The Master and the Slaves: Plantation Relations and Mestizaje in American Imaginaries
2008; Volume: 27; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-9648
Autores Tópico(s)Caribbean history, culture, and politics
ResumoAlexandra Isfahani-Hammond, ed. Master and the Slaves: Plantation Relations and Mestizaje in Imaginaries. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 161 pp. nine essays in this collection echo the following note in Antonio BenitezRojo's Repeating Ishnd: No perspective of human thought - whether premodern, modern or postmodern - can by itself define the Caribbean's complex socioculturel interplay [. . .]. We need all of them at the same time [...]. Every Caribbean person knows that the Caribbean is much more than a system of binary oppositions. Not surprisingly, Benitez-Rojo and H. Orlando Patterson are invoked in the editor's introduction as two of the initiators of postcolonial discourse on the political, psychological and symbolic meanings of slavery and its legacy. It is the unearthing of such meanings that also engages the other contributors to this volume. Framed as meditations on the dynamics of post-plantation relations and identity politics, the essays shed a refreshingly new light on the tradition of critical inquiry that New World slavery has created. Although each deals for the most part with a single national site, (the United States, Haiti, Martinique, and Brazil), the collection enables a transnational view of miscegenation, traversing the ground between its sublimation in the US imagination, and its affirmation in Brazil and the Caribbean. editor stikes an important chord in the introduction by drawing two suggestive ideological parallels. first has to do with a perceived affinity between earlier Latin and Caribbean discourses on miscegenation and the contemporary global embrace of multiculturalism. A second important nexus is established between the anti-black fear-mongering in the region occasioned by the 1791 rebellion in San Domingo and present anti-Muslim sentiment in the US and Europe. use of American imaginaries in the collection's title speaks to the current understanding of language as discourse, which provides a solvent for the polarization of fictional and non-fictional genres. Through a study of texts traditionally classified as non-fiction, and of the graphic arts in one case, the collection offers a timely complement to the many studies of slavery, race, and identity in the Americas which have been based on fictional works. In both the introduction and her essay in chapter two, Writing Brazilian Culture, collection editor Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond disputes the distinction conventionally drawn between a normative one-dropism in US identity politics, on the one hand, and the idea of racial assimilation as the rule in Latin America, on the other. In this regard, she claims that post-slavery scholarship has been uncritical in its characterization of miscegenation as evidence of egalitarianism. Some of the essays that follow serve as a corrective to this latter view by foregrounding the example of the hierarchical understanding of racial mixture in Brazilian sociological literature. With the exception of the final essay, (Shreerekha Subramanian's Blood, Memory and Nation: Massacre and Mourning in Edwidge Danticat's Farming of Bones), which is a mostly structuralist appraisal of that novel, each chapter of the collection presents an engaging variation on the collection's main theme. dominant focus on Brazilian cultural discourse is first signalled in the collection's title, taken from the English translation of Casa-Grande e Senzah, Gilberto Freyre's landmark social history and anthropological study. Freyre's work is the subject of three of the collection's nine essays. Two of diese demonstrate well the meaning-making function of literary criticism. In The Sugar Daddy: Gilberto Freyre and the White Man's Love for Blacks Cesar Braga-Pinto reads Casa- Grande through a postmodern optic. Braga-Pinto recognizes, but without judgement, die presence of literal and figurative bisexuality in Freyre's writing. …
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