Achac

I must observe the activities of ACHAC  http://www.achac.com/ and look at the attachments they are sending me by e-mail. They believe in the possibility of a post racial world. I am convinced that when Europeans talk about that they’re trying to train themselves out of very conservative ideas, to moderate ones. I must think about this and in the meantime it is a good counterpoint to raise in my current paper.

David Roediger – The Wages of Whiteness, and more.

Complicates the way race is (traditionally) seen to operate in the United States.

See Theodore Allen on this.

Marxists, by talking about class, do not really address race which is pervasive.

His latest book is about the persistence of race. Having it be bad form or rude to point out racism is just one more tool of white supremacy.

Additional Points to Be Made

* Repeat from Lorna Williams: in 19C Cuba/Spain, to be for intermarriage was to be for abolition. This is really important.

* Learn more about the ESCALERA CONSPIRACY.

* Note the debates on who is more or less racist — note the moral triumphalism in them, the way in which people are more interested in being right in the abstract than in looking at reality or seeing subtleties.

* I always thought of the Latin American insistence on mestizo identities as an inability to accept difference. I do not think I am necessarily wrong and I also think that the “postethnic” view is this. All very “Western” (modernizing, male, and so on) in my view.

Mestizaje in Mexico

The PORFIRIAN regime had a mestizo rhetoric that spoke of integration of differences under the umbrella of scientific (positivist) cultural development. There was to be an integrated, pural community, imagined with a mestizo cultural identity; there was to be one history, one memory, while Indians, women, and other ethnic groups (with their own memories and histories) were being sociopolitically excluded.

The Revolution wanted to include in the new nation these excluded groups but the actual results of the nationalist discourse of the new mestizo men in power resmbled those of the Porfiriato. The thing is, I would add, that the nation, to constitute itself, needs an other, and often an other within not just an external enemy. The state is racist!

And so the mestizos themselves, as they work to social climb, try to overcome “the cross of their existential calvary” by hiding their “shameful origin” or Indigenous side, which isolates them and circumscribes them to an existential solitude.

That is Alejandro Cortazar commenting on Elena Garro’s LOS RECUERDOS DEL PORVENIR.

Station Break: Review of a House

It is a fact that as long as I continue to put myself in places and in positions which impede work, it will be difficult for me to work. What frustrates me is that I do in fact try very hard to put myself in places and positions which will enable me to work. The fact that this fails so often is extremely hard on me. I wish I were comfortable where I live (where my job is), but I am not.

*

The phrases which come to my mind in relation to the house I rented in Salvador, Bahia, Brasil this month are that I feel swindled, exploited, used, abused, deceived, cheated, or imposed upon, depending on the day.

It is not that it did not have some of the advertised features. It did. It is not that I did not understand how the neighborhood would be. I did. It is not that I have not lived in non luxury Brazilian and South American houses before. I have.

But the actual conditions in which I found this house, especially in comparison to the way it had been advertised and the price, left a very great deal to be desired and were very inconvenient. The owner has, furthermore, decided to divide the house into two parts, charging the same rent for each that I paid for the whole house.

Having seen the house and its entrances, bedrooms and bathrooms, I really do not think that having only half of the house is viable due the crampedness of the space of each part and the unreliability of the workings of each part.

At present, the owner is trying to rent each part of the house for $1000 for the week of Carnaval. This is a laughable proposal, in part because his renters will apparently not be told in advance that it is highly likely there will never be any moment during that week, in which the loudspeakers right outside the windows will be at top volume.

It is a place to leave for Carnaval, not to go. I feel truly sorry for anyone who gets taken in.

I am not sure whether to tell the owner these things. He could just be an inexperienced business person, and need the information. He could be a swindler, and not care. He could also simply delusional.

I would, however, like to warn future renters about the problems they may face, and how they can perhaps get around them if they still want to rent here. I wish there were a way to review it. I don’t mean I wish to take revenge or slander anyone; I just think future renters deserve to know.

I have a lot of other practical advice I could give about the neighborhood, transportation, and so on, that will make the landing easier for people. Note that I speak Portuguese and know Salvador. There were still a lot of things I wish I had been told so that I would not have to spend as much time and energy finding out.

Random Notes from Multiculturalism Conference

QUESTIONS OF RACE PERMEATE THE DISCOURSE OF LATIN AMERICAN LETTERS, AND INDEED RACE IS THE LETTER IF WE LOOK AT NEBRIJA.

RACE IS A VISUAL SIGNIFIER OF DIFFERENCE BUT AS SIGNIFIER IT IS MORE SUBTLE IN THE HISPANIC WORLD BECAUSE OF MESTIZAJE AND THE LETTER (although: who was it who said that “negro” in the Anglo Saxon world also meant unable to read? anyway: reading and writing whiten in the Hispanic world and that is what matters. BECAUSE of this and actual mestizaje, people need “discerning eyes.”

I do not necessary understand or agree with all of the following, but I wrote it down.

Latin American multiculturalism: it was never just about race and color; economic equality was never outside the debate; multilingualism, coloniality, all of this was there

The elites decided to unify the countries

The Question is how to to articulate alternative “epistemologies” once we are relieved of “mestizaje” and European universalism

We also need to develop regional agendas that do not fall into the twin traps of globality and provincialism

Mestizos exist in the United States; race in symbolic terms is central to Western consciousness

The Creole is created and produced as such

How is Arguedas postcolonial or not — he predates postcolonial theory

Toussaint l’Ouverture

The absolute other

A culture that defines itself through achievement and productivity

Transformation not tolerance

The dominant culture involves ascension and consumption

Canada talks now not about “diversity” but about citizenship

Creolization as occidentalization and as the transfer of cultural capital upward

Mestizaje as whitening

Race and the letter: when we talk about it, think of de la cadena’s idea of race as a “spiritual” thing, a cultural understanding

Her piece may actually be key for me, because it is about racism accompanied by its denial.

Is my “evoke and elide” concept racism and denial, or not? I think not: it’s this deferral idea I was talking about before, this driving underground … or: strategies to defer discussion of the whole thing. I am not overreacting because Isafahani, Jackson, and all these people talk about it; they’re not listened to

Cecilia Valdes: racism and mestizaje; MESTIZAJE AS AN ‘ESTABLISHED DISORDER’ … Cecilia the novel raises, then defers the issue: go back to Gelpi’s article. It is about maintaining the established (dis)order or adjusting it.

MY POSSIBLE SUBTITLES: RACE AND IA STUDIES, MONGREL NATION, RACE AND THE LETTER, THE LUSO-HISPANIC WORLD, CECILIA VALDES, SPACES OF DIFFERENCE.

Think of the connections between CULTURALIST, SPIRITUAL, and LEGITIMACY / PATRIARCHAL

That October PMLA is evidence that formation theory is important

Seeing like a state / the racial state

Smith: “It is in aporias, dark sounds, spaces of difference, that blackness is, and the possiblity of resistence lies”

Andrews, Wade, et al. do not say you cannot compare, or that Americans cannot get it right, and French has already destroyed Bourdieu and Wacquant, so we know these arguments are silly; why am I worrying!

But: postethnicity, multiculturalism, and creolization are all interested in the hyphen.

Another Offprint I Am Leaving in Salvador

Williams, Lorna V. “The Feminized Slave in G. de Avellaneda’s Sab.” REH 27 (1993): 3-17. Note its bibliography, too, which includes R. L. Jackson’s “Black Phobia and the White Aesthetic in Spanish American Literature,” Hispania 58 (1975): 467-80, and Martínez-Alier’s Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society. London: Cambridge UP, 1974.

See also: Paquette, Robert L. Sugar Is Made with Blood: The conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict Between Empires in Cuba. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1988.

Late 1830s: del Monte was urging manzano and Suarez y Romero to write their anti slavery narratives; G. de A. was formulating her own critique of slavery in Europe. It was actually a way for her to express the woman’s dilemma; G. equates the situation of women and that of slaves.

G was destined for a marriage of convenience; the 1839 version of her autobiography repeatedly mentiones the unhappily married women in her family and her own horror of marriage. She also felt morally and intellectually superior to the men to whom she was supposed to defer. Her family considered her literary inclinations to be dangerous, and even a “delito.” So in SAB, she tries to write a claim of autonomy for the different.

SAB is secretly noble, as she feels to be. And he is constantly associated with feminine activity — being a tour guide, serving meals, etc. — even though he is really an overseer. He is also chaste, like a woman, and emotionally vulnerable, like us, and also emotionally subservient — he does a lot of emotional work as well, and sacrifices himself, and so on.

Important: p. 8: “For her characters voice reservations that were widely held among the members of the Cuban ruling classes in the empirical domain. At the time when the novel was written and published, cases of interracial marriage were not considered to be individual instances of social equality, but rather to be a prefiguration of a widespread demand for emancipation among the island’s slave poulation. Consequently, slaveholders and other authority figures actively discouraged intermarriage because such visible manifestations of racial equality were taken to be contrary to the public interest (Martínez-Alier 20-76). This is why the union of Sab and Carlota, or even Teresa, is unspeakable — to contemporary readers it would have meant abolition (as it was a “metonymic sign of abolitionist intent [9]).

Sab is not a revolutionary leader, doesn’t declare himself to be an “hombre” and so on; feminization is not only a characteristic of a Romantic hero, but also an expression of the slave’s powerlessness.

Carlota is compared to the earth and made equivalent to Cuba. She, Sab, and nature all flow together in the text’s imagery. Enrique’s marriage to her would be a misappropriation.

Interesting: Sab, when he has the opportunity to kill or at least not to save Enrique, is impelled not to do so by his own internalization of his master’s voice.

Very interesting (14-15): Carlota reads Romantic novels to Sab, which teach him about unrequited and “impossible” love, i.e. teach him to accept his slave destiny. Williams’ phrase on 14 is “curtails his imaginative freedom.”

The effect os Sab’s letter, read by Carlota after his death, is to reaffirm her centrality and her importance (to him), at a time when her control of self and other has been displaced via marriage (and to a British person). So, the role of the slave, even in death, is to confirm the owner’s sense of importance.

[Note: Romantic heroes of the 1820s were feminized and in love with unattainable women because they were actualizing themselves, unfit for crass material life and a good thing, too!]

TROPICALISMO PRAGMATICO. O POETICO E O POLITICO

For almost 22 years I saved an article from LETRA. JOURNAL DE CULTURA. SECRETARIA DA CULTURA E FUNDACAO CULTURAL DO ESTADO DA BAHIA – SALVADORE NO. 84 – MARCH 1988

This was because it has an article called “Tropicalismo pragmatico” by Antonio Riserio and Gilberto Gil. The sub headline is “Mesmo quando o homem estetico se despe de atributos lendarios e assume uma posicao explicitamente politica, persiste a desconfianca do homem politico.”

The piece was originally published in the Folha of SP, and a defnitive version was to be in the book by the same authors, O PETICO E O POLITICO, which I believe has actually come out and that I have.

The part that I underlined was that the Tropicalistas were very serious. They understood the fragmentery directions and meanings of the phenomena of urbanization and industrialization in a peripheral country, over which the fat eye of planetary powers grew spectacularly. Thus the tropicalistas took upon themselves, from a universalist and people’s perspective (“popular”), the sociocultural chaos of the country. The authors say that in the era, they said they were there to bastardize the banquet of Brazilian culture. Tropicalia wanted to inject the present and reality into Brazilian culture’s bloodstream.

***I still think my idea of tropicalismo / boom novel is good***

Nationalizing Exoticism

Pratt, M.L. Nationalizing Exoticism: Spanish America After Independence. Inscriptions 2 (1986): 29-36. Unrevised text of talk given at NY MLA, 1986. (My first MLA! I love New York!)

I don’t know where she published a longer version of this or whether I should really leave this printout here. It says things I already know well, but it does say them well. It is related to the later Santiago Colas piece on Bello that I like.

It is about literacy and voice, 1820s to 1840s, for the new Republics. Two sets of dynamics condition literate efforts to create a voice: changing relations between the new republics and Europe, and between SA intellectuals and other sectors of criollo society.

As Rama points out, intellectual and literary life in the colony was urban and yet the economic base was rural; the bourgeoisie identified with the land and not the city. Intellectuals were modernizers and writers; landowning elites were not.

Yet the rural people represented to the intellectuals their difference from Europe, which they wanted; Independence did not mean independence from Europe but freedom to associate with all of it.

These intellectuals were highly selective and inventive in their use of European cultural paradigms: they transculturate. Example: Bello, Agricultura de la zona torrida. He is writing against utilitarian British descriptions of America, which they see exclusively as the future object of industrial exploitation. (See Jean Franco, “Un viaje poco romantico: viajeros britanicos hacia sudamerica,” 1818-1828 (Escritura 7, 1979, p. 133.) Pratt: “These accounts see creole society as indolent and ignorant; traveler after weary traveler complains of creole indifference to the consumer virtues of comfort, cleanliness, variety, and taste.” Bello is reacting against the industrializing, commodifying eye of the English engineers. He is not interested in mineral riches but in humble farmers; he does share the Britisher’s critique of the traditional inhabitants who have not domesticated the countryside.

In Sarmiento’s account of his 1845-47 voyage to Europe, in which he talks about what happens to him on the isle of Masafuera (where Crusoe had been set). … he finds transculturated yet efficient north american castaways living there, with wild goats (a natural resourse Crusoe had left). Then goes to Paris and discovers how consumerist and so on the French are; is amazed that they made the revolutions they made. Benedict Anderson points out that nation/nationalism is a transculturation that went in the other direction — America to Europe.

So her general point is that the exotic gets incorporated into 19C national visions in non imitative ways — ways that resist both colonialism and recolonization, although they aren’t always/aren’t necessarily “progressive” I suppose — and that this work on defining the nation state then gets exported to Europe.

So, hm: Nation is always about dealing with otherness, incorporating the primitive, and so on; that is interesting; nation is always about race, as we know; that is also interesting.

Seeing Like A State

Review of Canaday’s THE STRAIGHT STATE: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090817/epstein

Canaday’s book: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8943.html

James Scott’s SEEING LIKE A STATE: http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300078152

Brad deLong’s review of Scott’s book: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/Reviews/seeing_like_a_state.html