Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
47
result(s) for
"Aching, Gerard"
Sort by:
Freedom from Liberation
By exploring the complexities of enslavement in the
autobiography of Cuban slave-poet Juan Francisco Manzano
(1797-1854), Gerard Aching complicates the universally recognized
assumption that a slave's foremost desire is to be freed from
bondage. As the only slave narrative in Spanish that has surfaced
to date, Manzano's autobiography details the daily grind of the
vast majority of slaves who sought relief from the burden of living
under slavery. Aching combines historical narrative and literary
criticism to take the reader beyond Manzano's text to examine the
motivations behind anticolonial and antislavery activism in
pre-revolution Cuba, when Cuba's Creole bourgeoisie sought their
own form of freedom from the colonial arm of Spain.
eBook
Masking and Power
Focusing on masking as a socially significant practice in Caribbean cultures, Gerard Aching’s analysis articulates masking, mimicry, and misrecognition as a means of describing and interrogating strategies of visibility and invisibility in Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Martinique, and beyond. Cultural Studies of the Americas Series, volume 8
eBook
The Slave's Work: Reading Slavery through Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic
In phenomenology of spirit (1807), G. W. F. Hegel employs the figures of the “lord” and “bondsman” to explain the struggle between an independent and a dependent self-consciousness in the aftermath of what he calls the “trial by death” or “life-and-death struggle.” Commonly cited today as the “master-slave dialectic,” this complex, foundational theory of the subject relies on metaphors that compel us to ask whether consciousness can be represented through language. Hegel's recourse to these metaphors has produced two broad tendencies in the understanding of and approach to “master” and “slave” in the philosopher's theory. Many current interpreters of the dialectic practice a phylogenetic reading, in which both figures are taken as historical subjects whose documented interpersonal relations provide empirical proof of slavery's practices. By contrast, most Continental philosophers perform an ontogenetic reading, in which they consider the relations between master and slave to be intrapersonal and regard these figures as metaphors that can be used to explain precise moments in the speculative processes of consciousness. Deciding to read the master-slave dialectic as either a struggle between two individuals or a struggle between two forms of consciousness within the subject has important theoretical and methodological consequences that I would like to describe and examine, especially as they pertain to the meanings of work in slavery. Whereas the slave's work has traditionally and accurately been understood as physical labor externally enforced by the master, less critical attention has been paid to reading the slave's work ontogenetically, as an internal struggle for the freedom of self-mastery. Such an ontogenetic reading provides valuable insights into ubiquitous but less frequently studied forms of resistance from within slavery.
Journal Article
The «Right to Opacity» and World Literature
This study proposes a critique of the current definitions of the concept of world literature. Most of these posit world literature as an undifferentiated circuit of readers that relies on the circulation of literature outside their sites of origin. According to these definitions, world literature constitutes an industry that simply partakes of the commodification of difference. Citing Édouard Glissant’s defense of the «right to opacity» and Derek Walcott’s experience of opacity as a reader and translator of Patrick Chamoiseau’s writing, I demonstrate how opacity, extracted from Walcott’s approach to a literary work written in a «standard» language, affirms the local and the particular in ways that elude translation and absorption into the circulation and circuits of world literature today.
Journal Article
THE «RIGHT TO OPACITY» AND WORLD LITERATURE/El «derecho a la opacidad» y la literatura mundial
According to these definitions, world literature constitutes an industry that simply partakes of the commodification of difference. According to most recent definitions, circulation -that is, the circulation of literary texts beyond their place of origin- constitutes the sine qua non of world literature. According to her, it is the competi- tion among writers that unifies the literary world system since «all writers attempt to enter the same race, and all of them struggle, albeit with unequal advantages, to attain the same goal: literary legitimacy» (Casanova 2004, 40). To read literature in and across the world requires a commitment to undertaking difficult decolonizing pro- cesses of self-education that resist the impulse to create universal subjects. [...]processes are undertaken, the concept of world literature will remain aloof to the very conditions that make it possible.
Journal Article
Freedom without Equality
In a letter concerning the Missouri Compromise that he wrote to the American politician John Holmes from Monticello on April 22, 1820, Thomas Jefferson famously described the dilemma of slavery in the United States in the following terms: “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”¹ Even though the country had won its independence from Britain forty-four years earlier, slavery loomed as an issue that threatened to tear the United States apart, had it not been for the stopgap measure
Book Chapter
Being Adequate to the Task
One of the most significant transformations in the study of British abolitionism began with the publication of Eric Williams’s seminal Capitalism and Slavery in 1944. The late historian and first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago argued against the widely held view, when he undertook research for his doctoral thesis at Oxford University, that philanthropic humanitarianism was the principal motivating factor in the movement to end the slave trade and emancipate slaves throughout the British Empire. Instead, he proposed that the rise of industrial capitalism and a transatlantic bourgeoisie that advocated free trade and wage labor and worked in tandem
Book Chapter
Liberalisms at Odds
In a letter that they wrote from New York on September 12, 1834, to the Creole patrician and liberal reformist Domingo del Monte and his cohorts, the Cuban exiles Félix Varela (del Monte’s former philosophy professor and a priest) and Tomás Gener (a wealthy Catalonian plantation owner from Matanzas) strongly advised their colleagues against translating and publishing Charles Comte’s Traité de legislation.¹ Comte, a respected law professor and permanent secretary of L’Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in Paris, published his treatise in 1826 on the natural and moral laws that determine the conditions and potential for the advancement of
Book Chapter