My egalitarian bias keeps me from seeing this.

If race is constitutive of the modern state, as Goldberg demonstrates (2002), or of modernity itself, as da Silva argues (2007), the liberal assumption that inequality can be addressed within the framework of the nation does not hold. How might this perception change our understanding of these and other texts that have been read as … More My egalitarian bias keeps me from seeing this.

Planning

1) What do you think of going to a conference that would put you out of class for an entire week? The conference is W-F and I would have to travel on the Tuesday, which means missing four weekdays. On the one hand, it is research. On the other, that is a week of class. … More Planning

C’est tout fini

I cannot tolerate further work on this abstract so, despite my dissatisfaction with it I am sending it in. This is the literary version; the Spanish version will be more sociological. Its title is El lado oscuro del mestizaje: raza y estado en tres textos decimonónicos, and I like that better. This was hard to … More C’est tout fini

A hermeneutical problem

Actually it is a downright Gadamerian problem. A second look at this 19th century corpus may not support the romanticized readings it elicited after mestizaje was embraced as national ideology decades after its first publication. It is Gadamerian because the problem is what the readers bring; their assumptions, predilections, blind spots. Axé.

In which my students may be unsophisticated, but do not lack insight

I had assigned the class to do some additional reading on Romanticism, and put each student in charge of introducing a poet and a representative poem. Here are some of the interesting comments and questions they had. ♦ Zorrilla was “financially unwise” and must have had a magnetic personality, to attract all those women looking … More In which my students may be unsophisticated, but do not lack insight