Randomly, I think Bonilla-Silva (‘racism without racists’) can help me with my book. The reason the novels I don’t understand are so incomprehensible around race is that they’re in fact massively racist. My initial reaction was that they were describing a racist environment in massive detail, with some implicit or even direct critique, but not addressing the whole situation.
There’s also Coronil, “Listening to the subaltern: postcolonial studies and the neocolonial poetics of subaltern states,” pp. 37-55 in some book. It’s a different piece than one with a similar title, that’s on JSTOR, and I think it’s in the Fernando Coronil Reader — not in the library — should I get that for the iPad, saving space? It’s $30, which seems somewhat high for something you’ll only get to have electronically. (Coronil is one of those great people I wish I could have gotten to know better before they died.) I have to get the book because of its perspective on Carpentier, very different from the one I took in my recent manuscript.
The end of the article talks about Spivak. He thinks spatial forms are informed by the meanings attached to human agency (i.e. those meanings create forms). This time/space perspective should get us beyond the dichotomies Spivak works with. He wants them to be relationships, not polarized options. He also says the locus of enunciation is the enunciation of locus–so voice and place are intertwined with the subject position. He understands why Spivak says the subaltern cannot speak but thinks holding to this rigidly just increases silencing.
In my review I can talk about Ferreira da Silva, Spivak, Wynter and Coronil, then, and I will advance in consciousness.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 