Revista CLAVE

La revista CLAVE. http://www.clave.org/menu.html Still have to clean up this blog. !

Sara Ahmed “The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism”

http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/ahmed_declarations.htm

And this is Borderlands e-journal, and no this blog is not abandoned, and yes I am fixing it up although I have not finished doing so!

Mongrel Nation

See Historiann on the Tenured Radical on Clarence Walker’s book, and then click through to the TR herself.

See also Carldyke on the Red House.

Jorge Bruce

OJO: I will soon come in and clean up this blog. Really and truly.

On May 26 and 27 I posted to my wall on Facebook a series of links and comments on Jorge Bruce’s NOS HABIAMOS CHOLEADO TANTO. I have not finished the book or figured out how it fits into everything else but I think Bruce is onto something and that a lot of the reactions miss his point. I will try to reproduce the Facebook material here so that I do not lose it over there.

Tanaka:
http://martintanaka.blogspot.com/2008/03/blog-post.html

Zona de Noticias:
http://zonadenoticias.blogspot.com/2008/03/cuestin-de-piel-narrativa-peruana.html

Puente aéreo [I LIKE THIS BLOG]:
http://puenteareo1.blogspot.com/2008/03/silenciosa-vigencia.html

On FB, I said:

But, re this book: I bought it over others because it appeared to be onto something and I think it is.

Vislumbro que a lot of the negative buzz around it is because it is challenging. Bruce says racism affects everyone in Peru, and some people say (like Americans who don’t… Læs mere want to be called racist because racism is a sin and makes you trashy) — oh no, not me, I’m not racist, he is too negative, what is he doing, condemning the whole country… I have to look more into this but I think I, too, am onto something.

This is one of the responses I mean. I think it misunderstands what Bruce means by looking at racism as a pathology (which I don’t think he actually does … he talks about it as a psychic wound and that is not the same as saying it is a sickness).

http://bloodyhell-la.blogspot.com/2008/03/racismo-ep1-bruce-vs-tanaka.html

Here is a quotation from one of my favorite posts on the matter (nice weblog, too, good Peruvian links):

Cuando Jorge Bruce dice que no es bueno confundir los “discursos oficiales y legales, por un lado” y, por otro, “las pr… Læs mereácticas de la vida diaria de los peruanos”, está diciendo una verdad meridiana, que describe por completo el error de Tanaka. Quizá el ejemplo más sistemático esté en los estudios de Roberto Schwarz acerca de la discrepancia de décadas entre la hegemonización del discurso antiesclavista liberal en Brasil, su virtual universalización en cierto momento, su conversión en sentido común de la época, y el instante, muy posterior, en que empezó (sólo empezó) a generar frutos reales, cotidianos y visibles en la vida diaria brasileña.

http://puenteareo1.blogspot.com/

Luis Aguirre does not like the book:
http://bloodyhell-la.blogspot.com/2008/03/racismo-ep1-bruce-vs-tanaka.html

And there was apparently a huge discussion of it, all over the papers and blogs and so on, and if you know Peru at all you see that many of those weighing in are rather well known in their own right.

And apparently there was a review of it in the Sunday supplement of El Comercio by one Joel Calero, but I have not found it yet.

I WISH I could find a similar hot discussion or fight about Sansone’s RACE WITHOUT ETHNICITY but all I have found so far are the rather bland and careful not to offend academic reviews.

And that Peruvian Internet is just HOPPING with discussions of race and racism, somebody should write a dissertation on it for a Communications degree or something, I do not exaggerate at all.

Renato Ortiz

Renato Ortiz has a book, new to me, on modernity and space, Walter Benjamin and Paris, about which must post at my Permanent Seminar so as to be sure to study it. He also has a page at the Communications portal Infoamerica.org. This portal, too, must be studied.

Axé.

Laurent Dubois on THE BLACK JACOBINS

“Reading The Black Jacobins, Seven Decades Later.” NACLA Report on the Americas 42:2 (March/April 2009): 38-42.

+ It says the story of the French Revolution was also the story of a Caribbean revolution, and thus changes how we think we know about the past, about the history of democracy and revolution, the history of Europe and the Americas (unless, of course, you read it when young, so that it was the base of things).

+ New information we yave since James wrote this book: Toussaint was a freeman, not a slave, at the beginning of the revolution; the “mulatooes” were a very complex group with multiple political projects and affiliations; the enslaved also had a complex and varied political philosophy. We also know more about the influences of African cultures, philosophies, and histories on the course of events in Saint-Domingue. But this is still the best book on the Haitian revlution, says Dubois.

+ It caused the writing of an Atlantic history — that emphasizes connections among continents — and that also decenters Europe, paying close attention to the ways the central pillar of the Atlantic world, the slave trade and slavery, shaped life and ideas in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. And it reminds us that the enslaved were always actos and thinkers, not just workers or victims. The Haitian revolutionaaries would not accept the idea of slavery, so they crafted an idea of rights that was actually universal, not only putatively so.

+ That is why the revolution was an epochal and global event, to which we are all linked. The slave trade and slavery were the basis of the French Revolution, announces James early in the book. He quotes Jaurès, one of the few historians of the French Revolution, pointing out that the fortunes created by the slave trade gave the bourgeoisie the pride that needed liberty and thus contributed to human emancipation. This claim parallels Eric Williams’ in Capitalism and Slavery that the slave trade laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution in England.

+ Willliams’ claim on England has been widely discussed, but not James’ on the way the Atlantic plantation economy and the slave trade shaped social life and political thought in France. “The provocation issued byJames in this passage still awaits a full fledged response.” (40)

+ James is also curious about the influence of France on Saint-Domingue. Raynal, critical of European imperialism, had wondered when there would be a “Black Spartacus” … and James says this caused Toussaint to try to be that person. But did Toussaint actually read Raynal? Louis Sala-Molins says not: Raynal also has racist passages and could not have been the inspiration for Toussaint. He says Black revolutions were their own thing, not Enlightenment derived (Sala-Molins has always insisted that the Enlightenment worked either to openly justify or wilfully overlook slavery). (But Dubois seems to agree more with James.)

Good for my purposes (selling my project) here is the point that slavery and the slave trade were “central pillars” and not side issues / imperfections in modernity / something to grow out of / etc.

A Plan

This blog needs cleaning – the recent posts are messy, the right sidebar is entirely out of date, and the cross referencing system is incomplete (although I think I will just let that be for now — there is too much else to do).

Resolved: I will take a break from trying to understand the Silva book on its own and start back to my paper. I will figure these things out by writing. Then, later, I may come back to the Silva book. I am considering giving a paper on it but that conference will be expensive. For this, though, I need an abstract by April 1.

*

I have finally started to do my life’s work.

*

Proposition: if  author and the transcendental subject have died, we are haunted by their ghosts.
Question: is Vallejo’s subject his own ghost? Does he intimate this willfully in his poetry? Is it a conscious strategy?

Axé.

The Michael Jackson Effect

Patricia Williams’ book believes in the possibility of extending liberty and justice to all — but shows that it has not happened yet and furthermore, that many white people believe it has, or believe the situation has been reverse … and that racial thinking is much more pervasive than people admit, or allow themselves to see.

Does she attempt to explain why this is the case? I am not sure. The focus of the book — lectures for a general audience — seems to be to show that it is the case. But she does talk about self immolation and passing, the good reasons why people would want not to be Black, given all the trouble it entails. This is useful for thinking about Brazil.

Proto-Email

Can you comment on the critique of the Cartesian subject presented in a book I am reading? I do not know how deep the author’s understanding of Descartes is or is not. That is my problem.

Here is my summary of the book’s argument so far as I understand it. What do you think of it?

1. Racialization is constitutive in the discourse of modernity. Therefore it persists despite multiple declarations of its irrationality.

2. This is so because the cogito, modernity’s founding moment, depends upon a division between interiority (the mind that thinks) and exteriority (that which lies outside the mind), and it privileges the mind (the mind comes first, its existence is the first certainty).

3. To emerge, this modern (universal) subject requires a non-modern (non universal, racialized) Other.  Because racialization is necessary to the emergence of this subject, we cannot escape racial thinking. [I would have said this subject GETS raced, but that is in part because I want it to be capable of de-racing. The author says it cannot be. That is the whole point of the book.]

Here are my comments, on which you can comment if you wish, but I do not ask it, as it would take time.

1. This goes counter to the Habermasian idea of modernity as an incomplete project. It suggests that the exclusion of the colonies from the French Revolution makes sense in the modern paradigm, since modernity could only be extended to those endowed with universality; and that the original United States, with both democracy and slavery, makes sense for the same reasons. That explains why racial others have not yet been allowed to attain full subjectivity in these societies, and why the world has been divided as it has into central and peripheral countries. These situations are then, according to this author, not accidents or errors, but inevitable in the modern episteme.

2. In an apparent paradox “universality” cannot exist without an Other, so there is no universal subject except in the sense of the Kantian transcendental subject which, as we know, corresponds only to the transcendental realm. The “universal” subject, the modern subject who knows and thinks in more practical areas of life, according to this author is not universal but has an identity: it is a white man from the global north.

Fevered Brain

Warning: everything in this post is half-baked!

Has anyone here read Denise Ferreira da Silva? Is her thesis, that raciality is essential to the production of the modern subject, so that racialization and racial thinking are inevitable in the modern episteme, correct?

If it is, does that mean that in liberalism/modernity (coming from the Enlightenment, late example: Habermas) antiracist work is necessarily working at the more superficial levels of things — since our very subjectivity depends upon racial differentiation and hierarchy?

What does one then do/say about race in the premodern eras, if one is not to posit that this is either (a) a completely different world or (b) just a staging area for modernity? Can one talk seriously at a theoretical level about race in the Western world without considering this period as background?

Note that if Silva is right, then not only is Author A, whom I critique, wrong, but so is my critique, because both author A and I assume that human rights can be extended to the subaltern.

Finally: what would C.L.R. James say to Silva? I understand him to suggest that the Enlightenment could not be extended to the subaltern, and to disagree with Toussaint who thought it could. I really need to check on this and I need to figure out all of these things. I request help.

Axé.