Gerard Aching | Cornell University (original) (raw)
Papers by Gerard Aching
Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art, 2021
In response to demands from French Communist Party officials for surrealists to define the nature... more In response to demands from French Communist Party officials for surrealists to define the nature of their relationship to communism, André Breton published Legitimate Defense (1926), a pamphlet in which he described surrealism’s ideological and political stance and identified some of the principal debates and challenges that the group faced in Europe. What lie at stake in the surrealists’ effort to encompass metaphysical and dialectical methods are both the legitimacy of their claims on the term revolutionary and their insistence on a revolution of the mind. In this context, the author examines Breton’s concept of the “marvelous” that affirms the feasibility of equilibrium between the work of the mind and political engagement. He compares Breton’s stance to that of a group of Martiniquan students in Paris, who in 1932 published a legitimate defense of their own. Unlike Breton’s pamphlet, the Martiniquan publication wholeheartedly embraced the communist Third International organizat...
The extension of political sovereignty from the Iberian Peninsula to the Americas constitutes one... more The extension of political sovereignty from the Iberian Peninsula to the Americas constitutes one of the first and most consequential transatlantic relations in the modern era. This extension of sovereignty was not only spatial but temporal: it sought to create a paradigm that would allow territorial occupation to be considered the moral precondition for an ideology of paternalist tutelage that required rationalization after the appropriation of the new American territories. In this essay, Aching examines a line of disingenuous moral argumentation that made use of humanist thought, scholasticism, and just war theory to position and restrict an ideologically conceived notion of the “Indian” to a temporality of permanently arrested development, or what Aching refers to as the creation of the modern, colonial subject.
This study proposes a critique of the current definitions of the concept of world literature. Mos... more 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 Edouard 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.
Anthurium A Caribbean Studies Journal, 2013
delicacy.) Two natural phenomena took me by surprise when we entered a local restaurant-fishing s... more delicacy.) Two natural phenomena took me by surprise when we entered a local restaurant-fishing supply store. The first was an open wooden box, about three by five, that was filled with chirping grasshoppers, so large that I took them to be locusts of biblical proportions. To this day, I still have not been able to figure out why these insects, which I believe were being sold for bait, could not fly out of the open box. The second phenomenon was more consequential. It was there and then that I stumbled across the word, lagniappe, written on the wall of this establishment. I don't recall the exact reference. Was it the name of the restaurant-supply store? I doubt it. The only thing that I could think was, how did this word find its way there? I had often heard it as a child in Trinidad until I was eighteen, when I left to study in the United States. This "discovery" complicated cultural geographies that I had long held, in a good way, I think, because the experience made me thirsty for history. Now, I could have begun this account of my intellectual formation as follows. I came from a generation of students who straddled pre-independence and the first decade of Trinidad and Tobago's political independence (1962), when we prepared for and sat Cambridge University's Ordinary and Advanced Level secondary school exams while crossing the threshold into our postcolonial history. Was I supposed to study something "constructive" for nation building? Spanish, French, history, and geography were consistently my strengths throughout my secondary school education, even though, in my estimation, I was a poor reader. By that I mean, I was trained to read literature for designated facts about places, dates, and characters and was examined on my ability to remember them. The whole living, spectacular world of irony, satire, and every ingenious, rhetorical device you could imagine that belonged to popular culture and, in particular, to calypso and carnival did not enter our curriculum. How could there have been so wide a gap between schoolyard and classroom? This segregation of resources for learning about oneself is familiar to anyone who has lived through the transition to postcolonial history anywhere. The unevenly distributed acquisition to knowledge persists, but on a much larger scale than I suspected as a young adult, including with my complicity. It is undoubtedly a privilege and a luxury to undertake research on the Caribbean in the nation with the most resources for research in the world, but, to recall Jamaica Kincaid's critical language in A Small Place, there is a whole world in my becoming a Caribbeanist in the United States that I cannot get into right now.
Choice Reviews Online, 2016
1616 Anuario De Literatura Comparada, Oct 21, 2013
RESUMEN: Este trabajo propone una crítica de las definiciones corrientes del concepto de literatu... more RESUMEN: Este trabajo propone una crítica de las definiciones corrientes del concepto de literatura mundial. La mayoría de tales definiciones la presentan como un circuito de lectores indiferenciados entre sí, que depende de la circulación de la literatura más allá de su lugar de origen. Según estas definiciones, la literatura mundial constituye una industria que se limita a participar en la transformación de la diferencia en una mercancía. Citando la defensa que Édouard Glissant hace de «el derecho a la opacidad» y la experiencia de la opacidad de Derek Walcott como lector y traductor de textos de Patrick Chamoiseau, yo demuestro cómo la opacidad, concepto que extrae Walcott aproximándose a las obras literarias escritas en una lengua «estándar», afirma lo local y lo particular de tal manera que eluden su propia traducción y su absorción en la circulación y en los circuitos de la literatura mundial actualmente.
Revista Iberoamericana, 2003
PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2012
Inphenomenology of spirit(1807), G. W. F. Hegel employs the figures of the “lord” and “bondsman” ... more Inphenomenology 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 ...
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2012
... Casal dedicated the poem "A un h?roe" to Maceo, for which he received a che... more ... Casal dedicated the poem "A un h?roe" to Maceo, for which he received a cherished note of gratitude (Armas 132). Maceo's leadership ... No se ve?a un negro abogado, porque dec?an que los negros nada m?s que serv?an para el monte. No se ve?a un maestro negro. ...
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2013
In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon intimates to the reader that including his psychiatric... more In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon intimates to the reader that including his psychiatric notes in the book might be considered “out of place or untimely” for the cause of political decolonization that he advocates in it. This essay examines the theoretical implications of Fanon’s caveat and argues that he postpones unraveling the contradictions between approaching colonial subjects from both a political theory of decolonization and psychiatry for the sake of the war of independence.
Social Identities, 2010
Closely examining the dance form of winin', ubiquitous in Trinidad and Tobago's carnival,... more Closely examining the dance form of winin', ubiquitous in Trinidad and Tobago's carnival, this essay argues for the inextricability of carnival time and contemporary social life. In contrast to the notion that carnival constitutes interruptions or postponements of projects of modernity and, especially, that it invokes a temporality and social space where ideologies may be blissfully suspended, this study illustrates how this dance form articulates the status of and quest for personal freedoms in public spaces and contests a specific gender ideology. The essay describes and interrogates how winin' mediates the relationship between competing pleasures – those of the state and of the carnival reveller respectively – and illustrates the extent to which the dance form's exaggerated and hypervisible practices constitute a demand for social engagement.
Revista Iberoamericana, 2003
Tenemos que vivir como pueblo, pueblo. Tenemos que alzarnos. Alzarnos. Pero, ¿cómo se alza uno cu... more Tenemos que vivir como pueblo, pueblo. Tenemos que alzarnos. Alzarnos. Pero, ¿cómo se alza uno cuando sus hermanos hacen las paces por un puñado de dólares, cuando sus hermanas venden sus almas, y las madres y los padres a sus hijos?¿Cómo puedes alzarte si hay una renta que pagar y unos niños que llevar a la escuela, y cuando ves al hambre desfilar por tu patio y acampar en tu casa? Aldrick pronunció unas palabras de las cuales estaría muy orgulloso mucho después: "No lo sé". Earl Lovelace, The Dragon Can't Dance 2
Research in African Literatures, 2004
ABSTRACT
Hispania, 1999
... By contrast, Valle-Castillo claims, the Sandinistas popularized the poet by trans-forming him... more ... By contrast, Valle-Castillo claims, the Sandinistas popularized the poet by trans-forming him into "carne viva" [living flesh], a characterization that ... The conflict between these classes informed new albeit shifting cul-tural boundaries, or what Adam Sharman calls "una cultura de ...
Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art, 2021
In response to demands from French Communist Party officials for surrealists to define the nature... more In response to demands from French Communist Party officials for surrealists to define the nature of their relationship to communism, André Breton published Legitimate Defense (1926), a pamphlet in which he described surrealism’s ideological and political stance and identified some of the principal debates and challenges that the group faced in Europe. What lie at stake in the surrealists’ effort to encompass metaphysical and dialectical methods are both the legitimacy of their claims on the term revolutionary and their insistence on a revolution of the mind. In this context, the author examines Breton’s concept of the “marvelous” that affirms the feasibility of equilibrium between the work of the mind and political engagement. He compares Breton’s stance to that of a group of Martiniquan students in Paris, who in 1932 published a legitimate defense of their own. Unlike Breton’s pamphlet, the Martiniquan publication wholeheartedly embraced the communist Third International organizat...
The extension of political sovereignty from the Iberian Peninsula to the Americas constitutes one... more The extension of political sovereignty from the Iberian Peninsula to the Americas constitutes one of the first and most consequential transatlantic relations in the modern era. This extension of sovereignty was not only spatial but temporal: it sought to create a paradigm that would allow territorial occupation to be considered the moral precondition for an ideology of paternalist tutelage that required rationalization after the appropriation of the new American territories. In this essay, Aching examines a line of disingenuous moral argumentation that made use of humanist thought, scholasticism, and just war theory to position and restrict an ideologically conceived notion of the “Indian” to a temporality of permanently arrested development, or what Aching refers to as the creation of the modern, colonial subject.
This study proposes a critique of the current definitions of the concept of world literature. Mos... more 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 Edouard 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.
Anthurium A Caribbean Studies Journal, 2013
delicacy.) Two natural phenomena took me by surprise when we entered a local restaurant-fishing s... more delicacy.) Two natural phenomena took me by surprise when we entered a local restaurant-fishing supply store. The first was an open wooden box, about three by five, that was filled with chirping grasshoppers, so large that I took them to be locusts of biblical proportions. To this day, I still have not been able to figure out why these insects, which I believe were being sold for bait, could not fly out of the open box. The second phenomenon was more consequential. It was there and then that I stumbled across the word, lagniappe, written on the wall of this establishment. I don't recall the exact reference. Was it the name of the restaurant-supply store? I doubt it. The only thing that I could think was, how did this word find its way there? I had often heard it as a child in Trinidad until I was eighteen, when I left to study in the United States. This "discovery" complicated cultural geographies that I had long held, in a good way, I think, because the experience made me thirsty for history. Now, I could have begun this account of my intellectual formation as follows. I came from a generation of students who straddled pre-independence and the first decade of Trinidad and Tobago's political independence (1962), when we prepared for and sat Cambridge University's Ordinary and Advanced Level secondary school exams while crossing the threshold into our postcolonial history. Was I supposed to study something "constructive" for nation building? Spanish, French, history, and geography were consistently my strengths throughout my secondary school education, even though, in my estimation, I was a poor reader. By that I mean, I was trained to read literature for designated facts about places, dates, and characters and was examined on my ability to remember them. The whole living, spectacular world of irony, satire, and every ingenious, rhetorical device you could imagine that belonged to popular culture and, in particular, to calypso and carnival did not enter our curriculum. How could there have been so wide a gap between schoolyard and classroom? This segregation of resources for learning about oneself is familiar to anyone who has lived through the transition to postcolonial history anywhere. The unevenly distributed acquisition to knowledge persists, but on a much larger scale than I suspected as a young adult, including with my complicity. It is undoubtedly a privilege and a luxury to undertake research on the Caribbean in the nation with the most resources for research in the world, but, to recall Jamaica Kincaid's critical language in A Small Place, there is a whole world in my becoming a Caribbeanist in the United States that I cannot get into right now.
Choice Reviews Online, 2016
1616 Anuario De Literatura Comparada, Oct 21, 2013
RESUMEN: Este trabajo propone una crítica de las definiciones corrientes del concepto de literatu... more RESUMEN: Este trabajo propone una crítica de las definiciones corrientes del concepto de literatura mundial. La mayoría de tales definiciones la presentan como un circuito de lectores indiferenciados entre sí, que depende de la circulación de la literatura más allá de su lugar de origen. Según estas definiciones, la literatura mundial constituye una industria que se limita a participar en la transformación de la diferencia en una mercancía. Citando la defensa que Édouard Glissant hace de «el derecho a la opacidad» y la experiencia de la opacidad de Derek Walcott como lector y traductor de textos de Patrick Chamoiseau, yo demuestro cómo la opacidad, concepto que extrae Walcott aproximándose a las obras literarias escritas en una lengua «estándar», afirma lo local y lo particular de tal manera que eluden su propia traducción y su absorción en la circulación y en los circuitos de la literatura mundial actualmente.
Revista Iberoamericana, 2003
PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2012
Inphenomenology of spirit(1807), G. W. F. Hegel employs the figures of the “lord” and “bondsman” ... more Inphenomenology 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 ...
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2012
... Casal dedicated the poem "A un h?roe" to Maceo, for which he received a che... more ... Casal dedicated the poem "A un h?roe" to Maceo, for which he received a cherished note of gratitude (Armas 132). Maceo's leadership ... No se ve?a un negro abogado, porque dec?an que los negros nada m?s que serv?an para el monte. No se ve?a un maestro negro. ...
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2013
In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon intimates to the reader that including his psychiatric... more In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon intimates to the reader that including his psychiatric notes in the book might be considered “out of place or untimely” for the cause of political decolonization that he advocates in it. This essay examines the theoretical implications of Fanon’s caveat and argues that he postpones unraveling the contradictions between approaching colonial subjects from both a political theory of decolonization and psychiatry for the sake of the war of independence.
Social Identities, 2010
Closely examining the dance form of winin', ubiquitous in Trinidad and Tobago's carnival,... more Closely examining the dance form of winin', ubiquitous in Trinidad and Tobago's carnival, this essay argues for the inextricability of carnival time and contemporary social life. In contrast to the notion that carnival constitutes interruptions or postponements of projects of modernity and, especially, that it invokes a temporality and social space where ideologies may be blissfully suspended, this study illustrates how this dance form articulates the status of and quest for personal freedoms in public spaces and contests a specific gender ideology. The essay describes and interrogates how winin' mediates the relationship between competing pleasures – those of the state and of the carnival reveller respectively – and illustrates the extent to which the dance form's exaggerated and hypervisible practices constitute a demand for social engagement.
Revista Iberoamericana, 2003
Tenemos que vivir como pueblo, pueblo. Tenemos que alzarnos. Alzarnos. Pero, ¿cómo se alza uno cu... more Tenemos que vivir como pueblo, pueblo. Tenemos que alzarnos. Alzarnos. Pero, ¿cómo se alza uno cuando sus hermanos hacen las paces por un puñado de dólares, cuando sus hermanas venden sus almas, y las madres y los padres a sus hijos?¿Cómo puedes alzarte si hay una renta que pagar y unos niños que llevar a la escuela, y cuando ves al hambre desfilar por tu patio y acampar en tu casa? Aldrick pronunció unas palabras de las cuales estaría muy orgulloso mucho después: "No lo sé". Earl Lovelace, The Dragon Can't Dance 2
Research in African Literatures, 2004
ABSTRACT
Hispania, 1999
... By contrast, Valle-Castillo claims, the Sandinistas popularized the poet by trans-forming him... more ... By contrast, Valle-Castillo claims, the Sandinistas popularized the poet by trans-forming him into "carne viva" [living flesh], a characterization that ... The conflict between these classes informed new albeit shifting cul-tural boundaries, or what Adam Sharman calls "una cultura de ...