The
real war is between our imagination and theirs, what we can see and what
they are blinded to. Do not despair. None of them can see far enough, and
so long as we do not let them violate our imagination we will survive.
In
Imagining Argentina, Carlos Rueda's wife, Cecilia, is disappeared during
Argentina's dirty war.
Carlos' story is of dreams and the awesome power of the human imagination
to sustain life and reclaim the living through the simple will to believe.Cecilia's
is a story of the courage and integrity that still drive enough among us
to speak truth to power despite its well-known risks and predictable consequences.Although
Carlos and Cecilia are fictional characters, their story marks a vivid
*788 and appropriate point of departure for this volume of LatCrit
scholarship. This is because, in the last five years, the LatCrit movement
has emerged as the collective project of a diverse group of individuals
who are determined to consolidate an ethical community of scholars and
activists committed to combating injustice in and through the critical
analysis and effective transformation of legal discourse, legal institutions,and
the elitist culture of the American legal academy.
Like Cecilia's fate, the future of the LatCrit project depends on the power
of the human will to imagine, to believe, and to manifest meaningful alternatives
to realities conjured and coercively imposed by those who benefit from
current structures of domination and subordination. As evidenced by the
contributions to this Symposium, these structures exist both within the
legal academy and throughout the broader fields of social, cultural, economic,
and political contestation in which law routinely intervenes.
Like Carlos, this community of scholars and activists survives on the strength
of its power to imagine and its courage to affirm ways of being and doing
that effectively challenge the repressive practices, discourses, and ideologies
through which totalitarian realities are constructed both within and beyond
the legal academy.
In
this vein, the articles and commentaries in this Symposium are excellent
points of departure for reflecting upon the advances thus far achieved
in the evolution of this still very young community of scholars. The articles
and commentaries that follow this brief Introduction comprise the second
"free- standing" law review Symposium on LatCrit theory organized specifically
in response to *789 student interests and initiatives.
The timing is fitting, for this Symposium also coincides with the fifth
anniversary of LatCrit theory's emergence in the American legal academy.
Since then, five annual conferences and four additional colloquia have
produced, in total, nine published symposia in both mainstream and "of
color" law journals. This
record reflects and affirms LatCrit theory's original commitment to collaboration
with student law review editors, especially those of color, in the production
of this new critical legal discourse on Latinas/os, policy, and society.
This textual record--including this very Symposium--also attests to LatCrit
theory's expanding directions and exploding parameters. Indeed, this Symposium
effectively celebrates and continues the LatCrit experiment that, in 1995,
was, like Carlos' dreams, little more than a will to imagine and believe.
In
the five years since, LatCrit theorists have conducted several interventions
in critical legal scholarship, antiracist discourse,and public policy debates
guided by early commitments to *790 antisubordination theory, antiessentialist
community, and coalitional praxis. First, reflecting the imperatives of
demography, LatCrit theorists have centered "Latinas/os" in outsider jurisprudence
and legal discourse.
In doing so, we also have centered Latinas/os' multiple diversities precisely
in order to excavate the valences and explore the significance of intra-Latina/o
"difference" in the development of critical analysis, social activism,
public policy, and legal reform.
This antiessentialist approach to "Latina/o" critical legal studies has
helped to expand antiracist discourse and politics within the legal academy
and also has challenged some basic mis/understandings of Latina/o lives
and communities.
For
example, by foregrounding intra-Latina/o diversities, LatCrit has challenged
a core misrepresentation of Latinas/os. This misrepresentation is summed
up in the dominant presumption that Latinas/os are all, or would like to
be, "Hispanic"--Spain's progeny, with Eurocentric and White-identified
affinities.
In fact, as LatCrit theorists have shown time and again, Latinas/os come
in many racial and ethnic varieties--including a high degree of cross-mixture. Latinas/os
are indigenous, Asian, Black, and mixed, as well as Hispanic. Like other
populations, Latinas/os are multicultural, multiethnic, and multiracial.
And, in this vein, *791 Latinas/os--again like other groups--are
diverse along many axes of identity, including gender, sexual orientation,
religion, and socioeconomic class. By foregrounding these multiple internal
diversities, LatCrit theory has striven to ensure that public debates about,
and legal responses to, social issues deemed especially germane to "Latina/o"
populations will be guided in part by the needs that arise from multiple
intragroup differences.
We
similarly have sought to situate LatCrit analysis of the Latina/o condition
in intergroup social frameworks and cross-group historical contexts that
take into account both the present and the past in the delineation of LatCrit
priorities and projects.
This intergroup framing expands the circle of perspectives brought to bear
on the Latina/o condition and deepens the substance of LatCrit discourse.
The diversity of position and perspective enabled by this intergroup discourse
ensures a broadly inclusive multilateral dialogue that listens both to
Latina/o experiences and to others as well. In this way, LatCrit theory
is informed by diverse "outside" viewpoints--in addition to diverse "internal"
viewpoints. This openness to both "internal" and "external" critique
*792 helps to ensure a critical (as well as self- critical) approach
to Latina/o interests and issues.
In this way, LatCrit scholars learn from--and teach each other--about the
similarities and differences that construct domination and subordination
across multiple vectors of experience and identity, both within and beyond
Latina/o contexts.
Along
the way, this cross-group process promotes the formation of a progressive,
diverse, and inter-disciplinary community of scholars and activists united
across differences of position and perspective by a common commitment to
antiessentialist, antisubordination theory, community, and praxis.
Indeed, the creation of a diverse and antiessentialist community of critical
scholars and activists, grounded in antisubordination principles and praxis,
has been a key aspiration of the LatCrit project from its inception.
This kind of scholarly community serves not only as an incubator of intellectual
exchange and insight, but also creates a network of critical colleagues
and mentors to nurture new scholars *793 and their efforts. In crucial
moments of struggle, this type of scholarly community also can (and should)
serve as a bulwark against the oppressive social and/or institutional practices
through which too many minority scholars have been "disappeared" from the
American legal academy.
Moreover,
the insights and practices developed through this collective process of
mutual engagement are not limited in application to the legal academy.
On the contrary, the creation of an antiessentialist and antisubordination
discourse and community among diverse scholars and activists may serve
as a magnet or model for similar coalitional communities on a larger societal
level.
Over time, this cross-group process of exchange and convocation may help
to foster the discursive conditions and sociopolitical consciousness necessary
for a broader coalitional solidarity among outgroups in the United States
and beyond. In short, this community-building dimension of LatCrit theory
fully reflects the substantive vision of, and commitment to, antiessentialism
and antisubordination in both theory and praxis--through the conceptual
advances our discourse enables, as well as through the new practices of
mutual recognition, engagement, and respect that our collaborative efforts
inspire and manifest.
Thus,
in and through LatCrit theory we have sought to center, at once, in legal
discourse (a) Latinas/os qua Latinas/os, (b) our multiple internal diversities,
and (c) the schematics and dynamics of cross-group relations and inter-group
coalitions. In keeping with LatCrit community-building aspirations, these
efforts have entailed a conscious and conscientious dedication to community-building
ideals and practices in both individual and structural terms. This fragile
experiment has yielded promising advances to date.
*794
Through LatCrit exchanges, for example, we have transcended the"White-Over-Black"
binary of "domestic" race relations.
We have also challenged the dichotomy between "domestic" and "international"
that historically has bounded legal discourses and that too-often still
separates antisubordination undertakings that should instead intersect.
In doing so, LatCrit theorists have disrupted traditional paradigms that
have constricted antiracist work specifically and that, more generally,
have inhibited intersectional antisubordination alliances. Through these
exchanges, LatCrit and allied scholars have broadened, deepened, and textured
the antisubordination gains and antiessentialist insights of "outsider"
jurisprudence.
To
transcend traditional paradigms of analysis and engagement, we also have
learned to "rotate the center" of critical analysis and *795 collective
action.
In practice, this effort has entailed both individual and group embrace
of coalitional methods in critical and self-critical ways that continually
(re)ground both theory and praxis in the objectives of intra- and inter-group
justice. These practices include programmatic initiatives that periodically
shift the substantive focus of critical and self-critical inquiry among
and between various groups or identities, as well as individual research
projects that explicitly center marginal identities within outsider groupings.
This
practice of "rotating centers" was first initiated in a self-conscious
and programmatic manner at LatCrit III through the organization of a plenary
focus-group discussion titled From Critical Race Theory to LatCrit to BlackCrit?
Exploring Critical Race Theory Beyond and Within the Black/White Paradigm.
The purpose of this focus group was specifically and self- consciously
designed to center in LatCrit theory the problem of Black subordination,
and to explore the antiessentialist insights to be gained by shifting the
focus of LatCrit analysis from Hispanic Latinas/os to Black Latinas/os
and their intersectional commonalities with other Black identity groups.
The proceedings at LatCrit IV carried this important discussion forward
through a plenary panel on The Meanings and Particularities of Blackness
in Latina/o Identity and LatCrit Theory, even as the decision to organize
a plenary on Mestizaje, Identity and the Power of Law in Historical Context
encouraged yet another rotation designed to center mestiza/o identity in
LatCrit discourse.
Most recently, at LatCrit V, conference organizers sought yet again to
give substantive meaning and practical content to the antiessentialist
commitments of LatCrit *796 theory by "rotating the center" of analysis
in two ways: first, to focus on the problem of class subordination within
and between different minority groups and, second, by organizing a plenary
focus-group discussion titled Rotating Centers: Confronting Latina/o Homophobia--A
Moderated Focus-Group Discussion, which was designed specifically to address
the problem of homophobic oppression within Latina/o and other minority
communities.
This
collective experience in the practice of "rotating centers" powerfully
has demonstrated the learning achieved through programmatic initiatives
designed to manifest in concrete ways the commitment to antiessentialism
and inclusion that animates the LatCrit project. It has also born witness
to the value of continuity and to the importance of fostering a collective
commitment to sustained engagement in constructing a genuine "community"
of scholars within the legal academy. 31 By rotating centers, we have ameliorated
the tendency to imagine the world mostly through the prisms of our own
contingent experiences and the experiences and perspectives of others who
are "like us." In so doing, we have begun to give substantive content and
practical meaning to our commitments both to antiessentialist analysis
and to antisubordination solidarity--commitments that conceptually define
the otherwise fluid, shifting, and intersectional parameters of the LatCrit
"community."
Now--five
years later--this record of collective achievement confirms LatCrits' early
convictions and commitments. These convictions and commitments are reflected
in both sets of texts presented in this Symposium. Each "set" is comprised
of an article and two commentaries, with a foreword and afterword bookending
the Symposium as a whole. In the opening article, Professor Margaret Montoya
conducts a detailed, cross-cultural accounting of silence and its sociopolitical
uses and misuses. She is particularly interested in challenging the way
dominant representations of the meaning of silence, particularly the silence
of individuals belonging to subordinated groups, serve to reinscribe relations
of domination and exclusion and to marginalize alternative cultural understandings.
In their commentaries, Professors Steven Bender *797 and Dorothy
Roberts effectively link Professor Montoya's analysis to their own experiences
teaching law in order to reveal substantial obstacles currently confronting
the task of preparing law students to practice law for social and racial
justice.
In the second "set" of essays, Professor Gema Perez-Sanchez unfolds an
inter-disciplinary analysis of Spain's sex/gender national anxieties and
their homophobic lawmaking potency, situating this analysis in a rich and
multidimensional exploration of the relationship between homophobic ideology,
totalitarian practices, and the struggle for a more substantive vision
of democracy.
The commentary by Professor Peter Kwan raises probing questions, urging
further interdisciplinary exploration of the intersections between fascism,
homophobia, and the transformative potential of Queer identity,
while the commentary by Professors Ratna Kapur and Tayyab Mahmud extends
the discussion, incisively interrogating the relationship of (hetero)sexuality
to the project of "nation-building" and the structures of totalitarian
power (and resistance to it) both within and beyond the state apparatus.
The
rich diversity of methodology, terrain, positionality, and perspective
reflected in these articles and commentaries is salutary, revealing important,
and otherwise invisible, connections between the antiessentialist, antisubordination
objectives underlying LatCrit theory and social justice agendas, on the
one hand, and antitotalitarian struggles, on the other. They inspire demands
for more and better of the same.
This Symposium, as well as these times, challenges us to expand our practices
of "multidimensionality" and to interrogate continuously the meaning, and
expand the substantive parameters, of the commitment to antisubordination
that animates LatCrit theory, community, and praxis. In the next two Parts,
we briefly take up these two pressing imperatives and reflect on the contributions
of the Symposium articles and commentaries to the further evolution of
LatCrit discourse and analysis.
*798
I. Multidimensional Analysis: Grounding LatCrit Theory, Community, and
Praxis
The
LatCrit imperative of multidimensional analysis and action is presaged
by early outsider insights, such as intersectionality and multiplicity,
because these twin concepts demand more than single-axis, or unidimensional,
analysis of sociolegal conditions.
Multidimensionality, then, proceeds from multiplicity and intersectionality,
making it akin to a form of "multiintersectionality."
However, multidimensionality denotes more a qualitative shift in analytical
consciousness and discursive climate than a quantitative increase in the
recognition of identities and their intersections. This is simply to say
that "multidimensionality" cannot be reduced to a mere recitation of the
multiple diversities that constitute (and oftentimes disrupt) racial or
ethnic categories, such as "African American," "Asian American," "Native
American," or "Latina/o."
On
the contrary, "multidimensionality," as we use the term here, calls for
a profound and far-reaching recognition that the particularities of religion,
geography, ability, class, sexuality, and other identity fault lines run
through, and help to configure and to interconnect, all "racial" or "ethnic"
communities. ,
*799 multidimensionality is a necessary analytical and political response
to the fact that every "identity" group is a virtual construction that
organizes communities around imagined commonalities, even as it suppresses
precisely those "differences" that might otherwise reorganize the social,
political, and legal fields by reconstituting the structure of group identification
and alliance. Multidimensionality, as critical method and political commitment,
requires a flexible yet multifaceted approach to critical sociolegal analysis
that can operate on several levels at once, depending on context and circumstance.
These levels include both intra- and inter- group diversities based on
multiple identity sources, such as race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexual
orientation, and ability. As we use the term here, multidimensionality
may be viewed as a template of critical analysis that is adjustable and
transportable across varied legal regimes and social fields.
In
addition to describing a mode of analysis, multidimensionality describes
an analytical mindset that precedes and informs the framing and contents
of an analysis. This mindset is a keen but critical appreciation--at the
very threshold of any antisubordination project--of the fact that no structure
of subordination "ever stands alone."
At this juncture, this bedrock condition cannot be doubted; not only is
it amply demonstrated in this Symposium, but it has also been noted both
during and since the formative moments of outsider jurisprudence.
A threshold appreciation for *800 this bedrock fact therefore can
benefit both the conception and execution of all antisubordination projects.
Multidimensionality signifies both an expansive analytical approach to
issues of subordination as well as an antecedent understanding of the interconnected
structuring of sociolegal biases that necessitate this expansive approach.
Yet, multidimensionality as LatCrit method must also have a substantive
purpose. Through our sustained and collective engagement in each others'
differences of perspective and position, this purpose has emerged, in ever
clearer and increasingly self-conscious ways, as a commitment to anti-subordination
in any and every context.
Multidimensionality,
then, describes a method of critical analysis that seeks both to interrogate
the diversity and particularity of specific contexts and to situate those
findings within a critical deconstruction of the larger structures of subordination
that oppress *801 and surround diverse outgroups. LatCrit and allied
scholars increasingly must deploy multidimensional analysis not only to
root out the particularities of subordination in any given context, but
also to chart their interconnection with other particularities in other
contexts and, ultimately, to design our antisubordination interventions
more efficaciously.
Our challenge increasingly is to discern patterns from particularities
and design synergistic interventions through our mutual engagement in the
particularities of each others' realities and perspectives. This we do
by locating each particular analysis of social power/lessness and legal
position in a more inclusive and comprehensive understanding of the overall
organization of privilege and prejudice, which will in turn enable us to
recognize and therefore to dismantle interlocking structures of subordination
in law and society through our multidimensional analyses and coalitional
solidarity.
The
articles and commentaries in this Symposium clearly illustrate the practice
and value of multidimensional analysis. A key benefit of their analyses
is that they offer new, and otherwise inaccessible, insights into the way
relations of power/lessness are configured across different sociolegal
fields, thus revealing new perspectives on the commonalities and interconnections
linking the subordination of different groups in different contexts through
ostensibly different mechanisms of coercion, control, and erasure. The
two lead articles in this Symposium are a case in point. A unidimensional
reading might easily miss the unique opportunity these two articles offer
for exploring important, and otherwise invisible, connections between the
antiessentialist, antisubordination objectives underlying LatCrit theory
and social justice agendas, on the one hand, and antitotalitarian struggles
on the other. This is because, in a superficial and unidimensional reading,
these articles seem to have nothing to do with each other. A brief review
illustrates the point.
Professor
Montoya's project is to provide a comprehensive exploration of "the interplay
between the subordinating aspects of *802 being silenced and the
liberatory aspects of silence, its expressive and performative aspects
that are part of our linguistic and racial repertoires."
In exploring silence, Professor Montoya traces its modes and manifestations
across the fields of cultural, classroom, and legal discourse. In each
instance, her analysis advances a rich and complex argument that simultaneously
seeks to reveal the cultural and racial biases embedded in, and reproduced
by, the manner in which silence is interpreted, represented, and performed
in the discourses that dominate these three fields, even as she articulates
alternative ways of understanding and performing silence and seeks to excavate
the transformative potential embedded in these understandings and performances.
Her argument is that subordinated groups are oftentimes forced into silence
by dominant discursive practices ("centripetal forces") that "crowd" us
out or erase our realities, and that the possibilities of using silence
in transformative ways to disrupt and resist ("centrifugal forces") are
foreclosed by the fact that dominant interests routinely misinterpret the
meaning of our silence.
There
is no doubt that this is a complex and difficult argument to make. It requires
us to imagine what the silence of the marginalized and subordinated might
mean culturally, politically, and interpersonally if our self-understandings
were culturally dominant. Silence is at times a self- experienced instance
of resistance and withdrawal, oftentimes in disgust and disdain for the
processes, practices, persons, and/or institutions that trigger our silence.
Being the object of disgust and disdain is hardly a mark of distinction
or dominance, and yet there remains a profound disjuncture between this
way of understanding the meaning of one's own silence and the performative
impact of such silence on the structures of power/lessness that organize
the social spaces and institutions we inhabit. This disjuncture is precisely
the space in which our silence is misinterpreted as submission, rather
than disdain. It is this disjuncture that raises doubts about the transformative
potential of "holding silence" in this culture.
Professor
Montoya is well aware of this problem and the issues it raises.
The profound importance of these issues is in turn reflected in Professor
Roberts' thoughtful commentary. According to *803 Professor Roberts,
Professor Montoya's argument presents a significant challenge for resistance
scholarship and praxis. This challenge results from the fact that "[t]he
distinction between what is compelled and what is defiance is not always
apparent."
In this vein Professor Roberts asks whether we really can "tell the difference
between silence that is coerced by repression and silence that is an act
of resistance? Does outsiders' silence in response to dominant speech challenge
the status quo or simply acquiesce in it?"
These questions, and the fact that both Professors Montoya and Roberts
locate their analysis of silence and resistance in the law school context,
prompt further reflections on the way silence is institutionally and discursively
organized, as well as on its implications for the future of diversity in
the American legal academy. Minority (as well as non-minority) law professors
and students who are committed to fostering diversity and inclusion in
the legal profession are quite familiar with the ways in which resistance
to exclusionary admissions, appointments, and promotion practices is silenced.
Oftentimes this silence is organized around discourses of "collegiality,"
which cast resistance as "uncollegial," or through discourses of "academic
freedom." These discursive practices enable impunity by silencing internal
criticism and deflecting external accountability from the frequently racist
and sexist decision-making processes through which social elites reproduce
their political, institutional, and cultural dominance.
A
unidimensional analysis of the Montoya-Roberts "debate" would easily conclude
that while silence in this context may be internally experienced as an
expression of disgust, rather than submission, in this context it nevertheless
operates to acquiesce in injustice. But Professor Montoya's analysis is
not unidimensional. As we read her text, she does not ultimately disagree
with Professor Roberts, for she readily acknowledges and insightfully explores
the uses and abuses of silence in performing acquiescence to injustice.
For this reason, her multidimensional analysis forces one to struggle for
a broader understanding of the way subordination is configured and transformed.
This is because Professor Montoya is not simply writing about resistance
and the role of silence in *804 performing it (or not); she is in
fact performing resistance precisely by presenting an alternative account
of the meanings of silence from the perspective of subordinated cultures.
Her resistance is against the broader structure of power that not only
silences the marginalized and subordinated individual, but also destroys
the cultural understandings and suppresses the self-understandings through
which these individuals oftentimes do, in fact, perform their resistance
through silence. This exchange thus reveals the totalitarian dimensions
of domination, which not only structure relations of power/lessness, but
construct the "meanings" that define reality. In this totalitarian reality,
the marginalized and subordinated have no choice but to assimilate to precisely
those practices and methods of "resistance" through which "change" can
be effectively achieved. They must "play the game to win," even if playing
the game requires them to abandon the meanings and understandings that
define their cultural difference.
This
is, indeed, a very hard argument to make, for it forces us to recognize
the awesome dimensions of power that oftentimes may coerce us to relinquish
difference in the very act of defending it. And yet Professor Montoya does
resist--in and through the meanings she excavates and offers us here. In
doing so, she significantly expands our understanding of the meaning of
culture and counsels us to bear in mind that efforts to preserve cultural
diversity, unlike other forms of political struggle, require forms of resistance
that can counteract the cultural destruction that our participation in
"effective" political struggle may produce, both internally in our souls
and externally in the cultures whose extinction we seek to combat. She
also leaves us to ponder whether and how we decide whether there are some
games that simply are not worth winning.
Professor
Bender's commentary takes up and effectively expands upon a different dimension
of Professor Montoya's multidimensional analysis. Professor Montoya's analysis
of silence aims to show "how silence and silencing are used to draw and
maintain the borders of racialized power."
One important dimension of her project traces the way legal discourse silences
issues of race in the articulation of legal doctrine and the adjudication
of legal disputes. Her analysis crosses numerous doctrinal domains, revealing
the relationship between racial subordination and the interpretations of
silence that inform legal analysis, as well as exploring the silence of
law regarding matters of *805 race. Focusing, for example, on the
doctrinal structure of American property law regimes, she makes a compelling
argument that the silence of law on matters of race obscures the relationship
between property, power, and White supremacy.
Professor
Bender takes up this dimension of Professor Montoya's analysis and substantially
expands it by reflecting on his own experiences teaching a course titled
Chicano/as and the Law in an Ethnic Studies program.
In his commentary, Professor Bender effectively displays how the complex
dynamics critiqued by Professor Montoya play out in the context of higher
education; he shows the applicability of Professor Montoya's analysis to
our profession. After further mapping the erasure of Latinas/os across
multiple fields of law, Professor Bender reflects, as a teacher, on the
demoralizing and demobilizing impact that a deeper understanding of the
way American law erases Latina/o experiences, interests, and realities
too often has on the idealistic young students who take his class in the
eager expectation of one day practicing law for social justice. Professor
Bender thus raises profound questions about the role of legal education
in preparing agents of progressive transformation.
Of
course, as earlier indicated, this brief review of some of the insights
offered and debates triggered by Professor Montoya's article and responding
commentaries might prompt one to ask what any of them has to do with Spanish
literature and legal history, Franco's fascism or Queer theory--the topics
taken up in this Symposium by Professor Perez-Sanchez's article and the
responsive commentaries. Approached through a unidimensional lens, the
answer might well be nothing. Indeed, one might fairly ask what the evolution
of LatCrit discourse, understood specifically as a project to develop antiessentialist,
antisubordination critical theory and political community among diverse
groups of scholars and activists, has to gain from any engagement with
Spain. Certainly, one ready answer is that the historical and continuing
impact of Spanish colonialism and contemporary projects, as well as the
*806 terms and conditions under which Spanish supremacy gave way to
the rise of the United States as a global and imperial power, have had
profound and lasting effects on the configuration of Latina/o identities
and social realities, both within the United States and throughout this
hemisphere.
And yet, in the context of this Symposium, the real payoffs of this engagement
stem in large part from the fact that Professor Perez-Sanchez articulates
her intervention, like Professor Montoya, through a multidimensional analysis.
Locating
her argument in and around a critical analysis of the way homosexuality
was codified in Spain, before, during, and after the Franco dictatorship,
Professor Perez-Sanchez interrogates both the nature of power and the possibilities
of resistance, as well as the role of literary production in the struggle
for progressive social transformation. In their fascinating commentary,
Professors Kapur and Mahmud take up the issues she raises and substantially
expand the analytical scope of LatCrit scholarship by retracing the contributions
of Gramsci, Althusser, and Foucault, even as the authors challenge the
ability of these theories to adequately engage the realities of power/lessness
in the uncivil societies organized around colonial and non- capitalist
state formations.
In doing so, they open a whole range of questions that are ripe for LatCrit
engagement, to the extent that "the international move" in LatCrit theory
seeks proactively to engage "the struggles and suffering of our Third World
'others"'
in ways that foster the kind of commitment *807 to intergroup justice
and solidarity that can shatter the essentialist constructions of difference
through which antiracist, antiimperialist antisubordination alliances,
and coalitions too- often have been fragmented.
To advance the antisubordination objectives of the LatCrit project, this
engagement must, as Professors Kapur and Mahmud appropriately suggest,
"seek theoretical guidance from Europe's Others."
To advance LatCrit's antiessentialist commitments to intra- and intergroup
justice, this engagement must help us articulate theories that more effectively
can reveal the common contexts of struggle
that the colonial experience has structured across regions as diverse as
Asia, Africa, and Latin America. From both perspectives, Professors Kapur
and Mahmud's commentary offers important insights and maps new trajectories
of inquiry as LatCrit theory seeks to reveal interlocking sites of contestation
for the struggle against subordination in all its configurations.
Their
commentary is particularly on point insofar as they reveal that Spain,
for all of its colonial history and modern pretensions, internally has
been structured for much of its history around a non-capitalist, illiberal
state formation.
Indeed, this observation provides a welcome backdrop for reflecting yet
again on the LatCrit imperative of multidimensional analysis, as well as
on the particular contribution Professor Perez-Sanchez makes to this project.
By focusing LatCrit attention on the criminalization of homosexuality within
Spain, Professor Perez-Sanchez shatters *808 otherwise dominant,
and profoundly essentialized, images that cast Spain as a unitary "nation-state."
She also marks important points of antisubordination commonality linking
all people oppressed by homophobic ideologies and regimes across the essentialist
lines of national boundaries and, further, links the particular antisubordination
imperatives of Queer liberation to the seemingly more universal project
of fostering democracy and preserving democratic transitions.
In
this way Professor Perez-Sanchez reminds us that, like the United States
and, indeed, like any nation-state, "Spain" is an imagined construction
superimposed upon a people marked by distinctions of class, gender, race,
ethnicity, language, sexual orientation, and national origin, among other
classifications. Though Spanish colonial histories wreaked havoc at the
time and today constitute an important backdrop for the continued reproduction
of intergroup injustices and inequalities throughout the Americas, the
antiessentialist, antisubordination imperatives of the LatCrit project
call for multidimensional analyses that can help us find and align with
those at "the bottom" of any sociolegal context, including in colonial
centers such as Spain.
By unpacking and de-essentializing our constructions of "Spain," we not
only discover others whose struggles for justice we share and should rightfully
embrace, but we also expand the scope of our "coalitional imagination"
in ways that can have a profound and material impact precisely because
of the cross-national alliances this heightened consciousness of commonality
may activate.
In
this vein, LatCrit scholars might benefit greatly from a deeper understanding
of the "coalitional imagination" and the "multidimensional analysis" that
prompted approximately 3000 Americans, some ninety of whom were African-Americans,
to risk and in many instances lose their lives fighting Franco's fascist
troops in *809 the Spanish Civil War.
They were known as the "Abraham Lincoln Brigade."
From 1936 to 1939, these brave men and women flouted the myopia of United
States law and policy and crossed the Atlantic Ocean to stake their lives
in support of a democratically- elected government whose ultimate overthrow
paved the way for Franco's dictatorship and emboldened Hitler's aggression.
For the African- Americans who fought in this war, the interlocking connections
between fascism and racism were abundantly evident. Rejecting the essentialism
of a unidimensional race-nationalism, they understood the struggle against
Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia and Franco's assault on Spanish democracy
to be part of the same battle.
Indeed, while their struggles against Jim Crow racism in the United States
inspired solidarity with the Ethiopian cause, their decision to take up
arms against the fascist assault on Spanish democracy reflected a commitment
to eradicating all forms of subordination, particularly the material dispossession
of the poor.
In the words of one African- American veteran of the Spanish Civil War,
I
had been more than ready to go to Ethiopia, but that was different. Ethiopia,
a Black nation, was part of me. I was just beginning to learn about the
reality of Spain and Europe, but I knew what was at stake. There the poor,
the peasants, the workers and the unions, the socialists and the communists,
together had won an election against the big landowners, the monarchy and
the right-wingers in the military. It was the kind *810 of victory
that would have brought Black people to the top levels of government if
such an election had been won in the USA. A Black man would be Governor
of Mississippi. The new government in Spain was dividing its wealth with
the peasants. Unions were organizing in each factory and social services
were being introduced. Spain was the perfect example for the world I dreamed
of.
These
brief remarks can hardly scratch the surface of the many lessons to be
learned from the history of African-Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
and the political understandings that informed their personal sacrifices
on behalf of Spanish democracy. Nevertheless, these remarks do underscore
the insights LatCrit scholars can gain, and the solidarities we can foster,
by applying multidimensional antisubordination analysis in every context
we examine.
Though
not every project need operate on all possible levels of multidimensional
analysis at once, LatCrit scholars can and should remain at all times conscious
and attuned to the multiple dimensions of the issues and interests we take
up. By making multidimensionality a conscious process in the framing and
execution of our critical interventions, the limitations of our projects
can be self-critically reviewed, and these limitations can be explicitly
acknowledged and explained in relationship to the project's antiessentialist,
antisubordination objectives. In the same way, scholars can begin more
consciously and expressly to delineate the connection between the issues
we address in our critical interventions and the larger patterns of power
and privilege that confront social justice efforts. Over time, multidimensional
thinking can foster a culture of scholarly self-awareness that may facilitate
the commencement of a more collaborative and interwoven anti- subordination
discourse in the legal academy. Over time, the net result may be an enhanced
collective awareness of the multidimensional issues that inhere in every
community, discourse, and project. This awareness in turn should motivate
more effective coalitional antisubordination initiatives.
*811
II. AntiSubordination Purpose: AntiEssentialism in LatCrit Theory,
Community, and Praxis
To
be socially grounded, as well as socially relevant, LatCrit (and other
outsider discourses) must account for the multiple diversities within as
well as across traditionally subordinated non-White groups. Beyond doubt,
multidimensionality is one means of ensuring LatCrit theory's vitality
as one method of social justice resistance to the sociolegal ecology of
supremacy and subordination. However, in continuing and celebrating the
commitment to multidimensional projects, LatCrit theorists concomitantly
must devise the means of embracing multiple sources of "difference" in
self-critical and empowering ways--in ways that at once recognize differences
rooted in past, present, or prospective conditions and harness that recognition
to aid material antisubordination transformation. Sources of intra- and
intergroup difference must be more than mapped and named for the sake of
antiessentialism; difference must be put to work for social justice through
critical legal theory anchored to an antisubordination purpose. In our
view, an ever-present and always- pressing challenge for LatCrit and allied
"OutCrits" is the joinder of outsiders' postmodern discourse to a political
agenda of substantive social justice. To meet this challenge, LatCrit and
allied scholars must find a balance between the insights of antiessentialism
and the exigencies of social transformation.
One
challenge in the effort to strike such a balance flows from the regressive
co-optation of outgroup antiessentialism.
A danger already noted is the potential for--or actuality of--majoritarian
forces friendly with White and other forms of privilege to turn the complexities
and uncertainties adduced through outgroup antiessentialism against LatCrit
and RaceCrit theorists and our communities, and also to the detriment of
antisubordination goals.
Examples range from backlash academic discourse that *812 decries
critical analysis as "political correctness" to judicial proclamations
that squash affirmative action programs on the ground, effectively, that
they essentialize race. These and similar examples contort antiessentialism
in similar ways: if "race" and "identity" are socially constructed--if
all is multiplicitous, intersectional and diverse--then structural antidiscrimination
remedies are over-determined. This perversion of critical antiessentialism--indeed,
the general sociopolitical climate of these times--call for LatCrit and
other antisubordination scholars to distinguish between variants of "essentialism"--distinctions
fully congruent with LatCrit social justice principles and objectives.
In
the public discourse of cultural warfare, social backlash, and legal retrenchment,
majoritarian reclamation of in-group "rights" to economic preeminence and
social primacy has been successfully pursued through a deadly form of identity
politics that might be described as majoritarian, or in-group, essentialism.
In fact, the "culture wars" declared and waged during the past decade against
the nation's most vulnerable communities by majoritarian backlash politicians
and their (un)witting footsoldiers have been based on naked vows to "take
back" the country in the essentialized name of traditional, dominant forces.
This war has been pursued from coast to coast, against racial as well as
other "minority" communities, through the use of varied lawmaking devices
ranging from "popular" referenda to judicial rollbacks. In each instance,
majoritarian forces peddled essentialized appeals to homogenize majoritarian
self-interest and congeal majoritarian resentment of outgroup communities
that purportedly deprived majority-identified groups of their right to
the best social status and goods. In each instance, an essentialized sense
of majority identification underpinned the success of backlash lawmaking.
All this while the reactionary "political correctness" social police hiss
down progressive cries--or whispers--in the name of antiessentialist indignation
and righteousness. This Orwellian status quo thus enables majoritarian
identity politics, effectively practiced through majoritarian essentialism,
to reassert in-group privilege even while stigmatizing outgroup "essentialism"
as a form of resistance to in-group backlash.
*813
The consequence is that "identity" has remained intact as a basis for enjoying
the privileges of domination while becoming a taboo for rallying resistance
to subordination. This hypocritical approach to "identity politics" undercuts
the search for intergroup commonalities specifically as a platform for
social justice solidarity among outgroups, while at the same time valorizing
essentialist affinity among majority-identified in-groups. If permitted,
this hypocritical double standard could exploit for subordinationist purposes
LatCrits' antiessentialism.
The contemporary Orwellian status quo makes it imperative for LatCrits
regularly to revisit and refine the role of outgroup antiessentialism in
antisubordination discourse and praxis. In particular, this duplicitous
status quo makes it incumbent on LatCrit, RaceCrit, and allied OutCrit
scholars to clarify with more precision the forms of antiessentialism that
are conducive to antisubordination praxis and transformative theorizing.
To
begin with, LatCrit theory cannot revert to any form of pre-intersectional
quasi-essentialism that veils outgroup diversities and their sociolegal
significance in the conception of, and quest for, equality and equity.
But the practice of antiessentialism could benefit in particular moments
by strategic activations of quasi-essentialism among outgroups to harness
the power of identity and experience on behalf of the antisubordination
struggle. By "strategic quasi-essentialism" we thus mean a method of legal
scholarship and praxis that recognizes the coexistence--and politicized
juxtapositions--of essentialism and multidimensionality in public affairs,
and which strives toward critical coalitions that accommodate the complexities
of diversity and imperatives of solidarity among "minority" outgroups living
under a majoritarian unjust order.
The sort of outgroup quasi-essentialism that we embrace here is strategic
because it admits no romance with essentialized presumptions of homogeneity
or commitment to social justice transformation based on identity, instead
using commonalities of identity only as a point of departure for coalescing
new and *814 traditional outgroup antisubordination efforts in strategic
moments and substantive ways. This limited practice of essentialism is
qualified as "quasi" because it resists the "essentialism" it practices,
and it practices this "essentialism" only strategically. As part of a discourse
and vision anchored to antisubordination purpose, strategic quasi-essentialism
becomes another tool or technique that may assist at some points in LatCrit
theorizing, community-building, and even coalitional praxis.
To
be sure, strategic quasi-essentialism is no panacea to the troubles wrought
by backlash and other such ills. Like "interest convergence" politics,
strategic quasi-essentialism is a temporary and self-limiting enterprise.
It is, in fact, no more than a short-term catalyst for the mobilization
of communities under siege. Like all other tools of outsider scholars and
activists, strategic quasi-essentialism is merely one among many means
toward social justice struggle and transformation. As always, to sustain
outgroup antisubordination resistance in the longer run, a mutual and common
commitment to an expansively egalitarian transformation of law and society--rather
than "mere" coincidence of biosocial identity--must be shared and upheld.
This
longer-term reality is what requires outsider scholars to articulate a
vision of post-subordination society.
While history and experience inform contemporary socioeconomic realities,
the differences of the past and present are the context within which we
imagine, theorize, and act. While strategic quasi-essentialism may serve
momentary antisubordination purposes, a mutual commitment to a common vision
of an expansively egalitarian future--and an ongoing commitment to its
material attainment--are the only glue for long-term antiessentialist community-building
and sustained antisubordination activism.
Happily,
this Symposium manifests a resolutely antisubordination stance. Professor
Montoya's thorough critique of silence and its (mis)uses and (mis)interpretations
exudes a sharp antisubordination purpose. Professor Roberts' commentary
explicitly explores the complicated dynamics of silence to help advance
its antisubordination deployment in and through "resistance scholarship"--such
as LatCrit theory--while Professor Bender's commentary turns to language
law and policy to display and confront the "deteriorating *815 conditions
for progressive lawyering"
and to attract the attention of progressive Latina/o students toward an
education and, perhaps, a career in social justice lawyering. Similarly,
Professor Perez-Sanchez centers the socially and statutorily denigrated
"homosexual" in her analysis to expose and tranquilize Hispanic traditions
of homophobia and to promote sex/gender egalitarianism more generally.
In their two commentaries, Professors Kapur and Mahmud, as well as Professor
Kwan, push for thoroughly cross-cultural and transnational frameworks of
critical analysis and social activism to help bring into view the interconnectedness
of systems of subordination. Individually and as a Symposium, these texts
aptly demonstrate the substantive value and multifaceted functions of LatCrit
theory as antisubordination scholarship.
Individually
and as a Symposium, these texts likewise demonstrate the crucial joinder
of antiessentialism and antisubordination in LatCrit theory. In each instance,
the Symposium texts represent clear efforts to intervene on behalf of the
subordinated, the devalued, the marginalized among us. But, while so doing,
each Symposium author also (de)centers essentialized categories of law,
society, and dominant cultural understandings. In each instance, the Symposium
texts effectively practice antiessentialism to promote antisubordination.
Uniformly, the Symposium authors put under LatCrit pressure the normalized
categories and accompanying (mis)conceptions to which humans become acculturated--and
subservient--through coercively Euroheteropatriarchal ideologies, hierarchies,
and systems.
These
articles and commentaries thereby point to the substantive anchor for LatCrit
antiessentialism. This Symposium makes plain that critical analysis and
praxis, while requiring multidimensional frameworks, need also be grounded
in antisubordination purpose at all times and in all contexts. Antisubordination
principles and analysis, applied in critical and self-critical ways, provide
the substantive limits for and directions *816 of antiessentialism
in LatCrit theory, community, and praxis. Thus, antiessentialism is no
end unto itself; its utility is defined in relation to a contextual antisubordination
purpose. In LatCrit theory, community, and praxis, antisubordination ideally
always contexualizes and informs antiessentialism.
In
closing, this Introduction celebrates the continuation and advancement,
via this Symposium, of the LatCrit project as we enter the second half
of our first decade. As this Symposium well illustrates, this LatCrit project,
while a young and fragile experiment, continues to grow--to broaden and
deepen, as a discourse, community, and praxis. This growth continues to
evince a strong embrace and earnest practice of antisubordination and antiessentialism
through multidimensional analysis and critique. For this vitality and grounding,
we salute--and congratulate--the authors and editors who bring us this
enriching collection of new LatCrit texts.