"Disastrous Looking": Response to Saldivar

Abstract

I would like to open by confessing to some surprise at the pleasure I derived from reading Jose Saldivar's piece and writing this response; I would not have expected to enjoy commenting on an essay that treated the ideological work performed by dominant historiographies of what in my country, Spain, we still call el desastre, the Spanish-American wars of 1898. Blows to narcissist self-understanding tend to have long lives indeed, and a wound to a nation's image-ideal may rankle especially for those subjects farthest from it. My remarks bear restrictedly on the determining opposition at work in Saldivar's essay between a metropolitan or straightforward critical gaze and the subalternist or gaze that wryly unmasks it. They bear more generally on the type of economic work that this opposition performs in studies; they treat most broadly the distortion that this economic work works on the commendable and urgent project announced in Saldivar's pages: the project of awry at the discipline's looking so as to discern, from the traces of the interested framework that distorts the gaze subalternists look at, the and distinctive features of the object 1898 and of the object 2000. Let's say that the terminological shift seen in critical writing of the last decade from the restrictive use of the qualifiers Western or colonial, characteristic of first-wave postcolonial studies, to the terms metropolitan and subaltern works strategically in three ways. First, the (more or less) new terms make much clearer that the geographies at issue are complexly symbolic as well as spatial, the metropolis being both this or that particular location and the index-the meter-for evaluating the nature and extension of social organization-the polities-elsewhere. (I am thinking of course of the concurrence between the history of colonialism and the late-Enlightenment standardization of surveying techniques and indices, like the Delambre-