-title to the chapter,
mi casa [no] es su casa, is a kind of dialectical double entendre. On the one hand it reads as a
sign on the dominant culture's "house" stating No "Others" Welcome, 'my house is not open to
you'; on the other hand it is an assertion of autonomy, 'our houses are not alike'. In this latter
sense, your house is not mine because (in the language of semiotics) symbolically, yours is not
culturally meaningful, which renders mine invisible. Gaspar de Alba is using the master's tools
to remodel the "master's house," rather than trying to use them to destroy it. Basically, she
accepts the theoretical language games used to model and explicate "culture," but she is going to
employ them in novel ways, to tweak them a bit so that they yield an understanding of Chicano
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culture as an "alter-Native" culture within the context of dominant cultural hegemony. Using the
"master's" tools then, enables Gaspar de Alba to "analyze power relations and deconstruct
experience from the inside out." (p. 201)
With the genesis of the CARA exhibition came a whole host of unforeseen difficulties
and political/philosophical, inter- and intra-cultural clashes. CARA was meant to break
new curatorial ground by an unprecedented collaboration between both the various Chicano/a
cultural perspectives and the mainstream art world in the creation of the exhibit, thus reducing
the ethnographic mediation, normally associated with a museum's curator, between art/artist and
viewer. Gaspar de Alba writes,
…the curator of a mainstream exhibition about ethnic "Others" can fill the role of the
traditional ethnographer…the curator is in the position of interpretive authority without
accounting for the sociopolitical differences that comprise the ethnographer's subjectivity
- the very subjectivity that not only interprets the data, bur chooses from it the images to
be used for representation."(p. 26)

By the same token, the organizing committee occupied the position of native
ethnographer, deciding what would be used to represent the 'essence' of the Movement, just as
the curators did when making changes to the CARA logo and design of the exhibition. And,
as Rosaldo points out, 'not unlike other ethnographers, so-called natives can be insightful,
sociologically-correct, ace-grinding, self-interested, or mistaken … [but] the do know
their own cultures.' (p. 27)

Following an alter-Native myth-image-symbol theory of Nachbar's popular culture bungalow,

the CARA organizers sought to represent the Chicano Art Movement primarily through el
Movimiento political iconography, the UFW Thunderbird, the Pachuco/Cholo, Aztlán. And as
with Clifford's narrative, this realm of representation is fraught with hazards and inconsistencies.
Nachbar's abstracted model of the "master's house" is projected onto its physical
manifestation in the art world, the museum, which sets up an insider/outsider polemic. This
polemic, however, exists on many levels of cultural politics, and is what Gaspar de Alba lucidly
examines. The fundamental insider/outsider dichotomy is between mainstream American art
(the master's of the house/museum) and the unrepresented, and therefore invisible, outsider
Chicano/a artists. But this simple dialectic model is quickly complicated by Gaspar de Alba's
analysis of the CARA exhibit. From a cultural representation point of view, it is the Chicano/a
artists who are the insiders, the initiates and voices of Chicano culture, and the colonial powers
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of the art institution (curators and NEH funding agents) who are outsiders. In another model, the
outsiders are Jessie Helms and Ted Stevens as well as CARA organizers, anathema to the
regional and professional insiders, museum curators. Intra-culturally, this polemic is likewise
present, between the genders, the various generations, between academics and administrators,
between artists and artist's groups. Through this network of oppositions courses the question of
who gets to define how Chicano art, and by extension Chicano culture, is represented?
On each level of cultural politics, individuals are themselves acting as ethnographers.
Each constructs a fictive whole based on one's unique perspective and experience. The CARA
organizers were attempting somehow to save or redeem, to make visible their cultural heritage in
much the same way as ethnographers were attempting to capture the essence of the cultures they
studied before it was lost, altered or erased from memory. The artists themselves were in the
position of a participant/observer, an insider ethnographer, insofar as their art was a
representation of Chicano identity. There is clearly a great difference between ethnography done
from the outside and ethnography done from the inside, that does not, however, reconcile the
fundamental issue of who has the authority the represent a cultural whole? Chicano insiders of
el Movimiento, Gaspar de Alba asserts, were ultimately chosen as cultural representatives for the
CARA exhibit. Her examination of the exhibition revealed that it was heavily skewed by
representations created by Chicano artists (men). Presenting relatively few works by feminist
Chicanas and grouping them together in one room, CARA perpetuated the traditional role of
women in Chicano culture by primarily representing women through the trinity of icons, the tres
Marias, virgin/mother/whore. Just as the hegemony of mainstream/dominant culture makes
invisible Chicano culture, 'mainstream' Chicano culture relegates any unorthodox Chicana
identity to the WC, the women's closet, and likewise renders it invisible. She states that "the
[feminist] artwork ends up being grouped together and used by the curatorial agenda to serve and
reproduce the sexist ideology of el Movimiento." (p. 131) Gaspar de Alba furthermore points out
the masculine appropriation of the altar, traditionally a symbol of feminine autonomy and
devotion, in some of the individual installations.
The fact that the CARA exhibit was dominated by Chicano perspectives does not,
however, preclude a Third World, lesbian, feminist voice or interpretation. Chicana artists have
done some subversive appropriation of their own, "with the power of self-naming, Chicana
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lesbians can take 'Malinchista' away from the oppressive and degrading signification of
patriarchy." (144) Gaspar de Alba continues,
Indeed Chicana historians, theorists, and writers have begun to transform the story of
Malinche into an example of militant female resistance on the homefront of Chicanismo.
(144)

From these cultural myths-images-symbols comes a source of resistance, precisely because they
are so deeply imbedded in the cultural consciousness. These cultural icons can be subverted to
give voice to those locked in a closet of cultural invisibility.
The many ways in which Gaspar de Alba positions herself in relation to the CARA
exhibit is clearly stated in the "pre-face" (another double-entendre) of her book. Although she
seems very conscious and sensitive to the many spaces within which one can position oneself,
my only pause came with her incantation of bell hooks and her presumption that "in order to
resist hegemony from every front women of color must commit [themselves] to 'militant'
resistance - a resistance rooted in the margins and on the homefront, not afraid of sacrifice, and
enemy to the self-defeating practice of nihilism." (p. 144) So Gaspar de Alba can position
herself in many ways, but she appears unable to leave open a space for Chicanas who do not
wish to partake in the revolution, who want simply to construct an identity that falls within that
traditional role. She states in her critique of a conservative Chicana magazine, "despite a
quarter-century of struggle for liberation, El Rebozo's audience, many of them young Chicanas,
still believe and espouse the ideology of their own subjugation." (p. 127) It would seem that any
Chicana who identifies with the cultural "norms" is somehow complicit perpetuating in her own
unconscious (and her sisters') oppression, an unwitting Malinche. My only point here is to say
that one can open up spaces for oneself without closing spaces for others. I certainly feel a great
affinity with the major premises of this book, however I believe in the process expanding cultural
spaces one end of the spectrum, one should not close them on the other end. Her position and
politics as a young-educated-academic-middle-class-lesbian-Chicana may not resonate with an
older-uneducated-upper-or-lower-class-heterosexual-Hispanas; the politics of her cultural
positioning ought not to force a re-positioning or erasing of another's.
The final chapter and conclusion of Gaspar de Alba's book deal with the irony facing all
alter-Native communities and sub-cultures. It is the paradox of assimilation and autonomy, of
incorporation and resistance. She questions whether "multicultralism" has "altered power
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dynamics in the mainstream art world," or simply "mutated into an ethnographic method or a
primary instrument of incorporation by the producers of cultural and social hegemony." (220)
On the first account, it clearly had an extreme effect on the main-stream art world, if Gaspar de
Alba's analysis of the "tsunami" CARA created is any indication. As to the second account, in
light of Clifford's analysis, it may be that it was an ethnographic method that mutated into
multiculturalism and then mutated back into an ethnographic method. In the last account, we
see the theoretical source of the paradox. The "Discovery/Diversity" paradigm (associated with
the Quincentennial and multiculturalism in general) can be seen as a means towards
incorporation without equality, a way to safely assimilate alter-Native cultures while stripping
them of their "indigenous" identity. How, then, can artists of an art movement that is defined by
its very resistance to the dominant cultural values and beliefs take advantage of the access
granted to them through an exhibition of their work in "mainstream" museums? How can they
be "authentic" members of the Chicano Art Movement, of el Movimiento, if they have entered
the "master's house?" Is this simply an assimilationist tactic to be redeemed by the hegemonic
codes of respectability? (See discussion of Armando Rendón, p. 126-7) This is the same paradox
faced by Black Americans, in DuBois's "double-consciousness." How does one become an
American and remain Black? How does a Chicano/a artist enter the dominant culture's
mainstream art world against which one has defined oneself and retain the Chicano/a identity
that nurtured their art to begin with? I leave these questions for discussion.
Clifford's concept of "ethnographic surrealism," an admixture of the various strategies he
describes, is a particularly important mode of interpretation that marks the intersection between
art and science, aesthetics and the scientific method; it is “that moment in which the possibility
of comparison exists in unmediated tension with sheer incongruity,” a moment, “repeatedly
produced and smoothed over in the process of ethnographic comprehension.” (Clifford, 1988,
146) It is a process of collage in which the “cuts and sutures” remain visible. As an art of
juxtaposition, it “attacks the familiar, provoking the irruption of otherness—the unexpected.”
(145) I believe that Gaspar de Alba is (as was the CARA exhibition as a whole) engaged in a
dynamic "ethnographic surrealism" in Chicano Art: Inside Outside the Master's House. She uses
a multiplicity of perspectives to interrogate authority, representation, and identity, juxtaposing
these vantage points to gain a wider angle of vision, complicating while clarifying. In the end,
Gaspar de Alba is writing a place for herself, as a native ethnographer, but also as an outsider,
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within the Chicano/a culture as represented by the CARA exhibit and within mainstream culture
as represented by multiculturalism. She writes, like Anzaldúa, in order to construct a unified self
caught between two cultural worlds that deny, ignore and erase integral parts of her "whole"
being.
The history of ethnography, Clifford believes, has “resulted in a progressive, qualitative
deepening” of cultural understanding. (Clifford 1988, 83) We need to acknowledge the fact that
there is no unified self, no absolute self, while always striving for absolute unity. Indeed, it
seems to be the lot of human consciousness to construct such fictional unity, but what must be
maintained, what appears to run counter to our nature, is the critical self-consciousness of the
process by which wholes and unity are constructed. The American Studies approach, which is
Gaspar de Alba's, to cultural studies is an attempt to instill a permanent awareness of this process
by practicing-what-we-preach, by learning from the mistakes and the successes of those who
have come before, by recognizing and expressing the limits, doubts, and constraints of studying
“culture.” That is, “to see these methods and modes not as dichotomous and oppositional, but as
interrelated and relational, as different voices capable of communicating with and informing one
another.” (Sarris 1993, 7) Thus, American Studies (and multiculturalism?) is a project of
collage, an interdisciplinary technique of juxtaposition, the writing of those truths we have
ourselves discovered, and presenting it as an open-ended text, an extension of our perpetual
process of becoming.

Works Cited

Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography,

Literature,
and Art. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Gaspar de Alba, Alicia. 1998. Chicano Art: Inside Outside the Master's House, Cultural Politics
and the CARA Exhibition. Austin: University of Texas Press

Sarris, Greg. 1993. Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts.
Los Angeles: University of California Press.