The postmodern turn in Chicana/o cultural studies: Toward a dialectical criticism

This dissertation analyzes problems created by postmodernist theory for Chicana/o literary and cultural studies. Postmodernism has provided Chicana/o critics with tools for explaining the heterogeneity of culture and identity, but its relativism has also tended to limit the potential for Chicana/o studies to develop an effective social criticism. As an alternative to postmodernism, I outline a dialectical criticism based on the premise that historical subjects must come to know the world in order to change it---and conversely, that by acting to change the world, they come to know it. The dissertation is structured in three parts.;In the first part, I study the tension between Marxist dialectics and postmodernist theory. Examining works by Herbert Marcuse, I argue that historically the New Left repudiated dialectics and class analysis. This repudiation prepared the ground for the emergence of postmodernism. I also study works by Fredric Jameson and argue that, while he remains committed to dialectical criticism, the incorporation of postmodernist theory into his work limits his capacity to imagine an effective social praxis.;The second part analyzes the postmodern turn in Chicana/o criticism by examining various concepts that critics have used to explain ambivalence in Chicana/o literature, including "cultural schizophrenia" and "heterotopia." These concepts reflect a postmodernist misconception of social contradictions. Similarly, the concept of "the borderlands" helps to explain Chicana/o ambivalence, but it also poses problems for academic research and political activism with its non-dialectical conception of culture.;In the last part, I use a dialectical approach to interpret Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don and Cecile Pineda's, Face and Frieze. I challenge claims that Ruiz de Burton speaks from a "subaltern" subject position and argue that the ambivalence expressed in the novel represents the political views of liberal democracy rather than those of a radical ethnic subject. I argue also that Chicana/o critics have tended to disregard Pineda's fiction, in part, because her work does not depict history and identity in a postmodernist manner.