Abstract
While social geographers have convincingly made the case that space is not an external constant, but rather is produced through inter-relations, anthropologists and sociologists have done much to further an understanding of time, as itself constituted through social interaction and inter-relation. Their work suggests that time is not an apolitical background to social life, but shapes how we perceive and relate to others. For those interested in exploring issues such as identity, community and difference, this suggests that attending to how temporal discourses are utilised in relation to these issues is a key task. This article seeks to contribute to an expansion of the debate about time and sociality by contributing an analysis of a variety of ways in which Gloria Anzaldúa utilises temporal concepts as part of her work of rethinking social identity and community. In particular, I suggest that in contesting homogeneous identity, Anzaldúa also implicitly contests linear temporal frameworks. Further, in creating new frameworks for identity, I suggest the possibility of discerning an alternative approach to time in her work that places difference at the heart of simultaneity. I suggest that the interconnection between concepts of time and community within Anzaldúa’s work indicates, more broadly, that attempts to rework understandings of relationality must be accompanied by reworked accounts of temporality.
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Notes
Thanks to the anonymous reviewer who suggested this point.
For a closer analysis of the mythic, historical and utopian significance of Aztlán see Watts, 2004.
A complexity that was denied by the California based ‘Save Our State’ organisation, who in 2005 protested against a monument in Baldwin Park, bearing Anzaldua's poem, claiming that it was seditious and racist.
As María Lugones argues, the illusion of discrete social categories is, in part, attributable to particular representations of time and space, which deny that ‘history is shared, conflictual, and in relation to social power’ (2003: 198). The contestation of a single linear history in favour of ‘multiple historical lines’ is thus thought to be one of the key steps that enable the possibility of reconfiguring community as heterogeneous and conflicting (ibid.: 201). Consequently, Lugones’ own visions of communities as impure and heterogeneous ‘are forged in a line of historico-spatial impurity’ (ibid.).
It is not necessarily clear that Kristeva fits with Sandoval's characterisation here, since, in her essay, Kristeva claims that, ‘my usage of the word “generation” implies less a chronology that a signifying space … So it can be argued that as of now a third attitude is possible, thus a third generation, which does not exclude – quite the contrary – the parallel existence of all three in the same historical time, or even that they be interwoven one with the other’ (1981: 33). Though I also note that Kristeva is here using ‘time’ to signify separation and ‘space’ to signify togetherness, the very dualism under discussion in this paper.
This is not to say that all uses of the notion of evolution are necessarily exclusionary in these ways. Anzaldúa herself attempts to refigure what is meant by evolution, as mentioned above. See too, Elizabeth Grosz's The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (2004). Grosz argues that the notion of temporality that arises in Darwin's work is not deterministic or teleological, but rather suggests an open and unpredictable future. In addition to these recent reworkings of evolution, see Penelope Deutscher's discussions of the complex and contradictory uses of evolutionary theory in certain nineteenth century feminisms (2004, 2006).
See, for example, Johannes Fabian's Time and the Other (1983) and Anne McClintock's discussion of ‘anachronistic space’ in Imperial Leather (1995: 40–42).
Importantly, AnaLouise Keating has suggested that similar techniques have inhibited the reception of key aspects of Anzaldúa's own work, specifically its spiritual aspects (see 2005, 2006, 2008). As she summarises in a recent essay, ‘in short, references to spirit, souls, the sacred, and other such spiritually inflected topics are often condemned as essentialist, escapist, naive, or in other ways apolitical and backward thinking’ (2008: 55). It appears essential to consider whether the avoidance of discussing the place of spirituality in Anzaldúa's work is an attempt to ‘manage’ this threatening difference by temporally distancing it from the present.
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Bastian, M. the contradictory simultaneity of being with others: exploring concepts of time and community in the work of Gloria Anzaldúa. Fem Rev 97, 151–167 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2010.34
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2010.34