celebratoriness

— Yet another area of contention is that Borderlands offers a spectacle of the painful splits that constitute Chicanas’ multiple positioning for the voyeuristic delectation of European American readers. In the foreword to the second edition of Bridge, Anzaldúa herself seems to be aware of the backfiring potential of feeding non-Chicana readers’ perception that being a person of color is an exclusively negative experience: ‘Perhaps like me you are tired of suffering and talking about suffering. . . . Like me you may be tired of making a tragedy of our lives. . . . [L]et’s abandon this auto-cannibalism: rage, sadness, fear’ (iv; emphasis in original). Other artists who use the border as a sign of multiplicity have been criticized for the opposite, for an excessive or inappropriate celebratoriness.