Periphērica: Journal of Social, Cultural, and Literary History

Full Issue 2.2

Periphērica — 2023-12-30

Canción del alacrán (o desde la periferia)

Denisse Vega Farfán — 2023-12-28

Poema

Todo sigue

Alberto Moreno — 2023-12-27

Materia inanimada

María Tabares — 2024-01-15

El viaje de la sangre

Zingonia Zingone — 2023-12-27

Preface to Issue 2.2

Pedro García-Caro — 2024-01-30

Convenient Quadrilaterals and Imagined Indians

Ernest Rafael Hartwell — 2023-12-31

n/a

José Martí: Political Organizing and the Issue of Race in the Period Leading to the Cuban War of Independence

Oleski J Miranda Navarro — 2023-12-26

The last years of José Martí in the United States can be classified as one of the author’s most prolific intellectual periods in terms of race. In the 1890s, he published several articles on the subject as his activism for the liberation of the island gained decisive momentum. With this work we try to illustrate how Martí’s position regarding the racial issue evolved towards carrying out concrete actions, such as the foundation in 1892 of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (PRC). The analysis is drawn mainly from a series of texts published in the Patria newspaper, the ideological organ of the PRC. Between 1892 and 1894, this publication was the platform that Martí used to prepare and promote the social scenario that he envisioned for the construction of post-colonial Cuba, encouraging racial inclusion and civil participation stemming from his political agenda.

“Nuestros salvajes filipinos”: Settler Encounters and Black Indigeneities in Mexico and the Philippines

Sony Coráñez Bolton — 2023-12-29

In this essay I develop a relational analysis placing Asian and Latin American racial discourses into conversation. My analysis here seeks to grasp with greater clarity the discrepant ways that Blackness, Indigeneity, and Asian identities are articulated in distinctly and distantly elaborated nation-building projects through mestizaje—a Philippine mestizaje and one originating in Mexico. I move us through an analysis of both Pedro A. Paterno’s ethnological study on Indigenous Philippine Blackness, Los Itas (1915), and José Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica (1925) as part of a global mestizo archive that is situated in the longue durée of the nineteenth century. The Aetas (or Itas), also commonly known by the Spanish term “Negritos,” are a community of phenotypically Black peoples that inhabit the mountainous regions of the northern Philippines in the island group known as Luzon. They have been a well-known community in the historical and cultural construction of Filipino racial identity. I examine the ways that the Aetas offered evidence of a Blackness that was transformed into a marker indexing the retrogression and development of the “Orient.” The dyad of civilization and barbarism in the Philippines pivoted on the dialectical antinomy of the Orient and Blackness. While the Philippines was not a site of and was far-removed from the transatlantic world, the physical darkness and qualitative Blackness of Indigenous peoples in the Philippines, the Indian subcontinent, and the Antipodes braid together the logics of Orientalism and Blackness in ways that are of interest to a transnational vista of race. This gesture of theoretical braiding of racial logics seemingly more germane to the Atlantic world with racial discourse in the Philippines invites questions on the ways that Blackness and Indigeneity in US-based and Latin American scholarship are treated. In the final analysis, I argue that through the comparison of these different mestizajes that the Asian political subject formation breaks from Indigeneity through the disarticulation of both Asianness and Indianness from Blackness. However, Blackness, as I'll explore, counterintuitively serves as a foundational heuristic device articulating Philippine racial identity through the prism of settler-native encounter. In my view, the racial scientific basis for Philippine racial identity being rooted in a conquest narrative of Malays conquering Indigenous “Filipinos” whose primitivity is indexed by Blackness has the potential to greatly reshape Philippine and Filipinx historiographies of race. This case study, I argue, provides compelling historical paradigms for thinking creatively and in coalition across Asian American, Latinx, Black, and Indigenous community and political formations in the present.

"Esto lo he leído en el cielo": visión martiana de la lectura y la escritura. Ensayo interpretativo.

Luis Álvarez Álvarez — 2023-12-26

This study aims to consider how José Martí valued reading as an immense field of cultural action, as a decisive instrument of epistemological and social liberation. José Martí’s oeuvre is examined here, particularly his articles, chronicles, and letters through the lens of his theory of reading: the concepts of reading, reader, the links between writer and reader, and the relationships with social and human environments are identified. We seek to reveal and highlight his conception and practice of reading, systematically oriented towards a deep human interrelation, not only of the reader with the text but beyond it, with the man who created it, an essential link between sender and receiver; the active and critical character that necessarily defines the reader and his participation as co-creator of the text; the cognitive and social functions of the book; the relationships between reading and writing; and Martí’s perception that reading constitutes, in its essence, a fundamental cultural process, the absolute bedrock of education and the true university, which is oriented towards action in the world.

Reivindicaciones políticas y sociales de los propagandistas filipinos a finales del siglo XIX: la Solidaridad colonial frente a la injusticia y la discriminación metropolitanas

Rocío Valderrey Martín — 2023-12-31

The ilustrado Filipino members of the Propaganda Movement at the end of the 19^th century organized a large-scale campaign to demand administrative, economic, cultural, and social reforms from the Spanish colonial government. In their writings, through their newspaper La Solidaridad and other publications, in speeches at banquets and other events, even in their private correspondence, they questioned their relationship with the metropolis: they considered that times had changed, and the needs of the Filipinos had evolved. That is why they demand, among other things, political enfranchisement, parliamentary representation, freedom of the press and the cessation of certain abuses in the overseas territories. They also called for solidarity among the different colonies, although they felt that Spain was treating Puerto Rico and Cuba more favorably.

“Un deleite lúgubre del alma, pero deleite al fin”: Cuba en el discurso eugenésico hispanófilo de Concepción Gimeno en México

Antonio Francisco Pedrós-Gascón — 2023-12-26

This article analyzes two novels by the Spanish feminist Concepción Gimeno in Mexico —Suplicio de una coqueta (1885) and Maura (1888)—, given the Cuban nationality of their protagonists. These texts are contrasted with her first novel, published in Spain: Victorina o heroísmo del corazón (1873). The article describes the way in which Cuba is appropriated by the discourse to address two issues: the future of the Spanish nation, and that of Hispanic world/Latin race. Regarding the latter, according to Gimeno, Porfirian Mexico is expected to exercise its continental leadership. In this Regenerationist debate, Cuba becomes a symbolic object of study for the rationalist eugenics discourse of late 19^th century.

Empire and Literary Autonomy in Antonio Luna's Impresiones

William Arighi — 2023-12-23

This paper examines the sketches of imperial Spanish life written by Antonio Luna, a Filipino chemist-turned-writer-turned-general. Collected in his 1891 book Impresiones, these sketches demonstrate Luna's attempts to claim autonomy through the written word. At the same time, they reveal the limits of literature's power in modernity for subjects of colonial power, as the same scenes that provide other writers with their greatest triumphs offer frustration to Luna. As Luna's characters traverse the cityscapes of the metropolis, they find themselves caught in the same flows of commodities and consumption as the coffee, sugar, and tobacco that traversed the globe, from the colonies to Europe, and offer hints of how patterns of consumption helped produce literary value in modernity.

The Impact of the 1833 Cholera Epidemic on Havana's Vulnerable Populations and Urban Landscape

Ninel Valderrama Negron — 2023-12-27

This article examines the connection between the cholera epidemic, health codes, and the early nineteenth-century urban change of Havana. Cholera was supposed to be a sickness that targeted weak people of color. Moral deviance and physical contamination had previously been vaguely associated with concepts of racial and class inferiority, but following the 1833 cholera outbreak, the ideological links between the two became clear. Colonial authorities took advantage of the circumstances to carry out many of the urban changes that would drastically change Havana's appearance, such as renovating the most vulnerable areas, creating roads, and establishing aqueducts, public fountains, and gardens. In this study, we will examine the impact of the cholera epidemic on women of color, as well as the modification of their living environments in Havana in the decades after the 1833 epidemic. Viewing the epidemic from the inside allows us to understand the trends of structural racialization prevalent in Havana at the time as well as within our own society. The structural violence made evident by analyzing infrastructure makes analysis of past societies, through race, gender, and class, vital for the creation of policy.

Laura Torres-Rodríguez. Orientaciones transpacíficas: la modernidad mexicana y el espectro de Asia. Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 2019.

Paula Park — 2023-12-28

Review of Laura Torres-Rodríguez. Orientaciones transpacíficas: la modernidad mexicana y el espectro de Asia. Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 2019.

Sebastiaan Faber, Leyendas negras, marcas blancas: La malsana obsesión con la imagen de España en el mundo. Madrid, Editorial Escritos Contextatarios, 2022

Daniel Ares-López — 2023-12-28

Review of Sebastiaan Faber. Leyendas negras, marcas blancas: La malsana obsesión con la imagen de España en el mundo. Madrid, Editorial Escritos Contextatarios, 2022.

Fabricio Tocco. Latin American Detectives Against Power: Individualism, the State, and Failure in Crime Fiction. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022.

José Ricardo Garcia Martínez — 2023-12-28

Review of Fabricio Tocco. Latin American Detectives Against Power. Individualism, the State, and Failure in Crime Fiction. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022.

Paul Dresman. In the River of My Sleep. Editorial El sur es América, 2023.

Amado Lascar — 2023-12-28

Review of Paul Dresman. In the River of My Sleep. Editorial El sur es América, 2023.

Ephemeral Sovereignties and Vanishing Communities

Fabricio Tocco — 2023-12-28

In Cidade de Deus (1997), the Afro-Brazilian anthropologist Paulo Lins (Rio de Janeiro, 1958—) explores the effects of the illegal drug trade on City of God, a favela located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Building on different readings of Lins’s work (Schwarz, Fitzgibbon, and Lorenz) and on the work of other anthropologists and historians (Alves, Segato, and Dawson), this article provides a close reading of the novel, focusing on an understudied aspect: the intersections between precariousness, gender, and the political, specifically, the relationship between masculine brutality and state sovereignty. First, I examine the portrayal of young drug lords and the vanishing favela sense of community. I then delve into how Lins’s drug lords personify what I call “ephemeral sovereignties,” i.e.: inchoate incarnations of state power through disposable bodies. In Cidade de Deus, these volatile sovereignties manage to produce a vanishing community while simultaneously paving the way for its self-destruction.

La pluma y la bolsa: El rol de la prensa reformista en la liberación del poeta esclavizado Ambrosio Echemendía.

Jorge Camacho — 2023-12-27

Ambrosio Echemendía was an enslaved poet born in Cuba in 1843 and freed in 1865 thanks to a collection organized by white intellectuals. This article analyzes the importance of the press in this process. It focuses on the newspaper El Siglo, published in Havana, which reproduced articles from other newspapers such as El Fomento and El Telégrafo de Cienfuegos to call on subscribers to free the poet. The article highlights that this liberation process was made possible by the development of communications in Cuba, which from the 1830s had began to expand and create what Benedict Anderson called an “imagined community” of intellectuals who read the same news and act as a united group to promote a cause of social improvement.

As the Bodies Pile Up, or What is Political Literature Today?

Luis Othoniel Rosa — 2024-02-10

Poetics are the ancestral reparation, an ancient redress for all the destruction our technologies of power have created. The politics of literature today must experiment with the position of enunciation, affirming a position-in-the-world while radically avoiding the risk of reducing that creative position to a label, to a superficial gesture, to a stable “identity.” Political Literature today remakes the position of literature in the world (the desk, the ink, the paper), in order to build with the new spoils of catastrophe that keep growing all around us. The great challenge of political literature today is to create the wildest poetics with the rubbles of the dying worlds as a medium.