When the World Trade Center collapsed, something like social solidarity radiated from its ashes. From New York, Washington, DC and Pennsylvania, a sense of common grief and shared bewilderment spread outward, engulfing the entire nation. The intensity of the anguish and the solidarity were perhaps strongest in New York City. Still, they were palpable throughout the nation - in small towns and large, in the countryside and urban centers. The attack struck three buildings in two cities, yet it was experienced as an assault on all. Just when we, US intellectuals, were most tempted to believe that we live in a nation of disparate individuals or disconnected groups, we were reminded, by terrible means, that we do indeed possess something like social solidarity. Evidently, it was there all along. We just did not have the eyes or occasion to see it.

Within weeks of September 11, the shared grief, outrage, and sense of unity also admitted diverse political commentary, national self-critique, and assorted views on why we were targeted and how we should respond. Does the rise of varied voices mark the eclipse of a short-lived solidarity? What difference might it make if we were to recognize solidarity in times of peace and not only in crisis or war? What role does and can solidarity play among us - citizens of liberal democracies?

In this chapter, I consider the nature and place of solidarity in the work of Émile Durkheim, and what lessons that work may hold for pluralistic, democratic societies at the outset of the twenty-first century. In particular, I explore Durkheim's notion of solidarity in his work on moral individualism, democracy, pluralism, moral education, economic justice, and globalization. In the concluding section, I ask what role “otherness” plays in Durkheim's thought, by comparing his work to that of Giles Gunn.

Dom Casmurro (1899), perhaps Brazil’s most celebrated novel, has acquired in the century since its publication what must be the longest critical bibliography devoted to any single work of Brazilian fiction. Part of its attraction no doubt lies in the enigma concerning possible adultery and betrayal that many critics have found in its pages. In the distinct stages the interpretation of the novel has gone through, betrayal has been the key issue of debate. Readings can be seen to organize themselves around the different answers to the questions of exactly who betrays whom, why, and to what end.

The third of the five major novels that Machado de Assis published between 1881 and 1908, Dom Casmurro is a retrospective first-person memoir - fictional, of course - told by an unreliable narrator. His perspective colors all elements of the narrative, subordinating them to his viewpoint. We have only Bento’s stubborn opinion of events and characters, which, however, his very text suggests may be different from what he makes them out to be. The “reality” the novel represents is radically subjectivized, nuanced, and complex, filtered by a problematic consciousness that ends up revealing perspectives other than the one he seems to intend. But while acknowledging this and other aspects of the novel that are in tune with modernism, we should also place it in the realist tradition where it also surely belongs. Recent critics, such as John Gledson and Roberto Schwarz, have argued persuasively for recognizing the novel’s keen understanding of class privilege and class relations in Brazilian society of the Second Reign (under Emperor Pedro II 1840-89).

The Caribbean is defined by its geographic location and its many islands, of which Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, which the Dominican Republic and Haiti share, and Jamaica are the largest. The Caribbean, whose name is derived from the Carib Amerindians, was the first point of contact between the Old and New Worlds. During his first voyage, Columbus made landfall in Hispaniola and Cuba, and in his second, in Puerto Rico. As the first and last points of contact between the Old and New Worlds, the Caribbean became a privileged area of transit and cultural exchange between Europe, America, Africa, and Asia.

The Caribbean revealed a different kind of wealth, not of gold and silver, but of fertile lands for planting and harvesting sugarcane, and producing sugar. In fact, this area would be defined by the plantation and sugar-mill systems described so masterfully by Antonio Benítez Rojo and Manuel Moreno Fraginals, respectively. Sugar is labor intensive and, with the advent of slavery, West Coast Africans were robbed from their lands and taken in large numbers to Santo Domingo (Haiti) and Cuba, but also to other islands. If other European powers like Great Britain, France, and Holland challenged Spain for supremacy in the Caribbean, the Spanish Crown was able to set the foundation for the development of culture in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic.

The origin of the Caribbean novel in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic is associated with the early nineteenth-century movements for independence in Spanish America, and the need to forge a national identity. However, these Caribbean countries obtained their independence many decades after those in Spanish America had gained their freedom from Spain, and with some important differences: the Dominican Republic received its sovereignty in 1844, not from Spain but from Haiti; Cuba and Puerto Rico became independent from Spain, but not until the Spanish American War of 1898.

Representation and periodization of Durkheim’s life and work

Émile Durkheim's life and work is presented in 22 lines in the Petit Robert (dictionary of proper names). It contains a summary of his sociological approach (including positivism, the specificity of social facts, a sociology with a naturalist and mechanist character, and the study of “collective representation”), and a list of his books with very short comments (e.g. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), a text that reveals his interest in ethnography). This type of information is significant for those studying Durkheim; particularly those descriptions that place the sociologist and his work in France, where he has become - in many ways - a cult object. On one tablet in Bordeaux, where Durkheim taught for many years, it has been written: “Émile Durkheim, Founder of Sociology.” No more, no less.

A well-known classical sociologist in the English academic world, Émile Durkheim has become the object of a number of commentaries and theoretical interpretations. For instance, 6.3 percent of the 8,353 articles published in the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review between 1895 and 1992 quote his texts. This is as many as Weber, the most influential sociologist of the era who was quoted in 6.5 percent of the articles during the same period. As Paul Vogt summarized, “[t]he knowledge of Durkheim and of his books is a full part of the definition of what a sociologist is in America” (1993: 227).

Nabokov the American

That Nabokov is an American writer seems both a marvelous conceit and an unavoidable fact. Twenty years ago, in my first published essay - provoked by an announcement that course work on Lolita couldn't count toward an American Civilization major - I suggested that while Nabokov might not wholly belong to the American literary tradition, some of his novels did. Today, the case for his Americanness seems more conclusive, whether one considers his knowledge of American culture, his effect upon it, his publications, his audience, or his citizenship. It is true, of course, that Nabokov grew up in Russia, studied French and Russian writers at Cambridge, and published nine Russian novels as an émigré author in Europe. But he was also raised in a cosmopolitan family, became fluent in English early, and steeped himself in American literature - especially after 1940, when he came to the United States.

On one thing most of Durkheim's readers, past and present, have always agreed: he, like Marx, emphasizes social structure. Durkheim helped to create classical sociology because he located social forces “outside” the individual actor. But from this point on, theoretical agreement ends. The problem for Durkheim and his interpreters, just as for Marx and his interlocutors, is what does structure mean? How does structure hold individuals within its limits? Of what are these limits composed? If structure exists, somehow, outside of the individual, can it act only in opposition to freedom?

The problematics of Durkheim interpretation, then, are precisely the ones around which Marxist inquiry has always revolved. The fundamental question has been how Durkheim stipulates the relation between structured and free action. People keep reading Durkheim, and arguing about him, to find out whether the determinateness of social structures must involve the sacrifice of autonomy and, conversely, whether insisting on human agency entails denying external control. How generations have understood Durkheim - and answered these theoretical questions through such interpretive understanding - has fundamentally shaped the pattern of sociological discourse. Debates over the meaning and path of Durkheim's work are, inevitably, arguments about the most basic directions of sociological explanation and more general social thought.

Is there a fundamental conflict between Durkheimian and more materialist forms of sociology, whether Marxist, Weberian, organizational, or behaviorist? Many have contended there is not, and they have found not only occasional passages but large sections of Durkheim's work to prove it. The present essay will engage in a meticulous reconstruction of Durkheim's theoretical development, from his earliest writings to his maturity.

As the nineteenth century began, Latin American writers had not yet produced a work that fully qualified as a novel, though many had written lengthy narratives with certain literary features. One reason for the delay was Spain’s ban on novels in its American colonies, though this ruling had proven difficult to enforce. In 1539, Mexico City came to house the first press in the New World, and Lima acquired a press in 1584, but these outlets were highly regulated. Authorized printing was controlled by the colonial government and was limited to official business and works with religious content. Privately owned presses operated outside these restrictions; unauthorized printing became increasingly widespread in the later years of the Colonial period.

Another obstacle to the development of the novel, even after the independence movements of the early nineteenth century, was the low prestige of the genre in comparison with such forms as heroic poetry. The reading of novels was associated in many people’s minds with idleness and escapism. The first Spanish American text that most critics consider a novel is the 1816 El Periquillo Sarniento (The Itching Parrot) by José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (Mexico, 1776-1827). For some time thereafter, novels appeared at a slow rate. Around mid-century, the genre assumed a more prominent place in Latin American literature and more examples of it came into being. During the final two decades of the nineteenth century, a great number of novels, many of lasting significance, held the attention of Spanish American readers.

El Periquillo Sarniento was an outgrowth of Lizardi’s newspaper El Pensador Mexicano (“The Mexican thinker”; the newspaper’s title came to be applied to its publisher as well). In February 1816, Lizardi began serializing El Periquillo Sarniento at the rate of two chapters a week. With this work, he sought to show that novels could serve a worthy purpose, providing readers with moral uplift and sound advice, particularly about molding young people into good citizens.

Modernism - or as Peter Nicholls has emphasized, “modernisms” - was a tangled web of international but mainly Western movements of literary innovation in the early twentieth century, especially from 1900 to 1930. Nabokov himself rarely used the term, which only came to dominate English-language criticism around 1960; and any account of his affinities with modernist attitudes in literature must begin by allowing for his resistance to all such historical labels. Sweeping generalizations about periods and styles were, after all, a stock-in-trade of Soviet literary policy as it promoted “socialist realism” from the 1930s onward. This doctrine routinely led to attacks on Nabokov's “top favorite” novelists from abroad (notably Flaubert, Joyce, Kafka, and Proust), and also resulted in the official exclusion of his own writings from Russia until Gorbachev and the glasnost of the 1980s. Even worse, these cultural policies blocked the careers and ruined the lives of many twentieth-century Russian writers, especially (for Nabokov) Osip Mandelshtam (1891-1938). This gifted poet graduated from the same progressive school in St. Petersburg that Nabokov later attended, and his death in a Siberian labor camp warned of the novelist's own probable fate had he not left for the West in 1919. Both Nabokov's intense dislike for literary “-isms” and the Soviet background for this hostility burst forth in one of his “strong opinions” of the 1960s, in which he expressed “helpless shame” at the thought of Mandelshtam having to write “under the accursed rule of those beasts” (SO, 58).

What does Durkheim mean for social science and social theory today?

This is a deceptively simple question. One way to attempt an answer is to put a deconstructive twist on the standard sociological literature about the production of culture and knowledge. It is commonplace within that field to suggest that authors produce texts to send messages to others. As participants in intellectual markets, writers strive to meet collegial expectations and hope to gain recognition in exchange (Collins this volume; Hagstrom 1965; Lamont 1987). Yet when an author's work has staying power beyond its immediate context, this being the very quality that distinguishes a truly great contribution, something much more intriguing happens. Readings proliferate that are unintended and unpredictable, with determinations that go far beyond those that could have been consciously anticipated by the maker of the original text. Time reverses the direction of influence. New contexts of interpretation come to rewrite texts as authors and theories are re-narrated for present relevance. Next, these critical interventions are themselves reworked and rethought. Eventually a layered field of immense dialogic activity is formed as words, ideas, their underlying structures of feeling and analytic choices accumulate and attach to the classical bedrock. It is precisely this sequential accretion of complexity and controversy that marks out the proper and full domain for inquiry into a great scholar. Because foundational texts and subsequent commentaries alike should be understood as social facts as well as a hermeneutic practice, we must give due attention to both scholarly intents and intellectual contexts. In thinking through questions about Durkheim and his legacy, we come to engage with others. These relate less to the cultural and intellectual preoccupations of other ages and more to those of our own.

Jeffrey Alexander (1987) has vigorously defended the centrality of the classics in the social sciences in opposition to a more “natural science” optic regarding the progress of a scientific discipline. It is part of the training of sociologists to internalize the classics (Alexander 1987: 20) as much as they internalize the methods and rules of evidence required to established empirical facts, which are the “stuff” of the natural sciences. The classics, thus, provide frames for finding, sensing, and mapping the major dimensions of the social order (Wrong 1994).

To add to Alexander's discussion, I suggest that we see a two-way interaction between the classics and our contemporary situation. On the one hand, the classics are heuristic in sensitizing us to a broader view and a broader search of social structures and patterns in our contemporary social world. They provide us with a “perspective” which may be otherwise missing simply because we may be so immersed in our situation as to be, in a certain sense, myopic of broader operative features. On the other hand, our contemporary situation may bring to light elements or dimensions that undergird the classic text, helping to understand (that is, to stand under) the text; ultimately, to bring out features of the text that may have remained obscure. Thus, to bring out a new understanding of our contemporary situation, to make sense of what might be otherwise an unwieldy set of data, and to make new sense of an accepted text is really a dialectical process of theorizing, from the past to the present and from the present to the past.

Émile Durkheim was not merely an individual, but the head, simultaneously symbolic and real, of a social movement. Of all the “great sociologists” who make up the canon of founders of the discipline, Durkheim's work was most thoroughly a collective production. This is so in every sense recognized by present-day sociologists. We are inclined to see any individual as a product of social conditions who responds to problems set by his or her historical milieu with the tools then at hand; yet we often set sharp limits to such sociologizing in the case of our particular intellectual heroes. Our feeling of respect raises them to the status of uniquely creative individuals, a sacred realm from which we, in turn, receive a sense of participation in something more important than ourselves. It is an unfinished task to explain why we feel more elevated in worshipping a heroized individual than in showing respect for the accomplishments of a social movement: why the collective symbol is generally an individual even where we have the ability to recognize the collectivity itself. In the case of some putative sociological founders, such as Karl Marx, the name of the emblem swallows up even known co-authors, like Friedrich Engels, who were often as much animator and originator as collaborator (Carver 1983; Rigby 1992). The intellectual world, as much as politics or religion, needs a sociology of the construction of emblems.

Gender studies is not synonymous with women’s studies, feminist criticism, or queer theory though it may encompass all of these. Gender refers to the social and symbolic relations of perceived sexual differences. In literary studies it provides a concept, a category of analysis, that enables us to think about how and why the terms “man” and “woman,” and the differences between them, have been produced historically through language. Gendered readings of Latin American novels, therefore, will focus on the constructions of masculinities and femininities in specific texts, the aim being to explore how this category of identification predicated on sexual difference is inscribed discursively in a particular time and place and how it comes to function as a principle of social organization and representation. Such a reading will also involve being alert to textual renditions of sexualities (sexual desires and behaviors) and questioning the heterosexual norm. Inevitably, power is a key issue here; what gendered readings hope to expose is the interplay of gender and social control, the fallacy of the self-contained autonomous individual (predicated on the masculine universal subject set up only by virtue of what it is not), and the exclusion of those identified (by themselves or others) as women or transgendered subjects. Gendered readings should be subversive in that they historicize the gender relations informing the cultural constructions of collective identities and thus unmask and challenge resulting power relations. Attention to the significance of gender has resulted in a sea change in the way the Latin American novel is perceived, interpreted, valued, and produced.

Darwin's passing comment in the 1932 novel, Glory, encapsulates the fundamental antagonism that characterizes Nabokov's own attitude towards moving picture art. On the one hand, cinema epitomizes the worst of commercially driven, populist culture and yet, on the other, it generates a compelling dynamic of excitement and wonder that is inarguably, and perpetually, fascinating. Nabokov, an avid filmgoer throughout most of his life, delighted in the movies as a source of pure entertainment. The films he cited as his favorites were mostly comedies - the slapstick features of the 1920s and 1930s, starring Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers - from which he could recall specific scenes in meticulous detail (SO, 163).

The earliest translations of the Latin American novel into English were sporadic and haphazard. One of the few nineteenth-century Latin American novels published in the first half of the twentieth century was Aves sin nido by the Peruvian Clorinda Matto de Turner, translated as Birds Without a Nest: a Story of Indian Life and Priestly Oppression in Peru (1904) by Thyne, a British Protestant press keen on underscoring the “priestly oppression” featured in the novel as the focal point of the defense of an oppressed indigenous people in need of salvation. The most unsavory elements of the novel were removed from the English version and duly restored by Naomi Lindstrom in her Texas University Press 1996 edition of that first translation.

Commercial publishers and small presses in the United States began to venture into the unknown wilds of South American writing in the 1920s and 1930s. New York based publishing houses such as Farrar and Rinehart (soon to be Farrar Straus, and by the 1960s, FS and Giroux) were seriously committed to the publication of some Latin American novels, and London editors such as Constable or Cape, and later on, others such as Faber and Faber tended to follow in the steps of their American counterparts by publishing English editions of the same translations within a year or two. An exception to this tendency occurred in the sixties and seventies when some of the more radical American published translations of experimental Latin American works were rejected, at first, because of the use of colloquial American speech and slang: two such examples were Manuel Puig’s Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (La traicioñ de Rita Hayworth, 1967) and Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers (Tres tristes tigres, 1965), both published in New York in 1971.