Read Machado Saéz's complete article in Latino Studies.
Machado Saéz, Elena. "Reconquista: Ilan Stavans and multiculturalist Latino/a discourse."Latino Studies. 7 (2009): 410–434.
Abstract
Ilan Stavans constructs a multiculturalist framework for understanding the US Latino/a experience. By reading The Hispanic Condition (1995) alongside Stavans’ discussions of the Latino/a literary canon in the introductions to his anthologies, New World (1997) and Lengua Fresca (Augenbraum and Stavans, 2006), and his articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education, I argue that this multiculturalist approach is based on an equation of culture with language. Through this linguistic formulation of Latinidad with the Spanish language as its defining facet, Stavans privileges a colonialist rendering of Latino/a history, tracing the ancestral lineage of Latino/as in terms of solely Western European culture. By valorizing Spanish colonization, Stavans glosses over sites of violence in order to highlight a linguistic inheritance and formulates
US Latino/a identity in opposition to American indigenous cultures. Uncovering the way in which Ilan Stavans positions the indigenous as Other in his multiculturalist approach to Latinidad is essential to understanding the colonialist and conservative underpinnings of how Stavans structures the Latino/a literary canon. I will consequently address how Latino/a Studies critics have wrestled with Stavans’ influence on the field and the ways in which Stavans’ vision of US Latino/a Studies resembles or reflects its institutional orientation and disciplinary locations.
About the Author
Elena Machado Saéz is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Florida Atlantic University. She is the coauthor of The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Machado Saéz has also published articles on Caribbean and US Latino/a literatures in journals such as Anthurium, MELUS, Phoebe, Sargasso and Small Axe. Her current book project focuses on contemporary historical fiction by Caribbean diasporic writers, including Julia Alvarez, Junot Dıáz, Cristina Garcia and Ana Menéndez.
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