ABSTRACT
In ‘Mapping the Mixedblood’, Owens draws on his own experience to enunciate a definition of mixed-blood cultural identity that, like Bhabha’s, is imagined as a spatialized concept. Given the painful and shameful history of contact, colonization, forced assimilation and attempted termination that is American history, his choice of metaphor is particularly appropriate. Owens reclaims the concept of ‘frontier’ and defines it as a creative, transformational, trickster space, similar to Bhabha’s sense of the third space. Bhabha draws implicitly on French philosophy, transforming Derrida’s notion of the hesitations and deferrals in language that open up gaps between signifier and signified into a potentiality for exploring cultural as well as linguistic difference. Owens, on the other hand, draws on his knowledge of the rich trickster traditions of oral American Indian cultures to propose a specifically American theory of elusive and multifarious cultural hybridity.1 Despite his selfdeprecatory disclaimers that he is not an intellectual, just a writer, Owens’ definition strikes me as eloquent and satisfyingly adequate:
Because the term ‘frontier’ carries with it such a heavy burden of colonial discourse, it can only be conceived of as a space of extreme contestation. Frontier, I would suggest, is the zone of trickster, a shimmering, always changing zone of multifaceted contact within which every utterance is challenged and interrogated, all referents put into question. In taking such a position, I am arguing for an appropriation and transvaluation of this deadly cliché of colonialism – for appropriation, inversion, and
abrogation of authority are always trickster’s strategies. ‘Frontier’ stands, I would further argue, in neat opposition to the concept of ‘territory’ as territory is imagined and given form by the colonial enterprise in America. Whereas frontier is always unstable, multidirectional, hybridized, characterized by heteroglossia, and indeterminate, territory is clearly mapped, fully imagined as a place of containment, invented to control and subdue the dangerous potentialities of imagined Indians. Territory is conceived and designed to exclude the dangerous presence of that trickster at the heart of the Native American imagination, for the ultimate logic of territory is appropriation and occupation, and trickster defies appropriation and resists colonization.
