A student long ago said of someone: “Well, he has no job skills other than his native language, so he has to convince everyone that being what you are studying is the only valid form of knowledge.” Axé.

“Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if … More Audre Lorde, on the recognition and denial of difference

Apparently it only exists in theory. States do but the bounded hexagon with its homogeneous culture and so on doesn’t really exist. If that’s true, it would explain all the contortions certain authors go through trying to represent the nation. It’s not that it doesn’t exist yet, or that we’re creating the first ones, it’s … More The nation-state

And Latin American elites make moves around their constitutive others similar to what the Russians do. So the term colonial discourse remains relevant, it seems. Snyder keeps talking about empire, colonialism and representations of nation. The fact that Russia and postcolonial Latin American elite discourse use so many of the same “rhetorical patterns” (as Jennie … More More notes following Snyder

Essentially, you create a hierarchized racial division that puts you at an advantage, deny that it exists, but call yourself a victim of it. Part of it is what those students said, “to be a legitimate white Latin Americans you must pass yourself through Blackness.” Oswald joked that Brazilians were cannibalizing Western Civilization but it’s … More Evoke-and-elide, that colonialist move

Reviewing, to see how much of this I should bring up in my departmental context now. There are lots of students in Spanish. Spanish doesn’t get enough resources and other languages feel crowded. There is lots of scholarship as well on Hispanism as a construct, by people including Gabilondo, Mariscal, Moreiras, and Resina. The situation … More What Carlos Alonso said in 2007

Transmodernity, perhaps, for the languishing Ferreira da Silva piece. Axé.

I discovered his poem “A Cachoeira de Paulo Affonso,” and it is interesting. I also discovered a book that discusses Castro Alves, about five years old, from WVUP. Amazingly, our library has e-access to this and other works by the author! I have to re-find and re-study all of this. Of course the enslaved woman’s … More Castro Alves

I said what follows to someone but should gather good defenses of the humanities here. “Well, humanities profs don’t always respect their own discipline so they define it in terms of skills only. This is partly the fault of Teaching Goals where you are supposed to be training students to do things. My department now … More Defending the humanities

(Honestly, I should just keep writing things up and stop over-censoring myself. I said that Louisiana participates in both U.S. and Latin American constructions of race and racial meaning.) I said historical work on individual Creole women is important because literary representations are often a-historical. In Latin America the woman of mixed race has been … More What I said to the Creole society decades ago