…to the races! Coming back to that paper again, I have decided not to worry that F. da Silva’s formula is too facile. I will take it for now. YES Descartes and Bacon with their division of Man and Nature, cosmic Subject and Object, enabled modern imperial ideology to “[define] women and colonies into nature” (Maria Mies) and so YES this parallels patriarchal marriage (where the husband guides and forms the wife) and yes “[t]hese associations are built into our gender-formative national imaginary.” (Goff 2019). Yes it was a mere op-ed that convinced me to drop doubt and actually work with the F. da Silva paradigm I have been struggling with, but I think that is fine. The images are helping me visualize that scene of separation and subordination and I will become articulate enough to finally explain the “scene of engulfment” and paradoxical establishment of the Latin American subject, I know.
For other reasons, I liked these lines from Goff:
Empire is materially established by exploitative flows between imperial cores and subjugated colonies. But imperialism is sustained, nourished, and mobilized by conquest masculinity. Oftentimes, our arguments against imperialism dash against this rock: Masculinity is self-protective, paranoid, and fragile, and so it must be walled in by a psychological fortress.
Meanwhile, I have two books in my Amazon list waiting to be bought but that I want to get in libraries. They’re both about Spanish North America and they both have material on Louisiana. One is by Robert Goodwin and the other is by Carrie Gibson; both came out this year.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 