Coloniality and Global Encounters in Romance Literary and Cultural History
E-Book, Englisch, 293 Seiten
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ISBN: 978-3-11-079642-1
Verlag: De Gruyter
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Tales of the World
Imagining Globally during Early Modern Romance Expansionism Romana Radlwimmer Encountering the World
Is there one world, or are there many worlds? Inca Garcilaso’s celebrated 1609 Comentarios Reales [Royal Commentaries] begin with an intriguing invitation to think globally. He asks “si hay muchos mundos”, whether many worlds exist, pondering how to conceive that round surface situated beneath wide skies and inhabited by humans and other species. He inquires how the globe dramatically changed when it was divided into two, the New World and the Old, and how its different zones are connected to each other (Inca Garcilaso 1985: 9–10). Five-hundred years later, in a global system shaped by the long shadows of colonialism – or “coloniality”, to use Aníbal Quijano’s term (Quijano 2008) – which excluded a plurality of world views, Inca Garcilaso’s questions still resonate. They direct the gaze towards the transcontinental emplotments (White 2014 [1973]; Ricœur 1984 [1983]), that is, the imaginary-narrative composition of historical representation, during early modern Romance expansionism. They stimulate further explorations: in which ways do the early modern Spanish and Portuguese Americas, which Inca Garcilaso referred to, participate in an emerging global literary system, and how do they coin it? How do they reflect on their contemporary world order, and how do they produce it? In Romance literary and cultural history, colonial and global expansion form much-debated reciprocal relations. Globalization is often seen as a process triggered by early modern colonialism’s massive mobilization of technical and financial resources, when soldiers, clergymen, merchants, writers, and editors systematically expanded awareness about intercontinentally travelled routes to new possessions and modes of production (Wallerstein 2011 [1974]; Braudel 1979; Gruzinski 2012; Hausberger 2018). The Spanish and Portuguese constitution of America served as a structural model for later colonial endeavors; together, they produced coloniality’s centuries-long cultural legacies of worldwide impact. In this panorama, the designation “encounter” has been exhaustively employed as a synonym for the global ramifications of conquest and has evoked equally much critical scholarship. The “encounter between Old World and New” became a main component of the discourse of discovery, generating alterity and excitement, and covering up the clashes and wars lying at the origin of coloniality’s hybrid practices (Todorov 1987 [1982]; Greenblatt 1991; Verdesio 2002). Building on these debates, this anthology dismisses the semantics of “encounter” which, in the politics of naming, euphemistically substitutes invasive violence; however, it invests in the notion’s dimension as a junction where literary, cultural, historical, and social relations are enacted (Bachmann-Medick 2016). At such dynamic meeting grounds, early modern literatures, cultures, and histories emerge which relate continents in priorly unimagined ways. From the perspective of Spanish and Portuguese American literature, culture, and history, Relating Continents: Coloniality and Global Encounters in Romance Literary and Cultural History revisits colonial and global encounters’, reencounters’ or misencounters’ relating of continents: encounters happened or hindered, public or private, desired or avoided; encounters resulting in alliances and attachments, or confrontation and frustration; encounters merging regional and transcontinental aspects to “glocal” constellations (Robertson 1995). Critically sounding out these associating or separating forces of colonialism and coloniality, the volume is methodologically oriented by historic and current debates on relationality. While non-Western ontologies have long seen all expressions of the cosmos as interconnected (Skousen/Buchanan 2015), more recent concepts from the humanities, cultural studies and social sciences have investigated the qualities and dynamics of relations, and the power they exercise. The imaginary, narrative, and geopolitical practice of relating becomes visible, for instance, as translation – as the ongoing linguistic and cultural transfer process characteristic for the global age (Bassnett/Trivedi 1999: 2; Cronin 2003: 2). The relating of continents appears also in contact zones, or in those “highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” forged by colonialism (Pratt 2008: 7). Latour proposes to think in terms of networks of discursive, cultural, literary, technical, or material entities to contemplate what happens between points of contacts (Latour 2005). Furthermore, “assemblages” designate heterogeneous groups of materials and bodies which affect others, generating new assemblages (Deleuze/Guattari 1987 [1980]; DeLanda 2006; Harris 2012). According to Édouard Glissant, the world is always constructed through relations, or acts of connecting through listening, comprehending, or telling (Glissant 1990). Sanjay Subrahmanyam talks about early modern “connected histories” to comprehend the transcultural relations of regions, archives, and stories which had been treated usually as individual phenomena (Subrahmanyam 2022 [2004]). All these notions propose paths to comprehend relationality and can thus illuminate the early modern literatures, cultures, and histories which were shaped through transcontinental encounters. A transcontinental literary-historical genre par excellence are the Relaciones de Indias [Relations of the Indies]. These accounts of conquest and colonization have been meticulously subdivided into relaciones [relations], historias [histories], cartas [letters], or crónicas [chronicles], each with their specific generic characteristics (Mignolo 1982). Relaciones can be described as a shorter, more immediate, and official genre; historias as long, expanding, detailed overviews which covered and were frequently composed over long periods of time; cartas count as first-hand observations, often sent to the Iberian authorities; crónicas as elaborate reports on specific subjects. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century letters, however, these designations were not always stable, but were at times used synonymously or even confounded. While a generic classification can be a useful orientation, a rigid understanding of it would not do justice to the monumental and multifaceted enterprise colonial writing produced. Rereading the writing of the early Spanish and Portuguese Americas, the anthology touches upon the traditional fascination for meetings between Europeans and Natives and its valid denouncing of colonial inequality, recognizable, for instance, in the globally impactful conversation of Moteuczoma [Montezuma] pleading with Hernán Cortés to remain open to all religious beliefs: Señor Malinche, muy bien tengo entendido vuestras pláticas […] de la cruz […]. No os hemos respondido a cosa ninguna dellas porque desde ab enicio acá adoramos nuestros dioses y los tenemos por buenos. Ansí deben ser los vuestros, e no curéis más al presente nos hablar dellos. (Díaz del Castillo 2015 [1632]: 318, original emphasis) [Lord Malinche [Cortés], I have understood your talk about the cross very well. We have not responded to any of these things because ab initio, we adore our gods here and we hold them in high esteem. Yours are certainly like this, and for now, please do not seek to talk about them anymore1]. The volume analyzes how Romance expansionism variously combated, erased, integrated, or encouraged non-European practices, while local actors correspondingly resisted, accepted, or subverted such endeavors, actively shaping the global encounters imposed on them, or generating such meeting points themselves. How did Native knowledges inform European thought, starting, but not ending with those conquerors who rejoined other conquerors’ armies after years immersed in local cultures? Jerónimo Aguilar in Mexico, Juan Ortiz in Florida, or João Ramalho in Brazil became prolific interpreters and mediators for the Spanish and Portuguese (Díaz del Castillo 2015: 113; Inca Garcilaso 1986: 308; Nóbrega 1956: 498); contrary to Gonzalo Guerrero who, married in Yucatán, bluntly rejected Cortés’ invitation to see him, and certainly did not accompany his men to seize Mexico (Díaz del Castillo 2015: 107). Considering such specific moments, Relating Continents also captures larger dispositions of encounters. How did literary, cultural, religious, or political tensions, transferred to other regions, replay and complicate encounters? The founding of a Huguenot haven in the Timucua territory renamed La Floride, for example, gave rise to conflicts between the French Crown and the Spanish colonizers, which were portrayed by the French painter Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues in his picture-book and published in Latin by the editorial magnate Theodore de Bry (Le Moyne/De Bry 1591; Lestringant 1990). And yet, the anthology takes the query for early modern...
