The notes are fragmentary, but the question was, what do these novels mean? I was suggesting these novels present state projects that do not resolve the questions of race and slavery, and are in fact designed not to do so. The Latin American subject is the one who is going to remain in this limbo; the ~1930 decision to declare mestizo states functions to mask this fact.
Here is where Ferreira da Slva comes in, because she is trying to theorize this moment. Her work explains this incoherence and these juxtapositions. (It’s more complicated, I was claiming, than Marisol de la Cadena says it is.) Mestizaje and racism coexist. And indigenous culture is appropriated to state projects … the problems are dramatized but also formulated in the 19th century novel, which is working to naturalize them, not to dismantle them. Sommer implies they are narratives of healing, but I say no: this is partly because they are negotiating and juxtaposing different proposals, and that is why they are confusing, why it is hard to see what their attitude actually is.
So, in order to talk about them at all, one needs a theory of race. This is why: transcendental poesis and the scene of engulfment.
There was more in the notes, and I was thinking well, but this is what I can get now and it is what I’ll work with. Some of the other things are the idea of “discurso permitido” and the need for alternatives to the “fractured subject,” but I have those only as tantalizing fragments now.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 