"Disastrous Looking": Response to Saldívar

I would like to open by confessing to some surprise at the pleasure I derived from reading José Saldívar's piece and writing this response: I would not have expected to enjoy commenting on an essay that treated the ideological work performed by dominant historiographies of what in my country, Spain, we still call el desastre, the Spanish-American wars of 1898. Blows to narcissist self-understanding tend to have long lives indeed, and a wound to a nation's image-ideal may rankle especially for those subjects farthest from it.

My remarks bear restrictedly on the determining opposition at work in Saldívar's essay between a "metropolitan" or "straightforward" critical gaze and the "subalternist" or "interested" gaze that wryly unmasks it. They bear more generally on the type of economic work that this opposition performs in subaltern studies; they treat most broadly the "distortion" that this economic work works on the commendable and urgent project announced in Saldívar's pages: the project of "looking awry" at the discipline's "looking" so as to discern, from the traces of the "interested framework" that distorts the gaze subalternists look at, the "clearer and distinctive features" of the object 1898 and of the object 2000.

Let's say that the terminological shift seen in critical writing of the last decade from the restrictive use of the qualifiers "Western" or "colonial," characteristic of first-wave postcolonial studies, to the terms "metropolitan" and "subaltern" works strategically in three ways. First, the (more or less) new terms make much clearer that the geographies at issue are complexly symbolic as well as spatial, the "metropolis" being both this or that particular location and the index--the meter--for evaluating the nature and extension of social organization--the polities--elsewhere. (I am thinking of course of the concurrence between the history of colonialism and the late-Enlightenment standardization of surveying techniques and indices, like the Delambre-Méchain metre or the platinum Kilogram of the Archives, held in Paris.) In the second place, the minimal conceptual couple of the "metropolitan" and the "subaltern" works by reparticularizing the location of colonial enfranchisement. A "metropolitan" view (in the first, locative sense) being considerably easier to define, presumably, than a "Western" line of sight, the opposition (or is it a distinction?) between what the modifier "metropolitan" represents and what is represented by the term "subaltern" seems promisingly free of the old humanistic constraints of Other-based discourses.

The effect of this reparticularization of the dominant or unmarked term is to move us sharply toward the local analysis of how global colonial economies and administrative regimes depend on particular determinations. We can then, for example, understand Theodore Roosevelt's racialization (or deracialization) of the Spanish-American War to be overdetermined by the concurrent and compensatory racialization of immigration patterns from southern to northern cities in the US, and from rural Europe to cities in the northeastern US and to Chicago. We can similarly understand the publication of Miguel Barnet and Esteban Montejo's Biografía de un cimarrón in 1966 and its immediate reediting and translation across Latin America, Europe, and the US as events or processes whose value is determined in part by the particular pressures felt in the middle 1960s by the Cuban Revolution (the consolidation of party power under Fidel Castro becoming the Revolution's central political and cultural concern from 1965 until the so-called Padilla affair in 1968). In part, too, the form of production, value, and patterns of consumption of the "object" Biografía de un cimarrón are determined by the cultural and political value that "Cuba" had assumed by 1968 in various international imaginaries. An account of Cuba's 1898 war of liberation from Spain, Biografía de un cimarrón also serves to authorize the more recent story of Cuba's liberation from the Batista regime, to tell the story of Cuba's embattled resistance to US hegemony in Latin America, and by...