Toward Political Belonging in the "non-name of All": Infrapolitics in the Wake of Arizona HB2281

Although Arizona House Bill 2281 is destined to be struck down by the federal government, the terms and conditions of the political in this space have come to be, against the backdrop of this controversy, reconfigured as the... [ view full abstract ]

Although Arizona House Bill 2281 is destined to be struck down by the federal government, the terms and conditions of the political in this space have come to be, against the backdrop of this controversy, reconfigured as the platform for a mode of political resistance premised upon precariously disciplined and facile—hegemonic—ideas of belonging. By and large, critics have come to a consensus that these laws constitute a concentrated targeting of Mexican and Mexican American subjects. El Librotraficante Tony Diaz, for example, an outspoken activist and critic of HB2281, encapsulates this critical disposition: “Our aim is to change the system so that it better reflects the students in classrooms around the country.” While we have clearly seen this legislation’s effect the Mexican and Mexican American communities, and while we bear witness to the increase of Latina/os across the United States, it is arguable that these will not be the only communities affected. As Abraham Acosta (2012) has observed, what one sees in the critical resistance to this situation is a rhetoric of sub-hegemony that turns on appeals to rights for a cultural minority in whose exceptional identity the conflict bears meaning: “what we are seeing here, in the name of diversity, is an appeal to the logic of hegemony—the very one used against the Mexican/Mexican American community—that subsumes and subordinates the interests of other groups to the interests of the most populous of them” (104). In light of Acosta’s claim, the arguments for reforming curricula so as to better reflect the students in classrooms around the country seems myopic, considering that such an appeal for restituting political belonging on the grounds of cultural heterogeneity simply necessitates more homogeneity. It is arguable, in other words, that critical thought in the wake of this struggle for political belonging and ethnic studies in the state of Arizona has reached a point of impasse.

In this presentation, I will argue for a way of thinking through this impasse and for rethinking the political in the wake of Arizona’s legislation. Through a rhetorical analysis of Guillermo Gomez Pena, Felicia Rice, Gustavo Vasquez, Jennifer Gonzalez, and Zachary Watkins’ multimodal/multilingual codex performance art, Documentado/Undocumented: Ars Shamánica Performática, this presentation demonstrates that in order to begin thinking about a truly progressive cultural politics, for thinking political belonging in the "non-name of All", it is plausible that we will need to move beyond or beside theorizing the subject.