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doi: 10.1215/00104124-11158643
The question of divisive affect and national cohesion has been placed at the center of debates in the United States over curricula dealing with race, but the problem is not a new one. Several European thinkers of the late-nineteenth through early-twentieth century theorized affect in the context of social cohesion, including Richard Wagner, Ernest Renan, and Georg Simmel. W. E. B. Du Bois, the author argues, lays bare the power dynamics of these intersecting views in his short story, “The Coming of John” in The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois recognizes and critiques a specific strategy that he finds most clearly crystallized in Wagner, who advocates building and transmitting national allegiance by suppressing historical knowledge, fostering affective attachment to the nation, and excluding dissenters. Philologist Ernest Renan and sociologist Georg Simmel elaborate on the temporal dimensions of these mechanisms. In conversation with these theories, Du Bois illustrates in “The Coming of John” a stickiness of time—reiteration rather than reconciliation—arising from the reciprocally reinforcing functions of loyalty and ignorance of the past. While Du Bois here also employs methods for re-engaging historical time, the difficulty of moving beyond past social structures reemerges in his later works.
doi: 10.1215/00104124-11158739
What kinds of collectivities might come into being in literature in an age of diverse global readership? This question, pressing for twenty-first-century reevaluations of comparative literature, is not new to Latin American literature and its criticism. This article takes Manuel Puig’s 1980 novel Maldición eterna a quien lea estas páginas as an example of a text that engages in debates of its moment, including reader-response theory and Latin American testimonio, while also looking over their horizons to anticipate the ways the collective “we” of literary studies would be thrown into question in the decades to come. Though the novel, which was written during Puig’s exile in New York and anticipates a metropolitan readership, condemns its reader from the outset to read badly (incompetently, extractively, parasitically), it also suggests that there is ethical value in staying with the textual encounter in which meaning, power, and relation are negotiated. Miscommunication, distortion, and projection may be inevitable when continuity in culture, language, and life experience cannot be assumed between writer, characters, and readers, but Puig’s novel affirms that the creative collaboration (however conflictive) that takes place in the act of reading is what gives rise to new ways of saying “we.”
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