by Bruce Bawer
The opening event is held in a lecture hall that is packed almost to capacity. The great majority of my fellow attendees are lesbians in their twenties or thirties, and a surprising number of them are cute and skinny, with short haircuts, T-shirts, and a body language that make them look like teenage boys. We’re welcomed by “Dr. Prof. Eveline Kilian” (Germans love to double up on the academic titles), a middle-aged woman who explains the “embarrassing question”: it turns out that the conference receives funding from the German Research Fund, which requires that the organizers provide a list of participants with Ph.D.s and another list of those without (the Germans love drawing up lists of names). Kilian asks that we “forget about the ideological implications of this”—never mind that the whole premise of Queer Studies is that it never overlooks the ideological implications of anything.
The conference, we are informed, is intended as a sort of response to the 2004 book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive by Lee Edelman, a professor at Tufts University. Edelman’s book is arguably the most influential work in the field at present, and underlies what is described as “the antisocial turn in Queer Theory.” Edelman depicts human society as being permeated by a mentality that he labels “reproductive futurism”—a preoccupation with the future and with the “Child” (a word he capitalizes consistently) that serves as “the emblem of futurity’s unquestioned value.”
Since gay couples cannot naturally reproduce, gays are widely viewed as the enemies of the future. The traditional “liberal” gay response to this “ascription of negativity to the queer,” Edelman says, is to dismiss it outright; but since Queer Theory views queerness by definition as oppositional, it is more appropriate, maintains Edelman, for queers “to consider accepting and even embracing” the “ascription of negativity” to themselves, and to explicitly reject any stake in or concern for futurity.” Gays should, he suggests, “listen to, and even perhaps be instructed by, the readings of queer sexualities produced by the forces of reaction.” So when Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association rails that acceptance of gays “will result in society’s destruction,” gay people, instead of denouncing such rhetoric in good liberal fashion, should “pause for a moment to acknowledge that Mr. Wildmon might be right—or, more important, that he ought to be right . . .”
In other words, queers should be the threat, the menace, that Wildmon describes; we should turn our backs on “[t]he structuring optimism of politics,” whether of left or right, because all politics is about hope for the future and is thus linked to a “life drive.” Briefly put, we should embrace “queer negativity”—we should embrace “the death drive,” which “names what the queer, in the order of the social, is called forth to figure: the negativity opposed to every form of social viability.” Edelman acknowledges that this approach would not bring gay people goodness, happiness, or self-knowledge; on the contrary, it would promise “absolutely nothing,” and would certainly yield nothing in the way of a “positive social value”; its sole value would lie in “its challenge to value as defined by the social, and thus in its radical challenge to the very value of the social itself.”
Edelman’s argument is widely viewed in today’s Queer Theory circles as brilliant, pathbreaking, and explosive. But in fact it is not even original; it is simply a more explicitly nihilistic version of the case against gay “assimilation” that was promulgated by far-left activists back in the 1980s and ’90s. But of course even to call it an argument is to give it credit it does not deserve: it is nothing but another Queer Studies “performance,” a cynical piece of claptrap that has no imaginable application to real gay persons’ lives. No Future is stunning in its moral irresponsibility and sheer fraudulence: this is, after all, a career-making book by a patently ambitious member of the professoriate who pretends to have given up any concern for the future and who pretends to be counseling his fellow Queer Theorists to join him. And indeed many of them, recognizing which way the Queer Studies winds are blowing at present, have—in the interest of their own futures—climbed onto the No Future bandwagon. It’s all a despicable charade, and what makes it despicable is the naked lack of concern on the part of some of the world’s most fortunate gay people for the futures of the most vulnerable of gays—among them the innumerable young people who are living with, or who have been thrown out of the house by, homophobic parents, and who may well not see much of a future before them; and the gay people, young and old, living in places where homosexuality is still punished harshly, in some cases with death.
This is what Queer Studies has come to: a breathtaking combination of purported nihilism and sheer academic careerism. With No Future, Queer Studies would seem to have arrived at its natural destination—a perfect moral and intellectual void.
Chapter 5
The Dream of Aztlán: Chicano Studies
Over our lunch in Monterey, I ask Shelby Steele about Chicano Studies. “There’s always a conflict between them and Black Studies,” he says. “At the University of Utah I was designing this [Black Studies] program, so they came forward very quickly. Their hustlers were as good as our hustlers. They wanted a piece of the action. So they said to me when the white man left the room, ‘Look here, this is the West, this is our territory.’ And they beat us out. We had one program, with one director for Black and Chicano Studies, and they got the director. It’s pathetic. It’s sad and funny at the same time. They did it that way throughout the Cal State system. Monterey Bay State came into existence when Clinton took the White House and said he would use the ‘peace dividend’ to close down Fort Ord and create a new campus in Monterey. The unspoken implication was that this would be a Chicano campus. They’d put a white [college] president in charge, but he’d be on a leash. From its inception, the idea was that this would be the Hispanic campus.
“Identity politics really shapes the contours of the Cal State system in this way.”
And from the very beginning of Chicano Studies, the Cal State system has been its ground zero.
It was indeed the black civil rights movement that—along with the farmworker activism of César Chávez (whose birthday is now an official holiday in several states)—helped spark the Chicano movement; and it was the birth of Black Studies that gave some Mexican American activists the idea that they, too, deserved their own academic discipline. To be sure, it cannot be said that they had a very clear idea of what the actual objective of these programs should be, and in fact all these years later the purpose of Chicano Studies remains a highly debated question. What is not debatable is the intensity of the passions that gave birth to Chicano Studies. The 1960s Chicano movement—known simply, and universally, as el movimiento—was for its participants a matter of ardent commitment to La Causa and La Raza, though there was much disagreement as to what exactly they were committing themselves to. Were they simply fighting for greater educational and job opportunities and the like? Were they out to transform the American system entirely? Or did they seek to secede from the United States? For many Chicano activists, especially in those early days, the goal (however utopian or quixotic it might now seem) was indeed one of secession: they sought nothing less than to tear the parts of the United States that had once been Mexican territory—including, roughly speaking, the present states of California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas (which many activists, using the Spanish word, chose to refer to as Tejas)—asunder from the Union and form a new nation. This nation already had a name: it would be called Aztlán, borrowing a place-name from Aztec history.
In 1969, two large national gatherings took place at which Chicano activists came together to produce manifestos. In Denver, the First National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference was organized by activist Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales. Born in Denver (his father was a Mexican immigrant), Gonzales was a successful featherweight boxer and founder of a group called the Crusade for Justice. He was also the author of the movement’s equivalent of “The Battle Hymn of the Re
public” (or, perhaps, Howl), a 1967 poem called “I Am Joaquín,” which is widely credited with helping to advance the Aztlán agenda. The poem, whose full text—several pages long—is to this day enshrined in several major Chicano Studies anthologies and textbooks, begins as follows:
Yo soy Joaquín,
Perdido en un mundo de confusion . . .
I am Joaquín, lost in a world of confusion,
caught up in the whirl of a gringo society,
confused by the rules, scorned by attitudes,
suppressed by manipulation, and destroyed by modern society . . .
As the poem continues, the protagonist identifies in turn with a Mayan prince, with Emiliano Zapata, and with other figures from Mexican history; he draws strength from both his Indian and his Spanish heritage. “I am Aztec prince and Christian Christ,” he writes. But identify with the Anglos and their dream of capitalist progress? No way. For Joaquín, the only true path—the only proper course to take in response to Anglo domination, the only means of preserving and being true to his heritage—is that of revolt.
The influence of Gonzales’s poem can hardly be overstated. As George Hartley of Ohio University writes, it
was mimeographed and widely circulated in order to be read during public demonstrations and organizing campaigns. . . . Beyond its immediate public activist function, however, I Am Joaquín also functioned as the inaugural work of what is now seen as the Chicano Literary Renaissance, lasting from the late ’60s to the mid ’70s. I Am Joaquín provided the groundwork, then, for all Chicano poetry to come. Yet what is perhaps more interesting is its role in serving as the founding literary work for all previous Chicano literature. What I am saying is that before 1967 Chicano literature did not exist, but after 1967 the whole history of Chicano literature from the 1600s to the 1960s suddenly, retroactively came into being. Moreover, I contend that prior to 1967 and the publication of I Am Joaquín, Chicanos did not exist, and yet after that moment we can see that they had been around for centuries.
It was not Gonzales, however, but another young activist (and poet) who wrote the manifesto that emerged from the Denver conference. “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán” was the work of Alberto Urista Heredia, a student at the University of California, San Diego, who published poetry under the pseudonym Alurista. His manifesto began as follows:
In the spirit of a new people that is conscious not only of its proud historical heritage but also of the brutal “gringo” invasion of our territories, we, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlan from whence came our forefathers, reclaiming the land of their birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun, declare that the call of our blood is our power, our responsibility, and our inevitable destiny.
We are free and sovereign to determine those tasks which are justly called for by our house, our land, the sweat of our brows, and by our hearts. Aztlan belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops and not to the foreign Europeans. We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continent.
Brotherhood unites us, and love for our brothers makes us a people whose time has come and who struggles [sic] against the foreigner “gabacho” [gringo] who exploits our riches and destroys our culture. With our heart in our hands and our hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture. Before the world, before all of North America, before all our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlan.
The manifesto went on to call for “total liberation from oppression, exploitation, and racism.” Chicanos would “driv[e] the exploiter out of our communities, our pueblos, and our lands” and “defeat the gringo dollar value system.” U.S. government authorities were described as “the occupying forces of the oppressors.” Finally, the manifesto called for the “[c]reation of an independent local, regional, and national political party” whose ultimate goal was “[a] nation autonomous and free.”
The Denver conference took place in March 1969; the next month, at a symposium in Santa Barbara, the Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education drafted El Plan de Santa Bárbara: A Chicano Plan for Higher Education, which brought together Chicano student groups under the name Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán), or MEChA. The manifesto read, in part:
For the Chicano the present is a time of renaissance, of renacimiento. Our people and our community, el barrio and la colonia, are expressing a new consciousness and a new resolve. . . .
The ethic of profit and competition, of greed and intolerance, which the Anglo society offers must be replaced by our ancestral communalism and love for beauty and justice. M.E.Ch.A. must bring to the mind of every young Chicano that the liberations of this people from prejudice and oppression is in his hands and this responsibility is greater than personal achievement and more meaningful than degrees, especially if they are earned at the expense of his identity and cultural integrity.
. . . [A]ll attempts must be made to take the college and university to the barrio, whether it be in form of classes giving college credit or community centers financed by the school for the use of community organizations and groups. . . . The idea must be made clear to the people of the barrio that they own the schools and the schools and all their resources are at their disposal. . . . Many colleges and universities have publishing operations which could be forced to accept barrio works for publication.
But how exactly did Chicano Studies fit into the goals of the Chicano movement? Even the leaders of el movimiento weren’t sure. After all, the demand by Chicano activists for an academic discipline of their own was rather illogical from the outset, given that the academy was a part of the very establishment that they viewed as their enemy and claimed to want to overthrow or secede from. Alurista himself would later admit that “Chicano Studies was created by students, by Chicano students, and as students we had no concrete idea of what it was that a department of Chicano Studies would accomplish in view of our recognition of the corruption and decadence of the American educational system.” In other words, from the very birth of Chicano Studies, there was no there there. Yet the student activists didn’t let that stop them. They pressured, bullied, and/or guilt-tripped one university after another (mostly in California and other southwestern states) into establishing Chicano courses, departments, and centers—though they played little or no role in actually shaping the discipline that resulted.
And how did the discipline get shaped? To borrow a distinction made by Michael Soldatenko, who chairs the Chicano Studies Department at California State University, Los Angeles, at the outset there were two main ways of doing Chicano Studies. One, born out of the Quinto Sol collective and articulated in El Grito: A Journal of Contemporary Mexican-American Thought (both founded at Berkeley in 1967), entirely rejected the premises of the traditional humanities and social sciences, and is labeled “perspectivism” by Soldatenko because Octavio I. Romano, El Grito’s editor, “proposed to initiate Chicano(a) research from the perspective of the Chicano(a) subject.” For Romano, traditional scholarly methods were so intrinsically prejudiced against Chicanos that “the very nature of objectivity . . . had to be rejected.” This emphasis on subjective testimony brings to mind Edward Said’s dismissal, in Orientalism, of the work of great scholars of Islam and Arab culture who didn’t happen to be Muslims or Arabs themselves.* Soldatenko actually says, without a hint of criticism or mockery, that Romano “provided Chicanos and Chicanas with a radical weapon in their battle with the academy and knowledge.”
Yet by the 1980s perspectivism had lost out to the approach promoted in El Plan de Santa Bárbara and articulated in Aztlán: Chicano Journal of the Social Sciences and the Arts, which was established in 1970 (and which soon altered its subtitle to International Journal of Chicano Studies Research). This approach, which Soldatenko dubs �
��empiricism,” was less personal and more political: while perspectivists sought to turn the academy into a place where they could express “the entire spectrum of feelings that are the soul of the barrio,” empiricists saw the university “as a political tool” that they sought “to capture” in order “to continue the fight to transform the barrio”—a “place to battle for self-determination and Chicano liberation.” The empiricists, says Soldatenko, saw “[a]cademic work” as “ancillary to political work” and hence accepted traditional academic models only because “they had no vision for intellectual work.” Most of them, he adds, began as Chicano “nationalists” but later gave up the dream of an independent Aztlán and became ordinary “liberal, progressive, or Marxist” academics.
For a time, the debate within empiricism focused mainly on whether Anglo oppression of Chicanos was more properly identified as racism or classism. Those who said classism were, of course, Marxists; those who went with racism saw Anglo oppression as “internal colonialism”—for them, Chicanos in the United States were, like Indians in the British Empire, the subjects of a colonial power. The “internal colonialism” crowd was no less revolutionary than the Marxists; nor were the two positions mutually exclusive. Indeed, if their goal was supposedly to “analyze” the oppression of Chicanos, Chicano Studies practitioners increasingly combined internal colonialism and Marxism in their efforts to describe Anglo domination.
In the 1970s, as fewer and fewer Chicano Studies professors pretended to have any intention of translating their radical rhetoric into radical action, many leading figures in the field lamented what they saw as its increasing “moderation”; political scholar Theresa Aragón de Shepro of the University of Washington called for a new birth of radicalism; and Chicano historian Mario García complained in 1973 that “Chicano Studies . . . now represents a bureaucratic organization laden with incompetent and opportunistic faculty members whose sense of commitment to the students and the Chicano Movement leaves much to be desired.” Apropos of García’s charge, it is hard not to notice that even some of the most celebrated figures in Chicano Studies write astonishingly poor prose. (A brief example: Rodolfo Acuña, author of the leading Chicano Studies textbook, refers to “[t]he hue of one’s skin color.”)