Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night

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n o t e s ฀ t o ฀ Pa g e s ฀ 0 0 0 – 0 0 0 ฀ • ฀ 2 5 5 notes Preface 1. In a poem titled “Historia de la noche,” which translates as “History of the night,” Jorge Luis Borges reminds readers that no one can contemplate the night without vertigo and that the night, both time-bound and transhistorical, would not exist “sin esos tenues instrumentos, los ojos” (Obra poética 1923–1977, 556). The night would not exist “without those fragile instruments, the eyes.” Introduction 1. Baca, Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet of the Barrio, 20 and 146. 2. I borrow the concept “aesthetico-political” from Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Rancière. He defines both art and politics as “a recomposition of the landscape of the visible, a recomposition of the . . . relationship between doing, making, being, seeing, and saying” (The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, 45). He writes, “Politics and art, like forms of knowledge, construct ‘fictions,’ that is to say material rearrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is said, between what is done and what can be done” (39). 3. García, A Handbook to Luck, 94. 4. I borrow the phrase “Other America” from Venezuelan public intellectual Arturo Uslar Pietri’s essay translated from Spanish into English as “The Other America.” 5. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 870. 6. See scholarship by Rodólfo Acuña, José David and Ramón Saldívar, Norma Alarcón, Héctor Calderón, and José Limón, among others. 7. See Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by John ฀ 2 5 6 ฀ • ฀ n o t e s ฀ t o ฀ Pa g e s ฀ 0 0 0 – 0 0 0 Cumming. Also, for a brief but highly informative discussion of various intellectual traditions informing notions of magical realism and lo real maravilloso, see Saldívar’s section “Some Concepts and Definitions of Magic Realism” in the section “Magical Narratives” of The Dialectics of Our America, 90–96. 8. Consult, in particular, Oboler, “‘Hispanics? That’s What They Call Us,’” in Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives, 16, and Caminero-Santangelo, “Introduction: Who Are We?” in On Latinidad, 1–35. 9. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 3–4; hereafter cited in parentheses in the text. 10. Within Chicana/o studies, to name just a few works, I would point to Ramón Saldívar’s Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (1990), José David Saldívar’s Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (1997), Sonia Saldívar-Hull’s Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature (2000), María Herrera-Sobek’s edited collection of essays Reconstructing a Chicano/a Literary Heritage: Hispanic Colonial Literature of the Southwest (1993), Alvina E. Quintana’s Home Girls: Chicana Literary Voices (1996), and Arturo J. Aldama and Naomi H. Quiñonez’s edited collection of essays Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century (2002). Within continental Puerto Rican studies, I would cite as examples Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez’s José, Can You See? Latinos On and Off Broadway (1999), Lisa Sánchez-González’s Boricua Literature: A Literary History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora (2001), Carmen Socorro Rivera’s Kissing the Mango Tree: Puerto Rican Women Rewriting American Literature (2002), and Eva C. Vásquez’s Pregones Theatre: A Theatre for Social Change in the South Bronx (2003). Within Cuban American studies, I would underscore sources such as Gustavo Pérez-Firmat’s Life on the Hyphen: The CubanAmerican Way (1994), José Quiroga’s Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America (2000) though his book also covers non-Cuban Latina/o writers, Ricardo L. Ortíz’s Cultural Erotics in Cuban America (2007), and Jorge J. E. Gracia , Lynette M. F. Bosch, and Isabel Alvarez Borland’s edited collection Identity, Memory, and Diaspora: Voices of Cuban-American Artists, Writers, and Philosophers (2008). 11. Muñoz, “Feeling Brown,” 67–79. Ironically, this essay calls into serious question the cultural and political efficacy of the term “Latino,” but I also see a glimpse of a negative dialectics in which the “term’s inability to index, with any regularity, the central tropes that lead to our understanding of group identities in the United States” opens up subversive possibilities later explored in studies such as Antonio Viego’s Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies. 12. Henry, Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy, 1...