File spoon-archives/seminar-13.archive/beverley-virtual-speech_1996/seminar-13.jan96-jan97, message 11


Date: Sat, 11 May 1996 11:02:44 -0400 (EDT)
From: Radhika Gajjala <rxgst6+-AT-pitt.edu>
Subject: the notes to part 4 and part 5 (i.e. the last part of speech )


10] There exists a perhaps apocryphal letter of Juan Bautista Tupac
Amaru to Bol=A1var, in which he writes among other things that the
blood of "mi tierno y venerado hermano... fue el ruego que hab=A1a
preparado aquella tierra para fructificar los mejores frutos que el
gran Bol=A1var habr=A0 de recoger con su mano valerosa y llena de la
mayor generosidad."  Several historians have suggested a link
between the Memorias and the program advanced by the party of
Belgrano in the Wars of Independence, which included the idea of
restoring the Inca empire.

11] "Just as any other reader, he (Rousseau) is bound to misread
his text as the promise of political change.  The error is not within
the reader; language itself dissociates the cognition from the act.
Die Sprache verspricht (sich); to the extent that it is necessarily
misleading, language just as necessarily conveys the promise of its
own truth.  This is also why textual allegories on this level of
rhetorical complexity generate history." (De Man 1979, 277)

12] Anti-literary because writing was one of the symbols of
colonial power itself.  Guha notes, for example, that in the Indian
peasant rebellions of the nineteenth century "The want of literacy
also made the peasants relate occasionally to a written utterance in
such a way as to destroy its original motivation by deverbalizing
it and exploit the resulting opacity in order to provide that graphic
representation with new 'signifieds'."  He cites in particular the
case of a leader of the Santal rebellion of 1855 who, as a sign of
his authority, waved before his followers a sheaf of papers, "which
proved on scrutiny to contain among other things 'an old Book on
locomotives, a few visiting cards of Mr. Burn Engineer' and... a
translation in some Indian language of the Gospel accoprding to St.
John.  What is even more remarkable is that the rest of the papers
said to have dropped from heaven and regarded by the Santal
leaders as evidence of divine supprot for the insurrection had
nothing inscribed on them at all either in writing or in print"
(Guha 1983, 248-249).


13] Rowe and Schelling (1994) offer a good critique of the
limitations of Anderson's thesis in relation to Andean social
formations.

14] As in the case of South Africa, for example, where it is worth
recalling that the Arikaans white minority was also "creole" and
anti-colonial (in its relations to the British).  In contrast to what is
going on in South Africa today, one could say that, mutatis
mutandis, apartheid "won" historically in Latin America.  Indeed,
apartheid may be a more accurate model of what happens in many
parts of Latin American culture than the idea, which has been a
mainstay of Latin American nationalism (and which is connected
to the notion of transculturation, as I noted earlier), of a relatively
benevolent racial-cultural mestizaje.

15] The argument that follows is developed more fully in an essay
called "The Real Thing," forthcoming in a collection on testimonio
edited by Georg Gugelberger for Duke University Press.

16] In our Founding Statement, we wrote that "the project of
developing a Latin American Subaltern Studies Group such as the
one we are proposing represents one aspect. albeit a crucial one, of
the larger emergent field of Latin American Cultural Studies"
(Beverley et al. 1995, 141).

17] In a series of lectures on The New Evangelism delivered at the
Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in 1993, Gutierrez noted that
Liberation Theology means by "the poor" not beggars or peasants
in alpargatas, but essentially the same thing as the subaltern, that
is, those who do not have access to full "signification" as subjects
in the dominant cultural codes. In the definition proferred by Guha,
the subaltern is "the general attribute of subordination... whether
this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office, or
in any other way" (Guha and Spivak 1998, 35).

18] Today I would say "human and non-human contemporaries."



   

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