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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