It was a symposium on the Atlantic world I went to at Rice years ago and I felt so intelligent, the papers were so intelligent. I have very fragmentary notes. Let’s just type them and see if they make sense later.
- Instabvility of race as signifier
- Racism as a condition under which freedom could be had (Ireland)
- Ethnogenesis
- Essentialism and exceptionalism
- Racial egalitarianism used by republics to assert modernity and progressivism
- Prisoners in camp waiting for execution and hoping to avoid it
- Hopes for Latin men of one blood–Ugarte Pérez, Gran Colombia
- Liberals support mestizaje and Conservatives don’t
- Hispanismo comes in so people can reimagine societies along the lines of the US and Europe
- “The Latin Race” (Sáenz Peña)
- What the letrados say about modernity is not what is really happening
- Essentializing cultural differences in racialized terms
- Mestizaje as a form of inoculation
- Textbook narratives
- LA essentializes itself against US imperialism and writes race out of it: US is white, US is racist, they are not
- You have to have exceptionalism to have the nation-state
- Colonialism – African bodies – sugar. Modernity does not exist
- During this conference I was already thinking I should work on my prison writing for my book project
That’s very fragmentary but it’s still suggestive. I think I should make my LAS course for the fall into a course on nation, nationalism, and regional identity and raise the question: how does what is said and aspired to fit with actual practice?
Also: I notice in my other manuscript, from 2003, that I already realized the mechanism: men of color are scary, but woman of color can be consumed and nationalized.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 