Scholar's Journal
Dear readers,
Thank you for taking the time to open my online research journal. I spent this last summer doing a lot of library research at the Berkeley libraries and archives, and at the Centers for African American Studies in Santa Barbara and U.C.L.A. While my reading plan included the discourses of Literary Theory, Anthropology and Theology, I found myself compelled by specific area of inquiry: Subaltern Studies. Subaltern is a term coined by the late Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks to describe the ethnic and economic composition of oppressed classes in an industrial society. Formal and informal Subaltern Studies groups throughout the globe use Gramsci’s term to study several areas of the imperial/colonial process, for example, the problems embedded in Anglophone/colonialist historiography, the production of anti-colonialist epistemology by colonial modernities and subaltern insurrections.
The first formal Subaltern Studies group was the South Asian Subaltern Studies Collective in the 1980’s. Lead by historian and economist Ranjit Guha, the group sought to challenge Indian historical discourse because it was written from the colonialist perspective. Since the inception of the South Asian Subaltern Studies Collective and the publication of its Subaltern Studies: Writing on South Asian History and Society (1982) volumes, other study groups have followed its footsteps focusing on different geographies, histories as well as different components of colonization. I use Subaltern Studies’ methods of inquiry in my project as a theoretical backdrop from which to think about the relationship between coloniality and writing, and as a way to study the impact of Third World cosmologies in New World ethno-racial fiction.
Since my summer break I have changed the title of my Haas project to “Kongo Cosmographemes & Allegorizations: Conjuring, Lib(er)ation and the Coloniality of Power in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” This title brings together my readings in Subaltern Studies, Linguistics, Literary Theory, Anthropology and Theology. Working closely with my project mentor Professor Alfred Arteaga and my project advisor Professor Jose D. Saldivar, I have been exploring Toni Morrison’s Beloved as a narratological “contact zone.” The latter is a term I borrow from theorist Mary L. Pratt to think about Morrison’s text not as a “hybrid” artifact, but instead, a text that dramatizes the coloniality of power integral to the relationship between Western writing and West African systems of signification. By using the structurality of the Western concept of allegory and the West African conjuring trope nommo, I have begun to thematize what I have delineated as a “contact zone.” From this intersection, my project has sought to locate sites in Beloved where West African systems of signification are placed under erasure by the violence of enslavement and Western methods of signification. In addition, my project also accounts for Morrison’s recovery of subalterned knowledges. By studying her narrative organization as well as the metaphoricity of her text, I have been examining the presence of West African cosmology in her text as well as what it means ideologically to interpret her text from the West African tradition of conjuration. The notion of Beloved as a conjure text is one that the late Barbara Christian along with Charles W. Chestnutt’s The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales and Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition (ed. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers) inspired.
I still have plenty of research to do in areas such as anthropology, theology and the coloniality of writing. Just in case you are wondering, I have started to write and organize my project as well as my presentation. Well, that’s all for now. Thank you for visiting my little enclave here in the Haas Scholars website and I hope that you can attend my presentation at the Haas Scholars Spring Conference.
Yours,
Carlos
