A Critical Review of Huntington and Saldivar: Using Culture to Claim Power and Representation
By Oscar Medina
In this paper I discuss how Samuel P. Huntington and Jose David Saldivar use the concept of culture in their academic work. I argue that both scholars use culture to advance their concerns about power and representation. First, I summarize Huntington and Saldivar’s main arguments. Secondly, I provide a working definition of culture from a cultural studies perspective. Thirdly, I discuss and examine how Huntington and Saldivar conceptualize and use culture as critical tool. Lastly, I argue that culture is used differently and similarly to advance both authors’ agendas: a cultural politics of power and representation is present throughout their work. My unit of analysis is at the cultural sphere, particularly paying close attention to the author’s writing, discussion and perceptions of culture.
Summary of Huntington’s Work
In The Hispanic Challenge (2004) by Samuel P. Huntington, professor at Harvard University in the Department of Government, Huntington writes how Hispanic immigrants pose a major threat to American culture. Huntington uses Anglo-Protestant culture to claim the foundation of the United States. He particularly emphasizes Anglo-Protestant culture to push his rhetorical claim that Hispanics are causing a “cultural division” among white Anglos and Latinos, a division that is replacing the black-white cultural binary. Huntington is explicitly concerned with American identity and culture. He defensively frames his argument to force his readers to question the historical and present U.S. culture and identity. Huntington states, “will the United States remain a country with a single national language and a core Anglo-Protestant culture” (32)? Anglo-Protestant culture, in Huntington’s view is the national identity of the U.S. Furthermore, a cultural identity under attack by the influx of Latin American immigrants, whom fail to assimilate to the Anglo-Protestant language and culture. Huntington writes, the “most serious challenge to America’s traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially from Mexico” (32). Not only does Huntington warn that Hispanics are a cultural threat to U.S. national identity but also warns of the political threat that may occur if Latino enclaves prevail. Huntington argues, “…Spanish-speaking communit[ies] with economic and political resources sufficient to sustain its Hispanic identity apart from the national identity of other Americans [may] influence U.S. politics, government, and society” (43). Comparing Cuban immigrants in Miami to Mexicans immigrants in the Los Angeles, Huntington forecasts a warning of a similar trend that may shift the cultural politics and government in the Southwest.
Summary of Saldivar’s Work
In Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (1997), postcolonial, literary and cultural critic Jose David Saldivar exposes U.S.- Mexico borderland culture through critical reviews of different texts such as novels, short stories, corridos, poems, autoethnographies, hip-hop and punk music, paintings and performance arts. In doing so, Salidvar claims to challenge U.S. nationalism and American culture. His interest in challenging U.S. nationalism and British and American cultural studies, in particular stems from a systemic exclusion of Chicana/o borderland experiences in the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies. In his work, Salidvar provides critical accounts of the U.S. – Mexico borderlands to disrupt the mainstream cultural narratives of what he calls the “tranfrontera contact zone,” a geopolitical border zone. The U.S. – Mexico borderlands is the space, according to Salidvar, where the subaltern produce cultural meaning of their lived experiences based on their material conditions (13). Saldivar is primarily concerned with disrupting the nation-state paradigm to include and represent a hybrid Chicana/o U.S. - Mexico borderland culture in the academic interdisciplinary field of cultural studies.
What is Culture and Cultural Studies?
Culture is often used loosely and undefined. The concept of culture evolved from the western academic discipline of anthropology. Today, in practically every academic discipline, culture is a sub theme or topic used to differentiate linguistic and social entities. Culture is commonly used to represent different linguistic and social practices. Moving away from a static anthropological definition of culture, cultural studies considers power and meaning as an intersection to the concept of culture. Culture enables different ways of talking about human activity. Culture is a terrain of struggle and the study of culture is a zone of contestation over meaning. In cultural studies, culture is the production and exchange of meanings that are centered on issues of power, politics and social change. Huntington and Saldivar use culture as their framework to write about Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, Chicana/os and Anglos. I use the definition of culture from cultural studies to examine how Huntington and Salidvar use culture in their academic texts.
Cultural Politics
Cultural politics is concerned with the contestation over the meaning and resources of culture. For example, Huntington uses a nation-state language to preserve the meaning of Anglo-Protestant culture. Cultural politics produces new languages that have social consequences. In other words, cultural politics is about the power to name, to represent common sense, to create knowledge, and to represent the legitimate social world. For example, Huntington’s work ties Anglo-Protestant culture to U.S. national identity. Huntington’s cultural politics is the practice of hegemony. Gramsci concept of hegemony, in cultural studies helps describe how a ruling class exercises social authority and leadership over subordinate classes. According to Gramsci, hegemony is achieved through the wining of consent. Huntington’s work as a cultural political text, attempts to win the consent of his readers in order to preserve the power of Anglo-Protestant culture as an ideology that sustains the nation-state paradigm.
Cultural Policy
Cultural policy seeks to manage and organize the production of cultural power. Huntington’s argument is one of cultural policy, a set of attempts that try to regulate and administer the production of culture and practices. Huntington is producing cultural policy by defining what is Anglo-Protestant culture to defend the nation-state. Saldivar, too, is producing cultural policy. However, Saldivar’s cultural policy re-imagines the nation-state to acknowledge a transnational borderland culture.
Analyses of Saldivar’s use of Culture
How does Salidvar use and define culture? Using the cultural studies language of hybridity, subjectivity, discursive formation and postcoloniality, Saldivar’s definition of culture is informed by Raymond Williams, a Welsh academic and cultural critic. Saldivar borrows from Williams’ definition of culture to propose that culture represents “a whole way of [hegemonic] life [in struggle], material, intellectual and spiritual” (11). Saldivar adds the concepts of hegemony and struggle, two key concepts that derive from the works of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian social theorist that profoundly influenced cultural studies. Because cultural studies is concerned with the process of making, sustaining, and reproducing emergent meanings and practices, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony describes how subordinate populations consent to authoritative structures of power, like those who control and produce popular culture. Saldivar proclaims that cultural studies should encompass the “everyday” and “should focus on the lived experiences and struggles of people” (21). For Salidvar, culture is a terrain of struggle.
Saldivar analyzes Mexican and Chicano popular culture such as norteño music of Los Tigres del Norte to demonstrate how a text (language) challenges the uneven power relations between national entities and advances an argument of transnational struggle (14). Saldivar views culture as fluid and subjective. He does not privilege one culture over another. Using the language of cultural studies, Saldivar suggest that the U.S. – Mexico borderlands is a site of transnational struggle. He is critical of the way in which culture is commonly used by the nation-state to construct borders and boundaries. Salidvar considers his academic work to be an interculturalist paradigm that challenges the common use of culture by that nation-state. Saldivar proposes hybrid cultural identities that are shaped and reshaped through crossing boundaries and blurring imagined communities and languages. For example, Chicanas and Chicanos are engaged in this process by making and remaking their identities. His notion of culture is not fixed, static but rather always in transit. In other words, identities are produced and reproduced on the bases of material and geopolitical conditions.
Analysis of Huntington’s use of Culture
How does Huntington use and define culture? Huntington posits that “America was created by 17th and 18th century settlers who were overwhelmingly white, British and Protestant.” He continues, “their values, institutions and culture provided the foundation for and shaped the development of the United States in the following centuries”(31). Essentially, Huntington argues that white protestant culture is the foundation of the U.S. Here, I am not interested in discussing if this is true or not, rather I’m interested in how Huntington conceptualizes his use of Anglo-Protestant culture. Huntington’s views Anglo-Protestantism as an essential culture, static and monolithic. He conceives Anglo-Protestant culture as a superior objective entity. He proclaims that Anglo-Protestant culture must organize the nation state identity because of threat that Mexicanos pose. His cultural politics are strictly concerned with challenging biculturalism and bilingualism. Huntington uses culture to defend the imperialist nation-state rhetoric. In fact, Huntington does not separate Anglo culture from the nation-state; he sees culture and the state interlocked and part of a nation-state identity. He conceives culture as homogenous. Huntington makes no effort to problematize “Anglo-Protestant culture,” rather he envisions culture as an identity with superior values that founded the U.S. Despite his monologue narrative of Anglo-Protestant culture, his work delivers a strong empowering message to whites in positions of power. He manages to convey his message to the academic and policy arenas. Huntington positions the Anglo-Protestant culture above others.
How does Huntington and Saldivar use culture similarly and differently?
Both succeed in using culture to advance their cultural political agendas. Although it may appear that Huntington is writing in defense of the nation-state and concerned with the distribution of social resources, he manages to defend and advocate white nativism through his weak conception of Anglo-Protestant culture. Saldivar too successfully uses culture to mark a borderlands culture within U.S. cultural imperialism.
Huntington and Saldivar are in a theoretical dialogue. While Saldivar re-imagines borderlands, Huntington reinforces the ideology of borders. Huntington defends Anglo-Protestant culture, while Saldivar is on an intellectual journey to illuminate cultural subjectivities and intercultural identities that break away from the nation-state. Indeed, these two individuals conceive culture in their own terms, but nonetheless, are concerned about cultural power and representation.
Concluding Thoughts
To conclude, both scholars use culture to claim power and representation. Huntington is concerned with not only maintaining Anglo-Protestant culture at the core of U.S. identity, but also in sustaining U.S. cultural power and representation. Huntington does not interrogate the changing Anglo-Protestant culture. His nativist ideology is no different from 18th and 19th century Anglo-Protestants who believed they were a superior race destine by god to control and govern. Huntington uses culture in a uncritical modern fashion to maintain the state apparatus. In other words, he converges the theoretical relations of culture and the state to explain what he considers a social threat to U.S. society.
While Huntington advances his notion of Anlgo-Protestant culture, Saldivar too advances his conception of U.S-Mexico borderland culture. Salidvar, on the contrary, views culture and society through a postmodern lens that attempts to disrupt the monolithic cultural perception of the U.S. - Mexico borderlands. Saldivar elaborates the importance of border experiences through a critical assessment of Chicano literature, and art. Saldivar uses the venue of cultural studies to include lived border experiences of Mexicanos, Mexican-Americans and Chicanos. Lived experiences of the borderlands are important because they map meanings of self-representations in the field of cultural studies. More importantly, lived experiences are a fundamental result of the material conditions. Saldivar succeeds in exposing U.S. cultural imperialism and remaps meaning to the field of cultural studies by including a critical dialogue of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
In this paper I have discussed how Huntington and Salidvar conceptualize culture in their work. I have illustrated how Huntington conceptualizes Anglo-Protestant culture to advance the nation-state while Saldivar conceptualizes borderlands culture to challenge the nation-state. The problem with Huntington’s use of culture is his fixed perception of Anglo-Protestant culture. He uses culture uncritically to defend Anglo-Protestant culture as if it was one identity represents the entire culture. Huntington uses culture to reaffirm Anglo-Protestant cultural power and representation in the nation-state. Salidvar uses culture to disrupt the nation-state. He particularly affirms a borderlands culture in a transnational paradigm. For Salidvar, the borderland culture is in constant movement. Using culture, Saldivar is able to claim space, identity and power. Both scholars manage to use culture to claim power and representation.
Work Cited
Huntington, Samuel P. (2004) The Hispanic Challenge. In Foreign Policy, March/April 2004
Issue. Washington, DC.
Saldivar, José David (1997) Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. University
of California Press. Berkeley, CA.
In this paper I discuss how Samuel P. Huntington and Jose David Saldivar use the concept of culture in their academic work. I argue that both scholars use culture to advance their concerns about power and representation. First, I summarize Huntington and Saldivar’s main arguments. Secondly, I provide a working definition of culture from a cultural studies perspective. Thirdly, I discuss and examine how Huntington and Saldivar conceptualize and use culture as critical tool. Lastly, I argue that culture is used differently and similarly to advance both authors’ agendas: a cultural politics of power and representation is present throughout their work. My unit of analysis is at the cultural sphere, particularly paying close attention to the author’s writing, discussion and perceptions of culture.
Summary of Huntington’s Work
In The Hispanic Challenge (2004) by Samuel P. Huntington, professor at Harvard University in the Department of Government, Huntington writes how Hispanic immigrants pose a major threat to American culture. Huntington uses Anglo-Protestant culture to claim the foundation of the United States. He particularly emphasizes Anglo-Protestant culture to push his rhetorical claim that Hispanics are causing a “cultural division” among white Anglos and Latinos, a division that is replacing the black-white cultural binary. Huntington is explicitly concerned with American identity and culture. He defensively frames his argument to force his readers to question the historical and present U.S. culture and identity. Huntington states, “will the United States remain a country with a single national language and a core Anglo-Protestant culture” (32)? Anglo-Protestant culture, in Huntington’s view is the national identity of the U.S. Furthermore, a cultural identity under attack by the influx of Latin American immigrants, whom fail to assimilate to the Anglo-Protestant language and culture. Huntington writes, the “most serious challenge to America’s traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially from Mexico” (32). Not only does Huntington warn that Hispanics are a cultural threat to U.S. national identity but also warns of the political threat that may occur if Latino enclaves prevail. Huntington argues, “…Spanish-speaking communit[ies] with economic and political resources sufficient to sustain its Hispanic identity apart from the national identity of other Americans [may] influence U.S. politics, government, and society” (43). Comparing Cuban immigrants in Miami to Mexicans immigrants in the Los Angeles, Huntington forecasts a warning of a similar trend that may shift the cultural politics and government in the Southwest.
Summary of Saldivar’s Work
In Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (1997), postcolonial, literary and cultural critic Jose David Saldivar exposes U.S.- Mexico borderland culture through critical reviews of different texts such as novels, short stories, corridos, poems, autoethnographies, hip-hop and punk music, paintings and performance arts. In doing so, Salidvar claims to challenge U.S. nationalism and American culture. His interest in challenging U.S. nationalism and British and American cultural studies, in particular stems from a systemic exclusion of Chicana/o borderland experiences in the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies. In his work, Salidvar provides critical accounts of the U.S. – Mexico borderlands to disrupt the mainstream cultural narratives of what he calls the “tranfrontera contact zone,” a geopolitical border zone. The U.S. – Mexico borderlands is the space, according to Salidvar, where the subaltern produce cultural meaning of their lived experiences based on their material conditions (13). Saldivar is primarily concerned with disrupting the nation-state paradigm to include and represent a hybrid Chicana/o U.S. - Mexico borderland culture in the academic interdisciplinary field of cultural studies.
What is Culture and Cultural Studies?
Culture is often used loosely and undefined. The concept of culture evolved from the western academic discipline of anthropology. Today, in practically every academic discipline, culture is a sub theme or topic used to differentiate linguistic and social entities. Culture is commonly used to represent different linguistic and social practices. Moving away from a static anthropological definition of culture, cultural studies considers power and meaning as an intersection to the concept of culture. Culture enables different ways of talking about human activity. Culture is a terrain of struggle and the study of culture is a zone of contestation over meaning. In cultural studies, culture is the production and exchange of meanings that are centered on issues of power, politics and social change. Huntington and Saldivar use culture as their framework to write about Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, Chicana/os and Anglos. I use the definition of culture from cultural studies to examine how Huntington and Salidvar use culture in their academic texts.
Cultural Politics
Cultural politics is concerned with the contestation over the meaning and resources of culture. For example, Huntington uses a nation-state language to preserve the meaning of Anglo-Protestant culture. Cultural politics produces new languages that have social consequences. In other words, cultural politics is about the power to name, to represent common sense, to create knowledge, and to represent the legitimate social world. For example, Huntington’s work ties Anglo-Protestant culture to U.S. national identity. Huntington’s cultural politics is the practice of hegemony. Gramsci concept of hegemony, in cultural studies helps describe how a ruling class exercises social authority and leadership over subordinate classes. According to Gramsci, hegemony is achieved through the wining of consent. Huntington’s work as a cultural political text, attempts to win the consent of his readers in order to preserve the power of Anglo-Protestant culture as an ideology that sustains the nation-state paradigm.
Cultural Policy
Cultural policy seeks to manage and organize the production of cultural power. Huntington’s argument is one of cultural policy, a set of attempts that try to regulate and administer the production of culture and practices. Huntington is producing cultural policy by defining what is Anglo-Protestant culture to defend the nation-state. Saldivar, too, is producing cultural policy. However, Saldivar’s cultural policy re-imagines the nation-state to acknowledge a transnational borderland culture.
Analyses of Saldivar’s use of Culture
How does Salidvar use and define culture? Using the cultural studies language of hybridity, subjectivity, discursive formation and postcoloniality, Saldivar’s definition of culture is informed by Raymond Williams, a Welsh academic and cultural critic. Saldivar borrows from Williams’ definition of culture to propose that culture represents “a whole way of [hegemonic] life [in struggle], material, intellectual and spiritual” (11). Saldivar adds the concepts of hegemony and struggle, two key concepts that derive from the works of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian social theorist that profoundly influenced cultural studies. Because cultural studies is concerned with the process of making, sustaining, and reproducing emergent meanings and practices, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony describes how subordinate populations consent to authoritative structures of power, like those who control and produce popular culture. Saldivar proclaims that cultural studies should encompass the “everyday” and “should focus on the lived experiences and struggles of people” (21). For Salidvar, culture is a terrain of struggle.
Saldivar analyzes Mexican and Chicano popular culture such as norteño music of Los Tigres del Norte to demonstrate how a text (language) challenges the uneven power relations between national entities and advances an argument of transnational struggle (14). Saldivar views culture as fluid and subjective. He does not privilege one culture over another. Using the language of cultural studies, Saldivar suggest that the U.S. – Mexico borderlands is a site of transnational struggle. He is critical of the way in which culture is commonly used by the nation-state to construct borders and boundaries. Salidvar considers his academic work to be an interculturalist paradigm that challenges the common use of culture by that nation-state. Saldivar proposes hybrid cultural identities that are shaped and reshaped through crossing boundaries and blurring imagined communities and languages. For example, Chicanas and Chicanos are engaged in this process by making and remaking their identities. His notion of culture is not fixed, static but rather always in transit. In other words, identities are produced and reproduced on the bases of material and geopolitical conditions.
Analysis of Huntington’s use of Culture
How does Huntington use and define culture? Huntington posits that “America was created by 17th and 18th century settlers who were overwhelmingly white, British and Protestant.” He continues, “their values, institutions and culture provided the foundation for and shaped the development of the United States in the following centuries”(31). Essentially, Huntington argues that white protestant culture is the foundation of the U.S. Here, I am not interested in discussing if this is true or not, rather I’m interested in how Huntington conceptualizes his use of Anglo-Protestant culture. Huntington’s views Anglo-Protestantism as an essential culture, static and monolithic. He conceives Anglo-Protestant culture as a superior objective entity. He proclaims that Anglo-Protestant culture must organize the nation state identity because of threat that Mexicanos pose. His cultural politics are strictly concerned with challenging biculturalism and bilingualism. Huntington uses culture to defend the imperialist nation-state rhetoric. In fact, Huntington does not separate Anglo culture from the nation-state; he sees culture and the state interlocked and part of a nation-state identity. He conceives culture as homogenous. Huntington makes no effort to problematize “Anglo-Protestant culture,” rather he envisions culture as an identity with superior values that founded the U.S. Despite his monologue narrative of Anglo-Protestant culture, his work delivers a strong empowering message to whites in positions of power. He manages to convey his message to the academic and policy arenas. Huntington positions the Anglo-Protestant culture above others.
How does Huntington and Saldivar use culture similarly and differently?
Both succeed in using culture to advance their cultural political agendas. Although it may appear that Huntington is writing in defense of the nation-state and concerned with the distribution of social resources, he manages to defend and advocate white nativism through his weak conception of Anglo-Protestant culture. Saldivar too successfully uses culture to mark a borderlands culture within U.S. cultural imperialism.
Huntington and Saldivar are in a theoretical dialogue. While Saldivar re-imagines borderlands, Huntington reinforces the ideology of borders. Huntington defends Anglo-Protestant culture, while Saldivar is on an intellectual journey to illuminate cultural subjectivities and intercultural identities that break away from the nation-state. Indeed, these two individuals conceive culture in their own terms, but nonetheless, are concerned about cultural power and representation.
Concluding Thoughts
To conclude, both scholars use culture to claim power and representation. Huntington is concerned with not only maintaining Anglo-Protestant culture at the core of U.S. identity, but also in sustaining U.S. cultural power and representation. Huntington does not interrogate the changing Anglo-Protestant culture. His nativist ideology is no different from 18th and 19th century Anglo-Protestants who believed they were a superior race destine by god to control and govern. Huntington uses culture in a uncritical modern fashion to maintain the state apparatus. In other words, he converges the theoretical relations of culture and the state to explain what he considers a social threat to U.S. society.
While Huntington advances his notion of Anlgo-Protestant culture, Saldivar too advances his conception of U.S-Mexico borderland culture. Salidvar, on the contrary, views culture and society through a postmodern lens that attempts to disrupt the monolithic cultural perception of the U.S. - Mexico borderlands. Saldivar elaborates the importance of border experiences through a critical assessment of Chicano literature, and art. Saldivar uses the venue of cultural studies to include lived border experiences of Mexicanos, Mexican-Americans and Chicanos. Lived experiences of the borderlands are important because they map meanings of self-representations in the field of cultural studies. More importantly, lived experiences are a fundamental result of the material conditions. Saldivar succeeds in exposing U.S. cultural imperialism and remaps meaning to the field of cultural studies by including a critical dialogue of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
In this paper I have discussed how Huntington and Salidvar conceptualize culture in their work. I have illustrated how Huntington conceptualizes Anglo-Protestant culture to advance the nation-state while Saldivar conceptualizes borderlands culture to challenge the nation-state. The problem with Huntington’s use of culture is his fixed perception of Anglo-Protestant culture. He uses culture uncritically to defend Anglo-Protestant culture as if it was one identity represents the entire culture. Huntington uses culture to reaffirm Anglo-Protestant cultural power and representation in the nation-state. Salidvar uses culture to disrupt the nation-state. He particularly affirms a borderlands culture in a transnational paradigm. For Salidvar, the borderland culture is in constant movement. Using culture, Saldivar is able to claim space, identity and power. Both scholars manage to use culture to claim power and representation.
Work Cited
Huntington, Samuel P. (2004) The Hispanic Challenge. In Foreign Policy, March/April 2004
Issue. Washington, DC.
Saldivar, José David (1997) Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. University
of California Press. Berkeley, CA.
posted by Oscar at 12:07 PM
1 Comments:
companero great read. i think it'd be good if you defined postmodern, in Saldivar's context. Great binary. okay good nigth.
Post a Comment
<< Home