coldhearted scientist وداد

My fall class is extravagantly called States of Ruin: Violence and Identity in Latin American Literature 1810-1930 and I cannot find the abstract or the reading list, so must reconstruct. It is being given under a culture rubric and I think it is being cross listed with several programs, such that it has to be in English.

So I have to decide what to do from the beginning, and I can include non literary things, and everything has to be available in translation which is the issue. I can change the time period covered but I wanted to look at state formation and violence after Independence.

I am giving the Latin American survey 1810-2014 the following semester and do not want to repeat material (although I could start that survey later in the period if I wish, and although one way I had thought of giving that survey, this time, was as a Mexican survey — letting students investigate other countries).

Here is a journal special issue on the topic of violence and identity, that I just found. I hope to find my abstract, and I want a book list, book list, book list, and as I say, everything has to be available in two languages. I am also thinking about using The Theory Toolbox — and I am not sure in what class, but they all need it.

♦

Every course like this I give should be a book or should at least be given twice, but does not get to be because the classes are actually invented based on what students want at the time — then things roll on, more new programs have to be created, and I do not get to concentrate. My colleagues are always shocked to hear of the range I teach, but here I am considered a narrow specialist. It has been suggested to me that I teach English Caribbean as well, as a stand-alone. I was called “arrogant” when I said I was not really qualified and was not sure when I would have time to become better qualified.

♦

I have a request for avant-garde in Fall 2014 and I might do something interesting — experimental writing and ethnicity. M. de Andrade, Leiris, Vallejo. I could refer to some other people, ethnomusicologists: Carpentier, Arguedas. I could talk about biculturality — not hybridity or mestizaje but double allegiances. With Leiris we could talk about primitivisms, origins, and so on, and we could see what light that shed on the other two.

→I could finally read Tace’s book, which I used not to be able to look at because of the recriminations — it is not the project I would have done, but it resembles the book I wanted to write using my dissertation material, Vallejo, Andrade, Césaire it was to have been, and I would then have gone on to write my real Vallejo book.

→So Tace came out with this, which is not the same (she does Vallejo, Kahlo, Rivera, Mistral) and I could not look at it because it nonetheless resembled what I should have done, should have done, should have done, when all I could think of was that I should not have hurt people as I had by being research oriented. People were suffering now because of who I was and I had to change.

→At the same time I was telling myself I should have written something like that while also being martyrized and murdered for doing it. If I had written it I would have enjoyed it and been fêted for one day, but after that I would have been killed with rocks and I did not want to feel that first stone hit my body, I would rather wait until the crowd passed on by.

→Other people work while being tortured, why can’t you? I kept saying. But I was not a real person, I was too scientifically oriented and too cold, my interests were too difficult for me, I should write lighter, sweeter things so as to have vita lines — especially since I was only here as a favor anyway, I had never done anything under my own power and not only could not, but more importantly should not as it was not proper.

In any case I may be able to do this now. I may never recover from self-hatred, it is so old in me, but I can recover from self-doubt and I have not always practiced self-hatred as we learned to do in Reeducation.

Axé.