Going in new directions sometimes requires returning to old destinations, and covering new ground may mean revisiting well-trodden areas. My work argues for the need to make genre a part of any discussion of Chicana writing, and it does so by exploring perhaps the most iconic text in the field, Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. A text that is foundational, but certainly not new, Borderlands may seem like a starting point for the history of Chicana literature but not the most current cite of innovative offerings. Yet, a renewed understanding of legacy can perhaps propel our current understanding of the field.
This piece is part of a larger project exploring genre matters in the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Emma Pérez, and is the result of study that began years ago when my first introduction to these writers caused me to notice that they were each in their own ways making important interventions in genre. At the time, there were more observations than insight and more questions than answers. I lacked the language to explain what I was seeing as well as the necessary genre knowledge to point out what made their works distinct. I had only the conviction that these authors were saying important things in new ways. That conviction led me on a journey to learn more about genre in order to explain the incredible innovation I was seeing. What I found was a rich legacy of genre theory dating back to Aristotle, as well as important developments in modern genre theory that offer context and insight into readings of Chicana literature. However, those connections are not currently being made. With the privilege of institutional centrality, genre studies tends not to look beyond mainstream literature, to its detriment. Because although ignoring genre does limit the possible insights gleaned from Chicana literature, ignoring Chicana literature, as genre studies has, means missing some of the most significant generic innovations in recent decades.
Bridging genre studies with Chicana literature, this piece traces metaphors of miscegenation in three central areas: throughout genre history, in Jacques Derrida’s important work “The Law of Genre,” and in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera in order to prove that Anzaldúa’s generic innovations are formal support for her theoretical concepts and, in so doing, counters genre’s essentialist logic. The logic of racial purity that Anzaldúa eschews is functionally similar to the laws of genre purity her writing defies. Anzaldúa’s text rejects such notions of pure essence and instead advocates a perspective of plentitude and inclusion described as mestiza consciousness. Functionally, genre in Borderlands becomes the performance of Anzaldúa’s project. As she deconstructs binary notions of race, language, identity, and geography, among others, Anzaldúa deconstructs genre. Focusing on genre in Borderlands is a strategic corrective to the unfortunate tendency whereby formal and aesthetic qualities are overlooked when examining texts authored by women and people of color. Reading Borderlands with an attentiveness to genre offers new insights in the ways Anzaldúa, and perhaps Chicana authors more broadly, participate in the social struggle for meaning at the level of discourse.
Why Genre Matters
While genre has become an essential part of my thinking about Chicana literature, for some the relevance of genre to a discussion of it might be in question. However, there are several important reasons why genre is relevant. First, the literature itself prompts genre questions through its revolutionary and unique engagement with itself. Whether they, like Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, mix traits of various genres in the space of a single text creating hybrid forms and prompting new genre classifications, or they challenge existing genres such as Sandra Cisneros’ House on Mango Street which re-imagines the Bildungsroman from a Chicana feminist perspective, mixing poetic expression with cuentos. Still others like Emma Pérez experiment with multiple genres across their entire body of work while still conforming to generic demands within individual texts, perhaps inadvertently, demonstrating the constraints of genre and the impressive power of academic disciplines to shape texts. Put differently, genre analysis matters to Chicana literature because of their innovative performance of genre.
Secondly, genre matters because it is a privileged area of literary study, an analytical framework rarely applied to minority literatures. The discussion of genre, the study of form in literature, is central, well-established, and occupies a position of power. According to Tzvetan Todorov in Genres in Discourse, genre “constitute[s] a privileged object that may well deserve to be the principle figure of literary studies” (20). While making genre the principle figure of literary studies as Todorov suggests may be unnecessary, it is absolutely necessary that genre play a role in any discussion of Chicana literature. All too often, the only attention paid to Chicana literature is to the way it provides a kind of social commentary. 1 Innovative style is overlooked. The difference is important. To claim that in its content Chicana literature critiques dominant ideology is altogether different from claiming that not only in content but in its revolutionary form Chicana literature challenges dominant discourse. To be clear, the goal is not to focus on form while ignoring content. Rather, the goal is to bring the study of genre alongside that of the already existing understanding of content, gaining new methodologies for analysis and garnering greater insights.
Thirdly, and finally, genre matters because as John Frow in his book Genre: The New Critical Idiom writes, “it [genre] is central to human meaning-making and to the social struggle over meaning” (20). To claim Chicanas are engaged in a social struggle over meaning is unlikely to spark controversy. Their writings are unambiguously engaged, blending art and activism. In fact, one could point to multiple examples of the ways Chicanas have challenged dominant culture and called for changes within their own communities. Yet, the struggle is not only about policy and practices, it extends to the level of meaning. Perhaps one of the clearest examples of this participation is the long tradition of Chicana feminist writers and artists revising the myths shaping cultural notions of femininity. Across mediums of art, poetry, and fiction, as well as in historical and theoretical pieces, Chicanas have sought to recuperate figures such as La Virgen de Guadalupe, 2 La Llorona, 3 and Malinche, 4 understanding that myths are more than narratives of cultural significance—they shape a community’s understanding of its past and its expectations for current behavior, as well as its beliefs in future possibilities. Chicanas’ engagement in the struggle over meaning-making could be illustrated in a variety of ways; revisionist myth-making is merely one of many. What is perhaps less obvious is how genre might be involved in that struggle.
Modern Genre Theory
To understand the role of genre in meaning-making requires a shift in our thinking about it. Traditionally, the tendency is to think of genre, primarily or exclusively, in terms of its classificatory function. While this approach is quite common and rooted in a legacy dating back to Aristotle, focusing exclusively on genre’s classificatory work is ultimately reductive. Modern genre theory offers an expansive and more dynamic understanding of genre that acknowledges genre’s role in placing texts within categories, but also seeks to understand genre as part of creative and interpretive processes, where it both produces and constrains meaning (Frow 2). Genre theory spans centuries, even millennia, seemingly literature’s constant companion. Modern genre theory by comparison is more recent, including developments from the mid-nineteenth century until now.
For modern genre theorists, the transition from traditional genre understandings to new ones entails the declining prominence of genre classification. Genre, according to Thomas Beebee in his work The Ideology of Genre, “is only secondarily an academic enterprise and a matter for literary scholarship. Primarily, genre is the precondition for the creation and the reading of texts” (250). Beebee’s citing genre as a precondition for creation and reading texts builds off work by other genre scholars who have claimed it as integral to interpretation. Hans Robert Jauss famously described genre as providing a “horizon of expectation,” highlighting the way genre knowledge precedes the reading of a text and impacts, in varying degrees, interpretation (131). E. D. Hirsch Jr. in Validity in Interpretation sees meaning not as dependent on but inseparable from genre, writing “all understanding of verbal meaning is necessarily genre-bound” (76). Modern genre theory, therefore, understands genre as having a more powerful role in creative and interpretive processes.
Additionally, while genre’s power is considered more pervasive and diffuse now, modern genre theorists are careful to denaturalize genre. No longer are genres thought of as natural essences, deviating from a tradition originating with Aristotle’s work in Poetics and steadily continuing through the early twentieth century. As Adena Rosmarin in The Power of Genre has written, genre is best thought of as “pragmatic rather than natural, as defined rather than found, and as used rather than described” (25). For Rosmarin, genre is “the most powerful explanatory tool available to the literary critic,” allowing metaphoric readings of one text in the light of another; genre is utilitarian tool, not a timeless truth of texts (39). This shift is perhaps most significant because it moves genre from a fixed essence to an element of textuality, which in turn transitions genre analysis from reading to discover to what genre a text “belongs,” to reading for “an awareness of how the subtle ties of texts are generically formed and governed” (Frow 101).
In correlation to its denaturalizing genre, modern genre theory acknowledges the constructed nature of genre and its embeddedness in culture. As Frow has claimed, “Genres have no essence: they have historically changing values” (134). When society shifts, those changes are felt even in genre. 5 For Todorov, genre is of interest to historians and ethnographers because “each epoch has its own system of genres, which stands in some relation to the dominant ideology, and so on. Like any other institution, genres bring to light the constitutive features of the society to which they belong” (emphasis added 19). Bahktin, although taking a different approach from Todorov, also points to genre as being a socially-constructed, culturally-embedded system of meaning. Bahktin describes the process of learning genre as akin to the process of learning language, gaining mastery of structure and composition “not from dictionaries and grammars” but from the everyday speech we hear and then replicate (90). By comparing genre acquisition to language acquisition, Bahktin makes genre a matter of cultural fluency. What connects Todorov, and Bahktin is their observations that genre is enmeshed in its cultural context and is not exempt from ideological influences. In fact, because genre is intertwined in the cultural context that births it, studying genre can reveal cultural values embedded in a seemingly neutral system of categorization. As Rosmarin has claimed, genre designations reveal less about textual traits than they do about what literary traits are considered valuable (39).
What may be modern genre theory’s most useful contribution is the way it makes genre’s role in creative and interpretive processes visible. This is not to say that genre was invisible in traditional genre theory, far from it. It was visible as categories and formal characteristics, but invisible in its shaping of the creative process and framing interpretations. For example, when reading (and interpreting), we import what we know of genre rules from our education and previous experience, and those rules tell us how to read a text. A sentence in a poem is read far differently than a sentence in a novel, or further still, words on a billboard. This difference in reading is a difference of genre. Simply knowing the genre of a text provides the reader with considerable information. Significantly, reading genre has traditionally been an unconscious process and therefore largely invisible, with much interpretation dependent on information provided by genre, seemingly without our knowledge. Frow describes the murky relationship between genre and interpretation, claiming the genre framework constitutes “the unsaid of texts,” and provides a network of information “which lies latent in a shadowy region from which we draw it as we need it” (83). Further, this shadowy information is “information that we may not know we know” and which is “not directly available for scrutiny” (83). Frow, along with other modern genre scholars, points to the unconscious, invisible qualities of genre at its most powerful. As Rosalie Colie has suggested, so much of genre boundaries are already understood that “a great deal need not be said about them,” and Frow, commenting on Colie’s statement adds, “To speak of genre is to speak of what need not be said because it is already so forcefully presupposed” (cited in Frow 93).
The invisibility of genre in meaning making is precisely what makes Anzaldúa’s writing in Borderlands all the more important. She makes genre an explicit part of semiosis. By transgressing and transforming genre, Anzaldúa, and others, invite their readers to engage on a level deeper than content and consider the multiple forces shaping culture, identity, and voice.
Tracing Metaphors of Miscegenation
In order to understand Anzaldúa’s monumental work to counteract the millennia’s long racial logic embedded in genre thinking, it is necessary to place Borderlands within a context of genre discourse. By tracing metaphors of miscegenation through genre history, Derrida’s “The Law of Genre” and ultimately Borderlands, Anzaldúa’s project becomes newly impressive, illustrating the need to apply genre analysis to Chicana literature.
Genre History
In looking at the history of genre theory, there is a clear trajectory, beginning with a belief in essence and emerging in more recent thinking about genre as historically bound expectations of and associations with a text. Classical understandings of genre begin with Plato and were developed by Aristotle. It is in Aristotle’s Poetics that he famously designates three genres of poetry: epic, lyric, and drama. His clarity and descriptive approach have appealed to and influenced scholars and readers for more than two thousand years, and yet it is the legacy of what I am designating “genre essentialism” that is most significant. Writing in Poetics, Aristotle describes his project as follows: “I propose to treat of Poetry in itself and of its various kinds, noting the essential quality of each” (1). Genre theory begins with Aristotle asserting genre essentialism, that texts do contain specific, discrete qualities which make them recognizably different from each other. Genre essentialism becomes the abiding trait of genre discourse, only recently being called into question by modern genre scholars in the last decades of the twentieth century. Aristotle’s legacy and the impact of genre essentialism cannot be overstated.
Writing three centuries after Aristotle, Greek philosopher Horace further entrenches the authority of the Aristotelian approach by linking genre essentialism with notions of...