Writing published by Frederick Luis Aldama http://www.humanitiesretooled.org Fri, 16 Sep 2005 02:16:28 +0000 FeedCreator 1.4 http://www.humanitiesretooled.org/index.php?sm=hrt_articles.php&modCMS_cidd=231 Literary theory has never suffered from a deficiency of submission to philosophy. As things stand today we may add: alas. For philosophy as a rational and argumentative enquiry has played in the past and keeps playing today--from Plato and Aristotle to Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Bertrand Russell, and Daniel Dennett, to name just a few from a huge list--the essential role of creating sciences. Logic, mathematics, rhetoric, physics, astronomy, chemistry, geography, history, sociology, law, biology, psychology, and many other disciplines were once inseparable from philosophy. Logical arguments and analysis, observation, experiments and other intersubjective tests developed under the capacious mantle of philosophy, gave a strong foundation to the pursuit of specialized knowledge while extending to more and more phenomena, and eventually gave rise to our contemporary sciences and technologies. Frederick Luis Aldama Fri, 16 Sep 2005 01:11:45 +0000 http://www.humanitiesretooled.org/index.php?sm=hrt_articles.php&modCMS_cidd=216 As a Chicano-teen growing up in a fast-postcolonializing London far from my homelands (Mexico and California), I found myself irresistibly drawn to literature. With the guidance of a gracious librarian, an Afro-Caribbean Brit.-identifying English teacher, and my father's letters from across the channel, I indulged in the inexhaustible splendors, merriment, and knowledge served up by the likes of García Márquez, Borges, Frisch, Kureishi, Desai, Goytisolo, and Rushdie, among many others. Frederick Luis Aldama Tue, 18 Jan 2005 17:54:59 +0000 http://www.humanitiesretooled.org/index.php?sm=hrt_articles.php&modCMS_cidd=213 In this lecture that Foucault delivered at Dartmouth in 1980 (four years before his death of AIDS Related Complications in June 26th, 1984) we can see clearly the foundation upon which he basis the theoretical approach to most if not all his work dating back to his best-selling Les Mots et Les Choses (1966). Frederick Luis Aldama Sat, 8 Jan 2005 08:51:21 +0000 http://www.humanitiesretooled.org/index.php?sm=hrt_articles.php&modCMS_cidd=210 The essence of the philosophical dispute amongst scholars of the University of Stellenbosch (US) merits judicious consideration. The scholarly debacle around Bram Fisher - the late head of the South African Communist Party, has set loose a range of questions of immense proportion, which, it is trusted, should provoke the awakening of South Africa’s dormant class of critical thinkers. Clive Kronenberg Sun, 28 Nov 2004 02:39:57 +0000 http://www.humanitiesretooled.org/index.php?sm=hrt_articles.php&modCMS_cidd=209 Like poor old King Lear, England’s Royal Shakespeare Company is “buffeted, homeless and feeling un-loved”, Alan Riding declares in The New York Times (B1). With its London stage gone, its Stratford attendance at an all-time low, and its fast slipping into massive debt, the Company, its new artistic director Michael Boyd has declared, needs to make “Shakespeare relevant to today’s audiences” (B5). Frederick Luis Aldama Sun, 28 Nov 2004 02:37:00 +0000 http://www.humanitiesretooled.org/index.php?sm=hrt_articles.php&modCMS_cidd=96 If you have contact with tourists or have family in the States, life can be pretty good here", Juan Carlos explained to me on the cab ride from Havana La Vieja to José Marti International. Clearly, the beneficiary of a dollar supplemented income--bedecked in gold chains and with a Nokia plugged into the dash--Juan Carlos didn't mind too much Cuba's two-tier economic system. Frederick Luis Aldama Fri, 12 Mar 2004 08:22:26 +0000 http://www.humanitiesretooled.org/index.php?sm=hrt_articles.php&modCMS_cidd=97 Music festivals. There's nothing like 'em for getting the blood pumping and feeling that surge of collective energy. Ever since I can remember as a young teen packed up against other bodies and with monolithic proportioned amps mainlining beats through my veins, I've always thought of musicfests as somehow supra-human, mystically transcendent, and radically transgressive. I've come to see them in a different light, of late. Frederick Luis Aldama Wed, 10 Mar 2004 02:28:45 +0000 http://www.humanitiesretooled.org/index.php?sm=hrt_articles.php&modCMS_cidd=90 Some of the underlying lessons arising from the Aldama-inspired debate on Castro, starkly correlate to issues imbedded in contemporary democratic South Africa . In this instance I employ Habermas's historic volume, The Structure of the Public Sphere towards highlighting some of the risks that have found their way into modern South African society Clive Kronenberg Sat, 6 Mar 2004 00:07:46 +0000 http://www.humanitiesretooled.org/index.php?sm=hrt_articles.php&modCMS_cidd=69 In Brown, literary agent provocateur, Richard Rodriguez, renders visible his experiences as queer and Chicano in a contemporary postcolonial America(s). Frederick Luis Aldama Fri, 5 Mar 2004 05:58:57 +0000 http://www.humanitiesretooled.org/index.php?sm=hrt_articles.php&modCMS_cidd=70 It maybe said that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. Frederick Luis Aldama Fri, 5 Mar 2004 05:58:28 +0000 http://www.humanitiesretooled.org/index.php?sm=hrt_articles.php&modCMS_cidd=71 There is much tectonic shifting taking place in the humanities today. Goods that once sold well seem to have a shorter shelf life; they're either being discarded all together or they're being salvaged for scraps in the remainder bin. Frederick Luis Aldama Fri, 5 Mar 2004 05:58:00 +0000 http://www.humanitiesretooled.org/index.php?sm=hrt_articles.php&modCMS_cidd=72 "Arundhati Roy" echoes loud and mightily through the halls of world literary pantheons. In October 1997, her novel The God of Small Things picked up Britain's prestigious Booker Prize, billowing up a storm of fame and infamy. Frederick Luis Aldama Fri, 5 Mar 2004 05:57:30 +0000 http://www.humanitiesretooled.org/index.php?sm=hrt_articles.php&modCMS_cidd=67 The future of music for the rest of Mexico was born here today", claims a young club-goer in an improvised dance club situated in a fifth floor artist's loft overlooking Tijuana's hyper-busy Revolution Avenue. Frederick Luis Aldama Fri, 5 Mar 2004 05:55:16 +0000 http://www.humanitiesretooled.org/index.php?sm=hrt_articles.php&modCMS_cidd=68 We can safely say that postcolonial and poststructural theory continues to have a huge impact on Latin American and U.S. multicultural studies today. The question is, does the cross-pollination of theory help understand our contemporary multicultural reality of the Americas more deeply? Frederick Luis Aldama Fri, 5 Mar 2004 05:52:57 +0000 http://www.humanitiesretooled.org/index.php?sm=hrt_articles.php&modCMS_cidd=66 I want to reassess at length some assumptions about the basic property of our existence: the constitution of self. Here, I do not aim to have the last word on defining the self and its constitutive ethnic, sexual, and gendered elements, nor do I seek to replay those au courant abstract and obscurantist metaphysical formulations. Frederick Luis Aldama Fri, 5 Mar 2004 05:49:35 +0000