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Prologue: Parallels and Meridians
- Fordham University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
p r o l o g u e : p a r a l l e l s a n d m e r i d i a n s Since its publication in January 1996, Southern Thought has elicited a wide range of responses, from unconditional approval to suspicious opposition, from requests to translate its categories into concrete political terms to expressions of ironic skepticism. Many of its arguments have also been simplified and those who have analyzed the thesis of the book did not always examine it in all of its dimensions.1 It is possible that this tendency toward simplification resulted from the fact that the author, focused on the theses he was proposing, did not seek to render explicit (because he considered them self-evident) the threads that connected the theoretical underpinning of this book to the ones that precede it and to the international debate. That assumption was probably mistaken and herein lies the main aim of this prologue: to reconstruct the intersection of arguments formulated in Southern Thought so as to allow the discussion to continue on more precise foundations. The one who writes has not arrived to the South and to Southern thought from a ‘‘we’’ or a sudden passion for identity, but from the category of the ‘‘other,’’ from a meditation on the shadowy side of every identity . In others words, the strongest motivation for reclaiming the value of the South came from a rebellion against its representations by dominant culture and the inadvertent forms of racism found in many of its variants, even those that are beyond suspicion of being so and politically correct. Faced with the haughty obtuseness of these representations, and an arrogant universalism that is not accustomed to being questioned, choosing the South was an attempt to take the side of the other even before taking the side of the self, a theoretical reaction to a characterization presented in such a negative and caricatured manner that it could not be true. Indeed, such a conclusion was coherent with the entire path that preceded Southern Thought; a path that began in the early eighties with a critique of the philosophies of history and with an interest in dissonances and residues , in that dust that dominant reason hides under the carpet to remove the possibility of other ways of life and experience. For the one who writes, that decade was, more than a period of mourning, a feverish season of xxxiii xxxiv Prologue reading and thinking away from beaten paths and disciplinary enclosures, a tour of the world highly recommended for those who are intellectually complacent, those who never abandon their conceptual cells. Already at the end of the seventies I enjoyed Philip Dick’s The Man in the High Castle even before having seen and loved Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. As is well known, that book, which has become more than just a science fiction classic , suggested that the outcome of the Second World War had been reversed. It seemed to me that Dick was teaching us, as few have done, to discover the ambiguous and complex relationship that we have with ‘‘truth.’’ The result of this was, against the grain of prevailing bigotry, a specific curiosity for ‘‘revisionism’’ and an attention to the effects that power relations exert over the structure of the dominant cultural field. The winners, after all, can always count on obliging intellectuals, and thus know full well how to impose their reasons, how to remove from the official version of history the ambiguity that traverses its depths and that only on rare occasion rises to the surface. However, this sensibility was different from the one that is normally attached to the adjective ‘‘revisionist ,’’ because here the losers are many more than those that are dear to our home-grown polemics: They are all those who cannot hire lawyers, those we do not know and do not speak about, they are the so-called ‘‘Muslims’’ described unforgettably by Primo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved.2 Today, many have made a career out of revisionism; but what rendered it respectable and engaging years ago was precisely that it went against the tide. The ‘‘revisionism’’ that asserts itself today is the opposite of what it was in the past: It is the adaptation of historiography and cultural politics to the new winners, to the relations of powers that have emerged after the fall of the USSR. It is precisely for these...