Transit and Dwelling: Notes for a Poetics of the Pluricultural Leo Cabranes-Grant UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA
T
he question I want to foreground in this short intervention is our increasing need to develop more nuanced epistemological models for the understanding of intercultural relations. I am concerned here with the phenomenological description of pluricultural environments, social sites in which several affective histories have been inflected by a particular process of conquest, trade, or political resistance. Intercultural exchange is an everyday event —no culture has ever been totally isolated from its neighbors. What I want to showcase is how we react when those daily negotiations are intensified by a demand to recognize new forms of self that were not explicit before. An intercultural process is at its most challenging when the prefix “inter” becomes obsolete, and the cultures involved forge ahead into something other. At that point tensions between cultures are also perceived as tensions within those cultures. There is a moment when the either/or of intercultural encounters becomes the both/and of an emergent identity. That is the moment I want to focus on. In order to unpack my investigation, I will confront two texts: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s prologue to her religious play The Divine Narcissus, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. Each of these works addresses a particular intercultural predicament, and each of them offers a different theoretical template to manage it. 182
