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Divergent perceptions and long~standing disagreements over the meaning of Chicano ethnicity in relation to the dominant culture continue to divide scholars of Chicano Studies. Specifically at issue is whether(or how far) the politics of Chicano identity entail a bid for Mexican American inclusion in "the American dream," or conversely, a radical rejection of its premises (Jankowski 201). In the cultural sphere, scholars who favor the inclusionary impulse have, over the past decade, emphasized a theme of "cultural hybridity." The literary critic Rafael Perez-Torres, for instance, asserted in 1995 that "rather than excluding or denying, ... Chicano poetry incorporates and includes. This signals a movement toward mestizaje, toward a hybridization and crossbreeding on a cultural level that reflects the racial mestizaje-which has produced the Chicano people" (8). This trope of hybridity locates a common "middle ground" (White x) with the dominant culture in a rearticulated and extended definition of the American dream that rejects older assimilationist models in favor of a vision of mestizaje.The discourse of cultural hybridity envisions the collapse of colonialism's structural inequalities into a polyglot' global culture, where cultural difference becomes the basis for creative syntheses. Instead of a boundary line where different identities meet and conflict, it imagines a "border zone" where identities mix and enrich each other. As Perez-Torres continued, "Rather than enforce the circumscription of borders, we might shift our critical focus away from the distinctions that demarcate the cultural terrains of Euramerica and Chicano America and toward points of interrelationship" (28). Many critics informed by poststructuralist linguis-
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The problematic and shifting nature of selfhood and subjectivity came to dominate intellectual and cultural dis cussion in the postwar years. The "relation of the self to culture rather than to society," as Lionel Trilling described it, cap tured a shift among many intellectuals away from political and social analysis to an abiding concern with culture, alien ation, and identityl The decade of the 1950s was neatly framed by the publication of David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950), with its deep ambivalence about the change from an inner-to an other-directed character type, and by Erving Goffrnan's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), where the theatricality of interpersonal relations became an object for analysis. Generally, intellectuals attempted to save the self from the ravages of a conformist consumer culture. More recently, however, historians of the Cold War period have shied away from this defense of the self. They have wedded theories of Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault to a narrative of corporate liberalism that manages to shut down the very possibility of an oppositional self, to foreclose authentic and meaningful forms of personal rebellion. According to this narrative, pro-corporate economic policies that promoted sustained economic growth, rising wages and consumption, and military build-up meshed with anticommunism at home and abroad. Abroad, anticommunism cloaked American expansionism; at home, it contained all forces deemed antagonistic to conformity. Thus corporate liberalism upheld an ideological consensus and assured institutional stability. This overly-worn thesis, begun by historians and espe cially popular of late with literary critics and art historians, posits that American life in the years following the Second World War was bound in a strait-jacket. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Ir.'s The Vital Center (1949) represents, for some, the ur-text of corporate liberalism and the self in the postwar era 2 In this work, Schlesinger's allegiance to the reformism of the New Deal remained steady; his politics of moderation rather than conservatism or progressivism informed the work. As a chastened liberal, drawing sus tenance from Kierkegaard and Niebuhr, Schlesinger embraced an anguished self, which realized its freedom in part by struggling against Communist totalitarianism. For critics of the postwar corporate-liberal ideology, Schlesinger's work is mainly an impassioned call to arms to defend American power and prestige. Although Schlesinger celebrated the moral and political virtues of existentialist angst in general, the vision of the new self that came to predominate and to capture the era was that of Riesman's Other-Directed Individual and Whyte's Organization Man. These "indviduals" were selves without substance, seeking approval from their peer group, lacking internal gyroscopes to resist or to rebel. In many ways, Schlesinger's text has striking affinities with the Puritan jeremiad as interpreted by Sacvan Bercovitch. Borrowing from Gramsci's theory of hegemony, although ofte...
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