{"id":19,"date":"2023-02-13T17:42:01","date_gmt":"2023-02-14T00:42:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmst372brblog\/?p=19"},"modified":"2023-02-13T17:42:01","modified_gmt":"2023-02-14T00:42:01","slug":"alejo-carpentiers-the-kingdom-of-this-world-week-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmst372brblog\/2023\/02\/13\/alejo-carpentiers-the-kingdom-of-this-world-week-6\/","title":{"rendered":"Alejo Carpentier\u2019s The Kingdom of This World (Week 6)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Overall, I found that I enjoyed Alejo Carpentier\u2019s novel, <\/span>The Kingdom of This World<\/span><\/i>, the most out of any text we have read so far this term. Not necessarily for any definable reason, although my cynical side wants to say I liked it because it was short. Regardless, it was interesting to read about Latin American history from the perspective of a French colony instead of a Spanish one. I do not know enough about the history of Haiti to know how much involvement the Spanish and French portions of Haiti had with each other, but this novel is obviously situated amongst the French half of the island. This might just pertain to this particular novel, but the political and social differences were made much more apparent than in previous texts we have read for this course. Previously, colonial and political realities were more obscure and less clearly defined than in <\/span>The Kingdom of This World<\/span><\/i>. <\/span>The Underdogs<\/span><\/i> is a good example of this. While the text concerns a deeply political event, the Mexican Revolution, the exact motivations and goals behind the violence are very opaque. Most characters involved barely seem to know why exactly they are fighting or who they are fighting against. As I said, this might simply be a coincidence of the texts I have read, but I do find it interesting that Carpentier himself was not from Haiti. From what I can gather from my super thorough Wikipedia research, he was in Haiti for the Revolution, but he entered it as an outsider. Therefore, it is easier to understand how he could have approached writing about the Haitian Revolution from a more academic perspective.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As for the text itself, I was very interested in how it compared colonial appropriation of the land and the people with how Macandal fused with his environment. The way in which “the one-armed [is] everywhere” evokes a mindset more akin to a spiritual connection to the land (Carpentier 24). Once again, I do not know the history of Haiti well enough to know if there was a native population there when it became a colony and if there was, what became of it. Whether this population was incorporated into the slave population or not, I can’t help but wonder if Indigenous spiritual philosophies inspired this line of revolutionary thinking. While this early foray into the possibility of a more reciprocal relationship to the land, the later events of the novel lay bare the violent realities that accompany pleasant revolutionary ideals.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Question: How much does an author’s origin affect their ability to write about somewhere else?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Overall, I found that I enjoyed Alejo Carpentier\u2019s novel, The Kingdom of This World, the most out of any text we have read so far this term. Not necessarily for any definable reason, although my cynical side wants to say I liked it because it was short. Regardless, it was interesting to read about Latin […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63729,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[18,19],"class_list":["post-19","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-alejo-carpentier","tag-haitian-revolution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmst372brblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmst372brblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmst372brblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmst372brblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63729"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmst372brblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmst372brblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmst372brblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions\/22"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmst372brblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmst372brblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rmst372brblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}