coldhearted scientist وداد

1. Starting 30/IX at sundown, at 6644 words. 6766 now, so it has been 122. Later session: 31, so 153 so far today, -3 for editing. Some drafting. Later: 80, so 220 today. I am at 6864 total. Next session 69, so 289 today. SATURDAY. Over these first 13 days of October I plan to write 7.
2. 153. Quoting a Tweet. “James Madison raped his half-sister who was a slave, had a son with her, then sold his child into slavery when he was a teenager and y’all mad at Lizzo for playing his flute?” I’ve got 7017 words.
3. Rewriting, editing, thinking. Still 7017. Later 7073 and quitting for the day; this means 56 new words today and 381 since the first. But I came back, and got up to 7234; that is another 161 words so I’m at 217 for today and since the first, 543. The next job is to read more from the Dívida impagável…I think.
4. Touched, for editing/rewriting/clarification of a much earlier section than where I am now. I am at 7317. 83 for today and 623 since the first.
5. Touched.
6. Traveled.
7. Presented.
8. Touched. I am at 7359 words, which makes 665 since the first.
9. Looking at ACLA seminars. Touching text. Finding books.
10. Writing/editing/thinking. I am at 7421. I had gone higher, but then cut. This is 727 words since the first. I might make the rest of the week abstract-writing.
11. Touched. Now at 7474. That is 780 since the first.
12. Read key article, took notes on it. This is toward the ACLA abstract but also the clarification of the present text. Then wrote abstract, got it down to 1490 characters, it was hard but worthwhile.
    • Give my abstract a title? This would be for the seminar “Literatures of Transnational Race/Critique,” American Comparative Literature Association. The abstract is 1490 characters including spaces.
    • This paper centers on Denise Ferreira da Silva, an Afro-Brazilian philosopher and visual artist I also take as a creative writer and literary theorist. I focus on the distinction between universality and globality in her Toward a global idea of race (2007), A dívida impagável (2019), and Unpayable debt (2022). For Ferreira da Silva the global is the “other ontological context” produced by the racial. The “universal” modern subject has interiority, and it inhabits the “horizon of life,” or the ontological context produced by the transparency thesis. But the others of Europe, subjects of exteriority, face globality or the horizon of death. The framework laid out in Toward a global theory of race challenges us to think transnationally without losing sight of regional particularities, bogging down in comparisons, or taking the racial formation of the United States as a standard of which others are mere variants. This opens paths, in the later work, toward a reconstruction of consciousness and knowledge from that other ontological context. As John D. French (TCS 2000, Nepantla 2003) has noted, her earlier work was already enough to allay Bourdieu and Wacquant’s concern that United States scholars might impose wrong-headed views upon less powerful Brazilian activists and intellectuals (TCS 1999). Rather than focus on a diaspora or region as Shohat and Stam do in their stunning Race in translation (2012), Ferreira da Silva works at a conceptual level on the world at large.
13. Carla B said: Ferreira is a complex philosopher–not sufficiently discussed. Not sufficiently represented. I would love to read your text when completed. Are you really looking for a title? I can only think of an opening: “That which is not: ….” for radical negation is the motif / and motivation / of Ferreira’s thought. I didn’t know Carla had written on da Silva and didn’t realize Fred Moten was doing as much on her as Carla says … so I have to look for all of this. Here is an interview by Fred Moten and it is very interesting, but goes to Glissant and Hartman, and so on, and is for the next paper–I cannot put everything here (I must remember that, although I probably need to show I know here). There is also Anke Birkmaier on Carpentier and this must be discussed/linked.
14. I submitted my abstract. And must find MGM Review of Birkenmaier, Anke. Alejo Carpentier y la cultura del surrealismo en América Latina.  Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 42.2 (2008): 355-357. “I just did peer review for a book proposal from Anke called Carpentier in Context that would consider him as a polymath in an interdisciplinary context, with 35 essays from a veritable who’s who of Carpentier scholarship for the “In Context” series at Cambridge UP. Looks amazing. I have a story about buying a first edition of Ecué Yamba-O from a drunk book dealer in Centro Habana. Also, there is a new non-traditional (in her 50s) grad student at TU who is a Cuban film specialist whose mother is a santera who says all the informants for Carpentier and Ortiz told them whatever con tal de que les pagaran. Maybe se dio cuenta and that’s why AC withdrew Ecué Yamba-O!?”

Axé.