Foundational Frustrations: Incest and Incompletion in Cirilo Villaverde’s \u3ci\u3eCecilia Valdés\u3c/i\u3e

In its canonical 1882 form, Cirilo Villaverde’s well-known novel Cecilia Valdés tells the story of the illicit relations between the creole aristocrat Leonardo Gamboa and the mulata Cecilia Valdés who, unbeknownst to them both, is his half-sister.1 The relationship ends in tragedy when Leonardo, after marrying the creole heiress Isabel Illincheta, is murdered by José Dionisio, an Afro-Cuban rival for Cecilia’s affections. Through the machinations of Leonardo’s mother, doña Rosa, Cecilia is imprisoned for the crime. Yet, while this story has been immortalized in multiple editions and adaptations, most notably Gonzalo Roig’s 1932 zarzuela and Humberto Solas’s 1982 film, in 1839—forty-three years before the definitive text—,Villaverde published two earlier and very different versions of Cecilia Valdés that, unfortunately, have not received the scholarly attention that they deserve.2 The first, penned in response to a friend who asked for a description of the Festival of Saint Rafael in the El Ángel neighborhood of Havana (Croguennec-Massol 1), appeared in two parts as a short story in the magazine La siempreviva (Luis 100) and was republished in 1910 by the Editorial Cuba Intelectual under the title “La primitiva Cecilia Valdés.” The second, a novella, was published, also by Cuba Intelectual, under the title Cecilia Valdés, o la Loma del Ángel. Tomo I and has not been reprinted since

Sarmiento\u27s Vida de Horacio Mann: Translation, Importation, and Entanglement

This article focuses on the broad sociopolitical implications of Sarmiento\u27s translations of Northern Hemispheric texts and ideas into the South American context in Las escuelas and the author\u27s correspondence with Mary Mann. Exploring the relationship between the two reformers—both of whom were interested in using education to prepare nonwhites for the duties of citizenship in a broadly defined South —in order to examine the entangled history of Argentina during the War of the Triple Alliance and the early Reconstruction-era United States, this article shows how Sarmiento puts his relationship with Mann to creative use in his effort to incorporate Argentina\u27s popular classes into the national project through public education. Ultimately, the relationship between the two writers points to how the interplay between transnational conversations and local histories gives rise to the entanglement of imperialism and neocolonialism in the Americas during the second half of the nineteenth century

Argentine Afterlives: Race, Hemispheric Comparison, and Translation in Benjamín de Garay’s Los sertones

This article considers Argentine Benjamín de Garay’s 1938 Spanish translation of Brazilian Euclides da Cunha’s 1902 Os Sertões as a transnational meditation on racialized processes of nation formation in South America. The translation paradoxically frames the linguistic and historical relationships between Brazil and Argentina in terms of both similarity and difference. While de Garay stresses the parallels between Brazil and Argentina in his translator’s prologue, he also includes a glossary of supposedly untranslatable Portuguese terms, suggesting incommensurability between the two national experiences. Tellingly, many of the glossary’s terms refer to racial categories. In this way, the de Garay text acts as a reflection on the divergent paths that Argentina and Brazil take in treating racial heterogeneity in their respective national narratives

La Patria es Nuestra Madre : Family Metaphor and Race in the La Guaira Conspiracy

This paper explores the intersection of race and the metaphor of the national family in the texts generated during the Conspiración de La Guaira, a failed 1797 republican independentista revolt in colonial Venezuela led by Mallorcan enlightened intellectual Juan Mariano Picornell. Turning away from traditional representations of the dynastic state in terms of paternity, the La Guaira conspirators figure the nation as a mother and creoles and Afro-Venezuelans as brother citizens. Yet, at the same time that it indicates a transition from dynastic to republican paradigms, the conspirators’ emphasis on revolutionary brotherhood serves to contain the radical notions of equality unleashed by the republican independence movement

Foundational Frustrations: Incest and Incompletion in Cirilo Villaverde\u27s Cecilia Valdés

This article explores the evolution of author Cirilo Villaverde’s racial republican thinking as it develops through the three Cecilia Valdés texts. Contending that—precisely because the incest trope is absent from the 1839 works—an examination of the two earlier versions of the story can shed light on the troubling place of consanguinity in the 1882 novel, I consider the three Cecilia texts in light of the genre that theorist Doris Sommer terms “foundational romances,” or, works in which marriage between members of opposing factions in the national body acts as an allegory for national consolidation. After situating Villaverde in the context of nineteenth-century Cuban creole reformer Domingo del Monte’s antislavery literary tertulia, this article explains how the three Cecilia texts break with the rules of the transAmerican foundational romance genre through a series of containment devices (most notably, the incest in the 1882 novel) that prevent the narrators from tying up their stories’ loose ends. I note that, in all three texts, the narratives’ inconclusive natures result in the protagonists’ inability to reproduce under circumstances propitious to the founding of the interracial nation—a political dream deferred whose fruitful realization seemed less and less likely as the nineteenth century progressed. With Villaverde’s seeming incapability to bring his interracial romances to a neat, nationally reproductive conclusion in mind, I will argue that the incest in the 1882 Cecilia text acts as an intervention into the hemispheric foundational romance genre, rejecting the mid-nineteenth century dream of national consolidation under the creole elite as blind to the racial realities of the New World

“La patria es nuestra madre”: family metaphor and race in the La Guaira conspiracy

This paper explores the intersection of race and the metaphor of the national family in the texts generated during the Conspiración de La Guaira, a failed 1797 republican independentista revolt in colonial Venezuela led by Mallorcan enlightened intellectual Juan Mariano Picornell. Turning away from traditional representations of the dynastic state in terms of paternity, the La Guaira conspirators figure the nation as a mother and creoles and Afro-Venezuelans as brother citizens. Yet, at the same time that it indicates a transition from dynastic to republican paradigms, the conspirators' emphasis on revolutionary brotherhood serves to contain the radical notions of equality unleashed by the republican independence movement

Local Deep Implicit Functions for 3D Shape

The goal of this project is to learn a 3D shape representation that enables accurate surface reconstruction, compact storage, efficient computation, consistency for similar shapes, generalization across diverse shape categories, and inference from depth camera observations. Towards this end, we introduce Local Deep Implicit Functions (LDIF), a 3D shape representation that decomposes space into a structured set of learned implicit functions. We provide networks that infer the space decomposition and local deep implicit functions from a 3D mesh or posed depth image. During experiments, we find that it provides 10.3 points higher surface reconstruction accuracy (F-Score) than the state-of-the-art (OccNet), while requiring fewer than 1 percent of the network parameters. Experiments on posed depth image completion and generalization to unseen classes show 15.8 and 17.8 point improvements over the state-of-the-art, while producing a structured 3D representation for each input with consistency across diverse shape collections.Comment: Camera ready version for CVPR 2020 Oral. Prior to review, this paper was referred to as DSIF, "Deep Structured Implicit Functions." 11 pages, 9 figures. Project video at https://youtu.be/3RAITzNWVJ

Nerflets: Local Radiance Fields for Efficient Structure-Aware 3D Scene Representation from 2D Supervision

We address efficient and structure-aware 3D scene representation from images. Nerflets are our key contribution -- a set of local neural radiance fields that together represent a scene. Each nerflet maintains its own spatial position, orientation, and extent, within which it contributes to panoptic, density, and radiance reconstructions. By leveraging only photometric and inferred panoptic image supervision, we can directly and jointly optimize the parameters of a set of nerflets so as to form a decomposed representation of the scene, where each object instance is represented by a group of nerflets. During experiments with indoor and outdoor environments, we find that nerflets: (1) fit and approximate the scene more efficiently than traditional global NeRFs, (2) allow the extraction of panoptic and photometric renderings from arbitrary views, and (3) enable tasks rare for NeRFs, such as 3D panoptic segmentation and interactive editing.Comment: accepted by CVPR 202

OpenScene: 3D Scene Understanding with Open Vocabularies

Traditional 3D scene understanding approaches rely on labeled 3D datasets to train a model for a single task with supervision. We propose OpenScene, an alternative approach where a model predicts dense features for 3D scene points that are co-embedded with text and image pixels in CLIP feature space. This zero-shot approach enables task-agnostic training and open-vocabulary queries. For example, to perform SOTA zero-shot 3D semantic segmentation it first infers CLIP features for every 3D point and later classifies them based on similarities to embeddings of arbitrary class labels. More interestingly, it enables a suite of open-vocabulary scene understanding applications that have never been done before. For example, it allows a user to enter an arbitrary text query and then see a heat map indicating which parts of a scene match. Our approach is effective at identifying objects, materials, affordances, activities, and room types in complex 3D scenes, all using a single model trained without any labeled 3D data.Comment: CVPR 2023. Project page: https://pengsongyou.github.io/openscen