Racial Immanence. Marissa K. López
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a genre, zines demand reading that lingers, that focuses on process over product, on representational strategies rather than represented objects. Zines, as Stephen Duncombe explains, are “noncommercial, nonprofessional, small-circulation magazines,” which their creators produce, publish, and distribute by themselves (6). They are products of passion that “communicate the range, however wide or narrow, that makes up the personal interests of the publisher” (Duncombe 10). Zines are a means without end; nonnarrative, noncommercial, they are modes of creative self-expression requiring, according to Todd Honma, neither technical skill nor adherence to any particular ideology or aesthetic. Zines are often thought of as individual endeavors, but they can be, as Honma argues, important community-building tools that promote a “participatory culture, in which everyone is encouraged to contribute according to their own capacities towards a shared collective experience.” Terrill’s Homeboy Beautiful and Maricón Collective’s reissues function both ways, as individual expression that is then cultivated, continued, and circulated by and through a collective of artists, activists, and community members.
To read Homeboy Beautiful as a work of Chicanx literature, then, demands considering the zine not as a representation of queer chicanidad but as both archive and actant of a particular social movement. This mode of reading must be nonrepresentational while also recognizing that Chicanx texts often have real stakes that matter in the real world. In Racial Immanence I limn this contradiction with a way of reading built around how racialized bodies flicker between indexical and materialist understandings of language. Homeboy Beautiful, to illustrate, hovers, with words and images, between meaning and mattering, yet the zine’s investments in race and gender linger. It remains socially and politically aware, that is, but refuses to clearly signify. That refusal makes sense only if we read in a way that brings both text and the human body into the fleshy folds of the stuff of the world.
I do this in Racial Immanence by mediating a philosophical argument between object-oriented ontology (OOO) and new materialism, whose disagreements open a radical space in which it is possible to read literature by people of color for things besides representation. OOO insists on the reality of things that can be neither known nor seen, but it flattens the work of language and prevents readers from achieving any great textual insight. New materialist theories of language, on the other hand, greatly expand our textual imaginations but offer no way to appreciate the significance of chicanidad. In this introduction I represent these fields in the work of Graham Harman and Karen Barad, respectively. From their points of tension and overlap I draw the building blocks of my own method.
A cornerstone of my approach is to insist on the reality of race despite its lack of genetic basis.13 Omi and Winant do this as well, but Harman’s work makes possible a consideration of race beyond the bounds of human sociality, and Barad offers the tools for keeping race rooted in the material world. Things exist whether or not we know about them, says Harman, rejecting the notion that things that cannot be thought do not, for all intents and purposes, exist. In fact, Harman writes, “the vast majority of relations in the universe do not involve human beings” (Immaterialism 6). If we thought of race as one such relation, it might be possible to read a Chicanx text, for example, for the ways it consciously resisted all attempts to “know” it instead of expecting it to teach readers something about Mexican Americans. Harman calls this “a weird [as opposed to naïve] realism” in which things actively resist interpretation (“Hammer” 187). Harman sees this as a form of what he calls “withdrawal,” a denial of substantive connection between words, things, and reality. This keeps him from seeing texts as active agents in the world, however, and leads to his substituting language games for textual analysis (“Hammer” 201).
Karen Barad, on the other hand, with whom Harman takes explicit issue (Immaterialism 14, 16), postulates “intra-action” over “interaction” as a way of understanding the relationship between words and entities. “Why,” she asks, “do we think that the existence of relations requires relata?” (130). What are the political and metaphysical stakes, she wonders, of dissolving the discrete boundaries around words? “Discursive practices are not … linguistic representations,” Barad contends, thus reimagining language as an agential intra-action catalyzing the emergence of matter into time-limited discursive practices (139). Barad rejects Harman’s distinction between ontology and epistemology, arguing that knowledge is gained not through observation but through embodied presence, by being in the world.
Drawing on both Barad and Harman, but mindful of their significant differences, in Racial Immanence I read in a mode best described as “choratic.” Doing so, I extend Rebekah Sheldon’s generative work on “chora,” which Plato describes in the Timaeus as both the place in which and the stuff from which a supreme craftsman formed the universe. “Chora’s” status as both space and stuff has long puzzled philosophers.14 Sheldon’s contribution to this conversation is to deploy “choratic reading” as a strategy for discussing the “emergent property” of matter that works “in the gaps between its actants” but “slips the noose” of language (Sheldon 209). This is, at bottom, what I mean to evoke with “racial immanence,” a method of reading choratically that emphasizes form as both the matter and energy of text.
“Racial immanence,” which receives a fuller explication in my first chapter, entails understanding race as animating the infolding of matter that coalesces into the cultural production at hand, as both constituting and being constituted by text. Reconceived in this way, language, human bodies, and all the matter of the world become intra-actional performances. Homeboy Beautiful appears as enacting political struggle rather than representing politicized subjects. Reading representationally stakes political claims built around subjectivity, rights, and human agency. What is the impact on reading, then, if we, as Guzmán, León, Beltrán, and Connolly do, pursue a radically different understanding of politics as affective moments of lingering and potentiality in productive tension? This brings me to the question I pose in my introduction’s subtitle: what are we talking about when we talk about Chicanx literature?
In Racial Immanence I treat texts as things rather than objects, not as things that represent other things, but as things in and of themselves. Homeboy Beautiful, for instance, forces a reading of itself as a thing that enacts and performs political struggle without resolution; it is an event that asks us to broaden the scope of actions that constitute “reading,” and it embodies the kinds of resistance to neoliberal aesthetics that runs as a thread through my chapters. To read it and the various other things gathered within these pages, I take as my methodological starting point Bruno Latour’s challenge in “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?” to revivify criticism by shifting our attention away from matters of fact to matters of concern. “What if, ” Latour asks, “explanations resorting automatically to power, society, discourse had outlived their usefulness?” (229). What would it mean to read Chicanx literature, then, if not as verbally indexing the ways that oppressed social subjects experience power? Such a reading strategy requires thinking of literary texts not as reflective objects consumed by reflecting subjects, but as events in and of themselves that exist in and make the world.
I build readings that eschew a distinction between subjects and objects in favor of considering texts as “things” as Latour defines them: as either object, event, or place, as a “gathering” or an “issue” that launches a “multifarious inquiry” into the nature and motivations of a particular coming together. Homeboy Beautiful, to illustrate, does not represent actual queer Chicanxs from the 1970s. It deploys highly ironized stereotypes who sometimes appear in frame but sometimes, as in the case of “Homeboy Makeover” from issue 2, remain largely off-stage to indicate their status as figments of an Anglo-American imaginary. In the zine, queer Chicanx concerns linger in the province of text and drawing, awaiting their emergence into the photographic real, just as the broader queer political debates hover in the background of issue 2 as so many spray-painted slogans signaling a political future at which queer Chicanxs have not yet arrived and adumbrating a political present in which they are not fully seen. Their invisibility, though, is rendered not as disempowerment but as an effect of intra-communal struggles over the plurality of queer chicanidad reminiscent of Beltrán’s insistence on the impossibility of Latinx politics.
Homeboy Beautiful makes room for a queer Chicanx future that had not in 1978, and still has not as of this writing, arrived. In bringing