Raúl Coronado
University of California, Berkeley
Raúl Coronado is an Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Berkeley where he teaches literary and intellectual history and the philosophy of history. He is the author of A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture (Harvard 2013), which received seven prizes including the MLA’s Best First Book Prize and the American Studies Association’s John Hope Franklin Prize for Best Book in American Studies. From 2014-16, he served as the inaugural president of the Latina/o Studies Association.
“Transformations: The Climates of History”
What is at stake in arguing that cultures change over time? What tools do we use to account for such change, and why? Most historicist literary scholarship attends to the distinctiveness of a period, but only some scholars take the phenomenon of change itself as their central question. They might track important shifts in the history of genre, literary form, aesthetics, authorship, or readership; examine changing ideologies, discourses, or hegemonic structures; trace genealogies of the emergence of modern cultural categories (race, sexuality, gender, the individual, the nation, and so on); or undermine the category of “literature” by emphasizing its historical contingency. All of these activities account for the ever-shifting historical “climates” such scholars believe shape culture. An alternative view has gained traction amid recent critiques of historical contextualization, periodization, and empirical historicism. This view has implicitly questioned “change over time” as a reliable theory for cultural criticism – as one perhaps tied to “homogeneous, empty time,” and therefore susceptible to teleological or developmental logic. Previous conversations at C19 have addressed this debate, and the place of historicism in our field – especially the dominance of ideology critique as the major strand within a certain kind of historicism that rose to prominence in the 1990s. Seeking to continue and extend that conversation, the contributors to this panel all offer reflections on their own engagement with historical narrative, specifically – a heuristic literary scholars seemed to have borrowed from historians, but which, of course, historians originally borrowed from literature. They consider this by offering case studies from current projects that reflect an interest in, and a reimagining of, historical thinking as practiced today.
“History as Presence”
Raúl Coronado, UC- Berkeley
Why does history matter? If, as Hayden White taught us so long ago, historical narrative is but a very finite selection of objects we call facts organized into a coherent narrative using the same rhetorical devices as fiction, then why does history matter? Reading through recent diatribes on the historicizing impulse, this paper makes the case for why history matters. It does so by arguing that humanistic historical projects should focus on the Heideggerian-Derridean concept of presence. To make this abstract argument more concrete, the paper will focus on how we should narrate early 19th century Latina/o literary and intellectual history.
