Romina > Recent Status Updates

So far, the best study on German immigration to Chile I have ever read. The author’s core argument is that the German colonization scheme in Southern Chile was German-initiated during a time when colonizations societies were flourishing in Prussia. The Chilean government signed on to the plan once the 1848 German Revolution erupted taking advantage that many Germans would be displaced as a result.

"But neither should one blame utopians for plotting the parameters of the coming age and engaging in futuristic discourse. Their dreams were a major ingredient in the poetics of the revolution, lending it the needed sense of justness and dignity, the human dimension without which reality might be unbearable for all instead of only for the victims."

“To identify myself as a diasporic is another way of demonstrating the degree to which the Caribbean was still inside me and shaped my approach to the world.” (169)

"A past which is forgotten, or rendered inconsequential, will take its historic revenge." (140)

"I shifted from thinking of theory as the search for the certainty of all-embracing totalities (which is how a generation of us originally encountered Marxism), to the necessity of recognizing the power of contingency in all historical processes and explanations (which is how we went on to understand it). Or, in other words, of recognizing that the dynamics of displacement underwrite all social relations." (76) <3

So far, I am impressed with her analysis and ability to describe simply, yet precisely, the distinct organizational power structures of various empires.