Amy A. Oliver

Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies
PhD, University of Massachusetts
aoliver@american.edu

Professor Amy Oliver's teaching and research on Latin America explore philosophical treatments of marginality, feminism, hybridity, alterity, "nepantlismo," and "transfronterismo." She works on the Hispanic essay of ideas and Latin American narrative. She has lived in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Spain, and traveled extensively in Latin America and the Caribbean. She serves on the International Editorial Board of Cuadernos Americanos, and on several committees of the American Philosophical Association. She has been President of the Society for Iberian and Latin American Thought and Director of American University's Women's and Gender Studies Program. Her latest book is Feminist Philosophy in Latin America and Spain (Rodopi, 2007).

Courses

Women in Latin America

"Have you ever asked why, world after world, in silence they come and go...?", the Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni once wondered. This course critically examines the lives and contributions of twentieth-century Latin American women to society, politics, and cultural traditions. The women studied range from the underprivileged and anonymous to the accomplished and famous. Course materials include novels, oral histories, biographies, photographs, films, artesanias, and critical works.

Graduate Seminar: Latin American Thought

Presentation of a range of dynamic Latin American thinkers chosen to demonstrate the power, vitality, and usefulness for North American social and cultural issues of Latin American intellectual life. Among the topics explored are identity, latinidad, argentinidad, mexicanidad, mestizaje, marginality, critiques of power, role of ideology, feminism, Third World identity, social justice, liberation, culture in human psychology, and indigenous peoples.

Hispanics in the U.S. (taught in English)

Taught in English, an exploration of the Hispanic heritage of the United States and the cultural contributions of Hispanics to contemporary life, the impact of "salsa in the melting pot." History, language, film, literature, politics, gender studies, art, and music combine to provide students with in-depth understanding of themes, ideas, images, and languages of various Latino communities in the United States.

Portuguese for Spanish Speakers

Brazil is the second largest nation in the Americas, 165 million people in one of the largest economies in the world, and a famous land of samba and carnival. This course has two purposes: to provide accelerated, contrastive analysis of Spanish and Portuguese, offering Spanish speakers the opportunity to "crossover" to Brazilian Portuguese in one semester (development of oral proficiency with attention to reading for research), and to study major cultural differences between Brazil and Spanish America through selected Brazilian history, geography, politics, film, art, music, and literature.

Mexican-U.S. Border

The Mexican-U.S. borderlands region is one of the fastest-growing in the hemisphere. It has been called a "crisis zone," "war zone," and "2,000 miles of hell." This course explores the perplexing paradoxes and unique culture of the "third country." Literature, linguistics, music, art and architecture are studied as well as political, economic, environmental, health, and human rights issues. In addition to attending class lectures and discussions, students learn about the border by visiting the Smithsonian, viewing films on the border, and visiting assigned web sites.

Latin American Short Story

Study of selected modern and contemporary short stories that have transformed Latin American and moved its fiction into the forefront of world literature. Among the authors included are Maria Luisa Bombal, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Juan Rulfo, Luisa Valenzuela, Isabel Allende, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The course traces the development of the short story in Latin Ameican and outlines its distinctive characteristics. An important objective of the course is close reading and analysis as emphasized through class discussions. Students should also acquire an appreciation of regional differences and cultural richness in Latin America.

Graduate Seminar: Political Ideas and Visual Arts in Mexico
Graduate Seminar: Modern Mexican Thought

Her specialization is Spanish and Latin American Thought. Below is an excerpt from her recent article, "Marginality," published in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

MARGINALITY

Traditional definitions of marginal persons include those who live in two worlds, but do not feel well integrated into either world, and those who live in societies which are in the process of being assimilated and incorporated into an emerging global society which the influence of Anglo-American and European cultures has brought into existence. A broader, more contemporary understanding of marginality is the condition of feeling marginal relative to various concepts of the center, thus possessing a stigmatized identity, and either aspiring to inclusion or assimilation into the center, or demanding recognition of and respect for a separate but equal existence. The condition of marginality can be experienced in varying degrees by many kinds of people.

Often, sex, gender, sexual preference, age, ethnicity, geography, and religion are factors which can influence perceptions of marginality. Those who perceive themselves or who are perceived by others to be marginal are often female, dark-skinned, very young or elderly, poor, disabled, non-heterosexual, displaced, exiled, immigrant, rural, indigenous, "foreign," outcast, persecuted, or otherwise "different" from those who occupy positions of privilege in the center or the metropolis. Critics of the term "marginality" believe it has become overused to the point that it has lost its descriptive precision because, they argue, almost everyone has experienced some form of marginality. In philosophy, however, the phenomenon of feeling or being perceived as peripheral or on the margin has generated critical perspectives which have enlightened discourse on social integration, stratification, personal suffering, and economic, political, and cultural inequality. In addition, analyses of marginality have called into question notions of the "universal" and the "objective" as put forth by many Western philosophers.

Forms of Marginality
People who live in two worlds, but do not feel well integrated into either world, could include, for example, "Nuyoricans," persons of Puerto Rican origin living in New York, who are often perceived as Puerto Ricans or, more generically, as Latinos or Hispanics by other New Yorkers, and are perceived by those who live in Puerto Rico as "Americanized" and as traitors to "real" Puerto Rican culture. Thus, the Nuyorican's existence is marginal on the United States mainland as well as on the island of Puerto Rico. "Chicanos" choose to identify themselves by a name other than Mexican-American to indicate that they are Mexicans with a non-Anglo image of themselves who are living in the United States. They are not Mexicans who would feel at home in Mexico, with which many of them are unfamiliar, yet neither do they feel assimilated or choose to identify with the mainstream Anglo-American culture they experience in Los Angeles and elsewhere. Similarly, "Black Latinos" often are categorized as or feel pressured to identify with either African-Americans or Latinos, but not with both, yet in fact, they do live in both worlds. Immigrants and exiles, in general, may feel that they live a dual, conflicting existence, attempting to maintain familiar cultural traditions which may become increasingly distant while struggling to adapt to new environs and linguistic challenges which some fail to master to their satisfaction.

Those who live in societies which are in the process of being assimilated and incorporated into an emerging global society which the influence of Anglo-American and European cultures has brought into existence include people in developing nations, such as those in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Their awareness of dominant or "metropolitan" cultures is often reinforced by television and imported music. A proliferation of icons of North American popular culture can be found, for example, in the southern Mexican states of Oaxaca and Chiapas where indigenous peoples are protesting, among other things, their marginality relative to both Mexico City and the United States. Consciousness of marginality even influences debate in Latin America over which trade agreements would be most beneficial in bringing particular countries closer to the centers of power. A corollary response to the awareness of marginality and the process of assimilation or incorporation is rejection of assimilation into a mainstream or "melting pot," favoring instead a defense of the interests and traditions of marginal groups and a right to a "tossed salad" of different groups coexisting side by side, respecting pieties without adopting one another's values.

The broader condition of feeling marginal relative to various concepts of the center, thus possessing a stigmatized identity, is often linked to concepts of otherness and alienation. It should be noted, however, that while a marginal person may feel alienated, a person who feels alienated is not necessarily marginal. Marginal persons are victims of a seemingly immutable, structural alterity. They feel or are made to feel voiceless rather than vocal, powerless rather than empowered, "barbarous" rather than "civilized," and unequal rather than equal. They may perceive themselves as subjects rather than citizens as they often lack the tools, the means, or the context to engage in transformational and participatory political processes (see CITIZENSHIP). Those whose marginality is not best captured by the earlier definitions of living in but not belonging to two worlds, or living in an assimilating culture, fit in the alienated world of marginality, of subaltern otherness. Such marginal persons may be female, dark-skinned, very young or elderly, poor, disabled, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual or transgendered, identified with religious or ethnic minorities, rural, or otherwise Geographically or ideologically peripheral to some center.

Marginality in Philosophy
Philosophy produced by thinkers who feel themselves to be culturally or politically "marginal," then, is often different in significant ways from philosophy produced by people who perceive themselves as belonging to the "center." This theme is present in the works of recent thinkers such as V.S. Naipaul, Edward Said, Derek Wolcott, James Baldwin, Edward Brathwaite, Adrienne Rich, Octavio Paz, and Leopoldo Zea, among many others (see AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY, LIBERATION PHILOSOPHY, PHILOSOPHY IN MEXICO, FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY). There are philosophers of the metropolis, whether or not they are aware of or refer to their position of privilege, and there are those who have been, as Octavio Paz writes, "expelled from the center of the world and... condemned to search for it through jungles and deserts or in underground mazes of the labyrinth."

Aristotle maintained that the Greek man was a rational creature capable of governing less rational creatures such as children, women, and slaves. In such a stance, marginality is a time-honored tradition throughout the history of Western philosophy. For Leopoldo Zea, marginality is a mechanism which one human being can use to deny the humanity of another. One's humanity, in his view, becomes circumstantial, resting on accidents such as the color of one's skin, one's sex, social class, level of education, etc. Zea refers to the "occidentals" as opposed to the "accidentals." Frantz Fanon uses the image of the "wretched" and Jose Ortega y Gasset writes of the existentially "shipwrecked." The image offered by Mexican humanist Alfonso Reyes in the second quarter of the twentieth century was that Mexican intellectuals would not be invited to the banquet table of Western civilization, although they had many contributions to offer.

The Value of Marginality
The Argentine philosopher Arturo Andres Roig believes that "The truth is not found primarily in the totality, but in determinate forms of particularity with power to create and re-create totalities from a place outside the latter, as alterity." Like Roig, most philosophers who arise within the marginalized peoples believe they are testifying that dominant philosophical canons are uninformed or underinformed by the experience of many people in the world who are socially and culturally removed from those metropolises in which mainstream philosophers live and think. Leopoldo Zea explains, "The great Greek, medieval, modern, and contemporary philosophers never had to worry about being original or about their cultures being strange since both their cultures and the people who created these cultures were considered universal." Zea maintains that the problem of philosophy in Latin America "is the awareness that its existence is a marginal existence."

Yet being marginal is not necessarily a negative intellectual phenomenon. On the contrary, there is an ironic sense in which the philosophy of marginality is a gift from the center to the margin. Marginality is a gift to philosophers who live and think on the margin in the sense that it affords them a certain latitude to make original contributions in areas that have been ignored through the undetected or unimagined provincialism of the mainstream. Marginality becomes a methodology that challenges how values are grounded, and by whom, to such an extent that marginal thinkers believe that their viewpoint offers a vantage point that better illuminates and more comprehensively grounds values. Since philosophy from the margin more easily lends itself to self-criticism, whereas philosophy from the center has no pressing need to criticize itself precisely because it is the center ("the universal"), marginal philosophy can be more thought-provoking and compelling.

References and Further Reading

Baldwin, James (1962) The Fire Next Time (New York: Dell)
*Fanon, Frantz (1963) Trans. Constance Farrington, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove)
*Paz, Octavio (1961) Trans. Lysander Kemp, The Labyrinth of Solitude (New York: Grove)
*Roig, Arturo Andres (1983) Teoria y critica del pensamiento latinoamericano (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica)
Stonequist, Everett V. (1937) The Marginal Man: A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons)
Weinstein, Michael and Deena Weinstein "The Problematic of Marginality in Mexican Philosophy," Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 4-3 (1981)
*Zea, Leopoldo (1971) La esencia de lo americano (Buenos Aires: Editorial Pleamar)
*Zea, Leopoldo (1992) Ed. Amy A. Oliver, Trans. Sonja Karsen,The Role of the Americas in History (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America)