The July 29 New Yorker has a beautiful article about Natalia Ginzburg, who is wonderful, and a fascinating one about Melville. Ginzburg: imagination is stronger when you are happy – suffering makes the imagination weak and lazy – drowning in emotions, and in particular, in pain is NOT what women writers should do. This is … More Ginzburg, Melville
I 1. The national novels are disturbing for what they do with incest, race, death [originary violence, romance of origins] 2. They’ve become nat. novels and also, under influence of Jameson & then Sommer, been read as nat. allegories 3. At that point the 1920s/30s national projects, which reflect some letrado discourse from further back … More The new outline
I’ve got to create a more efficient way of noting the files I clear, but I don’t want to make the invention of e-bibliography and file systems my center project right now. Photocopies I am recycling today, great and classic articles: Ulises Juan Zevallos Aguilar 2001 on Peruvian avant-garde, a wonderful piece that I love. … More Vallejo
We don’t know, of course, if anyone believes in the common good, or the public good any more, but here are some fragmentary notes from a conversation we had. 1. We should talk much more about research. In class. College has to become more interesting – we cannot allow it to be further redefined as … More The common good
Ancient notes, I think from a conference 20 years ago, that I kept and kept. What did they say and why did I keep them? Postmodernism as grand récit flattens out the complexities of Latin American modernism, which had postmodern characteristics and also more, it was more complex. It tries to articulate national and continental … More Ancient
The BRASA deadline is extended to September 1, Gott sei Dank, and I have to double-check the situation with LASA. I’d like to go to both just to see papers, and maybe I should even if I don’t get in or don’t make the submission deadlines. In the meantime, here are some of my old … More BRASA/LASA
On these issues: it seems that despite Catherine the Great’s reservations about serfdom, serfdom rose in the 18th century due to her modernization projects. Modern projects, modern ideas on liberty, AND more serf work needed, all at the same time. Modernity rises, coloniality rises. This is interesting; people do not realize how the serfs were … More Modernity/coloniality and race
I am still going through my files and it is shocking – so many quite good and almost finished papers I set aside, or that got swept aside in one storm or another. I have the Racial Order book, which is focused on the U.S. It talks about field theory (Bourdieu). Can race be a … More Des feuilles
FACE YOUR FEARS [I am transcribing these notes to avoid doing that, but it isn’t a bad form of procrastination as it is helping me get something else necessary done]. ALSO REMEMBER: Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro II was a Confederate ally who had sheltered and supplied Southern ships during the Civil War. Then he offered … More Ideologies of Hispanism (more notes to frame Cecilia and plaçage) … these 13 points are a fairly good blocking out
This is an old article I had kept to think about subjectivity in Anzaldúa and also Vallejo. It’s outmoded now, but some of the points are still valid, on the precariousness of identity and subject positions. Having no secure position to which to return distinguishes “passing” from “passing as,” she says. “Passing” is like Morrison’s … More That postmodern subject of PASSING
coldhearted scientist وداد 