Resumo

GOLDGEL CARBALLO, Víctor. Reivindicación del paréntesis. Prismas [online]. 2023, vol.27, n.2, pp.279-288.  Epub 06-Dez-2023. ISSN 1852-0499.

In defense of the parenthesis

Imagined Communities, by Benedict Anderson, became a classic as it was criticized for “putting into brackets” categories such as gender and race; for minimizing, marginalizing, or invisibilizing the internal differences characteristic of any nation. When we pay attention to the constant use of parentheses in the book, however, Anderson’s writing reveals a second and very opposed meaning of the action of putting into brackets: the sudden emergence of a voice and a narrative level that remind readers that what they had been reading was not the whole story; that something that had been left out is actually present. How may parentheses help one think the relationship between what is minimized and what suddenly emerges? How to reconcile the general arguments of Imagined Communities with the historical particularities that contradict them? Analyzing the cases of Ambrosio Echemendía, an enslaved Cuban poet of the mid-19th century, and of a wetnurse who was offered for rent to the right of one of Echemendía’s poems in a Havana newspaper, this article suggests that the future of Imagined Communities (and, by extension, of other grand scholarly narratives) will depend in part on the possibility of considering that everything that the book minimized lies at the very core of its validity.

Palavras-chave : Parenthesis; Invisibilization; Slavery; Race; Cuba; Imagined Communities.

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