Category Archives: Race book

The intellectual and the state: modernismo and transculturation from below.  Beasley-Murray.

And there is all this interesting work on the Amazon, and the Peruvian avant-garde, and Zevallos-Aguilar has written so much, and I am spread too thin.

(I am going through files, as you can see.)

And Steven White’s article on Afro-Brazilian poetry is on JSTOR, too.

Then there is Brazilwire, which we should link to, support financially, and read daily.

Axé.

Harvest of Empire, that I must watch  — Stuart Hall, Race, the floating signifier

A Georgia sharecropper’s narrative — The Bayou Brief: Petrostate

I saw your face … I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity

Jazz Lives. This is a whole blog I must link to. Look at their Memories of Club Hangover

Afro-Colonial Legislation in the Caribbean

Reinventing a sacred past in contemporary Afro-Brazilian poetry IMPORTANT

Axé.

I have them both, and keep forgetting passwords and forgetting how to really use them, and I have Evernote, too. I keep using this blog and my other one to take notes, but now I want to use these other sites more.

I am going to give a seminar called Global Lorca, or something close to this. García Lorca and modernism. Algo así.

The Moodle gradebook: to move items, you should check the box far to the right side.

About this paper: point 1 is 1518; point 2 is the middle ages; point 3 is the present: we, nowadays, evoke and elide the question of race in the same way as Latin Americans did in the 19th century and beyond, when we claim to be anti-racist or post-racial in polite company, but then have the mistreatment of migrants, the openly racist politicians, and grossly racist policies.

Axé.

I have to check out and reread this book.

Axé.

It is by Stuart Hall and it is a key text. I find myself caring about structuralism and poststructuralism as never before. But this is a q/d handout for the students.

Floating signifier in Oxford Reference:

…[R]ace works like a language. And signifiers refer to systems and concepts of the classification of a culture that structure its practices of making meaning. And terms like race gain their meaning not because of what they contain in their essence, but in shifting relations of difference, which they establish with other concepts and ideas in a signifying field. Their meaning, because it is relational, and not essential, can never be finally fixed, but is subject to the constant processof redefinition and  appropriation. Their meaning is subject to the losing of old meanings, and the appropriation and collection and contracting of new ones, to the endless process of being constantly re-signified, made to mean something different in different cultures, in different historical formations, at different moments of time. The meaning of a signifier can never be finally or trans-historically fixed. That is, it is always, or there is always, a certain sliding of meaning, always a margin not yet encapsulated in language and meaning, always something about race left unsaid, always someone on a constitutive outside, whose very existence the identity of race depends on, and which is absolutely destined to return from its expelled and objected position outside the signifying field to trouble the dreams of those who are comfortable inside.

Classification is necessary to create meaning. It also creates order. But when you combine classification and systems of power you get racism.

Visibility of race: the body as text: visible marker of difference: makes race seem like an essence — but it isn’t, even though racial thinking has concrete results and effects.

Race is not an essence, and cannot be traced to anything concrete. It is more like a language; it is relational and constantly shifting.

How does race, as a principle of classification, operate, how does it produce meaning? For all of society is shaped by that classification . . . race is just one of our ways of classifying.

Race is a cultural system. And race is a signifier because it is a visual marker of difference; it means in relation to other signifiers (this is why it keeps shifting).

Race as discourse: there ARE differences among people, different looks, etc., but it is in language that we ascribe meaning to these differences

The Enlightenment is big on classification … and an example of giving meaning is, you distinguish among groups and you decide which is more “civilized,” more “backward,” and so on. We have tried to locate race via religious, scientific, and anthropological discourse … all of these are efforts to make the differences we’ve marked out seem stable, inevitable, natural

We want visible markers of difference, markers we can see: is this person a slave? or what? We want the body to be readable. Because race is a cultural system we want to operate, operate in; we want visible indicators and want to believe they aren’t arbitrary, but are attached to something “real” … but race is not real in that sense.

So when we oppose racism, we’re opposing something that is contingent, not fixed, not guaranteed to remain stable or even to be a thing. Race is a changing concept, whose existence as such has effects.

Why does this matter for the interpretation of Sab? To answer this question, let’s go back to the Branche piece and see, once again, how he used the floating signifier concept, and then ahead to our 2017 articles on Sab.

Axé.