More from Branche

Fragmentary notes to decipher.

* 2, 802, 733: antislavery tracts (in enlish) 823-31 + poems, plays, fiction

* Alvar, LEXICO DEL MESTIZAJE EN HISPANOAMERICA (Branche 63) … and on 83-84, to acquire honra = to whiten

* 89 whiteness could be bought

*91 whiteness conferring status; the obsession with whiteness an American thing

*93 linguistic labels for color bespeak a one drop mentality although whitening was possible

* 104 contrapunteo en Madrid; Tarzan/Jane, is Cecilia Jane?

* 107: the torture of slaves belies facile generalizations on the benignity of Latin American slavery

* 115 my thesis too: the “embrace of mulatez is the suppression of the darker masses in the possibility that they might be protagonists of change” … and MIXING is not a bridge, but a barrier to Black empowerment.

* Gubar on racial impersonation in primitivism (Africans become “supermen”)

* 136 Manzano claims mulato status and constructs “negro” as Other

* 140 the character is returned to bozal status when he becomes threatening

Axé.

* 150 [look this  up] a specifically (Latin) American race obsession (?)

* 195 PALES MATOS on the Afro-Antillean difference: it is the tinge of color that counts

* the first poem on an African theme in Spanish appeared in 1455 (64)

* Lope de Vega (but really Antonio Mira): EL NEGRO DEL MEJOR AMO … and there were other plays on these themes; Quevedo wrote a poem “Boda de negros”; in EL NEGRO DEL MEJOR AMO the “solution” is to wash out Blackness

* the colonized must turn white or disappear

Jerome Branche

Colonialism and Race in Luso-Hispanic Literature (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2006):

CHAPTER 5: MUCH OF WHICH IS ABOUT ORTIZ AND HOW HIS WORK SEPARATES BLACK AGENCY FROM THE BLACK REFERENT AND OTHERWISE EMBODIES AND SUPPORTS RACIST INTELLECTUAL PRACTICES.

214: Depestre on negrismo: it showed “neither anger nor rebelliousness.” Branche: “The ability to sucessfully separate the political from the aesthetic is undoubtedly a striking feature of the genre, and could only have been achieved by way of silencing and/or co-optation of the referent, as indicated earlier. The more or less obvious absence or paucitry of black literary voices . . . would therefore offer only a partial explanation of this silence, which . . . has both a material, political dimension, and a symbolic, discursive one.”

214: A depoliticized Afrocubanness is reincorporated to Cuban culture by way of negrista arts … in this way white culture consumes, or cannibalizes Blackness.

230: [In the Revista de Avance/Ecué-Yamba-O] Carpentier used the bongo as an anti-Wall Street symbol. But how does this marginalized cultural artifact suddenly get to occupy a commanding space in the national episteme … and if it does, does its player (a Black man) get to do the same?

243: El Reino de Este Mundo consistently indulges in the “antiblack tropological archive”

CONCLUSION

249: Examples about how literary race making marginalize Blackness are a Negrist discourse in which denigration passes for glorification, and antislavery writing that is less about emancipation than about the celebration of elite abolitionists. Through these texts and their validation as liberating in the critical tradition readers learn to accept an inverted epistemology that sustains racism.

250: The white racial contract interpellates whites across the globe (useful for my purposes: it does not just interpellate Americans). Important source for the misreading of race in L.A. = the racial democracy principle.

Axé.

From Spicer (and perhaps elsewhere), for my Dresman essay

Page 209: “We do not write for each other. We are irritable radio sets . . . but our poems write for each other, being full of their own purposes. . . . And our lips are not our lips. But are the lips of heads of poets. And should shout revolution.”

1985 article by Lori Chamberlin, Ghostwriting the Text: Translation and the Poetics of Jack Spicer, on After Lorca

Spicer in the Electronic Poetry Center at Buffalo

Spicer at poets.org

Spicer at PennSound

The House That Jack Built

On January 10, 2009, there was a tribute to Spicer at the San Francisco Public Library. Read all about in X Poetics.

Axé.