En el actual estudio, leo una carta publicada por el intelectual cubano José Antonio Saco en 1829... more En el actual estudio, leo una carta publicada por el intelectual cubano José Antonio Saco en 1829 al lado de las Réflexions sur la question juive (1946) de Jean-Paul Sartre, ya que encuentro que las tesis centrales de estos dos ensayos tienen varios puntos de contacto. El ensayo de Sartre y su recepción, por otra parte, ayudará a deslindar dónde la carta de Saco anticipa la teoría crítica de la raza que surge posteriormente y varios casos en los cuales, a pesar de su perspicacia, Saco se equivoca. Habiendo resumido estas intersecciones, adopto la intervención ética de Emmanuel Levinas y sugiero que fue la relación empírica de cara a cara del cubano con un judío en Nueva York lo que motivó su meditación abierta y no convencional sobre el odio hacia el judío; en otras palabras, además de enseñarle inglés, el tutor judío de Saco le enseñó que, como decía Levinas, “puede existir un yo que no sea un yo mismo”.
Leonardo Padura Fuentes is the preeminent living Cuban novelist. In his Mario Conde detective ser... more Leonardo Padura Fuentes is the preeminent living Cuban novelist. In his Mario Conde detective series, whenever the eponymous protagonist is not preoccupied with solving crimes endemic to Special Period Cuba, he longs nostalgically for his prelapsarian youth. The leitmotif of Conde's nostalgia reveals Cubans' profound impression of temporal disjunction from the Revolution during the Special Period, when the state's future-oriented teleology jarred with the seemingly eternal present in which they languished. In the 1990s, Cubans would have agreed with Hamlet that "[t]he time is out of joint," who Jacques Derrida quotes in Specters of Marx, his riposte to the triumphal euphoria of capitalist society in the wake of Soviet communism's collapse. Yet in the eighth installment of the Mario Conde series Herejes, Padura surrenders the specters of aborted futures that haunt the detective in prior novels to make room for a conversation with ghosts of the past, which Derrida terms revenant in his hauntology. In talking to revenant, which, curiously enough, are almost exclusively ghosts of Jews, Padura once more short-circuits the Revolution's linear, progressive narrative, an historical conception against whose dangers Walter Benjamin warns us in "Theses on the Philosophy of History," a text that informs Derrida's Specters.
Chasqui-revista De Literatura Latinoamericana, 2015
In Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Matthew Frye Jaco... more In Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Matthew Frye Jacobson outlines how the centrality of "black-white" relations in the U.S. from the 1920s to the 1960s "altered the nation's racial alchemy and redrew the dominant racial configuration along the strict, binary line of white and black, creating Caucasians where before had been so many Celts, Hebrews, Teutons, Mediterraneans, and Slavs" (14). I seek to demonstrate that a similar alchemical process took place in Puerto Rico, albeit with one significant difference: it was at the expense of Jewish exclusion that certain nonwhites--but significantly not all--were made into Puerto Ricans. The ideological and political deployment of Jewishness that was useful toward consolidating a notion of Puerto Rican-ness inclusive of light-skinned mulattos is illustrated in Alejandro Tapia y Rivera's La cuarterona, one of the most widely-read Puerto Rican dramas of the nineteenth ce...
José Antonio Saco: An Early Critic of Anti-Semitism En el actual estudio, leo una carta publicada... more José Antonio Saco: An Early Critic of Anti-Semitism En el actual estudio, leo una carta publicada por el intelectual cubano José Antonio Saco en 1829 al lado de las Réflexions sur la question juive (1946) de Jean-Paul Sartre, ya que encuentro que las tesis centrales de estos dos ensayos tienen varios puntos de contacto. El ensayo de Sartre y su recepción, por otra parte, ayudará a deslindar dónde la carta de Saco anticipa la teoría crítica de la raza que surge posteriormente y varios casos en los cuales, a pesar de su perspicacia, Saco se equivoca. Habiendo resumido estas intersecciones, adopto la intervención ética de Emmanuel Levinas y sugiero que fue la relación empírica de cara a cara del cubano con un judío en Nueva York lo que motivó su meditación abierta y no convencional sobre el odio hacia el judío; en otras palabras, además de enseñarle inglés, el tutor judío de Saco le enseñó que, como decía Levinas, "puede existir un yo que no sea un yo mismo". Palabras clave: José Antonio Saco, antisemitismo, filosemitismo, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas In this study, I read a letter published in 1829 by the Cuban intellectual José Antonio Saco alongside Jean-Paul Sartre's Réflexions sur la question juive (Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate; 1946) as I find that the central theses of these two essays have several points of contact. Sartre's essay and its reception will, moreover, help chart where Saco anticipates later critical race thinking and several instances, despite his insightfulness, where he misses the mark. Having summarized these intersections, I adopt Emmanuel Levinas's ethical intervention and suggest that it was the Cuban's empirical rapport de face à face (face-to-face relation) with the Jewish other in New York that encouraged his broad-minded and unconventional meditation on Jew hatred-in other words, that in addition to teaching him English, Saco's Jewish tutor taught him that, as Levinas put it, "a self [moi] can exist which is not a myself [moi-même]." ("Ethics" 9; also qtd. in Hutchens 52).
En el actual estudio, leo una carta publicada por el intelectual cubano José Antonio Saco en 1829... more En el actual estudio, leo una carta publicada por el intelectual cubano José Antonio Saco en 1829 al lado de las Réflexions sur la question juive (1946) de Jean-Paul Sartre, ya que encuentro que las tesis centrales de estos dos ensayos tienen varios puntos de contacto. El ensayo de Sartre y su recepción, por otra parte, ayudará a deslindar dónde la carta de Saco anticipa la teoría crítica de la raza que surge posteriormente y varios casos en los cuales, a pesar de su perspicacia, Saco se equivoca. Habiendo resumido estas intersecciones, adopto la intervención ética de Emmanuel Levinas y sugiero que fue la relación empírica de cara a cara del cubano con un judío en Nueva York lo que motivó su meditación abierta y no convencional sobre el odio hacia el judío; en otras palabras, además de enseñarle inglés, el tutor judío de Saco le enseñó que, como decía Levinas, “puede existir un yo que no sea un yo mismo”.
Leonardo Padura Fuentes is the preeminent living Cuban novelist. In his Mario Conde detective ser... more Leonardo Padura Fuentes is the preeminent living Cuban novelist. In his Mario Conde detective series, whenever the eponymous protagonist is not preoccupied with solving crimes endemic to Special Period Cuba, he longs nostalgically for his prelapsarian youth. The leitmotif of Conde's nostalgia reveals Cubans' profound impression of temporal disjunction from the Revolution during the Special Period, when the state's future-oriented teleology jarred with the seemingly eternal present in which they languished. In the 1990s, Cubans would have agreed with Hamlet that "[t]he time is out of joint," who Jacques Derrida quotes in Specters of Marx, his riposte to the triumphal euphoria of capitalist society in the wake of Soviet communism's collapse. Yet in the eighth installment of the Mario Conde series Herejes, Padura surrenders the specters of aborted futures that haunt the detective in prior novels to make room for a conversation with ghosts of the past, which Derrida terms revenant in his hauntology. In talking to revenant, which, curiously enough, are almost exclusively ghosts of Jews, Padura once more short-circuits the Revolution's linear, progressive narrative, an historical conception against whose dangers Walter Benjamin warns us in "Theses on the Philosophy of History," a text that informs Derrida's Specters.
Chasqui-revista De Literatura Latinoamericana, 2015
In Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Matthew Frye Jaco... more In Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Matthew Frye Jacobson outlines how the centrality of "black-white" relations in the U.S. from the 1920s to the 1960s "altered the nation's racial alchemy and redrew the dominant racial configuration along the strict, binary line of white and black, creating Caucasians where before had been so many Celts, Hebrews, Teutons, Mediterraneans, and Slavs" (14). I seek to demonstrate that a similar alchemical process took place in Puerto Rico, albeit with one significant difference: it was at the expense of Jewish exclusion that certain nonwhites--but significantly not all--were made into Puerto Ricans. The ideological and political deployment of Jewishness that was useful toward consolidating a notion of Puerto Rican-ness inclusive of light-skinned mulattos is illustrated in Alejandro Tapia y Rivera's La cuarterona, one of the most widely-read Puerto Rican dramas of the nineteenth ce...
José Antonio Saco: An Early Critic of Anti-Semitism En el actual estudio, leo una carta publicada... more José Antonio Saco: An Early Critic of Anti-Semitism En el actual estudio, leo una carta publicada por el intelectual cubano José Antonio Saco en 1829 al lado de las Réflexions sur la question juive (1946) de Jean-Paul Sartre, ya que encuentro que las tesis centrales de estos dos ensayos tienen varios puntos de contacto. El ensayo de Sartre y su recepción, por otra parte, ayudará a deslindar dónde la carta de Saco anticipa la teoría crítica de la raza que surge posteriormente y varios casos en los cuales, a pesar de su perspicacia, Saco se equivoca. Habiendo resumido estas intersecciones, adopto la intervención ética de Emmanuel Levinas y sugiero que fue la relación empírica de cara a cara del cubano con un judío en Nueva York lo que motivó su meditación abierta y no convencional sobre el odio hacia el judío; en otras palabras, además de enseñarle inglés, el tutor judío de Saco le enseñó que, como decía Levinas, "puede existir un yo que no sea un yo mismo". Palabras clave: José Antonio Saco, antisemitismo, filosemitismo, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas In this study, I read a letter published in 1829 by the Cuban intellectual José Antonio Saco alongside Jean-Paul Sartre's Réflexions sur la question juive (Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate; 1946) as I find that the central theses of these two essays have several points of contact. Sartre's essay and its reception will, moreover, help chart where Saco anticipates later critical race thinking and several instances, despite his insightfulness, where he misses the mark. Having summarized these intersections, I adopt Emmanuel Levinas's ethical intervention and suggest that it was the Cuban's empirical rapport de face à face (face-to-face relation) with the Jewish other in New York that encouraged his broad-minded and unconventional meditation on Jew hatred-in other words, that in addition to teaching him English, Saco's Jewish tutor taught him that, as Levinas put it, "a self [moi] can exist which is not a myself [moi-même]." ("Ethics" 9; also qtd. in Hutchens 52).
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