RACE, SLAVERY, AND UTOPIA IN THE AMERICAS
November 19, 2014
Readings:
Edward K. Chan, "Utopia and the Problem of Race: Accounting for the Remainder in the Imagination of the 1970s Utopian Subject" (25 pp.)
David J. Hellwig, "A New Frontier in a Racial Paradise: Robert S. Abbott's Brazilian Dream" (10 pp.)
Gerald Horne, from The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade, Chapter 10 "Confederates to Brazil" (23 pp.)
Gary Wilder, "Untimely Vision: Aimé Césaire, Decolonization, Utopia" (40 pp.)
Christopher Dunn, "Jorge Mautner and Countercultural Utopia in Brazil" (12pp.)
Short excerpt of Tommie Shelby interview with Paul Gilroy (p. 129 after the 3 dots through 3 dots on p. 134 = 5 pp.)
Themes/Notes:
• Thinking about Race and Utopia, especially in Latin America
• Shards of utopian thinking in everyday life (Gilroy)
• Non-autonomous post-colony as a kind of utopia (Wilder on Cesaire)
• Colorblindness as a basis of some utopias (or dystopias?)
• Sparks of the past as recuperative? Power of past's vitality for present. Chan’s use of the "remainder"
• Individual subject as a subject in a social context
• The “who” of utopia; identity of the utopian subject.
• New model of subject that could accommodate particularities. Limitations of most utopian thinking -- especially in envisioning the subject as universal abstract subject of liberalism (Chan)
• Race as barrier to utopia, as holdover from history (Chan)
• Identifications as mixed race and refusals of racial categories
• Mautner’s readings of African American culture, racial mixture
• Durability of racial democracy idea in Brazil
• Drawing on radicalism without being implicated in its critique
• Race, empire, their intersections and tensions
• Counterculture, Bahia, and its relation to utopia
• Untimeliness, time, and utopia (Wilder). Seeing asynchronous time as a method for history,
• Wilder: imagination of postcolonial order without the telos of nation (108)
• Utopia as a strategy of reading rather than an empirical thing.
• Paul Gilroy’s renunciation of race
Questions:
• Do we come up with any different kind of utopia here? Does Marx remain? Is Marx enough?
• Nation as a utopian sphere? Are there more possible futures than an independent national republic? (Wilder)
• Horne and Abbot: racial utopias opposite, but do they link some ways in ending up in the entrepreneurial dream, capitalist utopia?
• The place of the body in utopian ideas?
• Can utopias sustain difference (Chan, 466) What can race be in a utopia? Embodied difference? Transcending difference?
• Is there a relationship between Latin American utopias and western representations of Latin America? Subaltern utopias?
• How can historians approach a utopian historiography and its disruptions of space and time?
• Does something have to call itself a utopia to be read as a utopia?
November 19, 2014
Readings:
Edward K. Chan, "Utopia and the Problem of Race: Accounting for the Remainder in the Imagination of the 1970s Utopian Subject" (25 pp.)
David J. Hellwig, "A New Frontier in a Racial Paradise: Robert S. Abbott's Brazilian Dream" (10 pp.)
Gerald Horne, from The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade, Chapter 10 "Confederates to Brazil" (23 pp.)
Gary Wilder, "Untimely Vision: Aimé Césaire, Decolonization, Utopia" (40 pp.)
Christopher Dunn, "Jorge Mautner and Countercultural Utopia in Brazil" (12pp.)
Short excerpt of Tommie Shelby interview with Paul Gilroy (p. 129 after the 3 dots through 3 dots on p. 134 = 5 pp.)
Themes/Notes:
• Thinking about Race and Utopia, especially in Latin America
• Shards of utopian thinking in everyday life (Gilroy)
• Non-autonomous post-colony as a kind of utopia (Wilder on Cesaire)
• Colorblindness as a basis of some utopias (or dystopias?)
• Sparks of the past as recuperative? Power of past's vitality for present. Chan’s use of the "remainder"
• Individual subject as a subject in a social context
• The “who” of utopia; identity of the utopian subject.
• New model of subject that could accommodate particularities. Limitations of most utopian thinking -- especially in envisioning the subject as universal abstract subject of liberalism (Chan)
• Race as barrier to utopia, as holdover from history (Chan)
• Identifications as mixed race and refusals of racial categories
• Mautner’s readings of African American culture, racial mixture
• Durability of racial democracy idea in Brazil
• Drawing on radicalism without being implicated in its critique
• Race, empire, their intersections and tensions
• Counterculture, Bahia, and its relation to utopia
• Untimeliness, time, and utopia (Wilder). Seeing asynchronous time as a method for history,
• Wilder: imagination of postcolonial order without the telos of nation (108)
• Utopia as a strategy of reading rather than an empirical thing.
• Paul Gilroy’s renunciation of race
Questions:
• Do we come up with any different kind of utopia here? Does Marx remain? Is Marx enough?
• Nation as a utopian sphere? Are there more possible futures than an independent national republic? (Wilder)
• Horne and Abbot: racial utopias opposite, but do they link some ways in ending up in the entrepreneurial dream, capitalist utopia?
• The place of the body in utopian ideas?
• Can utopias sustain difference (Chan, 466) What can race be in a utopia? Embodied difference? Transcending difference?
• Is there a relationship between Latin American utopias and western representations of Latin America? Subaltern utopias?
• How can historians approach a utopian historiography and its disruptions of space and time?
• Does something have to call itself a utopia to be read as a utopia?