I am moving this post up to work on the things in it. (The Espejo enterrado uses the Castro paradigm. One knows this but does not always remember it, so I have made this note.)
I am rereading David Theo Goldberg’s 2002 book and it is my claim that with this tome, Balibar’s, Winant’s, and da Silva’s I can read María and Cecilia Valdés in a new way. I have been trying to understand these two novels, and their cousins, for a long time; I must unravel them. We have Doris, we have Karen, we have William, and we have some other critics but it is really Goldberg who looks at these issues in the sharp way I want to do. I am also interested in the blog that goes with his newer book. His phrase the sensitive eye and ear rings with Villaverde’s “ojo conocedor” although in an opposite direction.
Goldberg’s title is The Racial State. I had forgotten about this book but more recent reading led me to realize that race is not primarily about nation, it is about the state. I believe I have potential JALLA and MLA abstracts hiding about this. I will open every abstract and unfinished essay in a different tab across the top of the Lyx screen, so that I can shift text between these and work on several different texts or pieces of text at once, shifting material between tabs so that each one goes somewhere definite. I must open my abandoned Cecilia paper.
Goldberg’s work supports, or appears to support my “evoke and elide” theory. Foucault’s idea of self surveillance is key to this (105); in the Americas we get lessons in how to form ourselves as the right kind of racial subject. Also, racial subjects are self fashioned; this is how hegemony works (106). Thus there is no clear cut difference between the state and the individual.
A paper given in this region and that was liked by that Routledge editor, asked: is Denise da Silva right? can we blame it all on Descartes? what about racialization in the late middle ages, and what about 1492? Goldberg has answers to these questions. Da Silva’s work is attractive in that she does not assert Brazilian exceptionalism and because she recognizes race as a world system. However, Goldberg answers my questions about her model and more. As I say, it is true that the issue is the state, and it I am quite sure that this perception is what will make my book work.
In the novels I am working on, though, one must talk about patriarchy and the señor. Patriarchy, race, state, modern subject. One of my starting-out threads is contained in a post I wrote in January, based on my conversation with José Fernando; everyone in the nineteenth century and many more are like Juan Preciado and the Inca Garcilaso, searching for their father and hoping to claim their inheritance. In the twentieth century, the terminology is different but we are still looking at race, state, modern subject.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 