Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa is known for her writings and theories of radical inclusivity, such as autohistorias, new mestiza consciousness, nosotras, geographies of selves, and new tribalism.Footnote 1 Among these non-binary concepts, new tribalism as Anzaldúa’s post-Borderlands theory of relational identity formation and planetary politics has encountered harsher criticism, especially from Indigenous perspectives. Some common critiques include primitivism, cultural tourism, individualization, and romanticization of Indigeneity (Pérez Reference Pérez, Francisco, Segura and Benjamin-Labarthe2018; Pitts Reference Pitts2021, 130–39). As a less harsh critique, new tribalism is still considered too ideal to be useful in a world where justice is still far from a reality (Moraga Reference Moraga2011, 123–24).
Since new tribalism is burdened by its deep connection with Indigeneity, whether the term should be kept remains debatable. However, abandoning it risks overlooking its relational and political potential. The value of new tribalism resides in conceptualizing identity and alliance building not through sameness, but through interdependent becoming across difference and the transformative reworking of identities. In context, Anzaldúa first suggested her theory of new tribalism as, in fact, a playful response to her critic David Rieff, who criticized her for being a “professional Aztec” and enacting a “new tribalism” (qtd. in Keating Reference Keating2022, 192). Anzaldúa turned the original denigratory term of new tribalism in Rieff’s articulation into a generative theoretical concept to further develop her inclusive view on identity and politics. Anzaldúa’s playful response to her critic invites us to remember decolonial feminist María Lugones’s (Reference Lugones2003, 27) use of the term “playful” to focus on “crossing” and “metamorphosis” and finding “ambiguity and double edges a source of wisdom and delight” (96). My article also intends to offer a rereading of new tribalism that embraces what is ambiguous and double-edged.
My revisiting of new tribalism is inspired by Anzaldúa’s commitment to conceptual risk and her refusal to render the concept reassuring or politically safe. She was aware that understanding indigeneity as a fluid category might make her appear a traitor in the terrain of identity politics or a cultural appropriator as a non-Indigenous scholar. Critics such as Cherríe Moraga (Reference Moraga2011, 124) have articulated powerful and necessary concerns about how new tribalism can enable appropriation and obscure ongoing asymmetries of power. These concerns are, in fact, anticipated rather than ignored by Anzaldúa, as I will elaborate on later in this article. As an unsettling thinker, Anzaldúa leaves her theory of new tribalism resistant to closure, which invites continual reinterpretation rather than stable consensus.
To re-enliven Anzaldúa’s contribution of new tribalism to envisioning a world of embeddedness without erasing difference, I propose to translate new tribalism through a Chinese worldview that is also attentive to relational becoming, cosmological resonance, and the interdependence of diverse forms of life. Within this Chinese correlative framework, life is understood as co-constitutive and processual rather than oppositional or static. It is this broader philosophical orientation toward life and relation that informs the analytical framework of this article, which I articulate mainly through the contemporary vocabulary of zoetology developed by Roger Ames.Footnote 2
A salient distinction between Chinese and Western thought, as expressed by the renowned Taiwanese historian of ideas Chan-liang Wu (Reference Wu1996, 259), lies in the former’s characterization by “a world view of becoming” and the latter’s by “a world view of being.” To articulate this distinction, Ames (Reference Ames2024b, 30) recently coined the term zoetology, with “Greek zoe-‘life’ and -logia ‘discourse,’” to encapsulate the cosmological assumptions emerging in the Chinese classic Book of changes. Zoetology can be translated into Chinese as shengshenglun (生生論).Footnote 3 Zoetology is “the art of living,” an alternative to substance ontology that Ames (Reference Ames2024b, 30) characterizes as “the science of being per se.” Zoetology not only takes living and growing as its motives to create “a world of boundless ‘becomings’” but also “gives us not ‘things’ that are, but ‘events’ that are happening. And it is the nature of life itself that it seeks to optimize the available conditions for its continuing growth” (Ames Reference Ames2023b, 90; original emphasis). Furthermore, zoetology assumes association rather than distinction as the momentum of life because “there are always correlative yinyang 陰陽 aspects within any vital process of change” (Ames Reference Ames2024b, 31).
I argue that a zoetological reading of new tribalism that centers on becoming rather than being can better capture what Anzaldúa intends to articulate with the concept in her corpus. Through a zoetological lens, we will realize that, rather than appropriating Indigeneity, new tribalism is more about approximating indigeneity to retribalize oneself in a web of relations for the purpose of locating potential openings of becoming. To clarify my terminology, in this article, I use Indigeneity capitalized to refer to a sovereign and self-determined identity rooted in specific Indigenous epistemologies while indigeneity with lower case refers to a more fluid, affective, and relational mode of belonging that does not necessarily claim Indigenous status. In addition, I acknowledge that my use of approximate may encounter potential criticism. For example, in her research on Anzaldúa’s archive, Suzanne Bost (Reference Bost2015, 627) argues that “it might not be possible to use the words ‘best’ or ‘approximate’ since [Anzaldúa] so insistently resists clear evaluation or approximation”; it is “difficult to imagine a coherent Anzaldúa.” In the context of Bost’s article, approximate suggests an attempt to close off the space between differences. In contrast, I use approximate in my reading of Anzaldúa’s new tribalism to highlight an ethical distance. That is, to approximate is to become close but never to be. The never-to-be is where the ethical distance exists. Moreover, the verb approximate here refers to affective yearning and praxis to be close to each other rather than to assimilate others to existing norms or beings. The relation between what to approximate and approximation is not one between an original and its duplicate. Instead, it is similar to a dynamic magnetic field where differences have attraction and repulsion among each other, depending on the change of their relations. I contend that new tribalism invites affective approximation and recognizes that everyone is situated in a zoetological web of becomings. In other words, new tribalism resonates with zoetology in the sense that the “human being is not something we are; it is something that we do and become, and either we do it together or not at all” (Ames Reference Ames2024a, 185; original emphasis). Both new tribalism and zoetology emphasize that identity is a collective, relational, processual praxis rather than an individualist, isolated, static state.
In this article, on the one hand, I respond to the criticism of Anzaldúa’s use of indigeneity in her theory of new tribalism. On the other hand, I adopt new tribalism as an interpretative guidance to cultivate a cross-cultural understanding of Anzaldúa’s philosophy from an East Asian philosophical perspective. Specifically, this article first situates Anzaldúa’s concept of new tribalism by engaging both her own writings and key scholarly critiques, particularly from Indigenous perspectives, to clarify its scope. Then, I bring Chinese philosophical vocabularies of relationality into resonance with Anzaldúa’s theorization of new tribalism. Finally, I illuminate how Anzaldúa develops new tribalism beyond identity formation into a broader planetary vision that can be understood as a zoetological web of becomings.
This article is grounded in an anti-possessive epistemology emerging from a condition of unsettling impurity shared by Anzaldúa, Ames, and myself. Anzaldúa, who did not claim an Indigenous identity, evoked indigeneity in her theory of new tribalism not as a fixed or owned identity but as a relational and unsettled mode of becoming. Ames, a Canadian comparative philosopher, approaches Chinese philosophy through translation rather than inheritance, which foregrounds relation over ownership regarding knowledge. Likewise, as a Taiwanese scholar engaging Chicana studies, Anzaldúan studies in particular, I work across traditions that are not mine in a possessive sense. Rather than treating our shared engagement with concepts and traditions that are not our own as a limitation, I see it as a methodological resource.
I adopt a comparative approach to trace relational resonances of processual becoming across different philosophical traditions. I dedicate myself to serving as a nepantlera, a bridge-builder between conceptual worlds, to graft Chinese philosophy onto existing Anzaldúan studies in order to produce an intellectual new tribalism that defies the West–East binary. By doing so, I aim to create philosophical resonances between the two schools of thought. I take the cue from the call of transnational feminist M. Jacqui Alexander (Reference Alexander2005, 278) to “[dare] to recognize each other again and again in a context that seems bent on making strangers of us all.” Similar to the decolonial intention of Anzaldúa’s new tribalism that makes different identities porous to each other to resist the compartmentation imposed on us and to recognize our collective embeddedness, my article also strives to liquefy the boundary between knowledge systems in order to build intellectual kinships across differences.
1. New tribalism and its critique
New tribalism originated from Anzaldúa’s playful response to her critic David Rieff by turning the phrase originally used as a criticism against her theory of mestizaje in Borderlands into her articulation of radical relational identity formation theory (Keating Reference Keating2022, 192). In an email interview with Inés Hernández-Ávila documented in “Speaking across the Divide,” Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2009d, 283) elaborates that new tribalism is “a more inclusive identity [than new mestizaFootnote 4 ], one that’s based on many features and not solely on race.” New tribalism allows people to choose with whom they want to be allies. Anzaldúa recognizes the blurring of the line between the privileged and the othered with the increasing success of people of color’s organizing and movements. As Anzaldúa notices, “We have some of whites’ privileges and whites have acquired some of our otherness” (Lara Reference Lara and Keating2008, 43). Therefore, it is not enough to lock ourselves up in ethnic identities. Anzaldúa suggests that we need to lift the slash between nos/otras (us/others) to recognize the commonalities between differences. New tribalism is Anzaldúa’s proposal to resist the compartmentalization of ethnic groups, to move beyond existing categories, and to form a heterogeneous wholeness. In addition, the most radical aspect of new tribalism lies in its hospitality and lenience in retribalizing oneself in different communities. As Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2015, 68) proposes, “To partake of the new tribalism, you don’t have to be connected to your home-ethnicity; other root systems will suffice.” In other words, in Anzaldúa’s theory of new tribalism, we are allowed and even encouraged to re-root and accommodate traditions, cultures, and spiritualities other than our own to situate ourselves in an interrelated web of relations.
Although many scholars celebrate Anzaldúa’s new tribalism with its inclusive, relational, hospitable, and decolonial characteristics (Elenes Reference Elenes2013; Núñez-Puente Reference Núñez-Puente2018; Prado Reference Prado, Heidenreich, Alvarez, Mata and Millán2022), some scholars are concerned with the notion’s seemingly idealist vision. Even though Anzaldúa’s new tribalism is meant to be applicable in a broader context, the word tribalism evokes Indigenous people and cultures almost instinctively because readers often associate it with traditional tribal societies. Therefore, the main critique of new tribalism is expected to come from Indigenous perspectives.
Among Anzaldúa’s critics, Domino Renee Pérez offers a scathing criticism of new tribalism, which I engage with in order to further illuminate what new tribalism is and what it is not when taking Anzaldúa’s corpus into consideration. In “New tribalism and Chicana/o indigeneity in the work of Gloria Anzaldúa,” Pérez (Reference Pérez, Francisco, Segura and Benjamin-Labarthe2018, 251) evaluates Anzaldúa’s new tribalism “as flawed as it is beautiful.” Pérez accuses Anzaldúa of appropriating, romanticizing, and fetishizing Indigeneity in the writer’s theorization of new tribalism. Pérez finds it problematic that Anzaldúa evokes indigeneity only as a metaphor rather than roots it in “living tribal traditions” (247). The critic further argues that, while new tribalism aims to highlight relationality, it ends up being individualistic because it fails to “recognize that many tribal communities are happy with their current and ongoing guiding myths” (251). Put differently, Anzaldúa’s call for relationality is only an individualistic desire imposed on others without realizing that tribal communities might have no motivation to change.Footnote 5
In addition to the criticism of individualism, Pérez (Reference Pérez, Francisco, Segura and Benjamin-Labarthe2018, 251) directs our attention to the difference between indigenous as an adjective and Indigenous as an identity when she asks: “We may see ourselves as indigenous, but are we Indigenous?” To this question, I think Anzaldúa already clarified her specific location in her usage of indigeneity. Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2009d, 286) emphasized that she “always claimed indigenous ancestry and connections” based on “a mestizaje (mixed-blood, mixed culture) identity,” but she “never claimed a North American Indian identity.” Along with other Chicanxs, Anzaldúa arrives at indigeneity through a different journey from North American Indigenous people. According to María Eugenia Cotera and María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2015, n.p.), Chicanxs lay claim to indigeneity through “mestizo mourning,” referring to “mourning for the loss of a historically filial relationship with indigenous peoples forged over centuries of interaction, intermarriage, collaboration, and alliance” (original emphasis). The loss of such a historical filial relationship in the post-1848 borderland resulted from “a bifurcated U.S. racial logic (white/not white; Indian/not Indian) that voided the Mexican concept of citizenship as composed of, indeed contingent upon, a racial multiplicity: of indigeneity, of mestizaje, of afromestizaje” (Cotera and Saldaña-Portillo Reference Cotera, Saldaña-Portillo and Warrior2015, n.p.). With their historical review of the post-1848 border history, Cotera and Saldaña-Portillo (Reference Cotera, Saldaña-Portillo and Warrior2015, n.p.) conclude: “there is more than one genealogy of what it means to be indigenous in the Americas.” Taking the insights from the two scholars, I argue that Anzaldúa does not intend to uphold an Indigenous identity in the upper case but keeps her use of the term in the lower case to acknowledge the plurality of how people arrive at their affiliation with or proximity to indigeneity.
Eradicating a wall to distinguish between the authentic Indigenous and the non-authentic indigenous is problematic for Anzaldúa because the division can lead to the failure to recognize interdependent webs into which everyone is woven. As Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2015, 76) articulates, “Chicanas silence indigenous women, and indigenous women lambast Chicanas for appropriating Indian entry. We hurt an ‘other’ for their identity, race, gender, sexual preference”; we “disregard the fact that we live in intricate relationship with others, that our very existence depends on our intimate interactions with all life forms.” The mutual betrayal between Chicanas and Indigenous women stems from the very desire to identify who is the other in relation to an illusionary authentic identity defined by dominant groups. Only by overcoming what Anzaldúa calls desconocimiento (not-knowing) that understands identity formation in a stable and fixed way can we begin to embrace the fluidity, impurity, and complexity of each other’s identity. When read in this light, Anzaldúa’s potential response to Pérez’s question above might be: We do not need to be Indigenous to be close to indigeneity to create a collective identity as new tribalism.
Besides questioning whether Anzaldúa’s use of indigeneity is legitimate, Pérez cautions against the danger of cultural tourism in the theory of new tribalism. Pérez (Reference Pérez, Francisco, Segura and Benjamin-Labarthe2018, 248) contends that “Without further guidance, new tribalism is at once superficial, a la carte spiritualism (either inclusive or independent of organized religious practices), culture, and personality.” The strong expression of “a la carte” is a direct criticism of Anzaldúa’s welcoming of our re-rooting in other traditions to create new tribalism. Pérez takes issue with Anzaldúa’s assumed voluntarism. Indeed, Anzaldúa emphasizes conscious choices in the praxis of new tribalism when she explains the concept. For example, in an interview with Irene Lara (Reference Lara and Keating2008, 42), Anzaldúa said:
New tribalism is a kind of mestizaje. Instead of somebody making you a hybrid without your control, you can choose. You can choose a little Buddhism, a little assertiveness, individuality, some Mexican views of the spirit world, something from blacks, something from Asians. (My emphasis)
Similarly, in Light in the dark, Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2015, 141) expresses that, when growing into new tribalism, “You pick and choose views, cultures with transformational potential—a partially conscious selection, not a mestizaje imposed on you, but one whose process you can control” (my emphasis). For Pérez, Anzaldúa’s emphasis on the act of choosing manifests problematic cultural tourism. However, I contend that the voluntarism conveyed through Anzaldúa’s repetitive use of choice accentuates the decolonial dimension in her theory of new tribalism. As decolonial thinker Walter Mignolo (Reference Mignolo, Mignolo and Catherine2018, 224) reiterates, rather than a “mission,” decoloniality is always “an option that cannot be dominating and imperative.” I see Anzaldúa’s repetitive use of choose as a decolonial claim. That is, to become a practitioner of new tribalism with inclusive political consciousness is always an option one makes intentionally rather than an existential state into which one is born.
Although Pérez’s overall criticism of Anzaldúa’s new tribalism seems harsh, the term is undeniably entangled with Indigeneity and thus remains subject to Indigenous critique. The concern with non-Indigenous people playing Indian is real and legitimate. As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (Reference Tuck and Yang2012, 9) insightfully critique in their article titled “decolonization is not a metaphor,” the rhetoric of “all Americans are a ‘little bit Indian’” enacts settler colonialism. Tuck and Yang identify several settler moves to innocenceFootnote 6 to illustrate how both white settlers and non-white settlers participate in diluting the meaning of Indigeneity and in disappearing of Indigenous people. Tuck and Yang (Reference Tuck and Yang2012, 28) call for “an ethic of incommensurability” rather than commonality as the basis for decolonial solidarity building. The emphasis placed on incommensurability highlights that decolonization is radically “unsettling” rather than “complementary”; decolonization is never a harmonious “and” but a disconcerting “elsewhere” (Tuck and Yang Reference Tuck and Yang2012, 36).
Anzaldúa does recognize the unsettling incommensurability between Native women and Chicanas. In “Speaking across the divide,” Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2009d, 287) expresses explicitly that “Native women and Chicanas construct their indigenismo differently.” Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2009d, 286) further clarifies that, even though her intention to engage indigeneity in her theory is out of personal healing and social transformation, she is aware of the risk of contributing to “the misappropriation of Native cultures.” Recognizing the problems of Chicanx appropriation of Indigenous identity, Anzaldúa has to tiptoe when she uses indigeneity in her writings to avoid encroaching on Native cultural integrity. She makes it clear that she has no intention to encroach on the sovereignty of Indigenous people. Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2009d, 288) clarifies that she draws from indigenous “cultural figures and terms” more for “a remembrance, an uncovering, and an exploration of [her] own indigenous heritage”; she does it “with a keen awareness that we’re living in Indian land.” Unlike settler colonizers who downplay the reality that they inhabit Indigenous land, Anzaldúa highlights the continuing presence of Indigenous land that awaits decolonization. Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa2007, 25) states explicitly in Borderlands: “This land was Mexican once,/was Indian always/and is./And will be again.” To emphasize the decolonial struggle of Indigenous people, Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa2007, 113) repeats the lines, only with a slight format change, at the end of the essay section of Borderlands. The coexistence of the past-present-future tense in the poetic lines foregrounds the legitimacy of Indigenous people’s claim to sovereignty.
In line with her emphasis on Indigenous decolonial struggle, Anzaldúa’s concept of new tribalism similarly avoids romanticization. In fact, Anzaldúa proposes new tribalism not to re-enact the trope of playing Indian to dispossess Indigenous people but to delineate an “elsewhere,” to borrow Tuck and Yang’s term (Reference Tuck and Yang2012, 36), for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to aspire to. In Anzaldúa’s own words (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2009d 287), “Until the indigenous in Indians and Chicana/os are ensured survival, establishing a new tribalism, a mestiza nation, remains merely a vision. But dream we must. The mestizaje and the new tribalism I envision adds to but does not dispossess Indians (or others) from their own history, culture, or home-ethnic identities.” Anzaldúa acknowledges that new tribalism remains a vision because decolonial struggle over the survival of the indigenous is still a present reality. But with the emphasis on the statement that “dream we must,” Anzaldúa puts forward that new tribalism is a visionary decolonial project worth striving for. It is a decolonial project in nature because its materialization requires ensuring indigenous survival and prosperity. The fulfillment of new tribalism is embedded in decolonial praxes. In this sense, I argue that Anzaldúa’s new tribalism stands apart from cultural tourism, for new tribalism requires its participants to devote themselves to carrying and remembering indigeneity to tour the world together.
To explore the constructive dimensions of Anzaldúa’s theory of new tribalism, it is imperative that we find an alternative vocabulary to better articulate and appreciate the very theory that centers on radical interconnectivity across differences. I propose that we can translate Anzaldúa’s new tribalism through a Chinese zoetological framework of understanding the world and identity, as there are strong resonances between Anzaldúa’s thought and zoetology. Re-interpreting new tribalism through zoetological vocabularies can thus potentially crack open alternative conceptual space beyond colonial dialectics.
Adopting a Chinese philosophical lens to approach Anzaldúa’s thought is not farfetched. In an unpublished archival entry titled “Spiritual activism,” Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúan.d.) writes that she finds “a lot of commonalities between Chinese culture and Mexican/Chicano culture.” Several traces in both Anzaldúa’s writings and secondary references on her works point to the influence of Chinese spirituality and philosophy on her thought, I-Ching and Daoism in particular. For example, in Borderlands, Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa2007, 110) includes a quote from Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the twenty-fourth hexagram of I Ching, “Return/復.” In her interviews documented in Interviews/Entrevista, Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2000, 48, 120) mentioned several times that she practiced I Ching. In secondary references on Anzaldúa’s works, several scholars also point out that the writer was immersed in various spiritual traditions, including I Ching (Ohmer Reference Ohmer2010, 150; Anzaldúa Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2015, 218, n. 77; Tirres Reference Tirres2019, 123). Furthermore, Daoism is also part of Anzaldúa’s intellectual and spiritual soil as her unpublished journey entry titled “Spiritual activism” and the records of her personal library holdings at the University of Texas at Austin reveal.
In recent years, scholars have begun to document the resonances between Anzaldúa’s thought and Chinese philosophy. In 2023, Saralina Anzaldúa published a journal article titled “Mexica monism and Daoist ethics in the philosophy of Gloria Anzaldúa.” The article is a pioneering study that brings Daoist philosophy into conversation with Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of nos/otras to foreground a spiritual ontology of radical interconnectedness in the philosopher’s corpus. Extending this comparative philosophical approach, I examine new tribalism as a site of relational identity and processual becoming through a zoetological framework to further cultivate conceptual kinships between Anzaldúa’s philosophy and Chinese philosophy.
2. Resonances between new tribalism and zoetological identity
2.1. From being to becoming
To challenge the ingrained, noun-driven formation of identity, Ames proposes the term of zoetology to revive ancient Chinese philosophical insights. Zoetology serves as a critique of substance ontology, which Ames argues is characterized by categorical thinking. Substance ontology centers on finding “what-it-means-to-be-a-thing-of-this-kind” and thus “setting a closed and exclusive boundary on any particular thing” to determine an identity that can only “be this, and not that” (Ames Reference Ames2024b, 30). In substance ontology, persons are defined by “limitation, self-sufficiency, and independence” (Ames Reference Ames2023b, 90). Ames (Reference Ames2023b, 89-90) draws from the conceptual vocabulary of Chinese philosopher Zhao TingyangFootnote 7 to argue that the closed-system categorical thinking in substance ontology provides a dictionary-like explanation of the world that renders human beings and other species as isolated nouns with clear definitions.
In contrast, a zoetological understanding of identity is correlative, open-ended, and processual. Whereas substance ontology relies on static categories, zoetology is driven by analogical and correlative thinking as well as the premise that “nothing does anything by itself; association is a fact” (Ames Reference Ames2024b, 31). Zoetological thinking recognizes that the self and others are mutually constituted within a dynamic web of relations. As Mengying Guo (Reference Guo2025) highlights, within the Chinese cosmology driven by shengsheng, or zoetology in Ames’s articulation, “an individual’s physical condition and overall well-being are intimately connected to and integrated with the cosmos and all things.” Ames (Reference Ames2024b, 31) explains this reciprocity that “Any given thing is internalizing its context in shaping itself, while its contextualizing others in turn are shaped by internalizing it.” Put differently, zoetology emphasizes the mutuality of the shaping and reshaping of each other through their ecological interactions.
Consequently, boundaries between differences in zoetology are porous and interpenetrating rather than solid and self-enclosed. Wu (Reference Wu1996, 272) describes this Chinese cosmo-ontological view of becoming as one where “[t]hings may change into each other, and boundaries and identities of things are illusory.” The emphasis placed on the becoming rather than being further leads Wu (Reference Wu1996, 275) to argue provocatively that “there is no such thing named ‘substance’” in Chinese ancient thought. It is important to note that no substance here does not mean that there is no thing (wu), but only that “a ‘thing’ is ‘nothing’” (Wu Reference Wu1996, 275). Wu explains that a thing is nothing because it is always “changing”; it is “becoming rather than being” (Reference Wu1996, 275).
Ames recapitulates Wu’s observation by stating that any category in zoetology, including identity, is “always provisional,” “processual, emergent, and thus open-ended” rather than having a “self-same, reduplicative characteristic” as understood in substance ontology (Ames Reference Ames2023a, 38). Whereas zoetology is dynamically interaction-driven, substance ontology is statically quality-centered. Ames (Reference Ames2024b, 31) distinguishes the “noun-dominated thinking” of substance ontology from the “gerundive” thinking of zoetology, likening the difference to that between “a leg and walking, between a lung and breathing.” In this light, a human is “the story of something done rather than what persons are” (Ames Reference Ames2023a, 38; original emphasis). Ultimately, “zoetology gives us a population of interdependent and thus always plural human ‘becomings’ rather than a world constituted by discrete human beings” (Ames Reference Ames2023a, 38; my emphasis). In zoetology, identity is always a perpetual process rather than a fixed outcome.
While Ames frames the difference between substance ontology and zoetology primarily at a conceptual level, decolonial feminist theories insist that this distinction can carry material consequences. What is problematic about ontology lies not in categories of identity per se, but in the ways categorical thinking produces regimes of classification that govern the recognition of life itself. Such conceptual categorization can be weaponized to reinforce structures of power that determine the boundaries of the legitimate and reproduce coloniality. As Shara Cherniak and Ashli Moore Walker (Reference Cherniak and Moore Walker2020, 428) explain, the coloniality of power relies on the production and reproduction of hierarchical binaries, such as “the human/non-human binary” and “the modern/non-modern binary,” to dehumanize the colonized and to delegitimize their ways of knowing and being for the purpose of justifying domination. The hierarchical binaries result from what Lugones (Reference Lugones2003, 128) calls “split separation” guided by a logic of purity and fragmentation that assumes “what is multiple is understood as internally separable.” Furthermore, in split separation, the dominant difference is neutralized while subordinate differences are regarded as deviations from it (Lugones Reference Lugones2003, 131). Therefore, in the examples of hierarchical binaries of human/nonhuman and modern/nonmodern, the categories are unequal. The negative prefix of non-in nonhuman and nonmodern highlights their subordinate position within the categorical hierarchies of humanity and modernity.
To confront split separation as a way to resist the coloniality of power, Lugones (Reference Lugones2003, 144) calls for “curdle-separation” that refuses fragmentation and instead insists on the stickiness of one’s multiplicity. This refusal of fragmentation echoes in Anzaldúa’s assertion (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2009a, 46): “Who, me, confused? Ambivalent? Not so. Only your labels split me.” Anzaldúa exposes the violence of split separation and voices the same embrace of multiplicity that Lugones theorizes in curdle-separation. In addition to the insistence on multiplicity, Lugones (Reference Lugones2003, 144) emphasizes that curdle-separation is not “something that happens to us but something we do.” The importance placed on an ongoing action rather than a static state in curdle-separation is similar to the zoetological shift from noun-dominated thinking to gerund-centered thinking that Ames illuminates.
Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2015, 90) offers a vivid illustration of this zoetological shift when she puts forward that “Activism is engaging in healing work. It means putting our hands in the dough and not merely thinking or talking about making tortillas. It means creating spaces and times for healing to happen.” While “making tortillas” foregrounds set outcomes, “putting our hands in the dough” underscores processual action, leaving what can emerge from the action open-ended. The contrast between making tortillas and putting hands in the dough also illustrates a shift from being to becoming, which is shared by the characteristic zoetological break from substance ontology.
2.2. Identity as relational
Moreover, Anzaldúa’s identity theory reverberates with the zoetological view on relational, dynamic, and open-ended identity. Anzaldúa distances herself from an exclusive ontological understanding of identity and embraces an inclusive zoetological identity formation. Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa, Anzaldúa and Keating2002, 3) proclaims that “Though most people self-define by what they exclude, we define who we are by what we include—what I call the new tribalism.” Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2015, 69) also recognizes identity as “relational,” and “always in process—self interacting with different communities and worlds.” Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2015, 75) elaborates: “Identity grows out of our interactions, and we strategically reinvent ourselves to accommodate our exchanges.” In other words, identity formation is always an interactive, processual endeavor rather than a solitary, pre-defined status. To use Ames’s zoetological vocabulary, Anzaldúa perceives identity not as a noun but as a gerund. In her rereading of Mestizas in Anzaldúa’s work, Deborah Miranda also recognizes that the identity is not only “a racial term” but more about a becoming emerging from “mestiza acts” (Miranda and Keating Reference Miranda, Keating, Gloria and Keating2002, 207). The shift from Mestiza as a term to that as an act stresses the gerundive aspect of the identity.
To visualize her theory of new tribalism, Anzaldúa uses el árbol de la vida (the tree of life) as her central symbol to illustrate that relational identity is not about being but becoming budding off from a web of relations. According to Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2015, 67), in the tree of life, we ground our roots in “ancestral/racial origins and biological attributes” and our branches and leaves are nurtured by “the characteristics, communities, and cultures that surround us, that we’ve adopted, and that we’re in intimate conversation with.” We “graft a new tribalism” onto the trunk (Anzaldúa Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2015, 67). Although we often consider roots to be unchangeable, the writer has an alternative view. Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2015, 67) herself has strong roots “deep enough in la cultura mexicana,” but she recognizes that people can have different relations to their roots. As she writes, “For some, home-ethnic roots may not be as clear-cut as those connected to the land, nor as portable and potable as the diasporic roots clinging to immigrants’ feet and carried from one community, culture, or country to another” (Anzaldúa Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2015, 67). Anzaldúa’s hospitable stance on roots sets her apart from other Chicana feminists. For example, Moraga (Reference Moraga2011, 125) considers it imperative for marginalized people to make their “way back to the home sites that have rejected and deformed [them] in order to re-form [the home sites].” In contrast, Anzaldúa does not see returning to the original roots as necessary for the marginalized. She even encourages practitioners of new tribalism to search for alternative roots that allow them to connect to their “inner [selves]” in order to bring out their “greatest strength” (Anzaldúa Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2015, 68). As Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2015, 68) elaborates, “To partake of the new tribalism, you don’t have to be connected to your home-ethnicity; other root systems will suffice.” By (re)rooting and grafting heterogeneous relations onto our trees of life, we can cultivate a richer ecosystem to situate our identity.
2.3. Identity as ecological
Using the tree of life as a central narrative to illustrate new tribalism, Anzaldúa calls our attention to understanding identities not as categorical but ecological, and not as static but organic. Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2015, 67) argues that new tribalism “recognizes that we are responsible participants in the ecosystems (complete set of interrelationships between a network of living organisms and their physical habitats) in whose web we’re individual strands.” Here Anzaldúa uses ecosystems to visualize the foundational relationality in identity formation in new tribalism, which is shared by a zoetological view of identity. According to Ames (Reference Ames2023b, 90), zoetology is characterized by “a holistic, organic, and ecological worldview,” in which persons are defined not by limitation and independence. Instead, persons are delineated “ecologically by the growth they experience in their intercourse with other persons and their worlds” (Ames Reference Ames2023b, 90). Similarly, Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2015, 75) also articulates that our identities are created when “we interrelate with others and our alrededores/surroundings.” Both Ames and Anzaldúa understand identity as relational and situational rather than self-enclosed. Identity emerges as a focal point defined by a specific spatial and temporal grid situated in a web of relations. As Ames (Reference Ames2024a, 184) emphasizes, “the ‘where’ and the ‘when’ in the relations of something gives you its ‘what.’” That is, what one’s identity is can only be explained by when and where one is situated ecologically.
Using ecosystems to explain the foundational relationality in identity formation in new tribalism also connotes that one’s identity is individualistic and collective at the same time. In other words, both individuality and collectivity can be retained in new tribalism without sacrificing one for the other. As the phrase “we’re individual strands” in the web of ecosystems in the aforementioned quote suggests, differences are not obliterated in the cultivation of a collective identity. The coexistence and mutual constitution between individuality and collectivity can be explained by zoetology that is informed by “‘the inseparability of one and many’ (一多不分觀 yi duo bufen quan),” a Chinese cosmological postulate originally termed by Chinese philosopher Tang Junyi (Ames Reference Ames2023a, 35). In such a worldview, everything is “at once what it is for itself, for its specific context, and for the unsummed totality” (Ames Reference Ames2024b, 31). Similar to a rich and healthy ecosystem that relies on the flourishing of different coexisting entities, new tribalism also encourages association making with others instead of annihilation of them. Notably, by making associations, one’s individuality is not lost but enhanced. As Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2015, 93) emphasizes, “Because of increasing self-knowledge and interdependence through communication, collaboration, and greater access to information, we’re increasingly becoming a part of the greater whole, but also more individualistic” (my emphasis). That is, continuous association weaves individuals into a larger whole. Creative associations make individuals more distinguishable because what we choose to associate with will change the shape of our branches and leaves of our trees of life.
2.4. Identity as narrative
The evolving grafting praxis to nurture our trees of life in new tribalism makes identity always about becoming. For Anzaldúa, identity is not a scientific truth that is duplicable at different times and spaces or replicable by others with shared identities. Instead, identity involves processual storytelling. Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2015, 75) specifies that “identity is an ongoing story, one that changes with each telling.” Anzaldúa’s associating identity with storytelling to accentuate human becomings is shared by Ames’s (Reference Ames2024a, 185) zoetological reading of identity when he points out that “our narratives and our persons … are one and the same thing.” Both Anzaldúa and Ames approach identity from an aesthetic perspective, diverging from an ontological identity informed by a scientific categorical lens. The difference between the two views on identity is made clear by Ames’s specific terms to distinguish between zoetology and ontology. He describes zoetology as the art of living and substance ontology as the science of being per se.Footnote 8 According to Ames, unlike ontological thinking which aims to establish “demonstrable truth” (Reference Ames2023a, 36) and investigate given reality, zoetological thinking endeavors to create realizable potentiality through an “aesthetic process of cultivating meaningful relations under the various rubrics of growth” (37; my emphasis). In another article, Ames (Reference Ames2023b, 97) further elaborates that human becomings generate meanings through “[transforming] ordinary experience into poetry” (my emphasis). The poetic cultivation in the zoetological view on human becomings is echoed in Anzaldúa’s theory of new tribalism. As Carolina Núñez-Puente (Reference Núñez-Puente2018, 51) observes, in Anzaldúa’s new tribalism, a self “that is open to being altered by the other—be it an emotion or another person—is a self with both poetic and queer qualities” (my emphasis). Poetry is a condensed art form to capture experience and reality. Therefore, using poetry to explore identity in both new tribalism and zoetology shows that identity is not a fixed dictionary entry but a tentative focal point that emerges from the complex web of space and time in which a person is embedded. In addition, poetry is often rich in metaphors and images open for interpretation. Identity understood in a poetic sense is also an open-ended and interactive event rather than a standalone and self-evident truth.
3. Revisiting criticism on new tribalism from zoetology
Understanding identity in an aesthetic sense as informed by zoetology gives us an alternative lens to revisit Pérez’s criticism of Anzaldúa’s new tribalism. Pérez finds problems with Anzaldúa’s use of indigeneity as a metaphor. However, I contend that, in doing so, Anzaldúa actually leaves the meaning of indigeneity open to interpretation and association based on different lived realities, rather than confining the term to a fixed, dictionary-like definition, as Ames criticizes substance ontology. Indeed, creating metaphors is a move to make generalizations to some degree. But generalization is not necessarily problematic, for it could still accommodate the complexities and contingencies of events. As Charles W. Mills highlights, abstractions and generality do not necessarily lead to ideal theory untouched by reality. Instead, Mills (Reference Mills2005) argues that for those abstractions and generality that do not “abstract away from gender and race” (173; original emphasis), they are capable of advancing nonideal theory that follows an “ideal-as-descriptive” model of theorization in contrast with an “ideal-as-idealized” model that characterizes ideal theory (172).
I read Anzaldúa’s deployment of metaphor as resonant with the abstraction and generality central to Mills’s conception of nonideal theory. Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2009c, 122) makes it clear that, as a writer, her metaphor creation aims to “give others access to a language and images with which they can articulate/express pain, confusion, joy, and other experiences thus far experienced only on an inarticulated emotional level.” Anzaldúa creates metaphors not to abstract away from lived experiences but to concretize those experiences that remain to be affirmed and voiced.
In her criticism of Anzaldúa’s use of indigeneity as a metaphor, Pérez views metaphors merely as a literary device detached from reality or assumes them only as the imaginary that is untouched by lived experiences. However, the critic overlooks that metaphors are always endowed with agential qualities to affect lives within Anzaldúa’s corpus. In “Metaphors in the tradition of the shaman,” Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2009c, 122) specifies that, through metaphors, we can “preserve,” “protect,” “change,” and “share” ourselves. For Anzaldúa, metaphors are not literary devices she creates just to entertain readers. Instead, metaphors are alive as shamanic mediums that can impact our storytelling of our immediate realities, our identities, and the visions we hope to materialize.
Metaphors as conceptualized in Anzaldúa’s corpus are similar to a zoetological understanding of language that has the potential to concretize reality through words. In traditional Chinese philosophical thought, including Confucianism and Daoism, language contains agential qualities. As Ames (Reference Ames2024b, 57) elucidates in the following quote:
Dao 道 means both “way-making” and “speaking,” where these are two aspects of the same activity. The fertility of language lies in speaking a world into being by activating the indeterminacies that are always available in experience and, in so doing, allowing for ars contextualis: that is, the omnipresent opportunity for artful recontextualizing.
The dual meanings of Dao written in Chinese as道—“way-making” and “speaking”—convey the intertwinement between creating a worldFootnote 9 and crafting words. It is in this sense that language can “[speak] a world into being.” The transformative dimension of language resides in its agential capacity to shape reality instead of merely reflecting it. The condition for language to form reality lies in the praxis of “artful recontextualizing.” Ames’s emphasis on ars contextualis in his explanation of language with agential quality reinforces that reality in zoetology is perceived mainly through an artistic lens rather than from a scientific perspective.
The zoetological view on language opens up a new terrain in which to interpret Anzaldúa’s treatment of indigeneity as a metaphor in new tribalism. While Pérez associates the writer’s use of indigeneity as a metaphor with a lack of specificity and accountability, I read it differently. I argue that to retain heterogeneity in new tribalism, it is necessary for Anzaldúa to evoke indigeneity as a metaphor, with agential qualities as understood in her own corpus, rather than a specific identity with a clear-cut boundary. By doing so, Anzaldúa insists on the instability, indeterminacy, and evasiveness in the metaphor of indigeneity in order to address the collective anxiety over indigenous authenticity.
I contend that Anzaldúa mobilizes indigeneity as a metaphor to resist the settler colonial logic of blood quantum.Footnote 10 Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2009d, 286) was aware that blood quantum is “one of the most explosive in the discussion of what constitutes tribal identity and indigenous legitimacy.” Read from Ames’s zoetological framework, blood quantum can be seen as a substance ontological enactment that relies on a scientific logic of being per se to certify Indigenous authenticity. Instead of proving her indigeneity through scientific blood quantum, Anzaldúa’s route to indigeneity is through continuous engagement with indigeneity in her writing and her politics. Anzaldúa’s use of indigeneity as a metaphor to make indigeneity open for (re)interpretation and (re)contextualization follows zoetology as an art of becoming. Anzaldúa deploys indigeneity as a metaphor to diversify, thicken, and amplify indigenous existence and struggle, for the purpose of subverting Indigeneity as approved by blood quantum that aims to dilute Indigenous blood to weaken tribal people’s authenticity and their claim to sovereignty. In other words, Anzaldúa’s call for new tribalism should not be read through modern categorical logics of authenticity that reduce tribes to fixed identities subject to purity tests, as the policy of blood quantum exemplifies. Instead, Anzaldúa’s notion of tribe in new tribalism should be understood in a nonmodern sense that refers to a relational and proliferative collective that resists the colonial split between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, human and nonhuman, and self and other.
Building on this nonmodern understanding of tribe, we can further see how Anzaldúa mobilizes indigeneity metaphorically to cultivate intercultural intersubjectivity among those who approach it from different journeys. For Anzaldúa, metaphors can be created to sustain links across divides. After her discussion of the impact of metaphors on real lives in “Metaphors in the tradition of the shaman,” Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2009c, 122) discerns that “Despite language, class, and identity differences and conflicts there exist strong cultural links among Chicana, mexicana, Latina, Native, Asian, Black, and other women.” For Anzaldúa, the self-enclosed boundaries between cultures are only tentative if not illusionary. Anzaldúa shares a zoetological worldview where “association is a fact” (Ames Reference Ames2024b, 31). Understood through a zoetological lens, Anzaldúa’s use of indigeneity as a metaphor in her theorization of new tribalism aims to mobilize a new cultural and identity narrative driven by a decolonial vision and an associative praxis rather than to recolonize Indigeneity.
Recolonizing Indigeneity is a concern that Pérez has with new tribalism. Such a concern is made explicit when Pérez criticizes Anzaldúa’s evocation of indigeneity as a tendency toward cultural tourism and cultural appropriation in her theorization of new tribalism. However, when it comes to the aspects of identity alignment expectation and rightful ownership of Indigeneity, Pérez’s criticism requires further scrutiny. On the one hand, Pérez (Reference Pérez, Francisco, Segura and Benjamin-Labarthe2018, 246) doubts whether Anzaldúa can legitimately claim Indigeneity when she “did not identify as india [sic]” but claimed “Indian ancestry through mestizaje” (original emphasis). In the criticism, there is a latent expectation of alignment between Anzaldúa’s racial identity, her epistemology, and her politics when it comes to Indigeneity. I argue that such alignment expectation falls back to the identity straightjackets that Anzaldúa strives to be liberated from throughout her philosophy, such as sex-gender alignment and the alignment between skin color and racial consciousness. On the other hand, in her argument that Anzaldúa’s appropriation of Indigeneity is only “a la carte spiritualism,” Pérez (Reference Pérez, Francisco, Segura and Benjamin-Labarthe2018, 248) already assumes not only clear boundaries between cultural spiritualities but also Indigeneity as something to be owned rather than done.
It is crucial to note that Pérez’s view and Anzaldúa’s on the identity of indigeneity diverge. To borrow Ames’s distinction between substance ontology and zoetology in terms of relationality, I argue that Pérez’s criticism mainly dwells on the second-order relationality and fails to recognize that Anzaldúa’s associative efforts are guided by the first-order relationality. According to Ames, there are two orders of relationality: zoetology is the first order while substance ontology is the second order. The second-order relationality assumes the existence of “discrete and self-sufficient things” before relations can be built among them (Ames Reference Ames2024a, 182). In contrast, zoetology as the first-order relationality “construes experience in terms of interpenetrating events, where linguistically an eventful, gerundive language is privileged, and the erstwhile distinction between ‘things’ and ‘relations’ has no purchase” (Ames Reference Ames2023a, 37); “vital relations are themselves first-order and constitutive of the unfolding pattern of events” (38). In other words, whereas the second-order relationality presumes a chronological order in which things exist before relations are made, the first-order relationality assumes that things and relations coexist simultaneously because they are mutually unfolding. In Pérez’s argument, indigeneity is understood in the second order of relationality in the sense that the category of Indigeneity exists before one’s relation with it is established. Therefore, the fact that Anzaldúa establishes her relation with indigeneity through mestizaje makes her a trespasser within what is considered to be a more authentic Indigenous identity.
In contrast to Pérez’s critique, I contend that Anzaldúa’s engagement with indigeneity through mestizaje positions her not as a trespasser but as a practitioner of complex communication in Lugones’s notion for Anzaldúa to return from the second order of relationality to the first. For Anzaldúa, indigenousness is not a fixed identity but a gerundive mode of becoming driven by zoetology featured by associative thinking. New tribalism emerges from a cosmology where foundational interconnectivity across difference is affirmed and presumed. Within this framework, there is no real separation between the outside and the inside. As Anzaldúa specifies, “There are no ‘otras [others]’—we all emerge from humanity’s basic shared, communal ground, an emotional-spiritual ground of being” (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2015, 81). The sentence underscores Anzaldúa’s affirmation of relational openness required for cross-difference engagement.
The relational openness across difference is also affirmed in Lugones’s complex communication (Reference Lugones2006, 84) that resists colonizers’ monologism by recognizing and engaging each other’s opacity and liminality without “assimilating the text of others to our own.” Lugones further emphasizes that there are multiple liminal sites where resistant consciousness is nurtured and where the oppressed can meet. The acknowledgment of the plurality of limens stresses the possibility that people can take different journeys to arrive at an emerging coalitional space, without needing to share similar identities or forms of oppression. As language understood in zoetology and the theory of metaphor in Anzaldúa’s corpus, complex communication is also “creative” and action-driven, through which “we create and cement relational identities, meanings that did not precede the encounter, ways of life that transcend nationalisms, root identities, and other simplifications of our imaginations” (Lugones Reference Lugones2006, 84). In other words, complex communication allows a potential coalitional space to emerge when returning from the second-order relationality to the first-order one in the sense that no transparency of identities or oppressions is required for relations to be built. Instead, through complex communication, each other’s opacity can be retained and relationality can be formed when their different journeys of resistance are turned from isolated stories into interpenetrating events to form new meanings. Meanings and encounters become mutual unfolding as suggested by Lugones’s words of “meanings that did not precede the encounter” in the aforementioned quote. Read through the lens of Lugones’s complex communication, I suggest that indigeneity in Anzaldúa’s theory of new tribalism can be viewed as a polyglossia used in a coalitional limen where people can arrive through their distinctive resisting journeys and proximity to indigeneity.
4. New tribalism as a zoetological web of becomings
She is willing to share, to make herself vulnerable to foreign ways of seeing and thinking. She surrenders all notions of safety, of the familiar. Deconstruct, construct. She becomes a nahual, able to transform herself into a tree, a coyote, into another person. She learns to transform the small “I” into the total Self. (Anzaldúa Reference Anzaldúa2007, 104–5)
Throughout her career, Anzaldúa never plays safe. From her early writings as “La prieta,” to Borderlands, and to post-Borderlands theories such as new tribalism, Anzaldúa constantly faces the looming accusation of unfaithfulness. Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2015, 74) acknowledges that she is “always, already, a traitor” for her writing and her language; moreover, “rewriting cultural narratives makes [her] even more of a malinchista.”Footnote 11 Anzaldúa recognizes the baggage of evoking indigeneity in her theories, but she never avoids it for the sake of staying in a comfort zone free from the worry of being accused of cultural appropriation. Anzaldúa’s continuous engagement with indigeneity can be read as a practice of what Leah Kalmanson (Reference Kalmanson2015, 206) terms as “historical contextualization,” a strategy to conduct comparative philosophy with a decolonial sensitivity. Kalmanson (Reference Kalmanson2015, 206) explains that the historical contextualization strategy is a “‘scare quotes strategy,’ in that we are admitting that our choices of words are undeniably indebted to the logic of colonial difference, even while we continue to employ those words.” Anzaldúa’s use of indigeneity is also a scare quotes strategy in the sense that she does not provide a fixed definition of the concept. Instead, as I have elaborated earlier, Anzaldúa deploys indigeneity as a metaphor open for interpretation; its meaning requires readers’ continuous vigilance and engagement to unravel in a particular context where it is evoked.
Anzaldúa confronts the settler colonial trope of playing Indian by putting herself in a muddy space of indigeneity and making her theory of new tribalism vulnerable to Indigenous critiques. By doing so, Anzaldúa welcomes the transformative “ambush” in George Yancy’s notion. Yancy originally uses the concept of ambush in the context of revealing, critiquing, and transforming what it means to be white in a white supremacist society. Although the term of ambush contains dangerous and unpleasant connotations, Yancy endows it with a transformative potential. As he argues, “the reality of being ambushed should be regarded as valuable to growth, not a sign of defeat” (Yancy Reference Yancy2008, 240). The transformative dimension of ambush emerges when the dominant group actively welcomes unsettling and uncertain encounter with the minority group to have “one’s world transformed and cracked” in order to crack open new possibilities of being in the world and being with others (Yancy Reference Yancy2008, 240). Similar to the transformative ambush that Yancy delineates, Anzaldúa refuses to steer away from the allusion to indigeneity in her theory of new tribalism even when she recognizes potential Indigenous critiques. Her goal is not to appropriate but proliferate indigeneity. In Anzaldúa’s own distinction between appropriation and proliferation, the former “steals and harms” while the latter “helps heal breaches of knowledge” (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2009b, 131–32). Unlike the settler colonial cultural appropriation that follows a logic of annihilation of Indigenous people, Anzaldúa’s deployment of indigeneity is motivated by the logic of proliferation and aims at cultivating cross-cultural planetary politics.
For Anzaldúa, new tribalism is not only a theory of relational identity formation but also a foundation for planetary citizenship. Keating (Reference Keating2022, 188) points out that Anzaldúa applies the relationality in new tribalism “to questions of nationalism and other forms of separatism, exploring how we can acknowledge the value of ancestry (traditions, family, etc.) without reifying these cultural roots or in other ways using them like rigid barricades that impede our ability to connect with others.” In contrast with an old tribalism that is self-enclosed and exclusionary nationalism, new tribalism is an inclusive “porous nationalism” (Keating Reference Keating2022, 189). The old tribalism relies on “acts of aggression and war-like activities” to secure national boundaries (Anzaldúa Reference Anzaldúa2003, 4). On the contrary, Anzaldúa’s (Reference Anzaldúa2003, 5) new tribalism resorts to agential narrative strategies and imaginal creativity to weave together differences across national boundaries into a “multicultural story.” Such emerging stories of new tribalism can “show that national and international boundaries are porous” and “redefine what it means to be an American of the US, what it means to be a citizen of the world” (Anzaldúa Reference Anzaldúa2003, 5). Extending this logic of porous boundaries, Anzaldúa argues in Light in the dark that enemies are not defined by their identities but by the specific thoughts and unconsciousness they internalize and act out. In Anzaldúa’s words (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2015, 93), “Isn’t an enemy not another person but the ignorance, fear, hate (los desconocimientosFootnote 12 ) that diminish us? When our ‘enemies’ become conscious of their desconocimientos and act on that awareness, they may become our ‘allies.’” According to Anzaldúa, no stable line can be drawn to delineate our enemies according to their identities and nationalities because enemies can also evolve into our allies when they make alternative associations in their processes of growing their trees of life. This fluid understanding of relationality contrasts sharply with old tribalism, which situates us within existing delineated national and international boundaries defended with aggressive patriotism. By comparison, new tribalism encourages us to liquify such boundaries by risking our existing identities in order to cultivate alternative planetary ecologies.
The planetary political vision with which Anzaldúa endows her theory of new tribalism resonates with Ames’s zoetological view on politics. In a recent article titled “What would Confucius say?,” Ames makes a provocative argument that everyone is more or less Chinese. Ames’s argument (Reference Ames2023a, 51) builds from a zoetological view of identity that is not defined by categories but emerges analogically through one’s participation in a “shared and unbounded cultural ecology.” In other words, even if people do not identify with the identity of Chinese, their interconnectedness in their participation in a “living planetary ecology” through a web of global relations makes them more or less Chinese (Ames Reference Ames2023a, 52).
If we follow Ames’s argument to return to Pérez’s question (Reference Pérez, Francisco, Segura and Benjamin-Labarthe2018, 251) on Anzaldúa’s new tribalism: “We may see ourselves as indigenous, but are we Indigenous?,” the answer will be yes, but with caution. It is important to clarify that the affirmative answer does not intend to erase the distinctiveness of various embodiments of indigeneity nor to recolonize Indigeneity. As Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio (Reference Osorio2021, 135) emphasizes in her discussion of how outsiders to Hawaiʻi can build connections to Indigenous land and people, “while kama‘āina [local] reflects a familiar pilina [relationship] to land and its people, it does not necessarily reflect a familial one” (original emphasis). The distinction between the familiar and the familial helps clarify the difference between practicing settler responsibility and enacting settler coloniality. The former entails accountable relational engagement without claims to Indigenous kinship, whereas the latter reproduces relations of possession, substitution, and erasure. Following Osorio’s distinction between the familiar and the familial, I suggest that the relational proximity envisioned in Anzaldúa’s new tribalism may render indigeneity familiar through practices of translation, witnessing, and association, but it does not establish familial belonging grounded in Indigenous kinship. By making the provocative argument that we are more or less Indigenous, I aim to highlight that we are differentially implicated in a global web of Indigeneity, whether through structures of oppression or through practices of witnessing and endurance. The recognition marks a beginning step toward mapping uneven relations within the same field, so as to trace the asymmetric distribution of colonial power and to acknowledge our accountability for each other.
Furthermore, as Ames’s article “What would Confucius say” informs us, we need to ask a different set of questions to begin to understand that individual and national identities should not be viewed as static beings but evolving becomings. We should move from “Who is Chinese/Indigenous?,” a question asked by substance ontology to generate noun-driven dictionary definitions, to process-oriented questions starting from “How.” For instance, we may ask “How do individuals become Chinese/Indigenous and through what paths?” and “How are we associated with China/Indigeneity in a particular time and space?” By asking an alternative set of questions, we will begin to realize that Anzaldúa’s new tribalism affirms indigeneity through an act of de-centering rather than that of centering. The centering logic of Indigeneity strives to pin down Indigenous identity through classification systems, such as the policy of blood quantum, that stabilize the boundaries of legitimate belonging. Conversely, I suggest that Anzaldúa’s new tribalism endeavors to de-center Indigeneity by shifting it from a fixed object of definition to a relational field of differential implication. In this sense, it moves from an upper-case Indigeneity understood as bounded identity toward a lower-case indigeneity that foregrounds histories of relation and colonial entanglement. As a pan-ethnicFootnote 13 and planetary framework, Anzaldúa’s new tribalism invites people to perform complex communication to broaden what indigeneity means to make everyone a potential coalitional ally to contribute to planetary citizenship.
To re-engage with Anzaldúa’s new tribalism from a zoetological perspective, we realize that indigeneity is an identity made by doing, translating, associating, and correlating. Put differently, in Anzaldúa’s theory of new tribalism, indigeneity is less a noun than a gerund with an emphasis on action in the noun. The gerundive understanding of indigeneity makes indigeneity in new tribalism not something static to be possessed and appropriated. Instead, indigeneity should be understood as becoming that is mobilized by a continuous process of approximating as the grafting praxis to cultivate the tree of life. Both approximating and grafting build relations with something heterogeneous to our original trees of life for a new ecology to emerge without erasing differences. Instead of assimilating indigeneity into a unity, new tribalism strives to approximate indigeneity with a breathable distance for both individuality and collectivity to be preserved. Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa and Keating2015, 85) emphasizes that new tribalism is “about being part of but never subsumed by a group, never losing individuality to the group nor losing the group to the individual. The new tribalism is about working together to create new ‘stories’ of identity and culture, to envision diverse futures.” Preserving differences while forming collective identities and coalitional spaces lies at the core of Anzaldúa’s philosophy. Andrea J. Pitts (Reference Pitts2021, 155) also discerns in her analysis of Anzaldúa’s multiplicitous agency that “Rather than assuming common causes of oppression or common identities, Anzaldúa understood such coalitional spaces as retaining differences in position, histories, and experiences.” Anzaldúa’s emphasis on preserving individual differences to activate collective change is also echoed by Ames’s zoetological vision on human flourishing. Ames (Reference Ames2024a, 186) puts forward that human flourishing requires our “activating our differences from each other to make a difference for each other and for the well-being of all” (original emphasis). Similarly, Anzaldúa’s new tribalism does not intend to dissipate the tensions of different interpretations of what indigeneity means and the various journeys of how practitioners of new tribalism arrive at it. The productive tensions in new tribalism are similar to the necessary, unresolvable, and generative tensions between yin and yang forces in zoetology that drive the continuous transformations and becomings in webs of relations.
This article is also an attempt to preserve the generative yin–yang tensions in re-examining Anzaldúa’s theory of new tribalism. Rather than settling questions of authenticity or correctness regarding Anzaldúa’s use of indigeneity, I foreground resonance: how critique, disagreement, and unexpected affinity generate new relations within an expanding intellectual ecology. Pérez’s Indigenous critique of new tribalism opens up a fruitful intellectual field for associative and repulsive relations to be built. My initial disagreement with Pérez’s critique motivates me to form affinity between Anzaldúa’s philosophy and Chinese philosophy. The newly established relationship between the two schools of thought further expands the academic ecology in the existing scholarship on Anzaldúa’s new tribalism. The article then invites future associations to be made. Whether the associations are about repulsion or attraction, as those in a magnetic field, we are all related in a zoetological web of becomings that allows Anzaldúa’s theory, such as new tribalism, to continue living and growing by building new conceptual kinships.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and constructive feedback, which significantly helped refine the argument of this article. I am also grateful to the co-editors in chief for their careful editorial guidance. This research was supported by the Young Scholar Fellowship Program of the National Science and Technology Council in Taiwan (grant number: NSTC 111-2636-H-003-014).
(Brena) Yu-Chen Tai is associate professor of English at National Taiwan Normal University in Taiwan. Her general research areas lie in Anzaldúan studies, decolonial thought, US women of color feminism, and women’s literature. Her publications have appeared in Women’s Studies: An Inter-disciplinary Journal, Journal of Gender Studies, College Literature, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, and the anthology titled Speaking Face to Face: The Visionary Philosophy of María Lugones.
