Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night

INTRODUCTION

CRITICALLY INHABITING THE NIGHT

Buenas Noches, Readers

Tropes of night in U.S. Latina/o arts take up the stigma of darkness as a condition to be inhabited ethno-racially and philosophically despite claims that the fate of U.S. Latina/os is to conform to an Anglo-American hegemony. Evocations of night might seem to be a way of making oneself palatable to a dominant Anglo culture through romanticization as people for whom the night is one long fiesta. However, exoticism within this rhetoric of night transgresses policed borders: a language of night and vision-illuminated darkness emerges to disturb people’s sleep.¹ The escapism that is often associated with night—particularly in the idea of night as fiesta or respite from the day—is channeled to wake the comfortable sleep of dreamers, challenging the habits of readers and viewers.

Illustrative of this aesthetico-political practice is the mention of night in Cuban American author Cristina García’s 2007 novel A Handbook to Luck.² Under cover of night, the character Marta Claros flees the civil war in El Salvador and her abusive husband, who works on the firing squad killing rebels for the U.S.-backed military government:

Marta had never seen a sky this dark. There was no moon, and the stars seemed to hide in the black folds of midnight. The silence was so complete that Marta feared life itself had withdrawn from these parts. At any moment she might cross the border from one world to the next, imperceptibly, like death.

The coyote said that a night like this was good cover, that the yanquis’ fiercest lights couldn’t penetrate it.³

The dark night presents an escape route for Marta, a birth canal from El Salvador across Guatemala and into the United States where she must begin life all over again. She must survive the illegality of her status despite the forces ranged against her. García deploys night in connection with the experiences of Marta Claros, who is always journeying, like Lena Grove in Faulkner’s novel Light in August, originally titled Dark House. The relationship between darkness and light (and light as birth) is extensive and complex in both novels. García’s novel mobilizes whatever escapist romance might be associated with night to portray the precarious passage into the United States of those dehumanized under the label illegals. The darkest period of night is represented as the paradoxical medium of baptismal birth and survival for so many twentieth-century and recent immigrants from the Other America south and southeast of the United States, who become Latina/os with all the chaotic disorientations that attend the category that is not one category.⁴ Tropes of night are equally important to Latina/os who have been living for centuries within what became the geographical boundaries of the United States of America and yet, time and time again, have been rendered foreigners in their native land or, at best, second-class citizens. Tropes of night express and construct the multiple dimensions of being los otros americanos.

To convey the range of meanings of the Spanish phrase "buenas noches, English must furnish at least two phrases: good evening and good night. Buenas noches" serves a dual function in the Spanish language. It does likewise in my study, signifying hello and good-bye, arrival and departure, recognition and transformation, beginnings and endings, and beginnings. Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night takes as its subject Latina/o novels, short stories, poetry, essays, nonfictions, photo-fictions, photographs, and films that evoke night. These night works suggest that the presence of Latina/os forms the dark underside and projecting shadow of American culture, constituting both its end and its beginning and calling to mind the Other America that was there before America as the United States, that remains alongside it, and that represents its culturally transforming present and future. Night as the Other America is a major overarching trope that is concerned with the power of the supposedly formless to give form to experience and with the relations among aesthetics, identity, identification, and history. Trope, from the Greek meaning turn, is a pattern of speech or writing that stands out from the ordinary flow of thought precisely because it turns away from the merely literal.⁵ Latina/o figurations of night have constituted an aesthetics of self-representation as well as a form of resistance to compulsory state-sanctioned definitions of Latina/o identities and conditions for exclusion from or inclusion in the body politic of the United States. Tropes of night are composed of multiple literary, visual, and critical devices that express and shape relations among Latina/os and non-Latina/os in the Americas as well as among Latina/o groups in terms of power, cultural identity, and socio-temporal maps of affiliation.

Despite the cultural work performed by tropes of night in Latina/o cultural production, no other scholarly study exists on this topic. By cultural production I mean everything that a group of people produce as users, transmitters, and transformers of sign, symbol, and image systems that they inhabit and that inhabit them. My book focuses mainly on literary production, but it also engages with some film and photography. The topic of an aesthetics of night in Latina/o cultural production has been occluded on account of the familiarity and universality of night in the linguistic division of the period of the earth’s rotation on its axis into the categories night and day, "noche" y "día. Night as a trope, especially in relation to historically politicized areas of study such as ethnic studies, critical race studies, and postcolonial studies, constitutes the overlooked," by which I mean that which is unseen because it is taken for granted as both an experiential and conceptual category. The overlooked is taken for granted and assumed to be a universal, thus engendering analytical passivity or paralysis. This book focuses active attention on Latina/o aesthetics of night.

The Night of Latina/o Cultural Producers

Latina/o cultural producers employ rich, expansive, and protean tropes of night to great effect, an effect hitherto overlooked in critical and theoretical studies of Latina/o literature and culture more generally. In Latina/o literature, for example, nocturnal references compose a very persistent means of conveying the sense of being the Other Americans spreading, like la noche, in both directions, into the past and into the future of the Americas and of the United States as part of those Americas. If these claims concerning a Latina/o rhetoric of night are reminiscent of Hitchcock or film noir, that is because, among other things, they are. Consider, for instance, Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo (1958). Madeleine, the principal mystery woman, has a historical alter ego or possessing spirit named Carlotta Valdes—a Latina name that is part of the things that [really] spell San Francisco. Throughout the film, both Madeleine and her alter ego Carlotta Valdes are associated with night and shadows. The Anglo male protagonist, a noir anti-hero, falls prey to the pull of these shadows when Madeleine plunges into the dark waters of San Francisco Bay. He rescues her only to lose himself, as male noir protagonists usually do, under the hypnosis or spell of their beautiful and deadly femmes fatales.

Tropes of night may be plumbed to articulate relations of Latina/o literature and visual culture to the Anglo-American canon, to African American literature and visual culture, and to the work of Latin American writers and artists. The book focuses mainly on contemporary Latina/o literature, visual production, and literature concerned with visual production from the 1940s to the present—and not just that of Chicana/o writers/visual artists, the obvious choice given that a large portion of the current-day United States was once Mexico.⁶ I examine Latina/o literary and visual production in its cultural variety and differences and yet also in its relative constancy with regard to the invocation of night as figure and discourse for the inversion and re-orientation of cultural norms and expectations, for speaking of an Other America.

As phrases such as the Other America and "Nuestra [Our] América" suggest, I set this contemporary Latina/o literature and visual production in relation to keynote elements from essays and poems written by certain Latin American intellectuals and writers from the mid nineteenth century onwards, such as Simón Bolívar, José Martí, José Enrique Rodó, Arturo Uslar Pietri, César Vallejo, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Octavio Paz, Julia de Burgos, Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Reinaldo Arenas, Fernando Ortiz Fernández, Nelly Richard, and Aníbal Quijano. One of the implications of such a framing is the recovery and creation of a transnational, transcultural intellectual and cultural tradition that includes Latin American and U.S. Latina/o writers/artists and a re-visitation of the distinctions often made between them and among U.S. Latina/o ethnic groups.

I situate the work of contemporary Latina/o writers and artists in relation to essays and fictional works by Latin Americans and U.S. Latinos from the nineteenth century onward, particularly those that address concepts of the Other America, what Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier termed "lo real maravilloso, and epistemologies that challenge some of the assumptions of rational liberal humanism born of the Enlightenment’s sometimes totalitarian radiance that passes for reason, clarity, and even democracy."⁷ The focus on the 1940s to the present, however, has much to do with the history of civil rights; the demands on the part of Latina/os of different ethno-national backgrounds for recognition by the majoritarian non-Latina/o culture; and the ongoing realities of discrimination, marginalization, and invisibility despite the demographic preponderance of Latina/os in certain areas of the United States and the long historical legacy of Latina/o presence in the United States and across its contested borders.

This study consists of this introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion. Within that span, I attempt to do justice to the variety and heterogeneity of the populations and cultural productions designated as Latina/o. Latina/o is an umbrella term for people of Latin American and Iberian heritage living in the United States. The term tries to do the impossible: classify people from more than twenty countries and with many different spatio-temporal and geopolitical relations to the United States, the Americas, and various kinds of transnational and transcultural situations. Studies such as Suzanne Oboler’s Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives (1995) and Marta Caminero-Santangelo’s On Latinidad: U.S. Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity (2007) problematize the term Latina/o.⁸ For example, are Latin American immigrants who identify primarily with their country of origin or a particular district or province of that country Latina/os? Are the Hispanos of New Mexico or the Californios of California Latina/os? Are Latina/os really only those Hispanics who have adopted a transcultural, transnational identity within the United States—those who recognize a particular origin or identification and yet do not cling to it so closely that they refuse identification with other Latina/o groups?

I employ the term Latina/o advisedly, distinguishing among groups according to ethnic and ethno-racial identification but also according to other factors—generation, gender, sexuality, class, and regional and local affiliation. I move from Chicana/o literature and cultural production to mostly Puerto Rican and Cuban works (these being derived from the three traditional groups of Latina/os in the United States). From there I concentrate on work by Central Americans (Guatemalans, for instance). Then, in chapter four, I examine works by Chileans, Colombians, and Peruvians in the United States as well as by Latinas/o from the traditional three main U.S. Latina/o groups (Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans) whose texts and visual images markedly transculturate, transnationalize, border-cross, and even transvest culturally. I analyze these transculturations in terms of the kinds of re-definitions of nation, citizenship, personhood, inclusion, exclusion, and collectivity I argue they are putting forth under the guise of night.

Latina/o Studies and the Relevance of Aesthetics

Art acquires its specificity by separating itself from what it developed out of . . . There is no aesthetic refraction without something being refracted; no imagination without something being imagined . . . Aesthetic identity seeks to aid the non-identical [which I also understand to mean the non-mimetic function], which in reality is repressed by reality’s compulsion to identity . . . Artworks are afterimages of empirical life insofar as they help the latter to what is denied them outside their own sphere [emphasis mine].⁹

German-born, U.S.-naturalized philosopher, sociologist, composer, musicologist, and member of the Frankfurt School Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) posited that art or cultural production is different from that which is merely empirical or socially reflective. In his Aesthetic Theory, Adorno speaks of the function and movement of art in terms of visual refraction—a change in the direction of a wave (of light or sound, for instance) due to a change in speed when it passes from one medium to another and the concomitant change in appearance of an illuminated object. The emphasis is on transformation, not on reflection or even on imprint, as with the notion of an afterimage. At the same time, Adorno places art in a dialectic with social forces. Though it is not merely reflective of the social, art is dependent on social forces even as it constitutes a refracted articulation of those forces:

The aesthetic force of production is the same as that of productive labor and has the same teleology; and what may be called aesthetic relations of production— all that in which the productive force is embedded and in which it is active—are sedimentations or imprintings of social relations of production. Art’s double character as both autonomous and fait social is incessantly reproduced on the level of its autonomy. (5)

Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night examines the refractions of the social that constitute art or cultural production while simultaneously attending to art’s double character. Art’s double character as both reflecting and transforming social relations of production leads me to suggest that art functions not only as an afterimage but also as a pre-image, an image that necessarily precedes and mediates social change and transformation.

Within more ethnically bounded fields such as Chicana/o, Puerto Rican, or Cuban American studies that preceded the larger rubric of Latina/o studies, much scholarship has been produced to redress the potential reductionism of art to its reflective aspects.¹⁰ The increasingly multi-ethnic, transnational field of Latina/o literary and cultural studies is also yielding work that concerns itself with aesthetics, philosophy, and affect. The intersection between philosophy and affect has gained the attention of particular Latina/o scholars. Take, for instance, Jorge J. E. Gracia’s Hispanic/Latino Identity: A Philosophical Perspective (2000) or José Esteban Muñoz’s interest in affect and phenomenology in the productions/performances of Latina/o identities. See, for example, Muñoz’s 1999 study Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics and his 2000 essay Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect.¹¹ Wisely, most of these scholars have emphasized that questions of aesthetics, philosophy, and affect are social and political. For example, in the chapters concerning Latina/o identities of the 2005 Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self, feminist philosopher and ethnic studies scholar Linda Martín Alcoff deftly keeps phenomenological/philosophical/affect studies approaches from becoming separated from socially grounded questions about Latina/o identities and identity formation. Hers is a realist post-positivist approach that, as with Paula Moya’s, Michael R. Haimes-García’s, and Satya P. Mohanty’s contributions to the study of minority experience and cultural production, has allowed for a judicious and hard-won balancing act between empirical and conceptual approaches and between, in the case of my concerns here, sociological and philosophical/aesthetic questions without capitulating to reductionism, determinism, or deconstructive nominalism in any of these spheres of inquiry.

My book foregrounds Latina/o cultural production in relation to philosophy and aesthetics and to the politics informed by and fashioned from their mutual imbrications. Following Paget Henry’s caveat in Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy that philosophy must entail more than an affirmation of the autonomy of a thinking subject, my book is concerned with aesthetics and philosophy marked by historical and contemporary sociological forces.¹² I am interested in the aesthetic and philosophical dimensions of the works I investigate to the extent that they are doing conceptual work—producing paradigms of and for collective psychosocial cultural re-orientations and dis-orientations. I consider how, in their figurations of night, Latina/o literary and visual productions suggest new modes of American cultural identity.

I realize that when invoking the term aesthetics, one must acknowledge the pitfalls of what may seem, on the surface, to be a turning away from pressing issues related to human rights, citizenry, education, health, legal representation, and job opportunities. George Yúdice, citing the concerns of John Beverley, reminds and warns readers of the existence of a neo-Arielism in the appropriation of the legacy of Latin American intellectuals by the U.S. academy in an essay titled Rethinking Area and Ethnic Studies in the Context of Economic and Political Restructuring.¹³ By neo-Arielism he means a latter-day version of Arielism, based on Uruguayan essayist José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel (originally published in 1900) that called for Latin American intellectuals to eschew the allure of U.S. instrumental culture and instead model their politics on a quasi-Kantian disinterested aesthetics (98). Between the idealist mode of criticism of the neo-Arielist Rodó (with its distaste for the everyday world of socioeconomic and political struggle) and a sociologically and politically engaged mode of interpretation as suggested by Cuban intellectual Roberto Fernández Retamar, this study leans heavily toward the insights of the latter’s Caliban with regard to the implicit political nature of all cultural production, though it attempts to redress the masculinist bias of this contest between Ariel and Caliban.¹⁴

Talk of aesthetics can seem precious in the face of urgent practical concerns. Nevertheless, I speak of aesthetics because a politics and a praxis depends heavily on aesthetics, if by aesthetics one understands the ways or manners in which things present themselves or are presented, the material shapes that concepts and passions take. Style is part of aesthetics. Style is often misunderstood in writing as a question of sentence structure and diction when, in fact, it also manifests itself in choice of subject matter, key tropes, point of view or angle, stance, and myriad other factors. All these factors combine to create and sustain an entire environment of effects which readers or viewers are invited to inhabit.

The term aesthetic derives from the Greek word "aesthesis," meaning sensation (as opposed to thought, denotated by "noesis"). With the exception of philosophers such as Giambattista Vico and Immanuel Kant (The Critique of Judgment) in the mid to late eighteenth century, the likes of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche in the mid to late nineteenth century, and people such as Benedetto Croce, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt School in the early to mid twentieth century, a majority of philosophers have regarded aesthetics as a philosophy of beauty, and beauty in relation to its effects on the senses. The senses in Western philosophical traditions tend to be subordinated to thought, idea, or concept. Thus, the treatment of aesthetics as primarily concerned with sensations meant that it too was subordinated to what were deemed more serious concerns—theology or statecraft, for example. With Croce, Adorno, and Antonio Gramsci, for instance, and later with art scholars influenced by Gestalt psychology such as Rudolf Arnheim, Marxist phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and a host of postmodern thinkers as well as feminist philosophers, aesthetics has been increasingly understood as a central element of philosophy, ideology, and praxis, not merely a minor branch of philosophy. Furthermore, Marxist theory and psychoanalysis, while antagonistic in many aspects, both have as their best aim a liberating re-organization of material and psychic investments, whether collective or individual. Their confluence in post-structuralist theory underscores aesthetics as demonstration and catalyst of human motivation and behavior in relation to cultural values and vice versa. Aesthetics is as much about patterns of value as is ethics.

Major Trends in Twentieth-Century Uses of Night

In the twentieth century alone, the century by which we persist in defining contemporary modernity although we are well into the twenty-first century, tropes of night took on major importance in works that have since been classified as expressionist or existentialist or both and that were reworking, among other cultural influences and affinities, texts of the dark side of the Enlightenment and, more specifically, texts of German Romanticism. Here I am thinking of texts of German Romanticism such as Hymns to the Night (1800) by Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, otherwise known as Novalis; the poem The Night (1805) by Friedrich Hölderlin; Views from the Nightside of Natural Science (1808) by G. H. Schubert; Faust, Part I (1808) and Faust, Part II (1832) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; and Nachtstücke or The Night Pieces (1816–17), tales by E. T. A. Hoffman. Night figured prominently in much Romantic composition, textual and musical. Consider Frédéric Chopin’s twenty-one nocturnes, for instance. But so strong was the preoccupation with night and everything associated with it in German Romanticism, and so effective was the dissemination of this preoccupation, that the Scottish author Catherine Crowe of the highly influential collection of ghost stories The Night Side of Nature (1848)—the title was taken from a German term for the darkest part of the night—introduced into the English language a German term for a ghost that went bump in the night: poltergeist.¹⁵

To return to the twentieth century and the expressionist and existentialist cultural productions to which I was referring earlier, Francophone literature contains significant examples of uses of night, among them the expressionist naysayer Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932), throughout which night figures, and many of the Algerian/Africa-born Albert Camus’s existential works, especially The Plague (1947) and Exile and the Kingdom (1957). The deployment of night in both these works by Camus is particularly relevant to my present investigation. Their uses of night are connected with colonial situations, colonial malaise, and the stirrings of a growing decolonial consciousness against the oppressions of colonial rule. Both take place in French-occupied North Africa. The Plague is specifically located in Oran. During French rule in North Africa, Oran was a prefecture in the Oran département. Similarly, Exile and the Kingdom unfolds in the cities and deserts of French-controlled North Africa. One may assume that its stories are set in the city of Oran and its environs, but the stories do not always specify. Though the setting of the story The Growing Stone is Brazil, the effect is similar to those of the stories set in Oran. Readers find a society pervaded by colonialism and also overcome by the very people it has tried to subjugate and control. The colonial French are shown to have become exiles, not masters, in a land that is too much for them: Yonder, in Europe, there was shame and wrath. Here [whether North Africa or Brazil], exile or solitude. . . .¹⁶ Both the failure of colonial ventures and the revolt against their structures are represented in terms of night. The Plague represents the plague as thick darkness¹⁷ and extensively parallels a dark, muggy heat (30) with a queer kind of fever, which is causing much alarm (28). The novel is replete with many descriptions of various kinds of night-related darkness. It concludes with fireworks soaring over Oran’s harbor at night (271) to celebrate the supposed end of the plague that the novel reminds readers will return.

Figurations of night in The Plague are complex. Night is something to be both feared and yet also half-desired inasmuch as it overwhelms the colonial machine of the day, the machine of commerce and numerous kinds of enslavement. The Adulterous Woman, a story from Exile and the Kingdom published three years into the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) from France, depicts an active desire for night and all that the trope entails. The woman of a married heterosexual couple on a business venture to French-controlled Arabic Africa— North Africa, most likely Algeria, though the location is unspecified beyond the presence of a uniform of the French regiments of the Sahara¹⁸ and French officers in charge of native affairs (371)—escapes, late at night, from the hotel room where she has been staying with her husband. Feeling utterly stifled, she temporarily leaves her slumbering husband to step out into the night (377). The story’s title, The Adulterous Woman, would suggest that the wife has escaped to have an affair with some person. But the French woman flees the stuffy hotel room and her husband’s heavy, slumberous breathing to embrace not another person but, instead, the desert night. An eroticized encounter with the night encapsulates the discovery of a relation between the French woman desirous for liberation from the constraints of her life and the night world of the North African desert that defies the colonial, patriarchal order of commerce and French rule partly represented by her husband. The story powerfully articulates night as that which exceeds the patriarchal colonial order, that which cannot be contained by it, that which challenges the very foundations of that social order and the subjectivities within and under it. The story is written from the wife’s perspective. However, the effect of the story is not so much to have readers side with her as to have readers confront an alternate dimension, something both human— the Arab nightwatchman (377) she passes on the way to her encounter with the night—and inhuman, the night as it is portrayed. The implied relationship between the ethnicity and culture of the night watchman and the desert night toward which Janine, the French woman, runs is fleeting yet significant. It serves to remind readers that Janine is moving not merely toward nature but toward the alterity of another culture’s nature, toward the nature of the colonized culture—a nature that reveals none other than the limits of the colonial structure.

Night in The Adulterous Woman is not simply nature. It is alterity in many forms blended together: Janine’s difference from her husband, the Arabic culture’s difference from French culture (whether of the metropole or the colony), and the difference of what is not human from what is human. Exile and the Kingdom by Camus—who was born in Mondovi, Algeria, in 1913 and who lived in Algeria during all his formative years (he moved to France in 1940)—was published in France three years into the Algerian War of Independence that raged in and around Oran. These facts propel me even further toward a reading of night in these stories within the context of a colonial/decolonial struggle. What has since been classified as European existentialist literature used night to address both historically situated and transhistorical philosophical and political issues. A number of the Latina/o cultural producers whose work I examine demonstrate a critical and finely honed familiarity with European Romantic, expressionist, existentialist, and phenomenological traditions and have integrated and transmuted them to their own ends.

Tropes of night have a long, convoluted history in the Americas; they were partially carried over from Europe but intensified by the colonial project of the Americas that entailed fraught encounters with difference and alterity. Despite socioeconomic, political, and religious differences among colonizing Old World nations and empires (Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and British), the colonizing powers tended toward a Manichaean dualism in which European and white or light were equated with the civilization and the good, whereas non-Europeans (Indians, Africans, and a host of others) were equated with darkness, night, savagery, or evil. Thus, a Gothic mode runs throughout literature of the Americas, especially in Anglo-American cultural production, with its more Protestant-based, binary divisions between heaven and hell, good and evil, and light and dark. The Gothic mode that signaled the dark side of the Enlightenment and that inflected the cultural production of early British Romantics (Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, for example), German Romantics, and the dark Romantics of Anglo-American literature, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, generally represented night negatively and fearfully. Night was associated with tragic love, madness, loss of personal and communal identity, invisibility, nightmares, apocalypse, the void, knowledge and experience beyond the pale of social sanction, the frightening blurring or erasing of boundaries, and border-crossing into darkness.

The Anglo-American tradition of fearful and confusing night continues across the twentieth century with novels such as Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel (1929), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (1934), Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936), William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness (1951) and the much later memoir Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990), Richard Bausch’s Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea (1996) and In the Night Season (1998), and Patrick Stettner’s 2006 thriller film The Night Listener, which was based on Armistead Maupin’s 2000 novel of the same name and featured a screenplay by Armistead Maupin, Terry Anderson, and Patrick Stettner. Much of this Anglo Teutonic Gothicism about night feeds into both text-based and film-based noir. This flow of Gothic sensibility about night into noir productions of many kinds is significant because it has served to disseminate stereotyped ways of seeing and not seeing the existence of anyone deemed to be African American, Hispanic or Latina/o, Asian, marginal, foreign, or alien. A partial exception to this trend in Anglo-American cinema is Richard Kelly’s 2004 cult status film Donnie Darko, in which the night, darkness, shadows, and noirish alienation are gnostically valorized for the inconvenient truths they bring, however fearful, and in which marginalized characters, white and Asian (though not Latina/o or African American), are shown to be more receptive and trustworthy than those who attempt to complacently inhabit the dominant, authoritarian, conformist, manipulated, middle-class, largely white suburban U.S. culture.¹⁹

The Gothic coding of the subaltern and alien through tropes of night takes more self-conscious, reflective twists in fiction by Jewish American writers, most notably Paul Auster in novels such as Moon Palace (1989), Oracle Night (2003), and Man in the Dark (2008). The very title of Oracle Night announces an extensive engagement with night. This engagement is, by and large, very Gothic. It is replete with the dead, the sick, and dying; with mysterious and uncanny accidents that take place at night, including crimson nosebleeds²⁰ and the near death of a character called Nick Bowen from a gargoyle head dislodged from the façade of an apartment building (25); with paper ghosts in the form of photographs (39) and telephone directories (91–93) of people no longer living or exterminated; with villains such as Jacob and victims such as Grace; with time travel (120–26) and preoccupations with psychic gifts and, at the very least, disturbing dreams and premonitions (65); with urban zones of horror and devastation (70), not just cosmopolitan cornucopias; with truth as a swamp of uncertainty (81); with episodes of crypt-like solitary confinement (105); with anxieties about sexual reproduction typical of Gothic novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; with dumbfounding shifts of mood . . . enigmatic utterances . . . disappearance (212); with personal and collective catastrophe; and with Poe-like phraseology such as a man so sensitive to the vibrations around him that he knew what was going to happen before the events themselves took place (223).

As with the Anglo Gothic fiction of night, Auster’s Oracle Night evinces an obsession with non-white Others in relation to identity-challenging experiences, as demonstrated by the episodes involving Mr. Chang, the Chinese owner of a stationery store called The Paper Palace that becomes a big American dream flop (141); an African American World War II veteran Edward M. Johnson (aka Ed Victory) (102, 68), a supposed member of the American unit that liberated Dachau (92); Martine (151), a Haitian sex worker in a sex club at the back of a garment sweatshop in Flushing, New York; and, finally, Régine Dumas (157), a black woman from Martinique. Oracle Night conscripts non-whites into a pattern of unsettling events that befall the central male protagonist Sidney Orr, shaking him out of his complacencies. The non-white characters are not directly associated with night as in the Anglo Gothic stories. Rather, they are part of a larger narrative frame in Oracle Night that involves all the characters at multiple levels of smaller narrative frames, a storytelling architecture that attests to the metafictional nature of Auster’s novel.

With regard to night as a spatio-temporality, Auster’s novel, unlike many Anglo-American works about night, does manage to rehistoricize the fear associated with night. In Oracle Night, night, like a photograph and the 1937/1938 Warsaw telephone book full of the names of the dead (many of them exterminated by the Nazis), is a time machine. Night is a time machine that takes readers back into a confrontation with some of the darkest truths (47) of history—the Holocaust, for example. The novel’s darkest thought is articulated by a twenty-year-old pale, emaciated (198) drug addict who dyes his hair black and wears a long dark overcoat (232) and thick leather boots (236), melding concentration camp victim with Nazi with punk and suggesting some futuristic undertaker (232). He articulates not only the absence but also the irrelevance of God or any kind of divine intelligence (198). His cynical despair sounds one of the more devastating notes of Oracle Night. The general tenor of the novel, with its attempt to navigate radical uncertainty and both experience and salvage Grace (the person, the state of being) from the nightmarish maelstrom of events, reminds readers that informing Auster’s 2003 novel Oracle Night is Jewish concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel’s account of his time in the camps, which is titled Night in English and was originally published in France in 1958 as La Nuit. Wiesel writes,

NEVER SHALL I FORGET that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed. . . .

Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.

Never.²¹

In Wiesel’s book, night becomes the Kingdom of Night, of which all concentration camps and the Nazi project of extermination were a part—a space-time characterized by the absence of God and humanity. Though the Kingdom of Night is a concept and phrase that sounds fairy-tale-like, Elie Wiesel’s work rehistoricizes Gothic tropes, making them point toward history and not away from it. So do Paul Auster’s novels Oracle Night and Man in the Dark (2008) and other Jewish and Jewish American cultural productions. Man in the Dark involves an aging book critic who lives in a paradoxically real fantasy world during war, assassination plots, and the televised beheading of his granddaughter’s friend in Iraq. Norman Mailer’s 1968 apocalyptic novel The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History deals in detailed social commentary about the October 1967 anti–Vietnam War rally in Washington, DC, among other historical events.

This historicizing tendency is also strongly evident in the cultural production of African Americans. Some of the most nuanced explorations of the possibilities of night as a form of cultural critique and deep-structure revision exist in African American literary production. Take, for instance, Langston Hughes’s over forty-year (1920s–1960s) output of night poems that constitute some of his most striking examples of cultural critique and call for social action. Among those poems, I would count Negro with its opening lines I am a Negro: / Black as the night is black, / Black like the depths of my Africa²² as well as Summer Night (59), Harlem Night Club (90), Lenox Avenue: Midnight (92), Black Seed with its World-wide dusk / Of dear dark faces (130), Moonlight in Valencia: Civil War (306), and Night Song (330–31). After the mid 1960s, consider Clarence Major’s All-Night Visitors (1969); the formidable Night Studies (1979) by Cyrus Colter; Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark (1992) and Jazz (1992); a more marginal work such as Walter Dean Myers’s Somewhere in the Darkness (1992); the philosophically night-steeped, discourse-revising, deliberately scandalous black male homosexual underground classic by Samuel Delany titled The Mad Man (1994) with its hundred-page fifth part titled The Mirrors of Night;²³ or the poems, published in the United States, of Afro-Caribbean St. Lucian writer Kendel Hippolyte. I would point in particular to Hippolyte’s collection of poems titled Night Vision (2005), in which night vision is the ability to see transhistorically through history, to remember the history of slavery in the Old and New Worlds and yet also to be able to see beyond that history—to see your self in the illumination that discovers you / only in darkness.²⁴ Inspiring, complementing, and often intertwining with African American literary production on night is African American musical production—particularly in the song lyrics to the blues (see those of Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf, for example), jazz, soul, funk, and disco. Multi-valenced references to evening, nighttime, midnight, and darkness are scattered everywhere in these musical traditions. These references do not simply mark the time of day or night or describe a nocturnal environment or landscape. They are shorthand to the singer’s affect (melancholy, rebelliousness, anger, sorrow, and so forth) and, frequently, to the racialized, socioeconomic position of the singer and that of his or her community.

Methodology for Looking at Night in Latina/o Cultural Production

Methodologically, this project, located within Latina/o studies, brings to bear historical analysis, philosophy, psychoanalysis and depth psychology, postcolonial theory, semiotics, aesthetics, critical race studies, and gender/sexuality studies to the study of relevant texts, artifacts, and performances. I also read primary texts as theoretical contributions in themselves that prompt a reformulation of existing paradigms of identity and identification in the Americas. As part of that reformulation, this study takes a comparatist approach to Latina/o literary and cultural production. It stresses the necessarily comparatist nature of Latina/o studies. It acknowledges the historically and culturally shaping force of certain ethno-national, ethno-regional identities (Chicana/o, Caribbean, Central American, and South American). At the same time, it considers these various kinds of cultural production in relation to one another. My comparatist approach also entails contextualization of Latina/o cultural production in relation to European and Euro-American/Anglo-American cultural production along with the cultural production of African Americans whose work was and continues to be especially important to Chicana/o cultural producers and to U.S.-based Caribbean Latina/os with respect to intersecting histories and struggles. My invocation of European and Euro-American philosophy and texts underscores the fact that Latina/o cultures in the Americas are simultaneously the inheritors, users, and transformers of other cultural traditions that are both part of their cultures and alien to them. Latina/o cultures show a much more informed awareness about these other cultural traditions than they have received credit for by readers and critics with more bounded, closed-system models of culture and difference.

This study negotiates what is particular and unique about the use of tropes of night within various groups and groupings of Latina/o culture while at the same time acknowledging that this investigation necessitates a continual awareness of the transcultural and transhistorical aspects of the topic. When I write in the Americas, I do not mean to imply that tropes of night belong solely to cultural production of the Americas. References to night can be found transculturally and transhistorically employed for a wide range of purposes and effects. Night is a topic belonging to world literature. It crosses borders along with the people and cultures employing those tropes, as with the case of the Renaissance and early modern conquistadors, missionaries, and colonizers from Spain who brought their Baroque poetry to the New World, where it mixed with the nocturnal imagery of Mesoamerican cosmologies. Night as a topic and tropes of night are transfronterizos, border-crossers.

My book draws out the implications of this night work for the theorization of Latina/o studies in relation to comparative ethnic studies and transnational Americas studies and, conversely, the import of Latina/o studies for these areas of investigation. It traces the extent to which Latina/o literary and visual productions suggest new models of American cultural identity. Latina/o aesthetics of night deconstruct scenarios of assimilation into an inframundo (a Spanish term for an Aztec concept positing a world lying "within, amidst, and still beyond this