| Interrogating the University Archive |
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Gregory Lee Cuéllar, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary
University Archives and the Representation of KnowledgeFor students, faculty, and the public, university archives represent a kind of obligatory passage point for legitimating the true meaning of human experience. They emerge not just as a value-neutral repository of facts, but as institutions that fashion histories. As Elisabeth Kaplan observes, “Archivists are major players in the business of identity politics. Archives appraise, collect, and preserve the props with which notions of identity are built” (Lowenthal, 200). In many instances, the unquestioned assumptions underpinning this process are that the non-Western “Other” has neither a sense of national history nor a historical consciousness from which a distinct identity can be shaped. Such assumptions can be traced back to the preeminent archive of comprehensive knowledge; the British Museum. For instance, in a late nineteenth century guide to the British Museum’s Ethnographical Gallery, wherein the continents exhibited were from Asia, Oceania, Africa, and America, the curator informs the public of the following:
Here, in the archive, the cultural productions of the savage non-Western “Other” are, in Tuhiwai Smith’s words, “dismissed as irrelevant, ignored, or rendered as the lunatic ravings of drunken old people” (Decolonizing Methodologies, 29). Hence, strategies for collection development in a university archive should involve an interrogation not only of archival texts, but also of archival processes that unfold within and are structured by sociopolitical relations, dominant intellectual frameworks, established codes, conventions, and values — which together work to constitute representational forms of power. Before archivally produced knowledge enters the classroom and scholarship, archivists, administrators, and faculty must identify those governing procedures within the university’s archives that create oppressive categories of arrangement, languages, and concepts of the “Other.” University archives, both as a physical space and as a collection of texts, require vigorous and constant scrutiny to expose and eliminate any potential “othering” mechanisms. If the university archive is the place in scholarship and research through which all other points must pass, can other forms of cultural memory be discovered, particularly for the universities situated in the American Southwest? Rather than just aspiring to ascertain rare printed texts, can the university archive affirm other aesthetic and cultural texts that lie outside of the purview of Western research value-standards? Although this may demand confronting strenuous intellectual issues, it behooves university archives to be attentive to the contested texts of the racialized “Other,” particularly those vernacular verbal genres linked to migration, exile, diaspora, and borderlands. To address these questions, a new interracial ethnic alliance needs to tell our myths of origin and our stories of victimization. These remain “the powerful imperative of a powerful form of resistance” (Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 35). Indeed, the voice of the “Other” is not heard in official archives, wherein certain forms are prioritized above others, but within “genealogies, within the landscape, within weavings and carvings, even within the personal names that many people carry” (107). In the period of the antebellum South, for example, Mark Anthony Neal reminds us that “black culture found expression in the slave quarters, in the church, and most notably and brilliantly in the field under the watchful eye of the overseer” (2). As a person of Mexican descent, I hear the interior voice of my meztiso-self in the speech genres of Mexican border culture. By listening to the cuentos, rezos, chistes, and border corridos, I allow, in Les Black’s words, “the out of place a sense of belonging” (xxix, 140). Thoroughly imbued with orality, the border poet takes precedence in shaping my Mexican religious-cultural identity. In Anzaldúa’s words, “These folk musicians and folk songs are our chief cultural myth-makers, and they — made — our — hard — lives — seem — bearable” (61). In other words, alongside the dateable records lie a specific mythopoetic-oral tradition that also informs, either consciously or unconsciously, how Latinos/as of the American Southwest shape their Mexican identity. This storytelling tradition is also expressed through visual artistic productions such as Mexican retablos and ex-votos and Chicano/a public art. Rather than satisfy the scientific rules governing self-identification, some Latinos/as make use of a geocultural instinct to give meaning to their identity. For the thousands of Japanese Americans confined to internment camps during World War II, religious belief, various dance forms, the playing of traditional musical instruments, and rock gardens became revived modes of cultural resistance. Gary Okihiro, a scholar of comparative ethnic studies, states the following:
Okihiro claims that this poetry records the barren landscape of camp life — the barbed wire fence, watchtowers, and sentries; the searchlights, fingerprinting, and cataloging; mass feeding; interrogations on loyalty-disloyalty; and a dull, regimented life (232). When the message of resistance inscribed in this poetry speaks to us, are we offered a new way of understanding cultural resistance, imprisonment, and colonization in the Bible? Indeed, the value of our contested stories lies not in their “exotic” otherness but in the ability to decolonize minds occupied by the colonizers’ various cultural presumptions and persuade those who occupy the Euro-center to allow for the existence of other, equally legitimate centers. As a Latino biblical critic of the United States-Mexico Borderlands, I avail myself of the wide methodological repertoire at work in the diverse ideology-critical approaches, variously adapting such methods from the standpoint of and toward the ends of Latino/a reality and experience. Nevertheless, what remains absent for me in dominant scholarship is a collective complicity in the invention, celebration, and dissemination of hegemonic discourses that deploy mechanisms of “otherness,” alterity, and exclusion. I am encouraged, however, that this ideological ruse has not gone unnoticed by other marginalized people of color in the guild of biblical studies within the United States and abroad. Indeed, those contributing to a joint counter-space in which the objective is to interrogate dominant concepts and those rummaging around the site of interpretation in search of constructions of “otherness” are the racialized ethnic writers of the book They Were All Together in One Place?: Toward Minority Biblical Criticism (Bailey, Randall C., et. al., eds. Society of Biblical Literature, 2009). Beyond just blurring the boundaries of hegemonic categories of race, this emerging interracial-ethnic coalition gives us a vigorous critic of the methodological limitations that result from the insularity of the scientific ethos of academic biblical studies. An interracial ethnic disciplinary alliance not only provides different ways of reading biblical texts, but also creates a site of resistance wherein meaning is collaboratively negotiated, so as to avoid falling prey to dominant mythology. A coalition focused on generating comparative studies of “migration, exile, and diaspora; border and borderlands between (nation-) states; minority and dominant groups; othering via ethnicization and racialization; the political economy of globalization” (Bailey, 30) can help move us to a stronger position from which to counteract the rhetorical and material attacks on scholars and students of color in the academy. Helpful to our joint task of criticism is what Juan Flores calls a “grassroots, vernacular, ‘from below’ approach.” For Flores, reading texts “from below” renders visible “the many diaspora experiences that diverge from those of the relatively privileged, entrepreneurial, or professional transnational connections that have tended to carry the greatest appeal in scholarly and journalistic coverage” (Flores, 25). Guiding this approach, adds Flores, is an irrevocable commitment to the subaltern and daily struggles of the poor and disenfranchised people, which, in turn, “allows for special insights into ongoing issues of racial identity and gender inequalities that are so often ignored or minimized in the grand narratives of transnational hegemony.” (Ibid). To dismiss texts “from below” conversely empowers texts “from above,” whereby the prevailing structure of cultural imposition and domination are reinforced (153). The interethnic alliance of the field is not, finally, without dangers. How do we listen to the voices of the racialized “Other” amid the risks of enacting symbolic and epistemic violence? How do we resist tendencies towards the development of orthodoxies and codified vocabulary? How might we avoid contributing to a form of intellectual imperialism in which superficial understandings of other cultures define debates about identity and politics? |
Gregory Lee Cuéllar has been named assistant professor of Old Testament at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, beginning in January 2011. Prior to this, he has served as curator and lecturer of rare books and manuscripts, curator and lecturer of Hispanic resources, and subject specialist of religious studies at the Cushing Memorial Library and Archives at Texas A & M University; adjunct professor at Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University; visiting professor of Old Testament at Seminario Metodista Juan Wesley in Monterrey, Mexico, and adjunct professor of Hebrew Bible at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. Cuéllar has authored Passages in the New World (Cushing Memorial Library Archives, 2006) and Voices of Marginality: Exile and Return in Second Isaiah 40–55 and the Mexican Immigrant Experience (Peter Lang Publishing, 2008), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. He has a forthcoming book titled Archival Criticism: The Interrogation of Contexts and Texts in Early Modern Biblical Criticism (Brill, 2012).