I have given this post the title of my book, so as to keep it in view. In the interest of “at least touching work every day” I have reproduced the abstract that has gotten into a conference in the fall, on which I am to start working. It is packed with ideas and structured in part so as to get into that panel, so I have to be careful: the point of having written this, and my other two abstracts, and my proto-book proposal is to start writing the book itself.
Do I want to write this paper now, as a seven page exercise, or later, as a seven page boildown of something larger? I want to write it later, as a seven page boildown. I want to start now on a 36 page article, alluded to in this abstract and the abstract in Spanish I published here recently. Abstract C, on New Orleans, is a fillip on these. I think I need to meld parts of the two main abstracts together and write an article from that document. The article will refer, obviously, to more nineteenth century texts than these. I cannot write the introduction to the book yet since I do not have the whole outline of the book, and I do not want to write the whole outline until I have written this piece. It is to be the first chapter.
I may start with my Bolívar pronouncement and talk about Doris Sommer. Her book is of course wonderful, but it is altogether too classic. Other people have also written well about the nineteenth century and in the US we rely on Sommer too exclusively. Her book is also getting old. I need to find out if anyone disagrees with her perspective besides Karen Monteleone and me.
Sommer talks about love, mestizaje, the nation, and of the (mestizo) citizen. (Karen and) I think she is reading with the assumption, promoted by people like Freyre in the 20s and 30s, that the nation really is mestiza and that that really is the solution. If you look at the actual history of the 19th century and at social attitudes and political programs then, you find another story. And, as this very abstract suggests, the novels Sommer analyzes are more about rupture and loss than they are about conciliation. I am interested in them not as stories of love and patriotism but about originary violence and the reconfiguring of race and the state.
The Darker Side of Mestizaje
This paper rereads three nineteenth century novels from the Americas: Jorge Isaacs’ María (Colombia), Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (Cuba/U.S.A.), and Aluízio de Azevedo’s O Mulato (Brazil), in light of David Theo Goldberg and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s theoretical work on race, modernity and the state. If race is constitutive of the modern state, as Goldberg demonstrates (2002), or of modernity itself, as da Silva argues (2007), the liberal assumption that inequality can be addressed within the framework of the nation does not hold. How might this perception change our readings of nineteenth century texts commonly read as signs and symptoms of a mestizo or post-racial nation to come?
María, Cecilia Valdés, and O Mulato are all “foundational” texts in their national canons. Like several other novels of the period they tell stories intertwining incest and miscegenation. Read through the lens of the national projects based on cultural mixture embraced in the 1930s, the literature of this earlier period can be seen to form a corpus in which newly independent nations trace a common origin and project future cohesion. The writings examined here, however, chronicle rupture and and loss, not union or suture; they might more accurately be considered novels of originary violence than of national conciliation. At stake in these texts is not only the formation of a national culture but also that of the racial state that lies behind it. The reader witnesses a shift within the modernizing state, but not a challenge to its hierarchies. Comparative scholarship working beyond the frame of the nation may help elucidate some of the complexities around the articulation of race and state in these texts, and shed light on some of ambiguities and impasses present-day discourse on race inherits from this era.
The paper draws on research on race and the state in the Hispanic world by Jens Andermann, Joshua Goode, Joshua Lund, Deborah Poole, and Javier Sanjinés, as well as recent work on race and social policy by Gonzalo Portocarrero, Sérgio Paulo Guimarães, and Robert Cottrell. It considers Villaverde’s New Orleans sources, parallels and intertexts including George Washington Cable’s Les Grandissimes and Charles Gayarré’s Fernando de Lemos, and the fact that Cuba’s national novel was written over thirty years’ residence in the United States.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 