José Rabasa
Visiting Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures (University of California, Berkeley) (fall term only)
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Degrees: Ph.D. in History of Consciousness; University of California at Santa Cruz. Dissertation: Fantasy, Errancy, and Symbolism in New World Motifs: An Essay on Sixteenth-Century Spanish Historiography; M.A. cand. in Philosophy; Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; México, D.F., México. Thesis: Dios y hombre en Feuerbach,Unamuno y Sartre: una arqueología del ateísmo moderno; B.A. in Philosophy and Spanish; University of the Americas; Cholula, Puebla, México.
Interests: Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, Subaltern Studies, Historiography, Critical Theory.
Over the last few years I have been working on three main projects. I have written a series of essays that examine different aspects from folio 46r of Codex Telleriano-Remensis (ca. 1562). Codex Telleriano Remensis was painted by a native tlacuilo under the supervision of a Dominican Friars. This colonial codex contains four main sections that correspond to a) the ceremonies of the twenty months of the agricultural calendar; b) the tonalamatl (count of the days and destiny); c) a history of the origins of Mexico Tenochtitlan up to the Spanish invasion in 1519; d) an account of the colonial order up to 1562. Folio 46r corresponds to the colonial section of the text and offers a most vivid example of the invention of native pictorial vocabularies for depicting colonial institutions, material objects, ideologies, and authorities to just mention some items.
The second consists of series of essays on the Zapatista insurrection in the Mexican State of Chiapas. In writing on the Zapatistas I have brought their discourses into conversation with subaltern studies (from Gramsci to the South Asian and Latin American subaltern projects of the late twentieth century), Jacques Derrida, Antonio Negri, among other twentieth-century theoreticians.
Both of these projects are intimately connected in that I work on the assumption that what we say about the past cannot but be articulated from the present epistemological, ethical, ontological and aesthetic motivations that define the habitus of our times. In fact, writing on an indigenous colonial codex involves the interaction, often confrontation of at least two distinct habitus and backgrounds. On the other hand, writing on indigenous insurgencies at the turn of the twenty-first century must account for the past that that remains imbedded in their articulations of possible alternative worlds to those of late capital.
These insurrection have forced us to examine the categories that until very recently prevailed in transition to capital narratives of development. As such, indigenous insurgencies remind us that the oppressive nature of our modernist projects. Note, however, that these insurgencies articulate their life worlds in which the modern and non-modern coexist without incurring in contradiction. If it is as much an imperative to remain cognizant of the strength of the non-modern, as it is the realization that modernity and its colonial legacy are part of indigenous worlds and outlooks. It is as if one could not be but a modern and a colonial, which does not mean that one must necessarily turn the modern against the life forms that have prevailed since the Spanish invasion.
The third project examines alphabetical records of voice in the Historia Tolteca Chichimeca, Cantares mexicanos, Sahagún's Book 6 in Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, Tezozomoc's Chronica mexicayotl, Chimalpahin's Diario, and a Nahuatl spiritual exercise, among other texts where one can trace multiple voices ranging from stenographic-like recordings of speech-events to "literary" texts in which a Nahua “author” records internal voice. The objective of tracing echographies of voice in Nahuatl writing is to observe the incorporation of a European technology into a Mesoamerican space. As such, Mesoamerica retains its own background, that is, the absolute presuppositions from which and against which indigenous subjects have articulated their own forms of life.
Major Publications:
Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. French edition L'invention de l'Amerique. Trans. Claire Pergnier-Forestier, Paris: L'Harmattan, 2002.
Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest New Mexico and Florida. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000
"(In)comparable Worlds" (Work-in-progress due 5/07).
A series of chapter examine the intersection of pictography and alphabetical writing in folio 46r of Codex Telleriano-Remensis. The topics include apostasy as a historical category, the concept of “elsewheres,” and translation, the problem of the background in comparative studies, the colonial divide and the rise of modernity, the decolonization of medieval Mexico, and so on.
“Of Zapatismo and Subalternity” (Work-in-progress due 5/07).
This book collects a series of essays I have been publishing over the last ten years on subaltern Studies and the Zapatista insurrection in Chiapas, Mexico.
Edited Volumes:
Ed. with Javier Sanjinés and Robert Carr. Subaltern Studies in the Americas, a special issue of Dispositio/n 46,1994 (Published 1996).
Ed. with Masayuki Sato, Edoardo Tortorolo and Daniel Woolf. The Oxford History of Historical Writing, Volume III: 1400-1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press. In progress.
Ed. With Jesús Rodríguez Velasco, Examining Heretical Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, under submission.
Courses offered 2007-08:
For more information, go to the Harvard course catalogue.
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Last updated on September 18, 2007