Belle Créole
That is a trope, too, and it has been discussed/critiqued. Axé.
That is a trope, too, and it has been discussed/critiqued. Axé.
I have this as a journal article, in an issue I am recycling, but it’s available as part of Miller’s book Subject to Change, which can still be acquired. It’s a 1986 piece, from when I was worried about this question: was the decentering/death of the subject revolutionary if the subject to be killed, fragmented, … More Nancy K. Miller’s “Changing the Subject,” Vallejo, and the (il)legibility of Cecilia Valdés
The notes are good and I’ve been thinking about all of this far too intermittently for far too long. Some of them I don’t think I will write down because – I know them by heart, really. But Cecilia, the character, is ILLEGIBLE and the novel keeps telling you you have to read her, and … More Cecilia from ancient notes
And I won’t reproduce it all here. Point 1 was that Sommer says romance makes nation, but the families in the novels she discusses aren’t stable; they’re unhappy, disintegrating, and so on. Family is not peace and conciliation. Examples: Ma.: ella muere y Efraín se va a la nada; C.V.: los personajes mueren y las … More A paper on Sommer and da Silva I had sketched out in longhand
The inner life of mestizo nationalism (Tarica) is another book to get, probably key. Joshua Lund’s later book is in dialogue with it, too. And look at page 80 of Lund: I’m right, it is a question of articulating nation and state. And: Asturias uses the stylized indígenas to come up with a more inclusive … More More mestizos and more Cecilia
Glissant in Poétique de la relation talks about the mestizo as the one who confounds categories, disturbs whiteness. That’s not how they’re constructed in Spanish America, they’re a nation-building category. But it does seem to be how Cecilia works in Cecilia Valdés. Is this further evidence of that novel being written in the United States … More Cecilia again
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
I need to organize my notes. And files. As we know, and in a better way than making these blog posts. But for today: we will start here, anyhow, any way. Cecilia Valdés the novel is anti-colonialist, pro-elite, pro-white and pro-patriarchy (and check Doris Sommer on this; I am in the whole project arguing against … More Those notes
Era su tipo el de las vírgenes de los más célebres pintores. Porque a una frente alta, coronada de cabellos negros y copiosos, naturalmente ondeados, unía facciones muy regulares, nariz recta que arrancaba desde el entrecejo, y por quedarse algo corta alzaba un si es no es el labio superior, como para dejar ver dos … More The paragraphs in question