coldhearted scientist وداد

This article is turning into a discussion of several theorists, mostly not in literature, who say race is constitutive of modernity. If race is constitutive of modernity, there are definite limits to the liberal critique of racism, and hierarchies based on race may be made invisible but will not go away. If Latin America is interested in joining modernity in an original way, having “mestizo modernism” is an obvious way to do it and it makes your modernism very modernist indeed since mestizos are on the margins of modernity by definition.

There are problems with this when you look more closely, though, because “mestizo” is a problematic category and it is aligned with blanco as much as it is transgressive of it. My working title for the book at one point was Discerning Eyes: Latin American Modernisms and the Difference Race Makes and it is far too generalizing and not entirely applicable but I like the “Discerning Eyes” phrase. In Villaverde, the “ojo conocedor” is the eye that sees racial difference when it is hard to see. To train one’s eye in that way is a skill one needs in the Americas and this training is, efectivamente, what makes one American.

My hypothesis at one point was that this visual skill was also “seeing like a state” (although I may be taking Scott’s phrase out of context). This is an idea I need to work out more.

Goldberg points out that when race is silenced it is not absent, but can be discerned by the “sensitive eye and ear” — now the state is officially race-blind, but not really, and we are to respond to racial cues but not acknowledge this. That is to say our situation is not terribly different from the one in which an “ojo conocedor” is needed.

If race is constitutive of modernity, and if therefore one needs a discerning eye to navigate well, that mestizo modernist icon is unstable and is destabilized from within. And so it is with very many texts, which are trying to grapple with the paradoxical centrality and unremoveability of race in a social and political program that on the one hand, needs to evoke it, and on the other, elide it.

I will try to see how this works in two novels of whitening; they are much written on yet still not entirely understood and it is interesting to look at them through this prism of the inevitability of race. They both lead us, though, to the question of patriarchy, the state, its transition and revision, and the sign under which they are written is not reconciliation but violence.

Axé.