Search

This article analyzes the construction and circulation of historical memories of the Coro slave rebellion in Venezuela between 1795 and 2014. We show how historical interpreters have inscribed divergent representations of this rebellion in documents, landscapes, historiographies, monuments, and music. In a political climate defined by ethnoracial and political tensions, colonial elites saw in the rebellion the republican ideology and racial violence of the Haitian Revolution. Fearing the persistence of social divisions and political resentment, nineteenth-century republican leaders all but effaced the rebellion from the nation's historical memory. This episode was finally recovered by historians at the beginning of the twentieth century, and since the 1950s teachers, guerrilla members, and social activists have linked the rebellion to political discourses of ethnoracial struggle, cultural syncretism, bodily suffering, and social exclusion. Recently, communal organizations in the region have begun to connect it to contemporary anti-imperialist and socialist projects. We argue that historical memories have mobilized political identities at different times and imagined regional genealogies of struggle against imperialism and political oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay will discuss contending language ideologies in early twentieth-century efforts at translating Warao into Spanish. It will analyze the linguistic and semiotic collision between the Warao and the emerging Venezuelan nation-state. Its main focus will be on the Catholic missionaries' production of dictionaries, grammars, and other forms of linguistic descriptions, and the Warao's own interpretation of the language encounter. At the beginning of the twentieth century, missionaries regarded Warao as incompatible with modernity and with the political developments of that time. It was considered too underdeveloped and illogical to be the language of Venezuelan citizens. Hence the missionaries wanted to give the Warao the tools for interpreting modernity, and paramount among these tools was Spanish. At the same time, the Warao interpreted the encounter with the nation-state as a mistranslation. This lack of communication with the new nation-state found expression in Warao narratives and as a common discursive topic. From a Warao standpoint, the encounter with missionaries and modernity was full of confusion and misunderstandings. This essay will argue that an increasing awareness of subordination among the Warao paralleled the naturalization of semiotic mis-understandings at the moment of encounter with the state. The analysis of the linguistic ideologies that this situation produced will prove useful in illustrating how the Warao internalized their subordinate position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]