Cecilia again

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

Ideologies of Hispanism (more notes to frame Cecilia and plaçage) … these 13 points are a fairly good blocking out

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

Those notes

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

Encore des nouvelles. On modernity, and on race.

– Thursday is César Vallejo’s birthday and he will be 125. – This, as we know, could also be about Vallejo, as it is about many: Living in Budapest, connected to a self-confident and industrializing West but set apart from it by language and often religion, Polanyi and his contemporaries embodied one of the central … More Encore des nouvelles. On modernity, and on race.

Des joies du printemps.

A map shows each country’s current second language. Saudi Arabia’s is Tagalog. That New Orleans-Havana connection. * Russia in 1921, as represented at a conference of London trade unionists, held in the Friars Hall, Blackfriars Road, London, held on May 7 of that year. Here, the report’s author visits Russia. Volin’s anarchist analysis of the Revolution. … More Des joies du printemps.

On language and race

La opción filológica de Henríquez Ureña se debía en parte a esta alternativa: mientras que los científicos se habían equivocado al argumentar a base de hechos empíricos, tales como la mezcla racial, los filólogos tenían una base empírica mucho más precisa en la lengua. La herencia del Imperio español en las Américas era haber dejado … More On language and race