Notes on José Piedra, “Literary Whiteness and the Afro-Hispanic Difference,” part 2, and some strategies for reading critical essays:
As you read, consider using a different color to highlight each of the following:
→ argument (logical inferences, grounds, warrants, examples)
→ new information
→ theoretical concepts
What signals help you to identify these different threads of an essay?
How does the author deploy new information?
Are there places where you could disagree with the argument? On what grounds? What theoretical concepts does the author assume you understand? How could you find out more about them? List some resources you might use.
How does the author use theoretical concepts?
How do argument, information, and theory work together and influence each other?
Starting Piedra at page 306: second part of the first part of the article.
A. Grammar and the Hispanic Text.
As Piedra has explained in the first few pages, Nebrija formulated a “grammatical contract of servitude.” Slavery was apprentice citizenship and was teaching people how to be Hispanic.
On paper, but not in practice, differences were minimized as alliances were maximized. Nebrija provided the New World with the justification for a cohesive Hispanic Text. He unified otherness under the colonial letter. The disourse of the “Hispanic Self” disseminated within the discourse of Others was transformed into a unified discourse of Others within the Imperial “self.” Spain subjected the blood, the faith, and the letters of previous settlers on the Peninsula as well as Indians and Africans to a bureaucratic test of integrity. The Others thus were placed in a position of tactical compromise that was never forgotten in Latin American literature. Only those who considered themselves mediators between the extremes of the master culture and the potential slave dared to challenge the uneasy compromise spun by the Hispanic Text.
B. Afro-Hispanic mediators
Afro-Hispanics were among the mediators most profoundly affected by the Hispanic textual compromise. The unification of all races into the Text was propelled Spain’s own racially ill-defined origins, its occupation by lighter and darker-skinned conquerors who imported their own black slaves and citizens, and the rest of Europe’s prejudices about Spain’s imprecise racial heritage.
This led to a theoretical welcoming, on paper, of black newcomers under the umbrella of a “Hispanic” race. This welcoming, however, was predicated on the supposition that knowledge and practice of the Hispanic ways would be led by Spaniards. Syncretism and miscegenation were ways of transforming Africans into allies. And Africans or post-Africans constantly had to prove allegiance to Hispanic culture or, in other words, to “literary whiteness.”
But many used process of proving allegiance to whiteness as a means to register “crimes of difference” and thus to publish counter-narratives to literary whiteness. (We will discuss all of this and then continue from page 308).
C. A fictional, or rhetorical solution to the issue of race — the issue which has never subsided.
Note that the day of Columbus’ landing — day of conquest-mestizaje and of Hispanic unity — is “El día de la Raza.”
The Hispanic “Race” is really a metaphor for unrealized promises of harmony offered by the linguistic mother … Spanish. Piedra says it would be more appropriate to call it a “Grammar Day” … it “refers to the enlightened despotsm of rules which set the terms of inscription for all Hispanic subjects.
In reality, though, there was the Inquistion and there were other racial laws, obligating those who were visually different to prove allegiance to the Hispanic model. Tests for literacy and whiteness were formulated as tests of Hispanidad. Newcomers to the raza wanted to be declared “gente de razón” which was not easy for people of non privileged classes.
The theatrical space of the courtroom in which one was to perform Hispanic identity, as it were, allowed people to document themselves, and also to “blacken” the language rather than be whitened by it.
D. Literature and “ventriloquism”
Ventriloquism: Spaniard speaking through Latin American, or Latin American imitating / parodying European (see Julio Ramos on Sarmiento and how he does NOT just imitate European models).
Ventriloquism: N. does not like fiction or artifice. Yet his inclusiveness under the umbrella of grammatical correction allowed Spanish to take in local variants, fictional interpretations, a series of different viewpoints, to be heterogeneous, to open up space in which Latin American specificity can be articulated.
Joining the Hispanic raza, for white people, was easy: join the language and the religion. For Africans, more was required: slow miscegenation or a certificate of whiteness.
These new speakers were to adhere to bureaucratic norms of language, but in fact often subverted this, creating an Afro-Hispanic difference within or against literary whiteness.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 