It was rumored at Court that the child was fathered by an African dwarf named Nabo, a young man from Dahomey presented to the Queen by relatives in Spain. Soon after his arrival, Nabo had become the Queen's favorite companion. Perhaps, it was discretely suggested, a penetrating glance from this slave had corrupted the royal womb. Nabo was sent for by the King. The following lines are cobbled together with apologies from various chapters of his book, representing one of the several through lines of thought in an elegant argument.
Memory is a process that depends crucially on forgetting.
In representations of such encounters, at least one of the parties seems fated to disappear from the selective memory of another. On the one hand, forgetting is an opportunistic tactic of whiteness. On the other, the vast scope of the project of whiteness and the scope of the contacts amongst cultures that it required limited the degree to which its foils could be eradicated from the memory of those who had the deepest motivation and the surest means to forget them. In a world continuously reinvented by intercultural propinquity and that is precisely what the circum-Atlantic world was and is the order of any procession may be threatened with interruption or usurpation. There is a pressure exerted by this implicit menace of usurpation.