That feeling when you realize everything around you is designed to align your perspective with that of authority. It’s what I realized this month about Cajun culture, how the attempt to be kind to it and enjoy it is wrongheaded, I cannot make peace with it and it can never include me, because it is about other things and most of the world is outside that circle of authority.
Ferreira da Silva shows you this about certain Latin American narratives, and the Cajun discourse works the same way. The LA narratives do not make sense until you see that they are attempts at managing difference and aligning all perspectives to the state.
I pasted my Facebook post below, and it’s the third column that counts. How to start. “The nation-building interpretation of … “
Side note: does the Cajun narrative embody a fantasy of being a master race? I guess so, if it is a white identity narrative.
Axé.
Axé.
It’s the threefold combination of having power, being a culture that requires worship, and styling themselves as poor little things that works for them. We are to pity them and clap for their songs, while they oppress everyone and destroy the state.
But really, that poor little thing act is a version of the aw-shucks Southern white boy, and the Cajun nostalgia is a mechanism like that of the Lost Cause. These moves (or whatever we should call them) are not charming or progressive.
How the Lost Cause parallel actually works, I am not yet sure. But it’s a post-Imperial phenomenon, for sure, and it’s related to the way the criollo classes in Latin America appropriated the discourse of liberation and wrapped the continuation of coloniality and empire in the guise of the Republic (even styling themselves as Native Americans, and definitely claiming their African roots so they could continue mistreating their “servants”).
coldhearted scientist وداد 