We talked as we sat there, and we agreed that zoos are strange and depressing places to bring young children. This is no knock against Lisbon’s zoo; its designers at least had the dark comedic sense to place the crocodiles next to McDonald’s, and it seems to do its best with resources that can never match those that support famous zoos in cities like Berlin and Singapore. More dark comedy: an older Portuguese friend of mine, in a moment of passing melancholy, once sighed aloud to me that there were much better specimens (and a greater variety) of African animals in Lisbon’s zoo before 1974. I responded that he should perhaps break in at night and paint the lion exhibit pink, but he didn’t think this was funny. Or practical. These economic and post-imperial realities are certainly hard to ignore at Lisbon’s Jardim Zoológico (making of it a stunning microcosm), but then the zoo also has a cheetah exhibit that, on a beautiful June afternoon two years ago, distracted our daughters just long enough for my wife and I to sit together in the shade for a few minutes, holding hands and talking about the world’s many hypocrisies and horrors. As parents with small children know, this sort of time is a rare gift, and so it’s perhaps understandably difficult for me to criticize the Lisbon zoo in any sustained way.

The problem, in any case, isn’t with Lisbon’s zoo, but with zoos in general. As many activists say, they’re monuments to human greed and self-importance – to our willingness to take millions of hectares of wild animal habitat and convert them into ranches, oil fields, mines, and suburbs. This much is true, but then I’d argue that there’s nothing particularly useful about such a statement, which resembles, at least generically, the complaint that a particular sort of dictatorial regime is repressive. All dictatorial regimes are of course repressive by definition (though perhaps not equally), and similarly, monuments to human greed and self-importance are quite likely the only sort of monument that we can ever build. To build a monument of any other kind would compel us, it seems, not to build a monument at all. A monumental un-monument that passively speaks something far nobler than human action. Indeed, it’s in the absence of monuments – the monumental notes that we don’t play – that we show our greatest genius and highest potential as a species. The naked fact that we normally tear up trees and plants and destroy animal habitat to build our monuments (I like the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos well enough, but it always strikes me that a large grove of trees would have been infinitely more beautiful) strengthens this argument.

So no, I’m no great fan of monuments of any sort. But then what’s particularly galling about zoos isn’t that they index our unquenchable rapacity (once again, such indices are all around us); rather, it’s that they also try desperately hard to present us as somehow magnanimous and caring. They say: “Sure, we’ve nearly wiped these species off the map for no good reason, but we’re essentially good and compassionate; just look at the way we tend to these individual spider monkeys and rhinos.” There’s something inherently insane about our need to look ethical and even self-sacrificing while inflicting such serious global damage, and zoos are an effective symbolic tool in this process: come witness our earnest attempts to save the lowland gorilla and the great care that we give a particular family of gorillas, even as we (as a species) work diligently to wipe them (as a species) off the face of the planet. God, who I assume has no sense of humor about such things, has likely spent the last century wondering if he shouldn’t have given the planet to the lowland gorillas in the first place and simply smothered us in our phylogenetic crib.

All this existential hypocrisy aside, zoos also have a frightening stink to them. The smell of oblivion and ruin (and the piss and shit of inmates) is everywhere in a zoo, especially on warm summer afternoons when, for example, riverine breezes from the Tagus don’t quite make it up to Sete Rios. Strip a zoo of its gift shops and ice cream kiosks, and it’s little more than a soft prison camp for the endangered and defeated, a palliative antechamber to the hellish night of extinction. Death row, but with a gift shop for the kids. As an example, we might consider the handful of Iberian lynxes now on display at the Zoobotánico Jerez. There are now approximately 200 Iberian lynxes alive in the world, and in spite of serious conservation efforts in Andalusia (of which the zoo is an important component), it’s likely that the species will soon disappear altogether. A chilling and unsettling fact, and yet there they are, pacing around in an enclosed space for us to see and photograph, naked and mundane in their defeat, just across Calle Taxdirt (named for a successful Spanish cavalry charge in Northern Morocco) and less than a block away from a prominent school of Gestalt psychotherapy. The zoo advertises the lynx exhibit as a chance to be “face-to-face” with the most endangered feline on the planet, and yet one gets the strong sense that Emmanuel Levinas would shake his head in disbelief at such a statement. Can there be a face-to-face in such conditions? Can there be closeness with such an obviously exotic and sad spectacle, a feline Prometheus enrhythmed to the symbolic economy of human monuments? There’s little time to think about this: by the time our daughters grow to adulthood, there will likely be no Iberian lynxes (or wild polar bears) left in the world. And there very well may be no more cheetahs, either.

Images of Caspian tigers (Camões’s tigre hircana) in zoos from near the end of the nineteenth century provide a sobering window to the final days of an animal species. In one photo from the Berlin Zoo, a Caspian tiger stands next to the bars of his cage. The short, bulldog skull and white mane lead the stout body through its captive routine, thousands of miles from the Elburz mountains and the packs of wild boar that once foraged there for acorns: walk to one side of the cage, walk to another, look up, look down, sit, pant a little, scratch, wait to be fed. About fifty years after this photo (shocking in its banality) was taken, there would be no more Caspian tigers on earth. Victims of development, the Soviet army’s standing orders to shoot them on sight (no Cáucaso horrendo, fraco infante, / criado ao peito dalgũa tigre hircana), and their good sense not to procreate behind bars, these tigers fell back into the long, nameless night that preceded them.

Sitting in the shade next to the okapi exhibit, my wife and I took care to keep all of our grown-up talk about extinction and human recklessness far from our two daughters. They’ll know all of this soon enough, and like most parents, we try to take care not to place certain truths on their shoulders before they can safely bear the weight, or at least keep their mouths shut at school. Our eldest knows, for example, that babies come from a mysterious and abstract biological process that scientists refer to as “reproduction,” but so far we’ve left off describing any of its details. It’s a judgment call on our part, but questions of conception and extinction still seem to reside beyond the horizon of even our very strong-willed eldest daughter’s understanding – and, more to the point, we don’t want her friends’ parents to scold us because our daughter told their kids where babies come from (or that the San Francisco Zoo is at its core a chamber of horrors). Parenting is, in the end, an almost universal shame culture.

Back at the zoo two summers ago, our daughters were enjoying their close encounter with a cheetah that had made its way over to them, rubbing its spotted flank up against the plexiglass wall that separated it from them. Nervous giggles of pleasure, hushed silence, and cooing attempts to speak with the animal, to be the first little girl to break through all that fast-twitch carnivorous wildness and come to know the thoughts and fears of the world’s fastest animal. To be the first to scale the glass wall and sit down with the cheetah, to have the cat rest its tiny head (with its tinier, meat-driven brain) on her lap and sleep away the hot afternoon as people came from all over to take photographs of this post-humanist miracle. The newspapers would print an article on the little girl who talks to cheetahs, and the Prime Minister would drop his austerity plans for the day in order to meet her and wonder at her strange powers. Knowing our eldest daughter, she was also likely hatching an elaborate plan to adopt the cheetah and bring it back to California with us. She would make fashionable, sequined dresses for it, feed it pepperoni pizza and fish, and it would accompany her to school. It would sit obediently outside the classroom door while our daughter struggled with long division, and Daniela, the little girl who teases her and takes things from her lunchbox, would henceforth toe the line or be eaten. Hollywood would make a movie about the little girl and her pet cheetah, and our daughter would insist on playing herself, which she would do to rave reviews and many awards. All of this was fully worked out in her head even as she and her younger sister first leaned in toward the cheetah and began to offer it whispered promises and statements of unconditional love. The cheetah continued its daily routine, undisturbed and unmoved by the soft murmuring of little girls.

What struck me then also was the fact that my wife and I were similarly unworried by our daughters’ physical proximity to the cheetah. What came into focus at that moment was that whatever “closeness” might be, its thread is likely snapped by the presence of barriers such as the plexiglass that maintained the cheetah in its (much-reduced) world and our daughters in theirs. I imagined my daughters in some Zambian grassland (the mapa cor-de-rosa thus makes its return to our story), perhaps fifty meters from this same cheetah. Would my wife and I still be sitting down, enjoying the cool shade, unconcerned? Or would we scramble to protect our girls from the threatening, intolerable closeness of a meat-eater capable of closing that distance in less than three seconds? But how can a distance of fifty meters so dramatically remove us from our habitual economy while a distance of mere centimeters allows us to daydream and philosophize in the shade? The obvious answer is the glass barrier, a material manifestation of the guarantee that the Lisbon zoo gives us that we can enjoy a McRoyal Cheese and batatas fritas without being eaten by hungry crocodiles, or that our daughters might whisper in the ear of a cheetah without it being their last act on this earth. A fun and exotic experience, but perhaps the very opposite of closeness.

After a short while, our daughters grew bored of the cheetahs (as they do of nearly every diversion) and suggested that we move on to the lions, cape penguins, and white tigers, in any particular order. In the end, I suppose, it doesn’t matter which animals we decided to see, as all we were really choosing was our own autonomy and freedom to choose, in a kind of infinite loop of leisure, security, and privilege. Soon enough, dogs and cats will be the only non-human, uncaged animals left in the world. When this occurs, we’ll certainly be happy that we had the foresight to build zoos to help us perform the Christ-like miracle of transforming (just enough) our most unthinkable crimes into sweets for our children.

[Uma tradução portuguesa deste texto encontra-se em Forma de Vida, vol. 2 (Abril 2013)]

List of Readings

1. Theocritus: Idylls. This is about considering the beginnings of the pastoral mode, but Theocritus also has much more than just historical value. We’ll read this in English but look at specific terms/passages in the original Greek. (no prior knowledge of Greek required).

2. Virgil: Eclogues. The Latin pastoral tradition is bigger than just Virgil, but given the extent to which Renaissance writers followed his lead, it’s certainly worth giving his pastoral poetry a close look. We’ll read this in English but look at specific terms/passages in the original Latin. (no prior knowledge of Latin required).

3. Jacopo Sannazaro: Arcadia. Hard to believe, but the only English edition I could find for this text was Ralph Nash’s translation from 1966 (Wayne State UP). Seems odd. I’ll put this edition on reserve, but we’ll also have the newer Cátedra translation into Spanish. Italian editions are obviously easy to access, as well.

4. Garcilaso de la Vega: Eglogas. There aren’t that many of these, but they’re dense and brilliant. And very fun to read.

5. Bernardim Ribeiro: Églogas and Menina e moça. A little poetry, a little prose. For students with limited Portuguese, I’ll also have on hand Gregory Rabassa’s newly published English translation of Menina e moça.

6. Jorge de Montemayor: La Diana. This is the most famous Iberian pastoral romance, and it will take up a big chunk of our course. In part because it’s important, but also because it’s sorta long.

7. Luís de Camões: Églogas. Camões absolutely rocks as a lyric poet (Lusíadas, Shmusíadas), and his églogas are practically unparalleled. Even cynical moderns get weepy. They also allow us to talk a bit about mannerism and other changes taking place during the second half of the sixteenth century.

8. Luis de Góngora: Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea. It’s fun to see what Góngora does to (and through) the pastoral mode. Something like what Jimi Hendrix famously did to the Star Spangled Banner. This also allows us to open up a discussion on the Iberian baroque.

I’d also like to have us read Paul Alpers’s What is the Pastoral? (dense, long, but a pretty extensive overview and critical analysis of the pastoral). Moving to the present, we’ll also look at sections of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain.” The idea here is that we haven’t necessarily given up on the pastoral as a mode of expression, and it still has the power to speak and move us in profound ways.

As with my other seminars, my goal is not for students just to memorize a lot of material and criticism or to come to some “deeper understanding” of literature that somehow still manages to leave us unchanged, untroubled, and comfortable within our habitual economy. My sense is that we can still be moved and dispossessed by the pastoral (even the Renaissance sort), that it can still do its work on us.

1. Assemble a large corpus of stories focused on closeness.
2. Once the corpus is large enough, look for patterns.
3. Develop a web experience that visualizes the results in interesting and useful ways.

All of this is aimed at developing a more concrete sense of what closeness might look like as an area of inquiry within the humanities.

What We Have So Far

To see what we have so far, go to: http://cowbird.com/barletta/collection/closeness/.

The corpus is still quite small, and we’re hoping to get friends and colleagues to share their stories. To contribute, just go to cowbird.com and click the red “Join Us” button. Whether you join as a “Nomad” (free) or as a “Citizen” ($5 per month, and with a lot more options), you can still add your closeness stories. Stories can include text, images, and recorded sound.

Closeness Project Overview

This project is interested in exploring the idea of closeness as a field of inquiry in the humanities.

We have no a priori definition of closeness. Our plan is to proceed inductively — to collect as many accounts and versions of it as we can — and then look for patterns. This can mean, inter alia, interpersonal and/or spiritual closeness, closeness to nature, and of course to art and literature. While in Silicon Valley (where we live and work) notions of closeness often involve virtuality and robust forms of digital mediation, we’re interested in how technology can help us to preserve, nurture, and even better define what it is that we mean when we speak of the experience of proximity when we read, write, engage art, dance, translate texts, play music, and most importantly, when we share stories.

Our hope is to have several authors contribute short stories that focus on the question of closeness in some way. Once we have a large enough corpus, we’d like to develop different ways of visualizing the broader picture that emerges from these stories: patterns, themes, rhythms, and the like. What will emerge, we hope, is a rich, human(istic) picture of closeness.

Our team is Vincent Barletta, Jaih Hunter-Hill, Friederike Knuepling, and Tom Winterbottom. We exist thanks to a generous grant from the Research Unit of Stanford’s Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

The challenge for my book is to lay out this ethico-metaphysical framing of rhythm and then explore its implications for literary texts of various sorts. My plan is to look at Aeschylus (duh), Virgil, Luís de Camões, Paul Celan, and then (as a gift to myself) John Coltrane. Other candidates include Andalusi muwashshahat and the Toledo manuscript of the Libro de buen amor. Ausiàs March is also tempting. Maybe these won’t be whole chapters; maybe they’ll just find their way into other chapters. Hard to say at this point, as I’ve now only got a chunk of the introduction and bits of the Camões chapter written. Honestly, the temptation is to have the entire book focus on Camonian lyric. Would there be readers for such a book? That’s sort of the question. And then I also couldn’t write the Coltrane chapter that has me so excited. Sometimes I think I’m just a failed (or merely cowardly) jazz historian. I sometimes dream about playing and writing about jazz 24/7. A good dream that will be mine even as I breathe my last. What stops me? Probably all the other people who already play and write about jazz 24/7 and do so better than I ever could. As I said, I’m not necessarily brave when it comes to my dreams.

Back to the rhythm book. As a way of working through the question of rhythm, I’m teaching a PhD seminar on the subject. We’re reading Aeschylus (“Prometheus Bound” and “The Persians”), Avicenna (on poetics), Nietzsche (on rhythm), Aristoxenus (on more mainstream ideas of Greek rhythm), Benveniste (his landmark article on “ruthmos”), Blanchot (The Writing of the Other), Levinas (actually, Jill Robbins’s book on Levinas and literature), Celan (prose and some poetry), and primary texts from medieval and early modern Iberia: Garcilaso de la Vega, Camões, March, and the LBA (just the passages found in MS T). I think that’s it. It’s a lot to pack into a ten-week course, and the discussions have been very thick and exciting (for me) so far. The students are (no surprise) fabulous and committed, and I’m learning a lot from them. Right now we’re finishing up Blanchot’s text and launching into the T manuscript of the LBA (a text keenly focused on death and the “disaster” of writing). Our focus is on a VERY close reading of the primary texts, informed to a large extent by questions that come up in our secondary readings. What does it mean to speak about rhythm as ethics in medieval Iberia (and beyond)? It can’t be about traditional philology or even intellectual history, since the question of rhythm after Aristotle became a pretty narrow (“imbecilic” in Meschonnic’s terms) enterprise. Rather, it’s about taking up a somewhat open-ended conversation, about surrendering up this literature (and ourselves) to an inquiry into what it means to work at the limits of language (where we are no longer “able to be able”), to develop a philology of passivity, of “enrhythment.”

These are extreme positions, and we mostly don’t expect to write about medieval and early modern works in the same way that medieval and early modern writers did. Our readers, after all, have different expectations and needs. Modern theories and philosophies do have a place in our work, although we often have a very hard time defining for ourselves and our students (not to mention those anonymous readers who assess our work for publication) where the line that divides antiquarian fetishism and anachronism might be. Certainly citing “the Philosopher” as an indisputable authority on poetics is no longer acceptable (“Dixit Algazel in sua Logica. . .”), but then referring to Abd al-Malik ibn Quzman as some kind of Zizekian provocateur (waaaay avant la lettre) is similarly a no-no. Somewhere in between these two extremes (depending on our project, readership, and willingness to go out on a limb) is where most of us do our work.

But then perhaps the problem is our notion of context itself. Is context a static thing, after all? Most of us speak of it as a “moving target,” but is it a “thing” at all? A vessel into which text, culture, history, etc. are poured? And does context have any a priori existence at all or does it emerge precisely through all the talk and interaction (much of it mediated by writing and other technologies) for which we imagine it serves as a kind of container or platform (perhaps something like genre)? For literary scholars, is context perhaps better understood as an achievement, something that readers (and readers as writers) collaboratively strive to entail through the mediation of written texts? What happens if we take up Charles Briggs and Richard Bauman’s call to put aside our largely uncritical talk of “context” and focus instead on “contextualization,” or the processes by which participants (e.g., writers, readers, glossators, publishers, sellers, the Portuguese Inquisition, etc.) entail the ground against which their talk and interaction takes on (even if just for a moment) meaning and force?

What might such a literary research project look like? It would likely foreground the work of readers (and writers as readers). It also might have the look and feel of social history or network theory and analysis, but with a renewed focus on close textual analysis and textually-embedded forms of pragmatic signification (e.g., deixis). The results are somewhat unpredictable, but it seems right in any case that we’d benefit from a more precise and simultaneously dynamic sense of what it is we mean by “context.”

In more practical terms, it’s not that we seek to “understand” or “situate” (as a totalizing, unidirectional gesture) the poetry of (for example) Ibn Quzman; nor do we ever gain mastery OVER it. Rather, we work (and train ourselves) to enter into something like a conversation with his readers and listening public through the mediation of his poetry, to construct participation frameworks in which we ourselves intervene (as something like participant observers). Within this framework, we don’t bracket off our theories (folk and otherwise), but rather place them in explicit dialogue with (once again, returning to Ibn Quzman) Abu Nuwas and Ishaq al-Mawsili. This is a subtle shift, but it may make a significant difference in the work that we do. The results would inevitably be idiosyncratic, unpredictable, and ultimately risky, like all conversations.

Quijano sums up his thesis perhaps most succinctly on page 229, when he writes: “The coloniality of power, established upon the production of the idea of ‘race’, has to be admitted as a basic factor in the problem of nation-states or nationality.” What does Quijano mean by “coloniality of power”? In his formulation, it seems to revolve around two key elements: 1) the rise of world capitalism at the start of the sixteenth century (i.e., all forms of labor and production begin to revolve around the axis of capital and a now global market of goods and labor); and 2) the development at more or less the same time of a new mental category to “codify relations between conquering and conquered populations”; and that category, which not only codified these asymmetrical relations but also (more importantly) naturalized them, is race.

In speaking about coloniality and race, Quijano argues that the most decisive move achieved by the production of ‘race’ is the flattening of cultural, linguistic, and ethnic differences. In the colonial Spanish-American context, Yoruba, Igbo, and Ashanti, for example, are flattened into the category negros; Purépecha, Tzeltal, and Zapotec become simply indios; and Spanish, Portuguese, and French become blancos. There are of course famously complex forms of miscegenation that take place throughout the colonial period (as seen, for example, in Latin American casta paintings); however, these all stem from and refer back to the racial economy that Quijano describes. What stems from (and underlies) this flattening of difference into generalized racial categories, according to Quijano, is the formation of racialized forms of labor distribution: put simply (even reductively), blancos receive salaries, indios are relegated to serfdom, and negros are stuck with slavery. As Quijano has it, the racialization of the world economy during the sixteenth century likewise places whites – and western Europe – at the very center of a network of distribution and exchange that has continually enriched that region (although the distribution of this wealth has been anything but equal) for five centuries.

In historical terms, Quijano argues that it is with the colonization of the Americas, first by the Spanish and Portuguese, and then by the English, French, and Dutch, that the two elements – capitalism and race – become for the first time fully conjugated. And it is precisely this enduring conjugation (which has only intensified over the past five hundred years) – coupled with a strong commitment on the part of local elites to build nation-states along European lines – that conditions and ultimately limits political possibilities in Latin America (whether revolutionary in nature or otherwise). As Quijano puts it: “we have never seen in any Latin American country any separation or time sequence between slavery, feudalism, and capitalism. From the beginning, all of them have been articulated within the same single power structure” (230). According to Quijano, it is precisely this co-articulation, sorted out according to race, that has both given shape to and dramatically limited the democratic, revolutionary, and national possibilities of Latin American countries.

Something that comes to mind here is Dipesh Chakrabarty’s point, in a chapter dealing with Marx’s theories of capital in the context of a newly “provincialized Europe.” Chakrabarty writes that “life [ . . . ] is a ‘standing fight’ against the process of abstraction that is constitutive of the category ‘labor.’ It is as if the process of abstraction and ongoing appropriation of the worker’s body in the capitalist mode of production perpetually threatens to effect a dismemberment of the unity of the ‘living body’” (Provincializing Europe 60-61). Turning back to Quijano’s framework, we might say that two fundamental aspects of the process by which ‘labor’ (whether slave, serf, or salaried in form) has been constituted in Latin America are: 1) the racialization (and thus totalization) of worker’s ‘living’ bodies; and 2) a flattening out of time so that all of these (now racialized and thus naturalized) forms of labor co-exist. Put in another way, late medieval theories of geo-humoral medicine and the deleterious effects of a hot climate on the imaginatio of Africans, for example, begin to be framed as essential (and thus timeless and boundless) characteristics of workers’ bodies and selves – a framework, to use one of Marx’s more famous examples, that binds and defines the piano player as much as the piano maker.

In summing up his argument on page 229, Quijano enters into explicitly mythological terrain, and it is here that I’d like to segue from my brief outline of his article to a few ideas more or less of my own. On page 229 he writes: “The trouble is [ . . . ] that in Latin America the Eurocentricist perspective, adopted as their own by the dominant groups, has led them to impose the European model of nation-building upon the power structures that were organized around colonial relations between ‘races’. Therefore we find ourselves today in a labyrinth where the dangerous Minotaur is almost always in sight, but there is no Ariadne to show us the way out.”

No Ariadne to show us the way out, and likewise no Theseus to kill the minotaur. But then it’s entirely possible that Quijano has got his allegorical components somewhat mixed up. Since Quijano is in effect arguing that the labyrinth was constructed to keep us (that is, post-colonial Latin Americans) trapped within, it seems to follow that we are not Theseus – temporarily held up on Crete as we work to found Athens and all that follows – but rather the minotaur, an anthropophagous mestizo born out of an orchestrated rape. With this reading, one might notice, I’m consciously blending conceits from both Brazilian and Mexican modernism, and reworking a little Borges’s treatment of the minotaur in his short story “La casa de Asterión” (in a sense, Quijano follows Borges almost to the letter).

For those who don’t know the mythological story of the minotaur, it goes more or less like this. King Minos of Crete rises to his throne by making a deal with Poseidon to sacrifice to the sea god a beautiful snow-white bull. Minos doesn’t honor the deal with Poseidon, and so as punishment Poseidon contrives for Minos’s wife, Pasiphaë, to fall madly and passionately in love with the white bull. Enter Daedelus (exiled from Athens), who designs a life-like wooden cow that is hollow on the inside. Once this cow is wheeled out to the pasture where the white bull is grazing, Pasiphaë climbs inside and allows the bull to impregnate her. Her child grows to be a monstrous and dangerous man-eater (usually represented as having the body of a man and the head and tail of a bull), and so Minos has him imprisoned in a labyrinth (also designed by Daedelus) very near his palace. In the end, Theseus (the mythological founder of Athens) kills the minotaur with the help of the latter’s half-sister Ariadne.

So who in this story is el hijo de la chingada? Who is the anthropophagous half-breed unable to live in either his mother’s or his father’s world? Who is imprisoned in a labyrinth close by the palace that is his birthright? Who in fact is the tragic hero of this story? And should readers side with Theseus, the founder of the polis upon which the European nation-state is self-consciously based, or should we side with the minotaur: trapped in a prison without doors or locks, his own filth (and the carcasses of his victims) piling up around him, only to be clubbed to death through the machinations of Athenians and his half-sister’s unthinkable (and erotically motivated) act of betrayal?

This story has a particular allegorical richness within the Latin American context. Even Dante Alighieri (of all people) lends a hand. In Inferno 12:11-15, he presents the minotaur (in the seventh circle of Hell, among the violent) as a kind of guardian of violence itself. When Virgil (that poet of Western empire) mentions Theseus and Ariadne to the Minotaur, the latter lunges in fury at the travelers “like a bull that has just received a mortal stab wound that it has not been able to avoid.” The wound of betrayal and violence exacted upon him in the name of “order and progress” or (if you prefer) “liberty and order” would seem to be a deep one. And most decisively, the Minotaur seems not to know what to do about it. Up to his elbows in human blood he sits, and as Dante imagines it, “he gnaws away at himself” in violent fury. So he is not only anthropophagous, but in his Dantean form, he is also autophagous – the enraged and utterly confused – but by no means passive or messianic (pace Borges) – victim of his father’s greed and his mother’s amour fou. My point here, because there isn’t space to unpack the allegory fully, is that whether before his murder or after, the minotaur is a compelling figure not to be avoided, but to be faced as one might look in a mirror. And the notion of the mirror takes us back to Quijano’s text, which ends on this note: “What civil and political rights we have been able to advance and to conquer, in some necessary redistribution of power and decolonization of our society and state, is now being rolled back under the control of the same officers of the coloniality of power. It is now high time to learn how to become free from our distorting mirror” (231). Perhaps the problem is not the mirror, but rather our stubborn desire to see the image of Theseus (with Athens in the background) in it.

I’d like now to move away just a bit more from Quijano’s text and leave hanging my own admittedly idiosyncratic reading of the figure of the minotaur (a more forceful figure than the feckless Caliban, in any case). In particular, I’d like to look a bit at an underdeveloped aspect of Quijano’s formulation, namely the somewhat idealistic and historically reductive image that Quijano presents of the European nation-state. He writes that independence (without liberation, to paraphrase Frantz Fanon) in a Latin American context brought only the rearticulation of colonial frameworks of power. I think this is probably incontestable; but Spain and Portugal (the European countries I know best) likewise have struggled for years to shake off the old order. Toni Morrison (1993) has spoken of the “lethal discourses of exclusion blocking access to cognition for both the excluder and the excluded,” and extending this idea, I would say that coloniality serves as a block to cognition as much for the European nations that developed it as for the non-European nations on the other end of the whip. In this sense, coloniality functions much like the medieval conception of sin, defined as a “turning away” from God that is, in the end, its own punishment. The dream of empire (like reason), we might say, produces monsters of all sorts and on all sides.

As I’ve already said, for Quijano the coloniality of power involves the conjugation of the idea of race with global capitalism. Colonial Latin American literature is filled with articulations of this framework, as well as with (albeit more rarely) attempts to renegotiate the terms of domination. In the Iberian Peninsula as well, literature labors to theorize the new colonial order, and with only mixed success; and by “new colonial order” I’m referring to internal structures of colonial rule, such as those that obtained in the former Kingdom of Granada and the Crown of Aragon after the rise of Castilian dominance at the end of the fifteenth century (and to the present), as well as to the overseas empires in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. In the 1509 “India Play” by Gil Vicente, for example, a Portuguese wife who has been waiting very unfaithfully (although her name is Costança) for her husband to return from India greets him at the door with an exclamation of horror at his new blackness – the result of his melancholic passage through the “torrid zone.” She cries: “How black you are! I don’t love you! I don’t want you!” In the end, however, she is placated (and their marriage saved) by a walk to the docks, where the ships of Tristão de Cunha are loaded to the gunwhales with Indian spices. Later farces, such as Miguel de Cervantes’s “Retablo de las maravillas” likewise show the distorted image (and brutal results) that ideas of essentialized identity (within a capitalist framework) can produce. There are also much earlier examples of proto-racial structures taking form in contexts of imperial expansion into Africa and Asia, with Portugal’s official chronicler at the middle of the fifteenth century, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, producing a textual corpus that provides vivid accounts of this process. In historical terms, Portugal became a major player in the African slave trade as early as 1440, and writers such as Zurara were quick to begin elaborating complex mythologies (and taxonomies) of blackness built upon (yet already quite different from) a pre-existing base of ready-to-hand Muslim Otherness.

On the idea of race (specifically blackness) and Muslim Otherness, we might also look to Francisco Núñez Muley’s well-known letter to the Royal Audiencia of Granada, written in 1567. Núñez Muley was a well-to-do and elderly Granadan Morisco – or convert to Christianity from Islam – who wrote to the Castilian Crown to complain about new laws designed essentially to eradicate the culture of Granada and impose Castilian cultural and religious mores on the people there. The use of spoken or written Arabic would be forbidden, as would the use of veils and public baths. Traditional Granadan music, the zambra – which was even used in Granada to celebrate Catholic mass – would likewise be done away with. Núñez Muley complains about all of this and more, but most telling for our reading of Quijano is what he has to say on the matter of Granadan Moriscos owning black slaves:

With respect to what the decree says about the blacks that have served some of the native Moriscos of this kingdom, what harm has been done to the Holy Catholic faith by the fact that some of the natives of this kingdom have black men or women as slaves? Have these slaves become Muslims because of the influence of their owners, and do they, or their masters, have any knowledge of the Muslim faith? Don’t these blacks deserve their wretched state? Must everyone be seen as equals? Let them bring the water pitcher on their backs, or carry burdens, or handle the plow, for the natives do not serve each other for periods longer than a few days at a time, and not on a continual basis within their homes. What sin has provoked the order that the natives of this kingdom should not be allowed to have black slaves, given the former’s aforementioned needs?

So that this point isn’t missed, Núñez Muley is writing a letter to royal authorities protesting the discriminatory policies of the Crown with regard to the large (and native European) minority group to which he belongs. Within this letter, and in relation to the black slaves owned by members of his minority community, he asks the rhetorical question, “Must everyone be seen as equals?” His desired answer, one must assume, is no.

It is perhaps an obvious point that the Europe against which Quijano warns his readers, like the West of Edward Said, is a much simpler, more homogeneous idea than what one finds upon closer inspection. The reality is that European states – at least from my vantage point in the Iberian Peninsula – are on no surer political or existential footing than their former colonies. And it’s entirely possible that Quijano is right in saying that it is the conjugation of race and global capitalism in the sixteenth century that continues to make this problem so seemingly unsolvable. As far as historical reductions go, however, it seems to be a productive one – one that opens up rather than closes off conversation. To return to the realm of myth (and my own purposeful misreading of Quijano), it certainly could be in the sixteenth-century, and with the establishment of European colonies in a “New World,” that our Theseus-complex, which serves to paper over the bullheaded image we see when we look in the mirror, first took on mature form.

But then it occurs to me that the real labyrinth from which we must escape, we might argue, is history – and historical temporality – itself. And to imagine ourselves continually as so many Theseuses (or, I guess Theseoi) is to reproduce continually that labyrinth (and our entrapment within it) and to preclude the elaboration of other possible, non-ontological, modes of being-in-the-world. To alter somewhat Borges’s telling of the mythological story, we are not confronted with a deluded and chiliastic minotaur that is willingly clubbed to death by Theseus (as a heroic and civilizing Other), but perhaps more accurately (as Dante presents it), with a brutal suicide ritual, performed over and over throughout historical time. And, in the end, because of historical time and the imperialism of the same that it represents.

As faculty members, there is something truly amazing that occurs each time we attend a commencement ceremony. This probably sounds like a lie, or at least a flattering exaggeration. You might think that we’ve come to dread these events, since we attend them every year, or that we sleepwalk through them like Patrick Stewart at a Star Trek convention. To be perfectly honest, it is hard to be happy when you’re putting on a rented wool dress in the middle of June. The chorus to Amy Winehouse’s Rehab can come to mind, joined by some of the more gory pyramid scenes from Apocalypto.

All of this agida aside, when we arrive here and see our students and their families, there inevitably occurs in each of us a dramatic alteration, a change of feeling or mood that dissolves ironic distance and brings us into the ceremony like water into wood. This is because while the idea of a ninety-minute commencement ceremony may seem a bit empty, in reality it is always felt as a powerfully transformative event. Through it we say good-bye to a life that was while welcoming – and even entailing – a life that is to be, expressed by different participants in this ceremony either as a presence, an absence, or a messy combination of the two. Today, for example, we as faculty begin to feel the full weight of absence as students who have become very dear to us now leave Stanford and go on with their lives. In a perhaps bittersweet sense, this ceremony fulfills an unspoken desire on the part of the faculty (and maybe the students, too) to bring some kind of formal closure to an intellectual partnership that has changed all of us in lasting ways. For us, as faculty, there will be other students, but not these students – and so at commencement we feel very acutely both the weight of loss and the regenerative power of leave-taking. We say good-bye to our students, we show our respect to them and their families, we hold back some tears, and then we get out of their way.

Since my goals for this talk were to speak briefly about loss and transformation, insert a gratuitous yet somehow inoffensive reference to Amy Winehouse, and at some point use the phrase “unspoken desire,” I could probably stop now. But then I still haven’t said anything about Israel and Palestine, or what my dad did at my college graduation nineteen years ago. And as we work through this rite of passage, this ceremony, it also seems worthwhile to reflect just a bit on what it means to earn a degree in the humanities.

This is of course an enormous topic, so I’ll lean a bit on a short poem by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. The poem is entitled, “The Place Where We Are Right.”

From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.

The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.

But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.

This poem is commonly read as kind of a roadmap for peace. The whisper “in the place where the ruined house once stood” – an image of tentative hope – conjurs up equally powerful, though very distinct images for Israelis and Palestinians alike. But whether our ruined house is the Second Temple or a bulldozed home in the West Bank, the real muscle of the poem resides in what is hidden somewhat by its English translation. The Hebrew word translated as “right” in the poem’s title is not nachon (as in correct), but rather tsadekím, the plural of the adjective tsadeek, which means “righteous” or “just” in a theological sense. What Amichai is saying, then, is that from the place where we are righteous, holy, pious, just, in accordance with God’s plan, deeply, transcendently right, nothing living can ever grow, and no human voice, however muted, can be heard. Perhaps most importantly in this election year (and on Father’s Day), from the place where we are righteous, nothing can be rebuilt or healed. For Amichai, this righteousness implies fossilized rigidity and barrenness, a kind of rigor mortis of the living.

Forced to define what it means to work in the humanities, I would say that we are essentially diggers of the earth, that we are trained to turn the soil over and over again with both sincere love and focused, disciplined doubt. In this work we have no fixed vocabulary, no sacred text, no orthodoxy, and no claim whatsoever to righteousness. Our hands caked in dry clay and salt, we spend our lives in a place where we are mostly guessing and wrong because it is here that we believe that human growth and redemption are possible. As the late Richard Rorty, America’s philosopher and a former professor of comparative literature at Stanford, has put it: “growth is indeed the only end that democratic higher education can serve and [ . . . ] the direction of [that] growth is unpredictable.” It is precisely because of this unpredictability – the very condition of democracy – that those who work in the humanities make no claims to righteousness, or even to being right. Like good farmers, we keep our hands at the plow. And occasionally, on days like today, we pause to listen for the sound of whispers.

This largely covers everything I wanted to say in the brief time that I have today, except for one thing. I said that I would mention what my father did for me at my college graduation nineteen years ago. It’s a simple thing, but it has remained with me for nearly two decades as sign of the love and pride that he has for his eldest and most incomprehensible son: using his own farmer’s hands, he put on a suit and tie. Thank you very much, happy father’s day, happy birthday to Sepp, and congratulations to all.

As Khatibi has it, by writing neither fully in French nor in Arabic, he is able to develop a linguistic, literary, and ultimately cultural space in which a specific definition of bilingualism can flourish and received notions of colonialism and alienation can be challenged and reworked. Ronnie Scharfman also points out, in a brief review of Khatibi’s La langue de l’autre, that Khatibi consistently singles out “the role of syntax in providing rhythms where the m(o)ther tongue can be detected and explored” (192). The intersection of rhythm, language, and ethics is an important one. Khatibi himself refers to syntax as “my point of access, and my passageway into the time of each term; syntax: a unification in motion of the target language” (1005). For Khatibi, syntax “broadens the space of hospitality where the writer is received in [her or] his text like a guest, in the reader’s shadow” (1005).

The issue of syntax (and readers) is of course important for analyses of Aljamiado literature (whether in Arabic or Latin script), and Khatibi’s arguments regarding the rhythms of syntax as a kind of locus (to conflate metaphors of time and space) for play and negotiation are highly suggestive. What is, we may ask, the result of all those passages of Aljamiado that follow neither the rhythms of Arabic nor Castilian syntax in any full way? There is of course the practical issue of translation (i.e., many of these texts were translated directly from Arabic), but this adds to rather than takes away from the urgency and richness of Khatibi’s main point: he theorizes writing itself, at least within the strange (and estranging) “territory” (maybe “turf” is a better term) of francophonie, as an act of “simultaneous translation,” a “grafting procedure” (1005).

The thorny question for any Khatibian account of Aljamiado literature, of course, is what constitutes the “language of the other”? Is it Arabic? Castilian? Aragonese? Certainly arguments can be made that for Aragonese scribes and readers in the sixteenth century, each of these languages (as forms of monolingual expression in Derrida’s sense) would constitute a form of colonization — equally alienating langues de l’autre that “scramble” (to use Fieni’s term) the mother tongue. A mother tongue that was not either of these languages or both of them, but rather the result of a broadening of the space of hospitality afforded, at least in part, by the temporal/spatial interstices of syntax.

Following Khatibi’s ideas (and he’s not alone in this project, which seems to be a current that runs through much Maghrebi writing in what we might provisionally term the post-Fanon and post-Memmi era), we might argue that Aljamiado texts — in most extant cases a thorough mixing-together of Castilian, Arabic, and Aragonese morpho-syntactic, lexical, and even pragmatic features — represent a similar intent (and the queston of intentionality is very problematic, in large part because we know so little about the local theories of selfhood that would support any emic notion of “intention”) on the part of Morisco reading communities (which would include alphabetically illiterate members of the listening public) to create a “poetics of hospitality” within a setting that was decidedly inhospitable. This is subtly different from notions such as “decentering” and “subversion” that are common in postcolonial criticism, and I’m likewise not arguing that we should be engaging in close readings of Aljamiado texts for hints of some poststructuralist (très avant la lettre) approach to language.

We should also keep in mind that any sense of “inhospitability” and “otherness” for Morisco speech/textual communities would stem not just from Castilian but also (and perhaps more crucially) from Arabic, where rigid rules of grammar and highly developed ideologies of language and revelation have made Classical Arabic (or even MSA) the “mother tongue” of no one. The image that emerges here is not of Moriscos striving to preserve their Arabic (or some semblance of it) by any means necessary and against all odds, but rather of communities working to develop a “poetics of hospitality” (and practical mediation) somewhere between Castilian and Arabic (and various dialects, Romance and otherwise).

What emerges if we work to adapt Khatibi’s insights to examine the manuscript literature of Moriscos? I admit that I don’t really know at this point — my goal in posting these ideas is to start a conversation or to mark my place (at this time) more than to offer any sort of definitive argument on the subject. For now, I’m just holding Khatibi’s insights up to the literature that most concerns me and seeing what emerges. For the moment, at least, just more metaphors. And more evidence that focusing on rhythm and ethics matters.

Ayer hemos recibido la excelente noticia de que hay una editorial mexicana interesada en publicar una edición española del estudio etnográfico que Mónica ahora está elaborando sobre su tierra natal, la encantada (y encantadora) isla de Monicaña. Ahora nos toca traducir al español más de 300 páginas escritas en moniqués, y Mónica también quiere añadir algunos capítulos de posible interés para sus lectores hispanohablantes. A Mónica le hace muchísima ilusión entrar de esta manera en el mercado cultural mexicano, y sueña ya con publicar una serie de estudios sobre los mundos perdidos que yacen debajo del mar. Monicaña, según lo que ella nos ha dicho, no es una isla solitaria, sino parte de un arquipiélago que se extiende desde Portugal hasta California. Presentamos a continuación algunos párrafos de la versión española de su estudio.

Cuestiones de educación

En Monicaña se puede agarrar cosas gratis y también se puede comprar zapatos muy lindos de invierno y chaquetas de arco iris y hasta puedes comprar la ropa más abrigadísima para tus bebés. También, si tienes perros, hay muchos juguetes para los animales, incluso los perros. Si pasa algo malo, es muy fácil arreglarlo en la tienda porque hay una chita que es un hada y puede hacer todo lo que tú le pidas incluso ayudarte a encontrar tu libro favorito; pero si no le dices “por favor” no te va a hacer nada. Pero si se lo dices, y muy muy amablemente, sí te va a ayudar.

Cuento folclórico

Una vez, una calabasa estaba en un pumpkin patch y cuando se cerró el pumpkin patch, vino un unicornio volando por ahí porque estaba nevando. Se fue a mi castillo. La calabasa se hizo su propia cara y se fue a caminar. De repente, se encontró con una estampilla mágica. Y le dijo, “¿Me puedes pintar con tu pintura?” Y la estampilla le dijo que sí y le cubrió todo el cuerpo con rojo, rosado y amarillo. Y ahora la calabasa se veía ridícula. Pero no le importó. Y luego se encontró con un espantapájaros y el espantapájaros le preguntó: “¿Puedo ponerte todo mi foraje? Así te ves guapísimo.” La calabasa dijo, “¡CLARO!” (gritando). Y ahora se veía aun más ridícula. Se fue a una cueva, y se llenó de polvo. Ahora sus amigos humanos se reían de ella, pero era muy chistosa. Y hasta la calabasa se rio de sí misma. Luego vino Cepillín y le cantó su canción y la calabasa se rio aun más. La canción que cantó Cepillín era “Cocowawa,” y va así: “Cuando era chiquita su mamá se fue / y ella muy solita se quedó / y ella llorando en su rincón / cocowawa, cocowawa, cocococowa / y esta canción no pudo aprender.” Y la calabasa se rio, haciendo de una gallina. El sol se puso y ahora se veía a un pez. Y el unicornio dijo, “Ay ay ay, Calabasa chistosa – te tienes que limpiar.” Y la calabasa dijo, “Huuh! Está bien.” (Gritó). Y se lavó la cara. ¡Tan tan! Colorín colorado, este cuento se ha acabado.

El baile moniqués

Las personas de Monicaña bailan de una manera especial. Se ponen una cami rosada y una falda dorada y empiezan a bailar así: pon tu pie izquierdo pa’ trás, y el derecho al lado del izquierdo, y empieza a hacer un shake con tu cadera y empieza a saltar a la misma vez. Y al fin, pon tu mano derecha arriba y empieza a saltar por todas partes. ¡Muy alto! Y luego dices, “Colorín colorado, este baile se ha acabado.”

This year, the course will be especially interesting, as I’ll be inviting colleagues from different departments to come to class to lead discussion on texts that they know very well. For example, our discussion of “Merchant of Venice” will be led by Prof. Roland Greene (English/Comp Lit), and our discussion of Pierre de Ronsard and Louise Labé will be led by Prof. Cécile Alduy (French). My new colleague in Comp Lit, Prof. Dominic Parviz Brookshaw will even join us to talk about erotic poetry in Safavid Iran. Very cool. Here’s a list of the readings and special guests throughout the quarter. More guests may show up, but what you see here has been confirmed:

F January 13 – Plato: “Symposium”. This is the basis for most discussions of love in the Renaissance (and beyond), yet few literature students have read it. So we’ll read it and then trace its influence through some of the other things we read.

F January 20 – Petrarca: Canzoniere (Selections); and “The Ascent of Mt. Ventoux”. Can’t have a course on the Renaissance without something from the guy who invented the idea of the “Dark Ages.” And then there are all those poets (in so many languages) who tried to write like Petrarch. . .

F January 27 – Las Casas: A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies; Montaigne: “On Cannibals” (Guest discussant: Prof. Tamar Herzog). Two classics on European contact with Native Americans, and Prof. Herzog (History) knows this material (and much more) inside and out.

F February 3 – More: Utopia (Guest discussant: Prof. Roland Greene). It’s amazing how few students outside of English departments have read this book. Now they get to do so, and with an eminent specialist in Renaissance English literature to guide them.

F February 10 – Machiavelli: The Prince (Guest discussant: Prof. Carolyn Springer). A text that non-Italianists tend to cite a lot but never read all the way through. Prof. Springer is a specialist in cinquecento Italian literature, so we’re about to get an informed look at a hugely important text. Take that, Khan Academy (just kidding — I actually adore the Khan Academy, but I do wonder how it could ever work for the study of language, literature, and culture).

F February 17 – Ronsard/Labé: Selected Lyric. (Guest discussant: Prof. Cécile Alduy). Honk if you know much about Pierre de Ronsard and Louise Labé, or about French Renaissance poetry, for that matter. Prof. Alduy will lead us through the work of both poets, and then we’ll know vastly more than most of our friends and colleagues.

F February 24 – Camões/Soror Violante do Céu: Selected Lyric. Camões is most famous for his epic poetry (Os Lusíadas), but his real talent was lyric poetry. And Soror Violante do Céu was an absolute prodigy; she was perhaps Portugal’s greatest baroque poet.

F March 2 – Shakespeare: “The Merchant of Venice” (Guest discussant: Prof. Roland Greene). Shakespeare! And this particular play was hand picked by Professor Greene for this seminar. This should be a terrific discussion.

F March 9 – Safavid Poetry: Selected Lyric (Guest discussant: Prof. Dominic Parviz Brookshaw). The sixteenth century isn’t exactly the golden age of Persian poetry (this occurs much earlier), but Safavid poetry has its genuine delights, among which are the erotic poems that Prof. Brookshaw will be discussing with us. This is the Renaissance through a wholly different lens.

F March 16 – Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz/Santa Rosa de Lima: Selected Lyric/Texts. Prof. Herzog suggested that we look at Santa Rosa de Lima alongside Sor Juana, and that’s what we’re going to do. Sor Juana merits a course all by herself, and we’ll be looking at a selection of her poetry as well as some other short texts. A great way to end the course on a high note.

So that’s the course in a nutshell (except for the final paper). We’ll read some world-class literature and talk this literature over with experts. We’ll also learn an awful lot about what “literature” might have meant in different settings during the early modern period. Last but not least, we’ll hopefully get a sense of how it is that we might more productively approach it (literature, that is) in the future.