Mission Statement-The Future of Romance Studies Group- to be amended and edited at anytime upon vote, new member, new content, or valid ideas to the mission of discourse over the Future of Romance Studies in American Universities and the Global Community.
We wish to address and define the role of Romance Studies in the greater realm of the humanities through theories of the subject and the discourses of gender and race as they appear in works of Romance Literature. We intend to observe the influence of these spheres in the past and the present. We will define what this role and influence could, and should look like in the future, in an effort to develop self-aware critical thinkers who will generate new knowledge in Romance Studies, promoting the continuing expansion of the boundaries of humanist thought.
What are the stakes of the term Romance Studies versus Romance Languages?
Theories of the subject, the discourses of gender and race as they appear in Romance Studies
An investigation of Romance Studies' current status as an academic field and where it should be headed.
The Future of Romance Studies in light of Edward Said's book Humanism and Democratic Criticism
Said's book Humanism and Democratic Criticism can be considered as one possible model for the future of humanities at large and Romance Studies as a discipline. The book provides tools to develop thinkers based on Said's reevaluation of humanistic principles as applied to the academic realm. Overall, the future of Romance Studies will be based on the intellectual's ability “to present alternative narratives and other perspectives on history than those provided by combatants on behalf of official memory and national identity and mission” (141). Through the humanistic approach outlined by Said, the Romance Studies' intellectual will resist idées reçues “to uncover and challenge and defeat both an imposed silence and the normalized quiet of unseen power wherever and whenever possible”(135). This effort is aimed to protect against the disappearance of human past and collective memory and focuses on finding “coexistence rather than fields of battle as the outcome of intellectual labor”( 141).
In the spirit of coexistence and collective memory, let us now address the subject as viewed in Said's book. Fundamentally, Said gives power to the subject through the use of language, allowing the expansion of boundaries in consciousness and thereby altering one's perception of subjectivity. “The deployment of an alternate identity is what we do when we read and when we connect part of the texts to other parts and when we go on to expand the area of attention to include widening circles of pertinence”(80). Beginning with Vico's idea of sapienza poetica,“humanism is the achievement of form by human will and agency” (15) allowing the creation of human action and accomplishment. Because of the subjective element in humanistic knowledge in Romance Studies, the subject “has to be recognized and in some way reckoned with” (12) in an attempt at coexistence.
Inextricably, gender is an element symbiotically linked to subjectivity and the discourses enveloped in Romance Studies. Although Said argues for a re-evaluation of the humanities in terms of coexistence and inclusiveness, his position as a male within the elitist academic community of the humanities, while not self-imposed, inherently perpetuates its strong patriarchal past and present. This position is reflected through the repeated citing of canonized and therefore well-respected male authors, such as John Ashbury, Derrida, Foucault, Tolstoy, Wagner, Armstrong, Melville, Shakespeare, and Milton, which are all mentioned within the span of one page (66-7) in his book. It can reasonably follow to posit that the canon within Romance Studies suffers the same fate. On the same note, page four gives yet another list of respected humanist scholars, Said's contemporaries, all of whom are male, and described as “humanists in all traditional senses of the word [and are] distinguished as notable examples of what academic humanism was and is at its best.” (4) So, where do women fit into the landscape of humanities, and specifically Romance Studies, if as Said states, “the world is made by men and women, and not by God.” (11) At the same time, Said also proposes a step beyond this exclusionary tradition, wishing to give voice to those outside of the canon, and he believes despite the growing ability to communicate on a global level, “more experience is being lost by marginalization and incorporation and homogenizing word processing than ever before.” (81) The experiences of “ undocumented peoples” (81), such as women, especially those who reside on the periphery of the Euro-centric core, represent one area within academia in which Romance Studies, and “Humanism... must excavate the silences, the world of memory...the place of exclusion and invisibility.” (81)
Just as gender is linked to subjectivity, because of the exclusionary nature of the realm of academic humanism, we may view race as an equally marginalizing factor in relation to the subject. But, according to Said, considering an essentially tragic humanistic truth of great significance, “every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism.” (23) Viewing history as a “document of civilization,” there is a dichotomy in the interpretation of the past: some consider it “an essentially complete history”, while others “ see history, even the past itself, as still unresolved, still being made, still open to the presence and the challenges of the emergent, the insurgent, the unrequited, and the unexplored.” (26) No matter how much history is written by the victor, the patriarchal white male, there is still a multiplicity of unheard, emergent voices, usually marginalized. So it is the white patriarchy who defines barbarism in terms of race and the subject's corresponding distance away from whiteness. Linking the past and present to the future, Said states that “Humanism is not about withdrawal and exclusion, quite the reverse: its purpose is to make more things available to critical scrutiny as the product of human labor, human energies for emancipation and enlightenment, and, just as importantly, human misreadings and misinterpretations of the collective past and present.” (23) Thus, the future of Romance Studies in regards to the discourse of race is one of a massive and more inclusive re-reading and recreation of the canon with an optic indifferent to race.
As we begin the process of discussing the future, change is inevitable within the field of humanism and Romance Studies and these changes should be embraced and not reacted to. Fundamentally the question qui parle? as introduced by Roland Barthes, has to remain a core element of the humanist's critical achievement with an aim at coexistence, because “change is human history, and human history is made of human action, and understood accordingly, [and this] is the very ground of the humanities” (10) and, in turn, Romance Studies.
The Future of Romance Studies in light of Structuralism and Post Structuralism
The concepts of structuralism and post-structuralism, as exposed by Barry in Beginning Theory, provide the reader clear paths of possible literary analysis to apply Said's reevaluating principles of humanistic practice in the academic sphere, and more specifically in the field of Romance Studies. The essence of structuralism rests in “understanding the larger abstract structure” (39) of things, and holds that a literary text must be “seen in the context of the larger structures they are a part of” (38). Furthermore, Jacques Derrida turned the structuralist world on its head with the ushering-in of post structuralism that questions the true possibility of “achieving any knowledge through language” (62). Derrida in Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences proposes a history rupturing ‘event’ in which the ‘logo-centric’ view on structure, in fact, limits the ‘free play’ structuralism was intended to allow. Derrida would suggest while moving toward the future, it is “ necessary to begin to think…the center [has] no natural locus….a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions [come] into play” or as Barry puts it we must accept, “the endless free play of meanings and the escape from all forms of textual authority” (64).
Considering the subject and subjectivity, it is fundamental to address Roland Barthes’ essay “ The Death of the Author”. Indubitably, “the corollary of the death of the author is the birth of the reader” (64), however Barthes, Hawkes, and other literary theorists hold a simultaneous-second-view trumping the ‘birth of the reader’. Doublingly, ‘The Death of the Author’ “is a rhetorical way of asserting the independence of the literary text” (63), but this should in no way allow the text to stand alone, free from all restraint. Following Saussure that “words are purely arbitrary”, (40) structuralists and post-structuralists must concede the ‘death of the text’ as well. If words are ‘unmotivated signs’ with no inherent connection between the word and what it designates, we must ask, “who is speaking?” or “who is giving life to the text?” If we take the reader to be the breath, performance or re-creation of the dead text, we must also concede the necessary deconstructing one must do is not of the text, but of the reader, or the subject. We must de-center the way we view Romance Studies and refocus our attention on the subject who reads, deconstructing the subjects' life experiences prior to contact with the dead text. Franco Moretti’s triangular relationship of foreign form, local voice, and local form is given a concrete shape through this understanding as we view the foreign form to be the dead text, the local voice to be that of the reader or subject, and the local form being the past experiences of the subject. Furthermore, the viewpoint outlined in this paragraph on the ‘death of the author’ allows a further de-centering of Euro-centric understandings of the world we live in, and embraces the Post-structuralist notion that we live in a “ universe of radical uncertainty” (Barry 59).
Considering race, the relative interpretation of a word is what gives it its meaning, and structuralism gives tools to analyze, think, and understand words and ideas related to race and racism, thereby making the science of linguistics a political act. It is also true that the same structure used to achieve this process might in itself represent a white and western-centered approach. Moreover, structuralism states that “the meanings we attach to words are purely arbitrary [and “relational”], these meanings are maintained by convention only [and “no word can be defined in isolation from other words.”]” (40-1). Thus, the subjective meaning and arbitrary form of race-related words with their conscious and/or subconscious connotations, the impossibility to use a word without suggesting its direct opposite, and the lack of linguistic tools to properly address the man-made concept of race, all perpetuate racial and ethnic differences and inequalities. These are not only reflected in academia, but in society at large. It is the langue and parole, used by Saussure describing “respectively, language as a system or structure on the one hand, and any given utterance in that language on the other” (43), and here it would be wise to juxtapose Walter Benjamin’s observation that every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism; Euro-centric western langue as the civilized, any of its peripheral paroles as the barbaric, those often being associated with ethnic and racial minorities.
Post-structuralism, on the other hand, could be considered as a voice-lending tool for minorities; just as it tends to reverse the polarity of binary oppositions, so too could it potentially reverse the weight distribution of voice and agency between the historically dominant Euro-centric cultures and that of under-represented groups. Additionally, and by its definition itself in which it refuses to guarantee the meaning of a word and exposes a de-centralization of the text, post-structuralism annihilates the possibility for words to be “interfered with by their own history” (62) and dims the bipolarity of words created by a structuralist approach, but nevertheless still leaves the ‘aporia’ to be dealt with.
Dealing with gender, we run into the same automatic system of opposition and comparison, and this system is further heightened by the structuralist adoption of Saussure’s theory that language constitutes the world, and furthermore, that words, and the attachment of meaning to one word versus another, are completely arbitrary. If language, a human invention, is what constitutes the world and allows us to give its contents meaning, then it follows to state that all language is a subjective construct; would the discourse of gender even be an issue if we had different words with which to address it and identify? Furthermore, the structuralist approach suggests that female cannot be defined without reference to male, and vice versa. Essentially, as Peter Barry notes, these binary opposing words are “mutually defining” (41), and could both be described as anything not characteristic of the other.
We could also apply the relational approach of definition to the words sex and gender, both extremely important words for feminist and gender theory. In The Second Sex (1949) Simone de Beauvoir wrote, “One is not born a woman, rather, one becomes a woman.” Feminists have defined sex as a biological term; applied to de Beauvoir, one is born a female. The feminist definition of gender is a socially constructed term, an acquired characteristic and behavior. For structuralists, sex and gender do not make sense separately, which again gives rise to the problem of treating this realm in such a binary, exclusionary way.
Applied to gender, post-structuralism’s “decentered universe, in which we cannot know where we are” (60) in relation to the Other turns structuralism’s binary opposites upside down to “reverse the polarity of binary oppositions like male and female. While the reversal in polarity could be viewed as a form of feminine empowerment by making the second term more desirable, the preservation of the binary system perpetuates inequality and exclusion. If the definitions of man, woman, female, and male are no longer clear and become unstable, this rejects the system of inequality-based organization and allows more for the inclusion of a subject who may not fit into either binary category. This new individually isolated mode of existence could also parallel Barthes’ essay The Death of the Author, where the death of the author gives freedom to the reader (68) by saying that the “death” of socially constructed gender codes/roles gives freedom to the subject to have a relationship with texts and to be who and what they are, without the limitations of linguistic structures.
We must take into account it is the subject who will be affected by the text in a simultaneous stimulation of mutual existence. After the text is brought back to life, it is only left to die once more until a new reader or subject ‘performs’ the text. Following this train of thought, according to Lacanian theory, the reader, or the subject, does not define itself, the subject, or in the case of Romance Studies, the reader is defined by what is read. Thus, we must take into account Nietzsche’s famous remark ‘there are no facts, only interpretations’ asking ourselves qui parle? and grant the reader, or the subject as opposed to the text or the author, their true birth as a defining principle to the future of Romance Studies and Humanities as a whole.
Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Print.
The Future of Romance Studies in light of New Historicism
New historicism and cultural materialism can offer new insights and areas of inquiry within the field of Romance Studies, especially in consideration of this field’s future. Developing new ways to read texts, compare, analyze and transmit new knowledge is of crucial importance when the ultimate goal is to continue engaging in humanistic practice and broadening our intellectual peripheries. This must be done not only individually but globally, within the academic community and beyond. Doing so involves encounters and interactions with the “Other”, and allows for the same kind of equal empowerment that a new historicist reading lends a text to also exist off the written page. This notion of empowerment versus disempowerment is clearly linked to the discourses of subjectivity, race, and gender.
Identity of the subject is created through interaction, and the construction of the subject is an accumulation of interactions. A universal empathy for equal human rights felt by the subject depends on the diversity of those interactions through whatever medium. As we consider the subject, we must accept that the concept of anthropocentrism prevailing in the Eurocentric way we view the centers and peripheries affects the disempowerment of a voice or voices. Through new historicism, we can understand that human agency and will are directly related to what Foucault calls ‘discursive practices’, and that these practices determine the real and true possibilities for human action, new knowledge, and change in humanity. In conjunction with the ideas of opacity/transparency presented by Greennblatt in Kidnapping Language, the subject only truly exists, according to Mansfield in Subjectivity, in the tension and interplay between what is imaginary and symbolic. To put it into Lacanian terms and to have it fit with the ideology of Foucault’s discursive practices, the subject’s sense of self is outside of the subject, radically de-centered within itself, projected on itself from a world over which the subject has minimal control. The subject is ‘the discourse of the other’ (Mansfield 43).
Overall, this system of discursive practices and the emission of an Ideological State Apparatus, such as within the institution of the University and especially mass media, continually and constantly generates the same docile workers and consumers the capitalist system needs. Concerning the future of Romance Studies, the institution must ask itself what kind of subjects would it like to have: empowered voices representing a diverse and un-privileged literary field, or subjects who don’t question and simply uphold the status-quo as is. Finally, the subject does not exist as a naturally occurring thing but “is contrived by the double work of power and knowledge to maximize the operation of both” (Mansfield 60). In other words, systems of power, much like the systems in place in Romance Studies, require some truth to be derived to justify what they seek to do, but at the same time, creating a fundamental truth is re-centering the optic and exclusively limiting who may encounter this discipline of knowledge. In this way, disciplines of knowledge divide the human population into distinct categories and this is the major tool to the disempowerment of voices of resistance and idealism.
In regards to the discourse of gender, new historicism and cultural materialism are important transformative tools. New historicists and cultural materialists both claim that “men and women make their own history,” (Barry 178), and both approaches can be used to shed new light on the perpetuation of patriarchy and traditional gender roles. New historicism demonstrates the influence of images and models presented in literature (and expanded to include other forms of media), on our everyday lives as citizens of society. Our ideas about gender and gender roles are clearly influenced and informed by the images which pervade through literature and popular media. The possibility of posthumanism, as outlined by Massimo Lollini in his essay, corroborates this belief. According to him, the posthuman “acquires meaning within the imagery of contemporary technological culture, and appears through some figures of corporeality and subjectivity that inhabit the margins of the idea of ‘human’ itself, namely the grotesque body and the gendered body.” (Lollini 21) Noticing the power of literature and the media over our everyday lives leads us back to Foucault’s concept of the Panopticon; the way we are disempowered by the media causes us to believe in the gendered images being displayed. In terms of the future of Romance Studies, new historicism and cultural materialism offer new insights into the present by “using the past to read the present” (Barry 177-8). The popular saying that “today’s present is tomorrow’s future” is entirely applicable here. With an expanded and more inclusive canon, we can guarantee that the future is not one based on popular pervasive images, but one based principals of equal empowerment outlined in the theory of new historicism.
New-historicism brings an alternative and more integrative way of interpreting literature in Romance Studies especially in regards to critical race and (post) colonialist theory. Barry states, “new historicist essays themselves constitute another remaking, another permutation of the past. (…) The aim is not to represent the past as it really was, but to present a new reality by re-situating it (169).” Consisting of a parallel reading of literary and historical texts (166) in which both texts are considered equal, or co-texts (167), and where both texts will be interpreted according to that same historical moment, “[new-historicists] try thereby to 'defamiliarize' the canonical literary text, detaching it from the accumulated weight of previous literary scholarship and seeing it as if new (173).” Therefore, new-historicism allows for a reinterpretation and partial recreation of the canon, and gives a chance to 'right the History' of disempowered minorities. The problem is that it seems limited to texts. What about other mediums such as cinema, audio recording, art? We have seen in Greenblatt that caesura – the process during which one goes from seeing to reading (87) – can be prolonged by the limitation of our knowledge, for we only recognize (and therefore name!) something if it is known to us (88). A linguistic take at this claim would be that language itself is not enough since caesura can establish the term “ otherness”, for if what we see 'does not talk' to us, then it might as well not exist or not be understood, which in turn can create (and has created in the past) inequalities and segregation. The “ mental set” that encloses society (i.e. Foucault’s panopticon and discursive practices) has allowed words association like 'colored skin' and 'inferior' to seem acceptable and unavoidable. Hence, the disparities seen in education today when it comes to race and ethnicity. One of Romance Studies' role in the future should be to break that mental set by fostering a wider integration of other disciplines such as cinema, sociology, anthropology, as well as history and others in order to compensate for the gaps left by language.
In light of these points, who decides who is empowered, and who decides who is disempowered, and how/why does the academic institution uphold these decisions, thus possibly perpetuating the same discursive practices, century after century? New historicism gives grounds to push for political, social, and educational optimism by providing “the literary student the feeling that new territory is being entered” (Barry 171). Thus, today’s student in Romance Studies is tomorrow’s educator and diffuser of humanistic principles, creating voices to disrupt and dismantle the popular, exclusionary ideology that flows throughout the body politic.
The Future of Romance Studies in light of Marxist Criticism
In terms of future directions in Romance Studies, Marxist criticism and theory could potentially be a powerful tool and catalyst for change. The root of Marxism, and of Marxist criticism, is the power of ideology. This is especially true in Althusserian Marxism, which echoes in some respects Foucault’s notion of discursive practices. Althusser’s ideology, as defined by Barry, is “a system of representations at the heart of a given society” (Barry 157), and in Barry’s own words, thus “making culture (including literature) a crucial vehicle of the values which underpin the status quo in any society” (ibid). What then is the ideology that shapes the field of Romance Studies? Literature here is seen as a “crucial vehicle” for diffusing ideology, in terms of an eventual interdisciplinary Romance Studies, then, cinema would certainly be viewed the same way from a Marxist/Althusserian stance.Sending an overall message through literature also forces us to consider what constitutes a “ good” piece of literature. To address that question in a manner suitable to the 21stCentury, Romance Studies must follow Shklovsky’s idea of ‘defamiliarisation’ or ‘making strange’ “ which claims that one of the chief effects of literary language is that of making the familiar world appear new to us, as if we were seeing it for the first time, and thus laying it open to reappraisal.” (155)
Applying the theories of Althusser and Marxist criticism to the discourse of gender, again the key word is ideology. Are the traditional gender roles merely a social construct as a result of ideology having become internalized by society as a whole (Althusser’s “state ideological apparatuses”)? Following Raymond Williams’ analysis of key terms used constantly today (culture, language, literature, and ideology), the same kind of analysis could be applied to gendered terms as well. The evolution of words and their meanings is a reflection of society’s evolution; the simple fact that terms such as “transsexual” or “transgendered” are becoming more widely known, if not used and accepted, is an indication of such evolution, an indication that society is not entirely resistant to changing values and widening acceptance, but also an indication of how far society has yet to go. From a less Althusserian and more traditional Marxist perspective, the discourse of gender also ties into the notion that texts are reflections of the author’s economic status (i.e., class). This is interesting to address when considering women authors. Are these texts, if read through a Marxist lens, treated differently because of women’s (still!) unequal economic compensation in comparison with men? Moreover, heteronormativity must be confronted in both genders “steering away from any notion that literature simply mirrors reality in a documentary way” (155) moving the optic in which we view literature to reach to the peripheries of thought allowing the rise of new ideas in the discourse of gender.
Furthermore, Marxist criticism allows for a critical re-evaluation of academia at large as it demands we see the world through a materialist lens, and “(as Marx famously said) seek to change it” (150). In particular, through the perspective of race in Romance Studies, while considering the author's work in relation to his or her social class-status, the covert content of any literary work reflects the social, political and cultural position of its author based on the economic context in which the author writes (Barry, 161) – the base versus the superstructure (Barry, 151). According to this theory, the unquestionable supremacy of white authors, scholars and professors observed in academia - including the field of Romance Studies – should be questioned, allowing the mono-centered origin of critical and theoretical texts to be racially and socio-economically addressed when determining a canon. The correlation between race and class in Marxist criticism as seen by Althusser's concept of decentering (157) brings out the fact that most (white) critical race theorists write from either a Euro-centered or United States-centered point of view. Althusser's vision of Marxist criticism, and in particular his differentiation between state power and state control (applying repressive structure for the former and ideological structure for the latter), allows us to make a connection with Roediger's Wages of whiteness in the sense that racial control is made through class. As an example of ideological structure, Roediger states that whites receive a “public and psychological wage (12),” creating a desire of detachment from “minorities.” (Roediger, 12). This is also why Marxist's criticism is relevant to the future of Romance Studies because through this theory, students can learn about those disparities and start working toward change, creating human action and avoid the trick of ‘interpellation’ (Barry, 158). Finally, it is important to cite Roediger's critic of the tendency for Marxists to reduce the problem of race to one of class (12), and extend it to join Althusser's thinking that base shouldn't be seen as the irrevocable determinist agent of superstructures (157), but that “the most pressing task … is not to draw precise lines separating race and class but to draw lines connecting race and class (Roediger, 11).”
In regards to the subject, the Marxist optic forces the definition of the author’s class and thus, the economic system from which the subject wrote must also be called into consideration. In a post-9/11 reality of global commerce and the overt capitalist system of most of Europe and the United States and many places in the world, Humanities at large must begin to deal with Althusser’s ‘interpellation’. This trick “ makes us feel like free agents while actually imposing things upon us” (158), encourages individuals to see themselves as entities free of social forces and “accounts for the operation of control structures not maintained by physical force and hence the perpetuation of a [certain] social set-up” (159) most often directed towards the goal of hegemony. “Hegemony is like an internalized form of social control which makes certain view seem ‘ natural’”(158) and makes others seem foreign or even insane. It is the duty of any student of literature to promote the awareness of such defining factors as these. Moreover, if we glimpse back at Vico once more on ‘man making his own history’ in The New Science, we see Vico’s call of anti-anthropocentrism as he demands “philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature” and not the world of men. As revisionist Marxism is an expansion of a strict practice, the practice could make itself strange once over and begin to include nature and non-human world in its discourse and afford, as Vico would certainly have wished, an idealist view of the world.
To conclude, the contextualization of Marxist theories on social class in regard to the author, ideology, interpellation and subjectivity, and the concept of de-centering, can be brought within the scope of the future of Romance Studies. De-centering in particular is an important practice prevalent in Marxist criticism and also reused in Levi-Strauss' post-structuralism, and should be applied to interdisciplinary and humanistic practices within academia. Marxist theories offer critical tools to analyze the reality of the field and promote relevant changes in order to make this discipline more inclusive and one that keeps pushing the boundaries of humanist thought.
The Future of Romance Studies in light of Post Colonialism
Whether completely unquestionable or not, Aravamudan clearly puts colonialism in the perspective of Romance Studies, placing – with others such as Césaire and the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group—notions such as tropicopolitanism, negritude, disalienation, nationalism, and the concept of the subaltern in the framework of the discourses on race, gender and the subject: “ The question of agency should not be collapsed into celebrating the acquisition of literacy. […] Rather, in an analysis of cultural and historical texts, the post-colonial critic is inclined to find resistance through acts of reading, transculturation, and hybridity […] The act of reading makes available the differing mechanisms of agency that traverse texts, contexts, and agents themselves ( Aravamudan, 14).” Through representation, self-representation, and self-awareness, all of which contribute to agency, it can be seen how interdisciplinarity and studying (national) literature also become prominent questions when addressing and defining the role of Romance Studies in the greater realm of the humanities.
With an incredible cynicism and irony, and a straightforward criticism, Aimé Césaire posits the humanities in the context of post-colonialism, categorizing it as unmistakably racist. Denouncing its hypocrisy, he sees colonialism – the process of making “civilized” - as decivilizing the colonizer (2), trampling what constitutes one of the pillars of western thinking by quoting Descartes in an obviously racist citation, and denouncing western civilization in general: “Where individuals of the same species are concerned, there may be degrees in respect of their accidental qualities, but not in respect of their forms, or nature (12).” In applying this idea to Aramaduvan and the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, one might then start thinking about the negative connotation of the word subaltern, and might prefer to use the word “tropicopolitan”. Moreover, the academy might start to think of colonialism not only in terms of a binary North/South, Oriental/Occidental, white/non-white dynamic, but of neocolonialism, as also implying the domination of the creole elite over other local minorities, and how this domination is represented in literature and other dominant forms of cultural representation and teaching. To use Aravamudan's term and according to Césaire, the humanities has therefore been a tool of tropicalization promoting assimilation rather than encouraging a process of disalienation and negritude for various “ subaltern” groups. Césaire cleverly denounces this process in greater detail, providing examples in various humanistic fields such as psychology and history, making us consider that it might not be sufficient for Romance Studies to embrace a more interdisciplinary approach to the field in order to eliminate racial disparities, but that a re-thinking of what constitutes the teaching of the humanities, the way the subaltern is being represented in academia and a re-designing of the content itself is necessary and imperative, in order to stop perpetuating the invisibility of neocolonialism.
Exploring post-colonialist theory through the lens of gender discourse further exposes the shortcomings of Romance Studies, the humanities at large, and, to make a bold statement, even the shortcomings of post-colonial theory itself. Drawing from Césaire, Aravamudan, and the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, it becomes clear that the colonial context created a different set of constructed gender roles. In Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, the only references to gender are masculine; the male perpetrators of slavery and imperialism, and the male “ subaltern,” victim to the white European bourgeois elite: “First, we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him” (Césaire 2). Then, “ I am talking about thousands of men sacrificed to the Congo-Ocean…I am talking about millions of men torn from their gods, their land, their habits, their life-from life, from the dance, from wisdom” (6). This limited gendered language indicates a large lacune: the presence of women in the colonial context. Aravamudan makes reference to women, but illustrates the rigidity and presumption of tropicalized gender roles: “From the viewpoint of a purchaser, the [able-bodied] male slave is very desirable property, and yet his unrelenting gaze suggests that he is going to be the least tractable member of the lot...Young, nubile, and attractive, she [the young mother slave] is a prime target for purchasers who desire a mistress and also a reproducer” (8-9). The tropicalized male and female slaves are both used and seen as tropes; the male for his physical capacity to labor, and the female for her attractiveness and reproductive worth. These are not far cries from the European model of gender roles, but they are unique to the colonial context nonetheless. Only does the Latin American Subaltern Studies group (LASSG) make a promising observation and statement in discussing neocolonialism: that the growing use of technology and communications will allow for a multiplicity of subaltern voices to be heard, citing the example of Rigoberta Menchú’s testimony (116). The necessity to recognize what Maria Lugones terms “the modern colonial/gender system” becomes obvious. The intersection of race, gender, and capitalist imperialism has been largely ignored in academic scholarship thus far. Lugones, it seems, would approve of the LASSG’s neocolonialist approach. Perhaps this neocolonialism corresponds with the “adept” phase, as Barry calls it (Barry 189).
In the same way as constructs, or tropes, of race and gender are examined in post-colonial criticism, so too is the subject called into question. In The Wretched of the Earth Frantz Fanon writes “the colonized, underdeveloped [being] is a political creature in the most global sense of the term” and must reclaim their own past and recognize the binary aspects of modern Eurocentric ways of life. According to Homi Bahbah, in the forward in Fanon’s book, critics of literature must accept that “the dominant forces of contemporary globalization tend to subscribe to free-market ideas that enshrine ideologies of neoliberal technocratic elitism.” A simplified understanding of this elitism may be Said’s Orientalism, in which anything not Western is Eastern, and anything eastern becomes the exotic or immoral “ Other”. Said’s ‘other’ can be interpreted on a smaller scale to be anyone who lives or acts outside Eurocentric universality. This is especially important to literary criticism and the subject as “literature itself is a site on which ideological struggles are acted out” (Barry 189) and following Fanon’s exploration of the psycho-affective realm, the future of Romance Studies and the Humanities at large must incorporate an affective experience to gain a response that “ involves the emotions, the imagination or psychic life” of the subject in regards to these ideological battles. It is imperative that authorities in the field of Romance studies create a realm in which a reader’s response is as valid andhighly valued as the author’sor the text itself. It is through the dialecticforces between the reader and the text that new ideas may form and it is the duty of the Humanities at large to allow this process to take place. In Literature as Exploration, Louise Rosenblatt points out that terms such as the reader, the student, the authority, the text, are mere fictions, although they may be convenient, and that “literature lends little comfort to [anyone] who seeks the security of a clearly defined body of information” (Rosenblatt 27) Statements like Derrida’s “there is nothing outside the text” ignore an essential element of the text, “the human being whomust make the linkage between”< /font> the ink spots on a page and the words as symbols and “infuse intellectual and emotional meanings into the pattern” (Rosenblatt 24). The future of Romance Studies must be wary of any type of “assimilationist, who, having assumed that in all contexts [x] is desirable over [y], attempts to render the [y into an x]” (Aravamudan 2) and instead create a realm in which we as humans no longeradopt the Eurocentric form as it stands, nor do we adapt, but rather we provide an environment in which texts may be the cause for the “adept phase, since its characteristic is the assumption that the colonial writer is an independent ‘adept’ in the form,” (Barry, 189) not a subaltern to the Eurocenteredperspective.
Reading post-colonial criticism and texts begs the question “qui parle?”: who is writing and who is reading. A logical and subsequent question is “how are ideas expressed, or through which medium?” In terms of the future of Romance Studies, these questions are integral as we begin to deconstruct and defamiliarize the canon and traditional humanistic practice. We must begin to broaden the material encountered in Romance Studies in order to create accessibility to otherwise exclusionary ideologies, groups, criticisms, and tropicopolitans/subalterns. Cinema, television, street art, internet media such as Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. are alsothe future of Romance Studies. By including these subaltern medium of communication and knowledge, we eliminate the concept of subaltern, recognizing disempowered voices as tropicopolitans, i.e. agents of resistance against Eurocentric universality.
