Blogging The Idea of Latin America

Image found here.

I’m pleased to say that I’ve just begun a happier reading experience than the one I reported on in the previous post.

I’ve just finished the introduction to Walter D. Mignolo’s The Idea of Latin America, and here are a couple of things said there that made me sit up straight. Italics in the passages below are Mignolo’s own:

Dialogue, properly speaking, cannot take place until there are no more places to be defended and the power differential, consequently, can be redressed. Dialogue today is a utopia, . . . and it should be reconceived as utopistic: a double movement composed of a critical take on the past in order to imagine and construct future possible worlds. . . . “[D]ialogue” can only take place when the “monologue” of one civilization (Western) is no longer enforced. (xix)

Mignolo’s book, as will become more evident in the second passage I’ve quoted, is speaking at the level of the cultural and historical and political: his book’s central thesis is that “‘Latin’ America” (his quotation marks around “Latin,” by the way) is a European/U.S.-imposed, and thus colonizing term; his book’s intent is to engage in “decolonizing” discourse concerning this region of the world. So, his book is not quite literary criticism (but then again, neither is mine, really–it just uses literature as its point of departure). Even so, this passage struck me because my project begins in part with an extended reading of portions of Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses–specifically, the conversation Ike has with his kinsman Roth’s mulatto lover in “Delta Autumn.” In that exchange, the woman speaks of not asking Roth to promise marriage “long before honor I imagine he called it told him the time had come to tell me in so many words what his code I suppose he would call it would forbid him forever to do” and that she had stopped listening to him “because by that time it had been a long time since he had had anything else to tell me for me to have to hear” (341-342). A way to frame what the woman had at one time hoped for with Roth–and which his “code” trumps in the end–is, it seems to me, precisely the sort of dialogue that Mignolo describes here.

“For what it is”: On the virtues of discussing the text in front of you

An illustration from Pictures and Stories from Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Boston: John P. Jewett & Co., 1853), an adaptation of Stowe’s novel for children, published the year after the novel itself. The illustration shows the Harris family reunited on free soil. Image found here.

From Carlos Hiraldo, Segregated Miscegenation: On the Treatment of Racial Hybridity in the U.S. and Latin American Literary Traditions:

Despite Stowe’s portrayal of such a complex act of passing on the past of George [Harris, a light-skinned mulatto who has dyed his skin dark to pass as a "Spanish gentleman"], she does not depict any of the mental and emotional processes through which a character in his circumstances could be expected to undergo. Her narrative never really stops to consider the destabilizing effect that George’s passing must have had on his own identity. The narrative never fully envisions how it would feel for a character enslaved because he is considered black to have to darken his skin to pass for white. Furthermore, it never explores how helping a fellow black escape the bonds of slavery by passing him off as his own slave would plausibly bring George to seriously question his own racial identity. Illustrating [James] Kinney’s pronouncement [in Amalgamation!, a survey of 19th-century American literature dealing with interracial relationships] on nineteenth-century representations of bi-racial characters, Stowe understandably demonstrates less interest in exploring the psychological ramifications of a polarized racial ideology in those bi-racial characters falling outside its parameters than with portraying the more immediate evils of slavery, such as the separation of families and the sexual and physical abuses experienced by the enslaved. (40)

I want to be respectful because Hiraldo has a book out and I don’t, and getting a book published is an accomplishment worthy of respect. Still, this paragraph, coming at the end of his book’s two-page discussion of Stowe’s novel, split about down the middle between some general comments on slavery in the novel (including the characterization of George quoted above) and some remarks directed at an article on George, strikes me as puzzling, to say the least. His reference to Kinney in the last sentence, apart from undercutting what he identifies as a weakness in Stowe’s characterization of George, also gives the game away, I think: Uncle Tom’s Cabin is here not because Hiraldo wants to offer a reading of it, but because he wants to talk about what is not in it–at least, as he understands the text.

A reading of a casta painting

(Note: This post, crossposted here, is part of a larger interest of mine in identifying the characteristics of visual and textual rhetorics of interracial mixing and seeing what larger conclusions we can draw from those characteristics.)

Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Yale, 2004). Amazon link here. Image found here.

Posts both at my other blog and at this one on the genre of casta painting continue to draw a fair amount of traffic, so as a follow-up to those posts I thought I would post some brief comments on Katzew’s book and offer up not so much a reading of a painting as a kind of wading-into of the various social codes casta paintings participated in.

Here are some things I hadn’t know before reading this book that seem to me of significance: First of all, casta paintings are apparently exclusively a Spanish colonial–more precisely Mexican–genre (though Katzew notes the existence of one known casta painting set from Peru). This was surprising to me because the French Caribbean colonies likewise had worked out elaborate nomenclatures for various racial combinations–though theirs involved black-white combinations, and the New Spain system carried within it an implicit didactic element for its audience, about which more later. The other thing I didn’t know was the extent of these paintings’ popularity: Katzew notes that there are 100 known complete sets of these paintings (a set usually consists of 16 paintings; some depict up to 19 racial combinations) and any number of paintings belonging to now-incomplete sets. The other sign of their popularity is that, similar to but stricter than the guild system for painters in Dutch and Flemish culture, the Spanish crown regulated the licensing of artist workshops and who could paint what subjects in the colonies. Specifically, the Crown determined through examination who could paint religious and royal subjects and how to paint them, but no such regulations governed casta paintings; Katzew politely suggests that this lack of regulation accounts for these paintings’ “wide range of quality” (9).

If you have more than passing (no pun, about which more later) interest in this subject, look for this book. Katzew’s book is exemplary art history, with the emphasis here on the “history” part. But though there is lots of history, it serves to provide much-needed context for what would otherwise be rather enigmatic paintings. But neither does it skimp on images: there are 265 of them, most of them in color, not counting large closeups of some of the paintings. Moreover, many of the paintings included here are held privately and published here for the first time, thus adding to the book’s value.

Reading Katzew’s book reassured me that for the most part I hadn’t just been talking through my hat in those earlier posts regarding these paintings’ ambiguities for their audiences. Because her book is a work of art history, as opposed to criticism, she does not in the end argue for a definitive way to think about them. Rather, by so firmly establishing their cultural and social and legal contexts, Katzew makes clear that a far safer way for us to think about these paintings is that how they were understood in the 18th century depended on a whole complex of issues. They are part American exotica for primarily Spanish consumption, part visual codification of class and racial codes (and, thus, reassurance for Spaniards that everything is under control) . . . and yet, something about the very necessity to create a casta system in the first place would lead to its eventual (partial) deconstruction in the form of the wars for independence in the first quarter of the 19th century. The title of Katzew’s conclusion pretty much sums it up: “A genre with many meanings.” It’s outside the scope of her book to do so, but I would push that conclusion harder: Given that these series of paintings are intended to be part dictionary of racial types, part social code, and part visual cabinet of curiosities, I tend to think that their audiences, if they thought about the correspondences between the paintings and the realities of New Spain, could not escape the uneasy feeling that a social order founded on racial difference would eventually become untenable–especially given that part of these paintings’ very point (and whether this point was intended or not is difficult to determine) is that those differences were becoming ever harder to discern in real life. These paintings end up implicitly depicting their own inadequacy to depict the very thing they’re intended to depict–another version of something I was trying to get at in this post with regard to American literature.

Imagine if the King of Ambiguity in American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne, had instead been a painter in 18th-century colonial Mexico. I think you’d have a pretty good sense of the complexities casta paintings presented for their immediate audiences–and, for that matter, for us.

An example of what I mean is below the fold.

What to expect

Time to rouse this blog from its slumbers . . .

On the off chance that anyone still comes ’round here, here are some things to look for within a week or two:

1) a post (or two, more likely) in which, pivoting off some things Margarita Zamora says in her fine book, Reading Columbus, I try to use Columbus as an exemplum for an argument that New World writing (as distinguished from “American” writing, and I haven’t forgotten about doing that . . . ) requires a rather different approach to reading it, one rooted in the dynamic of the Encounter itself. I have a pretty full post laying out those things over at Blog Meridian, so I’ll refer you over there if you want fuller explanations; but I can boil them down to these summaries: A reading of Columbus as a producer of New World texts before the fact (Roberto González Echevarría’s book Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Literature will be useful here, too). All this is bound up in an idea I have about wanting to discuss the New World as a heterotopic space.

2) Also inspired by Zamora, and linking up as well with Benedict Anderson’s discussion in Imagined Communities about the necessity of a concept of “homogeneous, empty time” in order for a sense of nation-ness to emerge in a people: Something that in the dissertation I call a “search for a language,” one that fumbles toward articulating the experiencing of this heterotopic space. In the diss., I worked this out via a long reading of Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios, along with some brief excursions into other texts; the Zamora and Anderson will help buttress that. Also, based on what I’ve read thus far in Ilona Katzew’s Casta Painting, some discussions of the impulses behind their production may appear here, too.

3) Or, the material on casta paintings might get their own post as a follow-up to my earlier, initial post on these paintings.

Lots of irons in the fire, in other words–which is, you know, good.

A painting by Dalí

This is a bit outside the concerns of this blog, but not too far afield. While looking at some paintings by Salvador Dalí this morning I ran across this: The Virgin of Guadalupe (1959)

(click to enlarge the image; originally found at Virtual Dalí)

The Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico, is not just an iconic figure in the Americas, she is also depicted as a mestiza. Dalí’s painting is an interesting fusion of Raphael and El Greco; his Virgin (who is holding an infant Jesus; the Mexican Virgin does now) appears to be a bit lighter-skinned than the image preserved in Mexico City. My first impression is that Dalí is reimagining her for a European audience: re-interracialized?

Initial response to “Miscegenation” post

[Update: some obvious errors corrected; some phrasing now (I hope) a little clearer]

I’m truly appreciative of the thoughtful, thorough, and challenging responses to my previous post. You have given me much to think about and re-think. I’ve been quiet on this end in part because of teaching duties but mostly because I needed some time to think through your comments and compare/contrast them to my own intentions and assumptions, examined and otherwise.

What’s meant here, then, isn’t a rebuttal but more like a sketching out of what I’m thinking about now in response to your critiques–and, of course, how my project can best be informed by those critiques.

“Miscegenation” as (a) “domestic issue”

It seems felicitous that I’m beginning this post on April 14: 180 years ago today, Noah Webster published his American Dictionary of the English Language. I say this because the word “miscegenation,” whose usage in these pages I’ll be discussing here, is in every sense an American word. More about that later.

I’m writing this post partly out of necessity–one of its concerns is, after all, the vocabulary of its subject–and partly in response to some questions asked of me by Jennifer and a commenter, cvt, over at Jennifer’s blog, Mixed Race America. Each wanted to know whether my choice of the term miscegenation when discussing racial admixture is a conscious one, and Jennifer has a post in which she asks her readers to comment on the efficacy of using loaded language and words and phrases with difficult and painful histories.

Here are the questions Jennifer poses:

Can loaded words and contested terms be rehabilitated? Can they escape, in the case of “concentration camp” the tragic and overwrought associations with one of the worst genocides of the 20th century? Can we use a term, like “miscegenation” to simply mean “inter-racial” without invoking its etymological roots in race baiting and its historic use as a word associated with negativity, rancor, and hatred (because whenever “miscegenation” was invoked in the mid to late 20th century it was usually done in the context of “anti-miscegenation” laws, ie: laws prohibiting inter-racial marriage, or white racist Southerners invoking the fear of “miscegenation” as a rationale for school segregation.

I suppose a few more questions to consider are:

*Why is this loaded word or contested term being used in current, contemporary usage?
*What is the purpose of this rehabilitation?
*Who is trying to use this term and for what purpose?
*Is there another term that is as accurate/precise in its meaning as the contested term? Why is it important to use the contested term rather than the less loaded word?

My response is below the fold.

Forays into the academic blogosphere

In a small exercise in scholarly self-aggrandizement, I’ve created a wiki page for good old Domestic Issue over at the very handy but (so far) modestly-sized AcademicBlogs Wiki. Now, I sit back and watch visits here jump into the tens per day.

It’s via that wiki that I’ve found a couple of blogs with foci that intersect with those of this one.

Mixed Race America is kept by Jennifer, a professor of contemporary lit. and Asian-American lit. somewhere in the southern U.S. Her blog’s banner says that she is interested in “any . . . way you can describe the blending, melding, melting, tossing, turning, churning of race relations in the United States.” That sounds a lot like this place, too.

Dennis Hildago’s blog, Professor of History, is focused on his research interests in comparative and Atlantic world history. His most recent post concerns a research project in which he compares the historiographies of, respectively, U.S.-Mexico and Haiti-Dominican Republic border crossings. This is especially intriguing to me in that I’m interested in seeing how that might intersect with Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s trope of the Caribbean region as a Repeating Island.

As a look ahead to the look of this page, as I find more blogs whose interests intersect more or less directly with those of this one, I’ll add a separate links category for them. Also: plans to jazz up the banner via the magic of CSS.

The “encounter with the Encounter”: New-World-centric reading

Note: This, with a little fiddling around with wording and minus footnotes, is an excerpt from my dissertation’s introduction. Context: The intro. begins with a lengthy discussion of Columbus’s voyages and how his confusion in thinking he was in Asia arose, basically, from not seeing what was around him–by insisting that he could be no place else except Asia. From there, I make the claim that then-current (early-’90s) theory-driven readings of, in particular, Latin American texts often to my mind guilty of the same error Columbus made: that of reading the New World through the lens of the Old World. This produced readings that simply didn’t make any sense when placed within the historical, social and cultural contexts of the hemisphere. This circumstance began to change, ironically, just about the time I was writing my dissertation; Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture appeared in 1993 with its powerful notion of hybridity–something I would have addressed in the dissertation had I known of it. Yet another reason to return to this thing. Anyway, from having declared wrong-headed for the Americas a whole bunch of post-colonial theory, I then propose another sort of reading. That is what follows.

I don’t yet know how much of the introduction I’ll keep. At the very least, it needs some extensive rewriting to account for hybridity and for the ways that idea has been both used and found suspect. That said, the reading of the poem that closes things is the sort of strategy I employ quite often, and I think it still reads well.

This project makes the claim that it is not only possible but necessary to articulate a theory of “New-World-centric” discourse, a theory which does not merely transpose Old World theory onto the cultural realities of the Americas. Such a discourse would both produce and comment upon New World texts in a manner peculiar to (or, if you like, “indigenous to”) the region. It would, like New World culture itself, synthesize discourses from throughout the world into a heteroglossic amalgam that both blends and becomes something other than its components. Like many studies of Latin American literature, this one accepts as given the critical commonplace that New World literature is a literature of encounter, a literature of the meeting and clashing of cultures. But in the recent past many critical texts have pursued this commonplace in an equally commonplace direction.

Hither and yon: posts from elsewhere

The links that follow are posts that originally appeared at my “home” blog that touch on this blog’s preoccupations and will probably end up being incorporated into the book project, even if only tangentially. Consider this page, then, as being as much a sort of collections of notes to myself as an actual post that some might find worthwhile. But I also invite you to leave comments, either here or at the original posts.

“American Aesthetics I: Bingham’s Lion”: In which I argue that this hemisphere’s aesthetic sensibilities are based in pastiche and not electicism or egalitarianism.

“Ellison and (American) Public Space”: A discussion of Ellison’s essay “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity”–in particular its proposal that we view “the whole of American life as a drama acted out upon the body of a Negro giant, who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and scene upon which and within which the action unfolds” and the further, equally-provocative claim that “[i]t is not accidental that the disappearance of the human Negro [as opposed to stereotyped Negroes] from our fiction coincides with the disappearance of deep-probing doubt and a sense of evil.”

“Some comments on The Fathers“: A reading of Allen Tate’s 1938 novel as something of a rewriting of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), though one that doesn’t deal quite as honestly with its subject as Faulkner’s does with its subject.

“More on Arc d’X“: A short discussion of Steve Erickson’s 1993 novel, in which I promise to return but, at least over there, did not. That’ll happen here and in the book project.

“Denial on the Mississippi?: The strange career of the narrator in Show Boat and “Denial on the Mississippi?: Part II–the river as engine of nostalgia in Show Boat: Two posts that contain the germ of an article I’m writing on Edna Ferber’s 1926 novel that is near completion and which I will wrap up this summer. Each explores how the characters and even the novel’s narrator are strangely (willfully?) reticent on the theme of certain characters’ racial ambiguity, even though its most famous scene is the “outing” of Steve and Julie as a miscegenated couple and the action Steve takes to make himself “black” according to the letter of the law. Meanwhile, “Blankness: On unselfconsciousness in narrative” is an offshoot of those posts.