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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

Casta paintings

De Español y Negra, Mulato. Image found here.
The “Images” page for Domestic Issue now has three examples of casta paintings (one striking example of which you see here), a genre that was once quite popular during the colonial era but languished as an area of serious academic inquiry until the 1960s. The subject [...]

Barack Obama’s post-race politics, Part II

(Part I is here)
So how does Barack Obama articulate a post-race politics in a nation–in a hemisphere–whose history has been shaped by racial tension literally since before Columbus? Here in the speech Obama gave at the groundbreaking ceremony for the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial, he reframes the theme of race in [...]

About this blog’s title

Welcome, accidental and intentional visitors. There’s not a lot to see here yet, but that will change on down the road.
In the meantime, I thought I would say a few words about the title of this blog. When working on my dissertation, I had a look at the etymologies of signifiers for the [...]