American immigrant literature whether it begins with the work of Cabeza de Vaca, William Bradford or a number of other texts, begins, nevertheless, with a journal meticulously re-presenting the moment of radical crisis that the text's subject experiences on first encountering the New World.(1) This crisis naturally involves the realization and articulation of the between Spanish and American, English and American, Dutch and American; in other words, the essential discontinuity that signals the beginning of the speaking subject's American experience seems be the main focus of the text. To name the texts of immigrant discourse of the real as Spanish-American, Anglo-American, Dutch-American and so on, is recognize the existence of discontinuity and, moreover, mark it with a hyphen.(2) The hyphen stands for discontinuity, difference, which appears merge the two constituent parts while at the same time maintaining the separate identity of each. Given claim representation and therefore consistency, the immigrant discourse of the real abhors the gap, the obvious lacuna that the hyphen indicates. Furthermore, if any discourse is characterized by an essential incompleteness, which it tries to mask or conceal in a false and misleading plenitude (Foucault 1977, 135), then it is inevitable that the immigrant discourse of the real expedites the pre-empting of the discontinuities and gaps that the hyphen indicates in order create this false and misleading plenitude. Since the American Revolution, the official foundation of an American State and the sanctioning of an American ideology, immigrant discourse of the real has battled overcome an ethnic and primarily ideological polysemy by establishing a legitimate origin, a beginning and consequently a genealogy, and thus bridge or gloss over the existent discursive as well as cultural lacunae. On the one hand, pursuit of origin, beginning and genealogy validates the immigrant subject's American identity; on the other, it guarantees her/his difference and therefore expedites the subject's cultural and certainly textual survival. Although seemingly contradictory, these two validations are not essentially so; rather they are complementary in constructing the subject of an American immigrant text. In the Greek-American texts considered in essay, for example, the relationship among Greek, American and Greek-American is not causal or sequential; furthermore, it does not predicate a potentially harmonious integration. The dominant principle is not that of succession. Rather, correlation, complementarity and transformation are given free play here. Moreover, if Greek, American and Greek-American claim a problematic beginning, beyond them lies an essential absence, that of origin. The fabrication of an origin, or rather the fabrication of an essence for origin, appears be a prerequisite for a discourse and a text trying hide their discontinuities and gaps. In Greek-American immigrant texts an origin, a beginning and a genealogy are established by the appropriation of a cultural tradition and more specifically of culture-bound stories and history that limit and focus the flight of the signifier, in our case the immigrant subject's name. What cannot be emphasized enough at point is the fact that these culture-bound stories and history belong the archive -- the general system of formation and transformation of statements -- use Foucault's enlightening concept, which has come determine any Western production of text on Greece since the Renaissance (1972, 130). A similar archive has determined and produced America since the Renaissance, but primarily since the foundation of the first modern state in the eighteenth century as we pointed out earlier. Thereby, the archive mends the rents in the fabric that joins past and present. Moreover, paraphrase de Certeau, a meaning is assured that surmounts the violence and divisions of time; finally, a theatre of references and common values is created which warrants a sense of unity and a symbolic communicability. …
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Oct 1, 1997
Cecilia Oesch-Serra + 1
Open Access
