Fragmenting dominant slogans linguistically lets colonized subjects remap their own identity

Evidence

By contrast, Gamboa demonstrates the limits of the English language by employing the shadows of history through a linguistic collage that shapes his own as well as a collective identity formation. Resourcefully, Gamboa builds on his childhood incident to make the English language bear the weight of Chicana and Chicano conquest. Gamboa examines the incorporation of Chicanas and Chicanes to the United States through the Mexican-American War in 1848, brought by US doctrines of expansion, justified through ideologies of Manifest Destiny. In one of his pieces, “Jetter’s Jinx,” a character utters: … Many festivals destroy tiny successes. Many fest, Dest, Tiny suck excess. Mani, Fest, Des, Tiny, Suck excess. Manifest Destiny Sucks. … The fragmented structure of this excerpt suggests the ways that Manifest Destiny needs to be revisited, revised, and challenged. Tellingly, Gamboa employs periods throughout these semantically fragmented lines, providing a foundation for self-representation that questions and remaps the United States through continuous linguistic, geopolitical, and cultural border crossings. Through border culture, Chicanas and Chicanos struggle to transform oppressive social and cultural conditions in the theory and practice of their subjectivities. Because of the absence of a definition of culture, border theory precipitates a manifestation of consciousness, a way of life meaning and forming beings. Border culture allows Chicanas and Chicanos, racially and sexually marked by US structures and practices, to (1) trace their lineage to indigenous cultures; (2) mix deviations of languages, including English, Nahuatl, Spanish, and Spanglish; (3) claim Mexican and US ties as political rhetoric and policies represent them as a questionable, problematic population and legislation militarizes the border; (4) confront issues of labor exploitation alongside social and cultural inequalities; (5) occupy various unevenly deployed geographical spaces; and, among other things, (6) insert queer and feminist configurations in heterosexualand masculine-centered constructions and assertions of Chicanoness. These avenues of thinking, points of interaction, and ways of generating new forms of interpretation and meaning demonstrate an engagement with sociocultural processes of being and becoming human in a popular mainstream in which Chicanas and Chicanos are “aliens.” — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2505

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘Manifest Destiny Sucks’ homophonic breakdown is a concrete, teachable example of literary linguistic subversion — an essay could pair it with other sonic-dismantling techniques across postcolonial writers.
• XREF: Connects to Achebe’s argument about the colonizer’s language being made to carry the colonized experience, and to Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands theory mentioned throughout this chapter cluster. — connects to: Repeated slogans sever language from lived experience, linking advertising with totalitarian control. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 121; Sloganeering reaction to complexity tends to confirm existing prejudices — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 2182; Valuing one’s own speech as citizenship requires inventing a new cultural niche — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 1203 (+6 more)