Difference and Hybridity

Ana Castillo's oeuvre is generally taken to be descriptive of Chicana culture and thus predominantly received in terms of ethnicity, feminism, and politics. As a result and as befits Chicana literary studies’ received tradition, Castillo scholarship is strongly thematic, with the themes of ethnic, sexual, and cultural identity taking centre-stage. Accordingly, the conceptual tools used for these thematic explorations are predominantly derived from postcolonial, feminist, and cultural studies with those of hybridity – or mestizaje as its specific Chicano/a variant – and difference ranging foremost among them. In this vein, and in accordance with the general bent of Chicana literary criticism, Castillo's work is read as representing the particular cultural, political, and economic situation of Chicanas and as articulating and affirming a resistant politics of hybridity and difference. The often unusual formal aspects of her work, if considered at all, are subsumed within this framework and relegated to the role of servant to these presumably primary political concerns. In short, in both Chicana literary scholarship in general and Castillo scholarship in particular, politics rules over poetics. This relationship needs to be reversed, however, as otherwise the critic runs the risk of effacing the poetic work's being qua literary art; no matter how explicitly political Chicana literature may be, it is always political as literature and warrants being treated as such. First and foremost, these works are works of literature and their respective politics is always channelled by means of literature. Scrutinising these means is the primary task of literary criticism. Thus, with respect to literature, rather than poetics (and, more broadly, aesthetics) being a question of politics, politics in fact is a question of poetics (or aesthetics). This is the case precisely because poetics itself is in turn a question of ontology: it is the poetics of a given literary work, which tells us what it is. In other words, literary artefacts are poetic objects. This is hardly a revolutionary diagnosis; nor should it generate much antagonism. In fact, this observation borders on the trivial.