Por que te me disso isso?: Uneven access to border-crossings

Unable to view Y tu mamá también on campus, I opted for the Youtube version with Portuguese subtitles and transnational subtleties. Nevertheless, I had to rely heavily on my four years of high school Spanish. Since the visual dialogue of the film explained so much, it was surprisingly easy to follow the spoken dialogue. Perhaps this accessibility is the reason why the film appeared in thirty-nine countries. Besides casting a wide net to a global audience through Youtube, the film has many other qualities of transnational cinema.

Set in Mexico in 1999 on the cusp of the presidential elections, Y tu mamá también highlights many particularities of Mexican politics, economics and society. Simultaneously the film addressed themes that were prevalent throughout the world. The film showed how Mexico’s dominant ruling party was voted out after 71 years. One-party control was common throughout the latter 20^th century world, particularly throughout Latin America.  With the election of Vincente Fox, Mexico entered a new phase of economic liberalization and political realignment known as NAFTA.  In all of this the film is both a national and transnational product, “transcend[ing] the national as autonomous cultural particularity while respecting it as a powerful symbolic force” (page 2).

The backdrop of the film is marked by disparities between rich and poor; urban and rural; politically well-heeled and disenfranchised. Economically speaking, 1999 represents the final victory of capitalism over communism and the ascendency of neoliberalism as instituted globally through the Washington Consensus.  The film depicts a Mexican political economy that was/is occurring throughout the world. The owners of Mexican fabricadores grow filthy-rich, due to low-paid workers who manufacture cheap goods for a global market. As such its particularities make the film both a national film to which Mexicans can relate, as well as a transnational film with its universalizing themes of the growing wedge between those who benefit from neoliberal reforms and those who do not.

As the protagonists drive deeper into rural Mexico, the mens’ national identities are blurred by the rural landscape harsh lives of their Mexican brethren. The camera perspective changes between the perspectives of safe, mobile passengers to the heavily regulated and immobile rural denizens, making clear the “imaginanary nature of any notion of cultural purity” (4). The passengers – under the protective, political aura of Tenoch – drive unperturbedly past armed soldiers in the truck bed, and barely glance at the soldiers force locals into an execution-style line. Indeed the three passengers seem to be moving in a different, more privileged direction than the Mexican citizens they leave behind, calling into question Mexican solidarity.  “This leave-taking often entails, to use Freud’s term, a becoming-unheimlich both to oneself and to those who are variously invested in the diasporic subject’s remaining recognizable” (11). The three passengers seem to possess the requisite pedigrees or associations to move seamlessly through Mexican terrain, while the disenfranchised rural citizens are treated like Zapatista terrorists, whose border crossings pose danger to Mexico’s society.

Like the three cosmopolitan, upwardly-mobile passengers, who are “most ‘at home’ in the in-between spaces of culture…between the local and the global”, UMD’s campus body is neither a culturally pure of entirely separate body politic (4). A simple search for “UMD campus advisory” delivers twenty unread advisory messages alerting UMD students of off-campus burglaries, armed robberies, and most recently an off-campus incident where a female UMD student was attacked from behind by a man holding a knife. The brave young woman broke free and managed to escape from the man described as wearing a red flannel shirt and having “dirty fingernails and a foul odor” (http://www.myfoxdc.com/story/27410206/police-releases-description-of-suspect-in-umd-off-campus-attempted-kidnapping) . As important as it is to alert students of dangers in surrounding areas, the frequent advisory messages suggest that no where but campus is safe for UMD students and that all community members are dangerous and suspicious. Like community relations, transnational “cinema is borderless to varying degrees, subject to the same uneven mobility as people [who cross them]” (5).

It appears that town-gown relations have a long way to go.

Through her use of the graphic novel genre, Satrapi strategically seizes control of the reader’s imagination. For years Satrapi was forced to ingest the images and cultural artifacts imposed on her from without by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Indeed Satrapi uses the graphic novel to coopt the images, signs and history that the Islamic Republic of Iran exercised over her and her people. By illustrating her memories as a subaltern Iranian female, Satrapi aggressively contests the Islamic Republic’s sole claim to write history.

Through her illustrations Satrapi creates her own – as Chakrabarty calls it – “alternative histor[y] in the heartland of ideology” (113). While Kraniauskas focuses on alternative temporalities to “global narratives of capital”, Satrapi’s novel comes closer to formulating an alternative temporality to the totalitarian fundamentalist Islamic regime;  “- in other words, [Satrapi successfully enunciates her own] cultural practices rather than mere false consciousness” (113). Both Kraniauskas’s and Satrapi’s conceptions of temporality challenge the hegemonic narratives imposed on the subaltern from without.

Parry (1994, 5) emphasizes the ‘enunciative act’ more than the substance of the narrated event. Likewise Bhabha (1994) is more interested in the enunciative process that creates a cultural difference which in turn challenges any single person’s, group’s or regime’s claim to cultural authority (118). While Satrapi’s narration of the Iraq-Iran war and other historical events is important, these events form the backdrop to another history: that of a female who bravely sets out to live her own life.

Through the enunciative act of her graphic novel, Satrapi causes disjunctures in the hegemonic temporalities of both European modernity and Islamic fundamentalism. Too Iranian for Europe and too European for Iran, Satrapi manages to forge her own hybrid identity and struggles to stop outside forces from shaping her subjectivity. To this extent then we can talk about alternative temporalities in two regards: that of the subaltern to the hegemonic and that of the interior to the exterior.

Satrapi exists in what Bhabha refers to as “hybrid time”. The image that Dr. Baer showed us with the split Socialist/Islamic imagery and corresponding unveiled/veiled Satrapi demonstrates how she had to inhabit different temporalities simultaneously. Likewise, the Islamic Republic’s “attempt to dominate” the cultural images was an attempt to shape individual’s subjectivities from outside to inside. Satrapi’s graphic novel is revolutionary to the extent that she cultivates her own semiotic language to challenge from the inside the external hegemony of the Islamic Republic (118). It is she and not the oppressive government who employs the signs, images and language to narrate and describe historical and cultural events. According to Marx and others it is the ruling class who controls the images and cultural artifacts, and so Satrapi’s use of graphic novel as an alternative form of historical narration is very radical.

Each cel of Satrapi’s graphic novel could be said to represent a point of disjuncture from the Islamic Republic’s writing of history. Furthermore, by aligning each disjunctive enunciation in her own desired order she is creating an alternative temporality that is based on her subjective experiences and memories. According to Bhabha “disjuncture – the return of the colonial repressed – happens in and through the present of enunciation” (121). Like splicing a broken film reel, Satrapi uses her graphic novel to cause a “temporal break in representation” and use her own images to create a hybrid history (121).

While abroad in Austria, Satrapi undergoes dramatic physical, emotional and psychological changes. Furthermore, she had accumulated cultural experiences that were at odds with the historical trajectory of the Islamic Republic. Her return to the Islamic Republic was akin to stepping into a time warp: having enjoyed the European luxuries of modernity for several years she would later return to a largely unchanged Islamic Republic, one which repudiated her new-found feminist identity. Both Europe and the Islamic Republic offered two different versions of hegemonic temporalities: one modern and capitalistic and the other archaic and religious. Like the Colossus of Rhodes, Satrapi straddles both temporalities and in so doing enunciates through language and images her own subjective understanding of history, a third space through which the reader can traverse.

 As I scanned the beer menu I was overwhelmed by the variety of Belgian ales and German pilsners. I ordered the Eupner. Why drink foreign when you can have domestic?

 The town of Eupen lies at the nexus of Netherlands, Belgium and Germany – for many, Eupen is a European borderland. Situated within Belgium, Eupen operates under the jurisdiction of a Deutsche Gemeinschaft (German community). Eupen is neither Belgian nor German and at the same time it is both.To add to their identity crisis the citizens inhabiting Eupen and the surrounding areas struggle to align their ways of life with their neighbors within the European Union. The most minute of differences among the three countries are migraine-worthy. One example: In order to cooperate during emergencies, the Belgians, Dutch and Germans in these borderlands agreed to share fire-fighting equipment and engines. Though admirable, the collaborative plan came to a standstill when Dutch and Belgian, and German fire-hoses did not fit their neighbors’ fire trucks.

 The Goethe-Institut sponsored both of my last teacher exchanges to Europe. A cultural extension of Germany, the Goethe-Institut is a public-private organization dedicated to promoting German language and culture – among other things. They operate in over 132 countries and are funded partially by the German government and by private organizations. The Goethe-Institut has expressed an interest in “internationalizing” the social studies curriculum and strongly promotes its Transatlantic Partnership Outreach (TOP) textbooks to American social studies teachers.

 I believe today’s educators have a responsibility to teach what Spivak calls “transnational literacy”. At the same time, educators should guard their classrooms from a Trojan Horse that is slipped into the curriculum.

 In “Crossing Borders”, Spivak notes how during the Cold War, the Ford Foundation helped found Area Studies, which combined social and literary studies.  In my experience education – especially social studies – is always political, always ideological, and never neutral. A teacher should always be on the lookout for bias in the established curriculum. Indeed, the Goethe-Institut’s TOP program is supported by big names such as Siemens, The Robert Bosch Stiftung, and the Deutsche Bank. Spivak notes the politics “the production of knowledge”, and educators should pay attention, lest schools become sites of indoctrination or manipulation. In the case of Area Studies during the Cold War, different agendas in the humanities had been mobilized to affect political outcomes.

 “In the Postmodern Subaltern”, Susan Koshy articulates the need for a ‘transnational literacy’ that I think has great potential in today’s public schools and universities. As an public educator in the borderlands of UMD, I have seen the transformative power of the classroom and appreciate the diversity that my students bring to the classroom. In just one class today I had five Iraqi, seven Hispanic, two African, three Nepali students. Of the fourteen hundred students about 52% are Hispanic and about 75% are on free and reduced meals. Indeed in my seven years of teaching Social Studies at Parkdale High School has been one transnational experience after the other. 

 One claim by Susan Koshy resonates with my experience of teaching first-generation immigrants. Koshy criticizes the feminist academic for assuming the voice of the oppressed subaltern female “through this discursive move” (124). In all of this I now question whether academics are the best people to speak on behalf of the subaltern or marginalized. I appreciate how Anzaldúa used language to incorporate all Chicanas into the fold. It is clear that she is interested in the lives of all Chicanas who inhabit the Borderlands. However, what is missing from this academic and transnational feminist debate is the real (if not unrefined) voice of the subaltern female. Indeed the majority of my Latina students possess a working-class subjectivity that seems overlooked or misappropriated by “hegemonic feminisms”.

 As a student at the University of Maryland I have experienced how language is kicked around like a discursive football. Seemingly intelligent people play conversational keep away. They try to force their voice down the field while blocking any dissenting voices. What if educators to first-generation, working-class immigrants imposed the same discursive imperialisms present at the university level? Shu-Mei Shih’s appeal for “discursive rights” is important not just for minority feminists but for all lone wolf academics. I believe both Anzaldúa and Spivak come the closest to honoring and valuing the academic and linguistic contributions of those “remedial classes whose imaginations are crossing and being crossed by a double aporia-the cusp of two imperialisms” (Spivak, 12). Perhaps for some would-be, working-class academics or feminists there are no divisions separating the political from the literary. Educators should listen more closely for the working-class subjectivities of their students, which is usually drowned out by more “respectable” discourses.