This is a mestizo post because it starts with some famous jarana criolla with my old professor Pepe Durand! After that, it offers an article by Charles Hale on the future of Latin American Studies. Then, it just keeps on mixing. ¡Adentro! My Vallejo problem is and always has been a research problem and not … More “y siempre en el sepulcro estaré ardiendo”
When sound is translated into a blow on the nape of the neck, and light into a flash so bright that it actually scorches the skin, when feeling is lost in one disintegrating jar of every nerve and fibre […] the mind, at such moments, is like a compass when the needle has been jolted … More A new kind of synaesthesia
“Race into Culture,” from a 1992 Critical Inquiry was an important article and still is. Here are some key sentences for me, now; they are not a summary of the piece. The United States was also creating a cultural identity that was racial but hid race behind a curtain (so to speak) in the 1920s. … More Walter Benn Michaels
“You need not feel commanded to evaluate the course right now. Indeed, the faculty would much rather encourage you to reflect on the nature of this course, carefully considering things like: its design and execution, as well as the extent of your commitment to making the course and your education a success. Don’t forget too … More A dispatch from the neoliberal university
I just lost a lovely post on giving, that recounted my dream of the coffee pot, and I will not attempt to reconstruct it now. But the meditation of the week is on giving, giving too much, more than one has or should give if one wants to be in a position to keep on … More Giving
The True Born Englishman Thus from a mixture of all kinds began, That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman: In eager rapes, and furious lust begot, Betwixt a painted Britain and a Scot. Whose gend’ring off-spring quickly learn’d to bow, And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough: From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came, With … More English mestizaje
True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal. One reads and rereads the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them to reach, to touch, the vision or experience that prompted them. One then gathers up what one has found there and takes this quivering almost wordless “thing” and places it behind … More John Berger on Translation
Here is a good, basic piece on the fantasy of the white race. The term Caucasian was created to trace the origin of “white” people to the Golden Age of Greece and the ancient Near East. These populations were not, of course, “white,” and this “Caucasian” race is an invention. Americans were strong and vital … More Hector de Crèvecoeur
When I have to give that pesky Spanish class again, I will have grades recorded all the time in a gradebook they can see electronically, with comments. Grade structure will be very easy to average at the end, because everything will be worth 10%. Four quizzes or tests taken online outside class time, that include … More Notes for next time
Vallejo first got to Paris in 1923, and I first got there in 1964. What we have in common is having seen it without the Montparnasse skyscraper. Now it is 2014 and I have celebrated the 50th anniversary of my transatlantic voyage, and more time separates me from it than does it from Vallejo’s arrival. … More
coldhearted scientist وداد 