The Emptying of Race and the Epistemic Caribbean in Úrsula and La maldición (1859)

Abstract

This article proposes a comparative reading of Úrsula (1859), by Maranhense writer Maria Firmina dos Reis, and La maldición (1859), by Colombian writer Manuel María Madiedo, as two aesthetic and epistemic reactions to the colonial project of the nineteenth-century Latin American nation. The shared publication year illustrates a symbolic rupture that makes it possible to articulate, from the margins of the canon, a discursive resistance to the civilization/barbarism dichotomy that structured the national utopias of the literate elites of the period. The analysis is organized around three textual operations: the emptying of racial concepts inherited from the colonial order, the restitution of subjectivity to silenced subjects through innovations in narrative focalization, and the resignification of territory as memory. It is argued that both works demonstrate that the categories of "race," "barbarism," and "civilization" are contingent constructions of power, incapable of sustaining the moral weight assigned to them by their makers. To describe the zone of enunciation from which these texts operate, the article develops the notion of the "epistemic Caribbean" as a way of inhabiting thought from the margins of the colonial project.