Is Liddell’s Constantinople and Istanbul insufferably Orientalist? Why do both he and Pamuk say Istanbul is so mournful? It doesn’t seem so to me, although I have not seen it, and I wonder what Said would think. This Nation book review indicates that in After Said I should read Lauren Goodlad’s piece on worlding 19th century fiction. Like everyone I am for reading Said as if for the first time.
Intermission: Béla Tarr, Sokurov, Twin Peaks, Zero Dark Thirty, and News of the World are recommendations I have received for beauty and darkness. For research, Úrsula (1859), by Maria Firmina dos Reis. “It opens the Afro-Brazilian novel, it was written by a black woman and works on themes such as slavery.”
Continuing I am redeveloping a different essay on Ferreira da Silva. It will be about race, slavery, and coloniality/modernity but it will sit next to a piece on race and writing and another on race, vision, and “seeing like the state.” This is how I will keep to length, and not get tied up in too many different knots of ideas. I am working on the list of books I will allow myself to discuss in the first essay, and it includes Race and the Education of Desire; I also think there are things about Foucault, from the beginning of the Pineda Franco book, to work with and I STILL say Marthe Robert’s Roman des origines / Origines du roman matters in some way. I will try to keep all of these things together. There is also CLR James, the counter-genealogy of race.
In the meantime and on another topic, Pineda Franco also has a book on transatlantic modernismo that I should read.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 