The Limits of Cultural Studies

Abstract

Cultural studies analyses of Chicano literature appeared on the scene just four years ago when Michael M. J. Fischer published his ambitious essay, Ethnicity and the Post-Modem Arts of Memory, in James Clifford and George E. Marcus's influential anthology, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986). Since then, the cultural studies movement has enlisted other well-known critics who, in a growing body of work, have begun to examine Chicano cultural practices. In addition to Fischer's study of ethnic American autobiographies and Chicano literature, George Lipsitz, in an essay about the Chicano band Los Lobos, Cruising Around the Historical Bloc-Postmodernism and Popular Music in East Los Angeles (1986), and Renato Rosaldo, in his revisionist essay on Chicano studies, Politics, Patriarchy, and Laughter (1987), have presented readers with broadly postmodernist and anthropological views of Chicano texts. Cultural studies, as it is practiced in the US, already seems to have taken its place as one of the established contemporary approaches to Chicano literature. As of yet, there has been no investigation of the kind of cultural criticism Fischer practices and its consequences for Chicano studies. Because of the quantity and the diversity of the interpretations that the cultural studies movement has generated in books such as Clifford and Marcus's and in journals such as Cultural Critique and Cultural Anthropology, I will limit the beginning of this essay to Fischer's representative analysis of Chicano literature. In the second part, I will focus on Rolando Hinojosa's Chicano testimonial chronicle, Claros Varones de Belken [Fair Gentlemen of Belken County] (1986), to see if there are ways of characterizing Chicano writing and culture other than the ones the (postmodernist) cultural studies critics typically provide, since culture, in Hinojosa's text, is not only constructed, but is also intimately connected with social relations and global power. Finally, I will look briefly at the in-