"Authenticity" and Representational Agency

Last week we discussed how MARB attempts to trump popular renditions of Mexican American men and women through the appeal for inclusion through "whiteness" in The Squatter and the Don. In the video below, representational agency (the mechanism through which subaltern consent is granted, disavowed, or negotiated) gains it's force through the performance of Latino "authenticity," or, more specifically, the performance of Boricua racial and class "authenticity." This "authenticity" elides an exhausted but necessary question Spivak posited in another context, "Can the Subaltern Speak"?

Spivak, who took to task in this foundational essay the work of Foucault and Deleuze, noted how contemporary critical theory’s focus on the elucidation of power formations inadvertently reinscribes colonial domination by purporting to give the subaltern a voice in theory but not in practice. By requiring or suggesting that the dispossessed speak for themselves, the critic obscures her or his own imbrication in a type of knowledge production that ultimately asks the subaltern to reiterate how they have been oppressed. Spivak seems to be saying that knowledge production is neither innocent or disinterested. “Tell me how we conquered you?,” then, might be a more honest but ethically suspect question for the subaltern. This, of course, is not a disavowal of the possibility of radical left critique but merely its precondition. Spivak’s critique of Foucault and Deluze is hardly they are not committed to transformative politics, but rather that they fail to address their complicity in the very system they attempt to elucidate.

How can "representational agency" in this context help us understand MARB's consent and paradoxical disavowal of "the American 1848"? We will attempt to answer this question through analytical and analogical means. However, we will first start with the question's iteration in a very presentist context. The video below will serve as a starting point.



Keywords for MARB's Squatter and the Don:
Race
Nation
History
Gender
Capital