Making Democracy Surreal: Political Race and the Miner's Canary

Abstract

Some of my initial critical thoughts on Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres’s The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (2002) were first cobbled together in a graduate seminar on cultural studies and social structure that I co-taught a few years ago with the sociologist, Michael Omi. In our seminar’s discussion of The Miner’s Canary, I confessed that as an undergraduate literature major I had collaborated on an experimental Spanglished literary journal with Gerald Torres, who was then completing his law degree. Preparing this review has stirred up memories of my discussions with Gerald about approaching the problems of Chicano/a multiculture and mestizaje from a different angle, about “bare life” and the structuring of law and violence, and about our divergent readings of our favorite imaginative writers of the time from the Global South, especially Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison. My Berkeley transdiciplinary graduate students, hearing again the elusive soundings Gerald and I heard many years ago down the mean streets of New Haven about Chicano/a multiculture, tended to dislike my literary (figural) reading of this legal and activist book, especially my claims concerning Torres’s dystopian melancholic take on mestizaje and his utopian faith in magical realism. In the difference between my reading and theirs, I now see that Guinier and Torres’s book still interests me deeply for reasons I will discuss below.