Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

84 reframing latin america
now have to their own past is, of course, part of the discovery of their own
ethnicity. They need to honor the hidden histories from which they come.
They need to understand the languages which they’ve been not taught to
speak. They need to understand and revalue the traditions and inheritances
of cultural expression and creativity. And in that sense, the past is not only
a position from which to speak, but it is also an absolutely necessary resource
in what one has to say. There is no way, in my view, in which those
elements of ethnicity that depend on understanding the past, understanding
one’s roots, can be done without.
But, on the other hand, there comes the play of difference. This is the recognition
that our relationship to that past is quite a complex one, we can’t
pluck it up out of where it was and simply restore it to ourselves. If you ask
my son, who is seventeen and who was born in London, where he comes
from, he cannot tell you he comes from Jamaica. Part of his identity is there,
but he has to discover that identity. He can’t just take it out of a suitcase
and plop it on the table and say “That’s mine.” It’s not an essence like that.
He has to learn to tell himself the story of his past. He has to interrogate
his own history, he has to relearn that part of him that has an investment
in that culture. For example, he’s learning wood sculpture, and in order to
do that he has had to discover the traditions of sculpturing of a society in
which he has never lived.
So the relationship of the kind of ethnicity I’m talking about to the past
is not a simple, essential one—it is a constructed one. It is constructed
in history, it is constructed politically in part. It is part of narrative. We
tell ourselves the stories of the parts of our roots in order to come into
contact, creatively, with it. So this new kind of ethnicity—the emergent
ethnicities—has a relationship to the past, but it is a relationship that is
partly through memory, partly through narrative, one that has to be recovered.
It is an act of cultural recovery.
Yet it is also an ethnicity that has to recognize its position in relation to
the importance of difference. It is an ethnicity that cannot deny the role of
difference in discovering itself [. . .].
We need a place to speak from, but we no longer speak about ethnicity in
a narrow and essentialist way.
That is the new ethnicity. It is a new conception of our identities because
it has not lost hold of the place and the ground from which we can speak,
yet it is no longer contained within that place as an essence. It wants to address
a much wider variety of experience. It is part of the enormous cultural
relativization of the entire globe that is the historical accomplishment—
horrendous as it has been in part—of the twentieth century. Those are the