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Ideologies of Hispanism
 HISPANIC ISSUES * VOLUME 30

Ideologies of Hispanism

Mabel Morana
EDITOR

Vanderbilt University Press

NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE
2005
 © 2005 Vanderbilt University Press
All rights reserved
First Edition 2005

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Manufactured in the United States of America

The editors gratefully acknowledge assistance from the

College of Liberal Arts and the Department of Spanish
and Portuguese Studies at the University of Minnesota.

The complete list of volumes in the

Hispanic Issues series begins on page 335.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ideologies of Hispanism / Mabel Morana. — Ist ed.

p. cm. — (Hispanic issues ; v. 30)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8265-1471-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8265-1472-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Civilization, Hispanic. I. Morafia, Mabel.
II. Hispanic issues; 30.
CB226.1345 2005
305.868—dc22
2004022806
 HISPANIC ISSUES

Nicholas Spadaccini
Editor in Chief

Antonio Ramos-Gasc6én and Jenaro Talens

General Editors

Luis A. Ramos-Garcia, Nelsy Echdvez-Solano,

and Gwendolyn Barnes-Karol,
Associate Editors

Luis Martin-Estudillo
Assistant Editor

*Advisory Board/Editorial Board

Rolena Adorno (Yale University)
David Castillo (University of Oregon)
Jaime Concha (University of California, San Diego)
Tom Conley (Harvard University)
Patrick H. Dust (Carleton College)
Eduardo Forastieri-Braschi (Universidad de Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras)
David W. Foster (Arizona State University)
Edward Friedman (Vanderbilt University)
Wlad Godzich (University of California, Santa Cruz)
*Carol A. Klee (University of Minnesota)
Antonio Gomez-Moriana (Université de Montréal)
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford University)
Javier Herrero (University of Virginia)
*René Jara (University of Minnesota)
Susan Kirkpatrick (University of California, San Diego)
Eukene Lacarra Lanz (Universidad del Pais Vasco)
Tom Lewis (University of lowa)
Jorge Lozano (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
Walter D. Mignolo (Duke University)
*Louise Mirrer (City University of New York)
Alberto Moreiras (Duke University)
Michael Nerlich (Technische Universitat Berlin)
Iris M. Zavala (UNESCO, Barcelona)
Santos Zunzunegui (Universidad del Pais Vasco)
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 Contents

Introduction: Mapping Hispanism

Mabel Morafia

PART I
Constructions of Hispanism:
The Spanish Language and Its Others

Spanish in the Sixteenth Century:

The Colonial Hispanization of Andean
Indigenous Languages and Cultures
Lydia Fossa

The Pre-Columbian Past as a Project:

Miguel Leon Portilla and Hispanism
Ignacio M. Sadnchez-Prado 40

“La hora ha Ilegado”: Hispanism,

Pan-Americanism, and the Hope of
Spanish/American Glory (1938-1948)
Sebastiaan Faber 62

PART II
Consolidation and Transformations
of Hispanism: Ideological Paradigms

4 Rapping on the Cast(i)le Gates: Nationalism

and Culture-Planning in Contemporary Spain
Thomas Harrington 107

Beyond Castro and Maravall: Interpellation,

Mimesis, and the Hegemony of Spanish Culture
Anthony J. Cascardi
vill CONTENTS

6 Whose Hispanism? Cultural Trauma, Disciplined

Memory, and Symbolic Dominance
Joan Ramon Resina 160

PART III
Latin Americanism and Cultural Critique

7 Latin America in the U.S. Imaginary:

Postcolonialism, Translation,
and the Magic Realist Imperative
Sylvia Molloy 189

8 Mules and Snakes: On the Neo-Baroque

Principle of De-Localization
Alberto Moreiras

9 Keeping Things Opaque: On the Reluctant

Personalism of a Certain Mode of Critique
Brad Epps

PART IV
Hispanism/Latin Americanism: New Articulations

10 Xenophobia and Diasporic Latin Americanism:

Mapping Antagonisms around the “Foreign”
Idelber Avelar 269

11 MHispanism in an Imperfect Past and

an Uncertain Present
Nicolas Shumway

12. Hispanism and Its Lines of Flight

Roman de la Campa 300

Afterword
Nicholas Spadaccini

Contributors

Index
 5 Introduction:
Mapping Hispanism

Mabel Morana

In the context of current debates on postcolonialism and multiculturalism, a

collective reflection on ideologies of hispanism seems to be in order. And yet,
this is a daunting task, given the ambiguities and complexities involved both
in the mere definition of the topic and in the demarcation of its theoretical and
epistemological boundaries. Indeed, the extension and transformation of cul-
tural and ideological practices associated with Hispanism suggest the impos-
sibility of confining the analysis to a specific period or modality. It indicates the
need to explore, from multidisciplinary and transnational perspectives, the vari-
ous ways in which Hispanism has functioned as a dominating political force, as
an interpretive and representational cultural model, and as an epistemological
paradigm, throughout the entire development of Spanish America’s and Spain’s
cultural histories.
At the same time, the topic points to the disciplinary level in which the dif-
ferent perspectives on Hispanism articulate. Within Spanish, Latin American,
and U.S. academies, disciplines constitute localizing spaces for the appropria-
tion, legitimization, and institutionalization of Hispanism, as well as sites from
which the global dissemination of knowledge related to this field is actually
implemented. A collective reflection on the ideologies of hispanism entails, then,
X INTRODUCTION

the examination of the intertwined connections between power, cultural institu-

tions, and cultural production, as well as an analysis of the changing role played
by writers and scholars in the production of critical discourse related to the cat-
egories of colonialism, national formation, modernity, and identity politics that
constitute the basis of the post-colonial debate.
Without a doubt, the project of hispanization evokes, in the first place, the
historical experience of imperial expansion in the so-called New World, and the
strategies of resistance implemented by the colonial subject in order to coun-
teract the violence of material and symbolic domination. The array of prob-
lems associated with what Anfbal Quijano has called the coloniality of power
are inextricably related to linguistic colonization, that is, to the imposition and
dissemination of the predominant imperial language for the purposes of con-
trol and submission of dominated cultures, the reduction of differences, and
the symbolic appropriation of autochthonous imaginaries. Intertwined with the
project of Christianization, as well as with the overarching purposes of eco-
nomic profit and political legitimization, the Spanish language became, from
the first stages of colonization, one of the most refined and versatile technolo-
gies of power in America.
In the Iberian Peninsula, the consolidation of Castilian hegemony over all
other cultural identities also indicates the crucial role of enforced monolingual-
ism in the projects of political unification and cultural dissemination of imperial
Spain within its own primary territories. But far from being limited to the pe-
riod of imperial expansion, the project and practices of hispanization have also
played a key role in the postcolonial scene, both in Spain and Spanish America,
throughout the process of the formation and consolidation of national states,
and nowadays in the context of globalization.
Over the centuries, the Spanish language has constituted, both in Spain and
in Spanish America, a distinct space for symbolic struggle, for the construction
of collective memories and subjectivities, and for the perpetuation of a cultural
and economic linkage between the old metropolis and the former colonies. The
transnational impact of Hispanism can also be traced at the academic level,
in the disciplinary fields associated with the transmission of Spain’s cultural
heritage or with the study of cultures derived from the Spanish conquest. Fac-
tors as diverse as the rapid expansion of the Spanish language, particularly
in the United States, the focus on social and cultural migrations promoted in
the framework of postcolonial and cultural studies, and the articulation of
Spain to the European Community, have considerably contributed to increasing
the attention on Hispanism, from different perspectives, and to reinvigorating
 INTRODUCTION Xi

transnational debates about its political content, cultural value, and political
significance.
The use of language both as a pragmatic and a symbolic device of domina-
tion—as well as a key element of cultural resistance—is one of the most impor-
tant issues studied in this book. In the Spanish American colonies, translation
is not only the main procedure for transculturation but also is one of the most
important recourses for the appropriation and subjugation of subaltern imagina-
tion. Lydia Fossa analyzes in this volume the manipulation of linguistic codes
in the Andean region, and the uses of hispanization—and latinization—as po-
litical procedures implemented for the reduction of cultural differences. The
invincible ignorance of the Indians and members of colonial castas was the
final frontier conquered by European epistemologies. For this reason, colonial
domination depended, to a great extent, on the proliferation of communicative
strategies designed to complement, and often to replace, linguistic colonization.
Fossa’s study shows that Hispanization was often confronted with the challenge
of going well beyond the limits of the language, which became only one of
the elements of the complex and effective cultural semiosis that accompanied
imperial domination in America. The use of interpreters, iconography, and per-
formances for the transmission of religious dogma, the adoption of teaching
techniques differentially applied to children and adults as well as to members of
different social strata, the construction of dictionaries, glossaries, and grammat-
ical treatises that transformed Quechua and Aymara into linguistic oddities even
in their own cultural realm, and the elimination in these books of all cultural
and linguistic components considered superfluous to the purposes of pragmatic
appropriations of indigenous cultures, were some of the strategies used for the
implementation of the paradoxical “evangelization without language” that, as
Fossa indicates, took place in America during the sixteenth century.
With the advancement and consolidation of colonialism, the Spanish lan-
guage was also crucial to the organization and transmission of a creole archive
that would define the cultural parameters of a new, emerging American elite
which, in spite of its subaltern position to Peninsular sectors, would claim the
right to re-discover, register, and interpret pre-Hispanic cultures as part of the
process of the “invention of traditions” initiated by Spanish missionaries and
men of letters soon after the “discovery.” But the recovery and interpretation
of indigenous cultures that survived the dismantling processes of the conquest
and colonization of America was a project that also found its way in the new
Spanish American republics, playing an important and, at times, contradictory
role in the articulation of national discourses. Ignacio M. Sanchez-Prado analyzes
xii INTRODUCTION

the rediscovery of pre-Hispanic cultures carried out in Mexico by Miguel Leon

Portilla, as well as his loose utilization of archival materials, and the operations
of cultural and linguistic translation used for the construction of an indigenous
past that could be productively integrated into the conflictive realm of modern
Mexican culture. Within this framework, Hispanism constitutes the institution-
alizing and legitimizing space for a nationalist appropriation of pre-Columbian
history. The Spanish language is defended by Leon Portilla as the unifying and
cohesive force—the lingua franca—that could articulate and bring together all
the components of Mexican diversity. Sanchez Prado’s study poses the question
of the limits and merits of transcultural appropriations (use of historic sources,
textualization of oral discourses, translation of indigenous languages into domi-
nant codes), indicative of the epistemological violence inherent in the interpreta-
tion and representation of subaltern cultures in postcolonial scenarios.
The discursive and ideological reappropriation of the past has been an ob-
sessive pursuit in modern historiography. As Joan Ramon Resina indicates, the
territorial loss that resulted from Spanish American independence is strategi-
cally compensated during the ninetheenth century by the gradual promotion of
a trans-Atlantic Hispanic culture articulated around the congregant power of
the language, and the communion of customs and beliefs.
The manipulation of social memory and, as Resina reminds us, the fab-
rication of oblivion, is thus one of the main dispositions of modernity. The
construction of knowledge in the specific field of Hispanism had its point of
departure in the universalistic and ahistorical concept of Hispania as a spa-
cial and temporal extension of what once was Spain’s imperial dominion. The
suppression of diversity and particularism, and the repression of all references
to the colonial origins of the concept, has promoted Hispanism as a program
of cultural and linguistic dissemination in modern times. As Resina indicates,
historical violence is codified as symbolic violence, and the superior value of
tradition absorbs all the political connotations of the historical concept.
In spite of the fact that, as Nicolas Shumway rightfully indicates, many of
Spanish America’s “enlightened” liberators—particularly Sim6n Bolivar—con-
sidered the “Spanish legacy an impediment to be overcome rather than embraced.”
in Latin America nationalism included the components of Spanish language and
Christian religion as unifying forces for the homogenization of diverse and con-
flictive populations strongly rooted in their own indigenous traditions, and for
the construction of consensus and citizenship in the new Republics. It is also true
that the role then played by Hispanism was certainly articulated with—and often
limited by—the forces of progress and political change. The dazzling effect of
new cultural models (i.e., France, Northern Europe, the United States) gradu-
 INTRODUCTION Xi

ally overshadowed most vestiges of the old Empire, which was seen by liberal
leaders of the nineteenth century as a declining, retrograde and peripheral nation
within the much more promising realm of Western modernity.
As an ideologically charged cultural practice, Hispanism produced differ-
ent results and managed to define very diverse political agendas, depending on
the project to which it was articulated, the international conjuncture in which
it was immersed, and the goals pursued by intellectual sectors connected to its
discursive field, both in the Peninsula and abroad. Yet the colonial past, and the
ways in which history was recovered and interpreted from different political
perspectives over the centuries, has always been the most conflictive and endur-
ing issue in these debates.
The ideological tensions which characterized the cultural relations between
Spain and the Americas from the beginning, manifested new and often contra-
dictory political dimensions during the twentieth century, in response to the
challenges posed by the transformations that were taking place in the interna-
tional arena.
The development of Hispanism reached one of its most notorious and pro-
ductive stages with the Spanish exile, which brought a large diaspora of schol-
ars and writers who would be crucial to the dissemination of Spanish culture
in the Americas across the Atlantic Ocean in the 1930s and 1940s. Sebastiaan
Faber’s study focuses on the underlying ideological tensions that dwell within
the concept of Hispanism, and identifies three major events that contributed to
the international re-definition of this field: the Spanish Civil War, Roosevelt’s
Good Neighbor Policy and consequent U.S.-sponsored Pan-Americanism, and
World War II, after which the Americas were perceived by many as the only re-
pository of Western civilization. While some of the movements emerging from
those events were directly linked to fascism, others were embedded in the cul-
tural and “spiritual” mission to disseminate the Spanish culture in both North
and Latin America, particularly at the academic level. Faber’s article illustrates
the redefinitions and transformations of Hispanism in three journals founded in
Mexico City between 1938 and 1940 (Revista Iberoamericana, Romance, and
Espana Peregrina). Based on the study of these publications, his essay focuses
on some of the contradictions that are inherent to the field. Among other things,
Faber mentions that “in spite of Hispanism’s transnational ambitions, it is sim-
ply too tied up with cultural nationalism,” and that the idea of Hispanic studies
proposes, to a large extent, the assimilation of heterogeneous cultural realities.
Multicultural studies could be, according to Faber, a way of counteracting the
rigid, expansionist, and homogenizing orientation of most traditional Hispanic
studies.
xiv INTRODUCTION

During some of the processes that I have described thus far, cultural politics
has often invoked the linguistic realm as a space for encounter and communion,
while in other cases language has been emphasized as one of the most sophisti-
cated and efficient tools used in the project of effacing cultural differences and con-
solidating political supremacy. Nevertheless, monolingualism has always been,
in fact, at the core of Spain’s hegemonic projects, both within its Peninsular terri-
tories and abroad. Thomas Harrington’s article analyzes the terms in which Cas-
tilian supremacy was constructed, established, and perpetuated in Spain, over
Basque, Galician, and Catalan cultural identities. Harrington traces the cultural
process of the standarization of Spanish as part of a political project initiated in
the late-Medieval period, which included a definition of the “nation” equalized
to the affirmation of Castilian exceptionality and superiority with respect to both
non-Christian populations and all other cultures, such as, according to Nebrija,
“‘vizcainos, navarros, franceses, italianos, y todos los otros que tienen algun trato
y conversacion con Espafia” (Biscayans, Navarrese, French, Italians, and all oth-
ers who have dealings and are conversants with Spain). Joan Ram6n Resina also
makes reference to this supposedly self-constitutive foundation of Hispanism,
which assumed since the Middle Ages the superiority and “intrinsic universal-
ity” of the Castilian language as a point of departure for the definition of a “spiri-
tual” and, without a doubt, political mission of cultural dissemination.
Several articles included in this volume focus on the disciplinary and aca-
demic aspects of Hispanism, not only as a field related to the teaching of the
language—in this respect, closely connected to the cultural and educational
market—but also as a space for the study of history and cultural production.
Anthony Cascardi’s contribution resides primarily in the analysis of several
key moments that can be identified in the development of Spanish literary and
cultural studies and proposes some ways in which traditional perspectives on
Hispanic literature could be refurbished, both critically and theoretically. Based
on his critique of both Américo Castro’s existential and vitalistic historicism
and José Antonio Maravall’s political and cultural perspective, Cascardi elabo-
rates on the theoretical avenues opened by the Althusserian notions of ideology,
interpellation, and subject formation, and offers the examples of El Lazarillo
de Tormes, and Cervantes’ Don Quixote to illuminate the idea of a “fractured
mimesis” in Imperial Spain, and to shed light on the often overlooked intercon-
nection between discursive strategies and institutional structures in canonical
literary works.
The essays included in this book are not only concerned with the revision
of disciplinary aspects related to the field of Hispanism, but are also penetrated
by many of the issues and theoretical problems currently debated with respect
 INTRODUCTION XV

to identity politics, collective subjectivity, and multiculturalism. In some cases,

the authors of these articles have chosen to focus on specific topics where the
tensions of aesthetic and ideological representation are particularly evident.
Among them, the category of magic realism and the readings of Spanish Ameri-
can Baroque and Neo-Baroque that have been, for several decades, at the center
of critical debates.
Sylvia Molloy’s article takes into consideration the specificity of Latin
American history and culture, in order to illuminate what she calls “a discom-
fort, an ideological blind spot in the construction of ‘Latin America’ by the U.S.
academy and by the public at large.” In particular, she makes reference to the
homogenizing postcolonial model elaborated mainly by intellectuals located at
American universities, and to the application of exoticizing critical categories
generally used to evaluate Latin American literary production. Molloy focuses
on the reception of magic realism in the United States, as a prominent example
of reductionist interpretations which often disregard the theoretical, critical, and
political density of this and other Latin American representational strategies,
thus preventing the possibility of a productive and non-stereotypical integration
of Latin American cultural practices in transnational debates.
The speculative essay offered by Alberto Moreiras focuses on what Carlos
Rincon has called “the returns of the Baroque” and on the attention given to
this model by critics such as John Beverley and Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria.
Following Spinoza’s concept of “‘sad passion,” Moreiras defines academic prac-
tices in the U.S. as a self-dominating, localizing, disciplining, and anti-political
passion, and wonders if there is “an exteriority to university discourse.” He also
refers to Hispanism as an epistemic “site of expropriation” with respect to a
slippery object of study that can neither be totally captured by critical practice,
nor fully resist its partial appropriation. As an identitarian expression of the
Hispanic experience of modernity, the Baroque—and the Neo-Baroque—have
become fields of theoretical and representational struggle and, in a way, a sym-
bolic commodity that gives evidence of the practices of transculturation and
hybridity in regional spaces of cultural production. Moreiras proposes to over-
come both the view of literature “as state apparatus or hegemonic identity” and
“anti-literature as a subalternist reading practice,’ and reflects on the possibility
of an alternative form of critique that, by de-localizing knowledge, could allow
for “a general practice of reading” that might shed new light on regional cul-
tural and literary productions.
However, Moreiras’s own critical practice of what could be defined as an
intricate philosophical and self-reflective critical approach to Latin American
literature is also questioned in this volume. Brad Epps’ article titled “Keeping
XV1 INTRODUCTION

Things Opaque: On the Reluctant Personalism of a Certain Mode of Critique” is

an exhaustive attempt to explore the question of locality: the place from where
we speak, work, and write. Yet by exploring intellectual location, Epps refers
not only to the geopolitical or institutional place, but also to the rhetorical site
of (self) production, the space of the critical or theoretical “I” often transfigured
in a self-reflecting “we” that maintains an evanescent but insistent presence
throughout the course of textual and/or cultural analysis. Moreiras’ personal
writing style—which Epps considers “representative of a certain mode of cri-
tique”—as much as some of his elaborations around the topics of Latin Ameri-
canism (regional or not, first or second), subalternism, and the like, are articu-
lated by Epps through an inquiry into the role of U.S. universities as privileged
spaces for academic exchange and knowledge production, and as contradictory
battlefields that frame—sometimes in more than one sense—our work and mark
our intellectual and ideological agendas. In addition, while discussing location
and locality, Epps’ article touches on the strategies of displacement—somehow,
the exodus or peregrinaje alluded to by Moreiras in his essay on the Baroque,
included in this volume—as a central proposition of “a nameless, groundless,
radical thinking” destined to counteract what Moreiras calls the “salvaging
movement” of neo-Arielist tendencies. Epps’ critique of de-localization is an
attempt to recuperate an awareness of the determinations—disciplinary, as well
as national and institutional—that influence our work, the disregard of which
contributes to the opacity of theoretical and critical discourse.
Even with the understanding that intellectual struggles and academic con-
flicts within the field of Latin Americanism, Hispanism, and Peninsularism will
not be resolved by the mere confrontation of individual or even representative
positions and polarized agendas (universalist theorization versus historically
and regionally-grounded critical thinking, self-reflective intellectualism versus
experience-based critical subjectivities, academic performativity versus cul-
tural and political activism, global epistemological dissemination versus local
knowledge), the disclosure of alternative and even divergent standpoints brings
to light some of the impulses that traverse disciplinary practices dealing with
ideologically and politically-charged fields of study. At the same time, current
emphasis on cultural studies over more traditional close readings and herme-
neutical or historiographical approaches have contributed to impel methodolog-
ical transformations in the field of Hispanism and to promote new disciplinary
articulations that pose unseen challenges to scholars working both in Peninsular
and Latin American studies. Academia is today, more than ever, a contradictory
space where the production and reproduction of critical knowledge receive the
impact of political, economic, and social conditions that modify pedagogical
 INTRODUCTION | xvii

practices and intellectual exchanges in a globalized yet strongly regionalized

transnational space.
The illusion of the existence of fixed and ahistorical identities that shaped,
both culturally and ideologically, the enlightened modernity where Hispanism
consolidated some of its most salient ideological features, has been gradually
replaced by a much more volatile, porous, temporary experience of the social,
where otherness, heterogeneity, and diversity are the conspicuous protagonists
of cultural exchanges and epistemological explorations. While the challenges
posed by the recognition of social, political, and cultural differences, as well as
the complex problems associated with the real implementation of democracy,
are today inescapable, the tensions and inequalities that characterize the dynam-
ics of globalization, have intensified defensiveness, discrimination, and funda-
mentalism, in different cultural and institutional domains around the world.
As Idelber Avelar shows in his article on “Xenophobia and Diasporic Latin
Americanism,” the concept of the foreign is the underlying and probably most
conflictive category in the vast realm of cultural studies and particularly in the
field of Hispanism. The definition of the boundaries that connect the Span-
ish language and its others—such as the previously mentioned imposition of
Spanish over both dominated cultural identities in the Peninsula and indigenous
cultures in Latin America, besides the tense coexistence of English and Spanish
in the Unitd States—has always depended on economic and political forces,
from which situations of cultural predominance emerge and perpetuate them-
selves, supported by legitimizing discourses and institutional arrangements in
their particular domains. The notion of cultural difference, conceived as the un-
representable site of otherness that empowers and consecrates the self-image
of dominating subjectivities, is an ever-changing battlefield where ideological
negotiations take place, in a balancing act that manifests not only the strength
of the political powers at work, but also the vulnerability of both dominant and
subaltern positions.
In the United States academy, Latin Americanism occupies an in-between
space strongly affected by the existence of ideological and political agendas
constituted as fields of symbolic struggles for the representation of Latino
and Hispanic constituencies which have always existed intertwined with the
dominant Anglo-Saxon culture. This in-between locality occupied by Latin
Americanism in the U.S. academy, the struggle of Latino studies to acquire
recognition in this country even within the space opened by current theories
on multiculturalism, identity politics, and ethnic studies, and even the most
recent attempts to put forward not only the political value but also the aesthetic
merits of bilingualism and hybridity have, without a doubt, managed to gain
xviii INTRODUCTION

space within the horizons of dominant cultural ideologies. Nevertheless, they

have been insufficient to eradicate the notion of foreignness that crosses over
academic practices, intellectual debates, and everyday life, as a ghostly feature
of the new world order.
As Avelar indicates in his article, the destruction of the World Trade Center
has radicalized the positions around the idea of foreignness, and made even
more vulnerable all academic and critical domains dealing primarily with the
diverse cultures that exist outside and within the United States. These cultures
are increasingly perceived as a potential threat, and could become the target of
discriminatory policies masquerading as security considerations. Avelar dem-
onstrates how the academic practice of Hispanism is directly affected by the
standards imposed at the academic level to faculty and students working in
this field, and by the universalization and imposition of criteria applied to the
evaluation of intellectual performance, without consideration for the diversity
upon which scholarly work has always depended. Today more than ever, this
imperative must be emphasized, particularly in all disciplines dealing with for-
eign cultures, within the context of globalization.
Closing the reflections of this volume, Roman de la Campa’s article on
“U.S. Hispanism and Its Lines of Flight” analyzes the critical scenarios that
followed the advent of deconstructive paradigms after the 1960s, particularly
in the U.S. academy. The fields of Hispanism, Latin Americanism, and Latino
Studies that had evoked until then distinct spaces of research and specific peda-
gogical practices in departments of Spanish, Modern, and Foreign Languages,
have experienced radical transformations in the last few decades. De la Cam-
pa’s article is an attempt to assess the disciplinary flux that characterizes current
humanistic approaches to Hispanic literatures and cultures in the realm of what
he has called the “discursive communities” dealing with Latin American stud-
ies. According to De la Campa, it would be impossible, in future years, to dis-
regard the disciplinary changes that have impacted the academic world, as well
as the pressures of cultural markets that have created a postnational production
and consumption of knowledge in these fields. Comparative approaches will be
necessary to articulate the new constellation of critical and theoretical practices
that should include Latino studies as an integral part of the cultural agenda.
While several articles included in this book focus on the clarification of
the origins and different stages of consolidation of Hispanism at the academic
level, others elaborate on the drastic transformations that have been affecting
the field, particularly since the end of the Cold War. Without a doubt, the ad-
vancement of the European Union has propelled the redefinition of Spain’s in-
ternational role in Europe, as well as with respect to Spanish American nations
 INTRODUCTION xix

and Spanish-speaking communities in the U.S. Based on its historic nexus with
Latin America, Spain is still perceived as the natural mediator for the economic
rearticulation of Spanish American countries to Europe in the post-colonial era.
At the same time, the rapidly growing Spanish-speaking population in the U.S.
has also opened up unseen scenarios for Spain, thus renewing a trans-Oceanic
connection, now with Anglo American cultures, via research programs and cul-
tural exchange. At the economic level, the financially troubled Latin American
countries have already received the impact of Spanish investments, which rec-
ognize in trans-Atlantic markets the opportunity for entrepreneurial and finan-
cial expansion within the framework of neoliberalism. Again, as Madrid places
itself at the center of international arrangements, the language is reaffirmed as
the primary and legitimizing vehicle for intercultural relations, and the expecta-
tion of profitable business paves the road for the re-entry of Spanish capitals
in the old colonies. Even though the terms and rhetoric of the new exchanges
have obviously been modified, the renovated relations between Spain and Latin
America are—needless to say—still marked by the sign of economic asymme-
try and cultural condescension.
Under these circumstances, the study of the variety of cultures that are
connected to or exist in the periphery of the Spanish language, either in Spain
or in the Americas, requires innovative trans-disciplinary and transnational ap-
proaches that take into consideration the political, social, and cultural transfor-
mation of the international arena. Within this context, it is possible to predict
that the highly politicized field of Hispanic studies will maintain its legitimacy
and specificity at the academic level, particularly in view of the undeniable
need to maintain the study of past colonialisms as one of the main foci of aca-
demic research. Furthermore, cultures and societies of Hispanic origin continue
to be located at the margins of global arrangements, a position of obvious disad-
vantage that provides, nevertheless, a strategic critical perspective on dominant
models, and calls for a strong political and cultural agenda for mobilization and
research. The same can be said with respect to communities that speak non-
dominant languages both in Spain and in Spanish America, which continue the
struggle to survive the effects of national colonialism, and to challenge the pre-
dominance of the Spanish language as well as the epistemological paradigms
that are still being imposed upon them in order to assimilate them at theoretical,
critical, and historiographical levels.
Finally, in yet another battlefield of Hispanic studies, it should be men-
tioned that literary and cultural studies conducted in Spanish or Portuguese in
the United States and abroad are also receiving the impact of a more trendy and
strongly institutionalized Latin Americanism or Peninsularism that finds in the
7,26 INTRODUCTION

English language its primary vehicle for production and dissemination of theo-
ries and critical approaches on the literatures and cultures that constitute their
field of study. In his polemic last article titled “Mestizaje e hibridez: el riesgo
de las metdforas” (Revista Iberoamericana, 63/180 [1997]: 341-44) Antonio
Cornejo Polar elaborated on this issue and its impact on Hispanic studies. The
concerns expressed by the Peruvian critic, as well as the positions discussed in
some of the responses triggered by his provocative piece, are implicitly echoed
in many of the articles included in this volume. As Cornejo Polar suggested,
the problem posed by the receding position of Spanish in Hispanic studies is
far from being restricted to the use of the language. This fact also entails the
application of epistemological paradigms created for other cultural realities,
which are often forced upon Latin American and Spanish productions with little
consideration for their historical, social, and cultural differences and, for that
matter, for the subaltern position that those cultures still have in the global
design. This occurs despite the fact that concepts such as difference, subal-
ternity, and the like, constitute an integral part of current theoretical agendas
that, nevertheless, frequently fail in identifying them when imbedded in their
own practice and critical discourse. Non-dominant languages—indigenous and
regional languages as well as Spanish and Portuguese (and the cultures they
represent)—are then placed in secondary or tertiary positions with respect to
English, which dominates, at least in the U.S., the scholarly production and
reproduction of knowledge in the highly polemic fields of Hispanism, Penin-
sularism, and Latin American studies. By the same token, critical or theoretical
approaches produced in languages other than English are often overlooked or
ignored in transnational debates. These situations create obvious imbalances
in the production of knowledge, and constitute some of the most flagrant and
inexcusable contradictions affecting our field.
As we have seen, and as the articles included in this book thoroughly dem-
onstrate, the predominance or subordination of the Spanish language and the
particular ideologies embedded in the field of Hispanism are a shifting reality
that varies depending on the historic, political, and cultural contexts considered
in each case, and on the particular agendas to which academic practices and
intellectual debates related to this field actually articulate. Far from diluting our
political or professional responsibility, this position must keep us alert with re-
spect to the forces at work in our field, the transnational parameters it involves,
and the academic and pedagogical implications of our work. In my opinion, the
tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes that cut across the field are precisely
what keep it alive, connected to both the social communities that produce its
objects of study, and the political and cultural processes that these communities
 INTRODUCTION XX1

continuously challenge and reshape. I hope that this book will contribute to the
understanding of our academic practices and to the strengthening of liberating
political agendas connected to them.
In closing, I would like to thank the contributors of this volume for their
generous and patient cooperation. This book belongs to them. Special thanks
to the editors of Hispanic Issues for the warm encouragement they gave to this
project. Finally, I am very grateful to Nicholas Spadaccini for writing the final
words that close this book and open it to new, constructive debates in our field.
 ota
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Part I
Constructions of Hispanism:
The Spanish Language and Its Others
 Spanish in the Sixteenth Century:
The Colonial Hispanization of Andean Indigenous
Languages and Cultures

Lydia Fossa

Evangelization was the main justification for the Spanish colonization of the
Indies, but it could not be carried out without a common language. I will ex-
plore the circumstances of this seemingly focused religious activity from the
perspective of its attached language policies and their application, and examine
their disproportionate consequences for the survival of the Andean languages
and cultures.
When first approaching the study of Andean hispanization, we see on the
one hand that there were several royal decrees and laws requiring the teaching
of Spanish to all inhabitants of the New World to facilitate their conversion; on
the other hand, the evangelization in indigenous languages was happening prior
to or in place of that teaching. I will analyze those simultaneous and appar-
ently contradictory movements in linguistic colonization that characterize the
fifty-year period between 1526 and 1576 in the Andes. The association between
evangelization, hispanization, and the teaching of “good manners” will also be
acknowledged, as well as the dramatic effects hispanization had on indigenous
languages.
4 LYDIA FOSSA

Evangelization, the Main Justification for Invasion

The Pope had the mission of promoting the dissemination of the New Testament
throughout the world (Vitoria 227). If he so wished, he could transfer this re-
sponsibility to royalty. The Spanish Kings received it by way of the Patronato.'
Through this Institution they received funding to exercise the missionary activi-
ties they entrusted to the religious orders and diocesan clergy in the Indies.
One of the first indications of the crucial economic and religious impor-
tance of the evangelization of the Indies is found in the Instructions of the King
and Queen of Spain to Christopher Columbus, in 1497:

Item: se debe procurar que vayan a las dichas Indias algunos religiosos e clérigos,
buenas personas, para que alld administren los Santos Sacramentos a los que alla
estardn, e procuren de convertir a nuestra santa fe catdlica a los dichos indios natu-
rales de las dichas Indias . . . (Morales Padrén 79)

(Item: it should be stressed that those going to the Indies be religious men, and cler-
ics, good people, so they can administer the Sacraments to the ones that are already
there. They should also endeavor to convert to our sacred Catholic faith the said
natural Indians of the said Indies . . . (translation mine)

In 1509, in an Instruction to Admiral Diego Colon, issued by the Catholic

King, Don Fernando V, the first paragraph instructs the Admiral on what to do
in Hispaniola regarding “las cosas del servicio de Dios Nuestro Sefior” (the
things needed for the service of God Our Lord). This Instruction was issued to
ensure that churches recently built were being used by the appointed clerics and
friars who cared for the spiritual needs of both Christians and newly converted
peoples. In the same Instruction, the King expressed his main wish:

... mi principal deseo siempre ha sido y es en estas cosas de las Indias que los
indios se conviertan a nuestra santa fe catdlica para que sus Animas no se pierdan,
para lo cual es menester que sean informados de las cosas de nuestra santa fe caté6-
lica; ternéis muy gran cuidado cémo sin les hacer fuerza alguna, ansi las personas
religiosas como aquellas a quien los dieren en nuestro nombre en encomienda, los
instruyan e informen en las cosas de nuestra santa fe catélica con mucho amor, para
que los que se han ya convertido a nuestra santa fe, perseveren en ella y sirvan a
Dios como buenos cristianos, y los que no se hobieren convertido hasta agora se
conviertan lo mas presto que ser pueda . . . (81)
 SPANISH IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 5)

(... my main wish has always been, and is, in these things related to the Indies,
that indians be converted to our sacred Catholic faith so that their souls will not be
lost. For that purpose it is necessary that they be informed of all things pertaining to
our sacred Catholic faith. You, religious persons or those who receive them in enco-
mienda, have to instruct them. You will be very careful in their instruction, teaching
them without pressure. As for those who are already converted, inform them of our
faith with love, to persevere in it and serve God as good Christians, and those who
have not been converted yet, should be converted as fast as possible . . . )

Friars and encomenderos shared the responsibilities of converting indige-

nous populations in the New World. The conversion was not to be carried out
under force or stress; infidels were to be informed and instructed in the Catholic
religion. Conversion and the consolidation of the Christian faith were of equal
importance, so the responsibilities Spaniards had did not disappear once the
new peoples were converted. In order to organize these two activities better, the
King of Spain ordered:

. . debéis mandar que en cada poblacion haya una persona eclesiastica, cual con-
venga, para que esta persona tenga cuidado de procurar como sean bien tratados
segun lo tenemos mandado, y que tenga ansimismo especial cuidado de los ensefiar
las cosas de la fe; y a esta persona mandaréis hacer una casa cerca de la iglesia, de
la parte donde habéis de mandar que se junten todos los nifios de la tal poblaci6n,
para que alli los ensefien esta dicha persona las cosas de nuestra santa fe . . . (81)

(... you should order that a clergyman be in each village, as be fit, so that this
person takes into himself that the Indians be well treated as we have commanded.
He should also be very careful in teaching things of faith. You will have a house
built for this person close to the church, in the section where the children of the
village will get together so that this person will teach them the things of our sacred
HEWN 2 2 ))

The idea that indigenous peoples needed to be protected by a clergyman is

clearly documented as early as 1509. The formal appointment of an officer for
this purpose had to wait until 1538 in the Andes, but that need was felt early in
the history of the Spanish presence in the Indies.
The order“. . . y trabajaran que los nifios hablen y sepan nuestra lengua . . .”
(... and you will work towards the goal of children speaking and knowing our
language ... ) (Lisson Chaves 139) reminded the clergy in New Castile in a
1541 Instruccién. Children were the primary targets for early simultaneous acts
of hispanization and evangelization.” They were ordered to be put under the
supervision of a clergyman in houses built for that purpose near every church in
6 LYDIA FOSSA

the Andes. This religious contact at an early age meant isolating them trom their
kin in order to train them as instructors of their own people and preparing them
for a life of close relationships with the Spanish community, The arguments
used to support the evangelization of children included their docility as well as
their ability to quickly learn the new language and concepts: *. . . los que son
ya hombres con mucha dificultad la tomaran [la lengua]. . 2” (.. . those who
are already men will take [the language] with great difficulty...) (139), Fray
Vicente de Valverde wrote in 1537 that the linguistic and religious project was
destined, first, to the children of native lords: “Que los hijos de los cagiques y
sehores siendo pequenos estén cierto tiempo en las casas de los religiosos hasta
que sean ensefados para que ellos ensefen a los otros en sus pueblos” (That the
children of cacigues and lords while they are small, should spend some time
in clergymen’s houses until they are taught so they, in turn, will teach others
in their villages) (20). Spaniards believed that conversion of the children of the
native nobility in a Spanish context would foster a rapid integration, This belief,
and the lack of monasteries in the early Sixteenth century in the Andean region,
spurred religious and civil authorities to send or take children and young men
to the Iberian Peninsula to learn Spanish, as the same triar stated in his 1539
letter to the King (115). Valverde also expressed the need to designate a special
location in the Spanish towns in the Indies in order to have alternative indoctri-
nation to that carried out in houses adjacent to churches (21). The idea was to
educate, within Catholic principles, the future lords of indigenous communities
(Solano 1993, 295),
Spanish historian Paulino Castaneda boldly states that: “La lengua siempre
fue considerada como indispensable para dar un paso en el mundo intiel. He
dicho siempre. No solo en 1492. En cualquier preparaci6n misionera el cono-
cimiento de las lenguas fue fundamental” (Language was always considered
essential to advance in the infidel world. | said a/ways, Not only in 1492. In
any missionary preparation the Knowledge of languages was fundamental) (29),
The experience with Muslim as well as Jewish communities in the Iberian Pen-
insula was decisive in approaching the Indies’ multilinguism.’ Linguistic poli-
cles were implemented in the Indies following those applied to other ethnic and
linguistic groups living in the Peninsula, such as Catalans and Basques: “Trato
y escuelas para los nifos y nifas indios, a cargo de sacristanes alfabetos que les
ensenen a leer y escribir: facilitando la difusion del castellano y la erradicacién
de sus lenguas y costumbres, El castellano, asi, seria una lengua general, tal
como se efectuo en Espafa con areas catalanas y vascas” (Manners and schools
for indian boys and girls in charge of literate sacristans who teach them to
read and write, facilitating the spread of Castilian and the eradication of their
 SPANISH IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY i

languages and customs. In this way, Castilian would end up being a general
language, in the same was as it was in Spain with Catalan and Basque areas)
(Solano 298-99). The Spanish experiences in Africa and the Canary Islands,
where similar linguistic situations were found, were also considered valuable.‘
The way of dealing with the lack of linguistic communication in the An-
des speaks of previous similar activities in other places. This is evident when
observing how the matter was approached, either by individual Spaniards, or
by corporate entities such as the Royal administration, or by religious orders.
Invariably, everyone knew what to do. They were simply repeating what they
had done before: impose the Spanish language and customs while battling the
other’s languages and customs on every front.
The group of young men who underwent indoctrination were known as
“los muchachos de la doctrina” or “los muchachos que ensefian la doctrina”
(the doctrine boys or the boys who teach doctrine) (Husson 265). Children were
drawn into church schools not only to evangelize and hispanicize them, but
also, and mainly, to turn them into auxiliary clergy: “... sirviendo la escuela
para la promocion elitista de una parte de la poblacidn indigena [los hijos de
la nobleza] asf como a la formacion de personal auxiliar en las iglesias” (...
school serving for the elitist promotion of one part of the indigenous population
[children of nobility] as well as for the preparation of auxiliary personnel for
the churches) (Solano 295).
The first addresses or Requerimientos were read in Spanish by either sol-
diers or priests, to speakers of indigenous languages in the early Sixteenth cen-
tury. In the 1530s, there was a special Requerimiento written for the Peruvian
territory, a document known as “Requerimiento que se ha de hazer a los yndios
del Peru” (The Requerimiento that should be done to the Indians of Peru)
(Lisson Chaves 22). In this case, Spaniards counted on the assistance of in-
digenous interpreters when available, even though the “lenguas” scarcely knew
Spanish or even the languages into which they were interpreting (Castaneda
30).° Friars resorted to symbols like the crosses they were carrying, and later
to drawings, pictures, and theater. They seldom transmitted their religious mes-
sages in the way it was supposed to be done, peacefully and lovingly, so that
Spanish authorities had to insist for centuries on this matter as evidenced by
their numerous decrees.’ A blatant example of the way these first communi-
cations were implemented is the Requerimiento,* written following Patronato
directives “en virtud de ser territorios reconquistados al Islam” (by virtue of
being territories reconquered from Islam) in the late Fifteenth and early Six-
teenth centuries (Garrido 21), and later because the Indies were believed to be
territories conquered from the devil.’
8 LYDIA FOSSA

Spaniards had dealt before with infidel communities who spoke other lan-
guages, as their Reconquest experiences show us. They were amply aware that
in order to evangelize properly, a language common to cleric and catechumen
had to be used. They also knew that mutual language knowledge was not a
short-term project, and that indigenous individuals had to be evangelized before
they died. Having no language in common, Spaniards resorted to violence. One
of the first steps taken by clerics and laymen alike was to destroy the natives’
temples and adoratories as well as their idolatrous images.'® The second was to
outlaw their religious customs and ceremonies as evidenced in the 1509 Jns-
truccion given to Diego Colon by King Ferdinand V:

... habéis de dar orden que los indios no hagan las fiestas ni cerimonias que solian
hacer si por ventura las hacen, sino que tengan en su vivir la forma que las otras
gentes de nuestros reinos, y esto se ha de procurar en ellos poco a poco y con mu-
cha mafia, sin los escandalizar ni maltratar. (Morales Padron 82)

(... you should mandate that Indians do not celebrate the festivities or the cer-
emonies they used to if they celebrate at all. They should incorporate in their living
the ways of other peoples in our kingdoms, and this should be little by little and
pursued with great tact, without scandalizing or mistreating them.)

Under papal authority, any Christian Spaniard could command infidels or

barbarous peoples under tyrannical rule to abstain from their rites and customs
when they were not in accordance with the Catholic faith (Vitoria 231). In addi-
tion to changing their ceremonies and celebrations, King Fernando V informed
Diego Col6n in 1509 of the way in which the Indies’ inhabitants should live:

Ansimismo, porque Nos hobimos mandado al dicho comendador mayor que enten-
diese con mucha diligencia en que los indios de la dicha isla Espafiola viniesen [sic
for viviesen] juntamente en poblaciones como los nuestros naturales viven en estos
reinos y que cada uno tenga su casa aparte y mujeres e hijos, y heredad conocida;
sabréis lo que esta hecho en esto, y si estuviere algo por cumplir dello, trabajad
que se haga lo mas presto que pudiéredes, mandando hacer las poblaciones donde
mejor vos paresciere para el bien de los pobladores de ella . . . (82)

(Also, we ordered the said comendador mayor to take diligent care in that the
indians of the said island of Hispanola come [sic for live] together in towns as
our nationals live in these kingdoms, having each of them a separate house with
women and children and known property. You should be informed what has been
done on this matter, and if anything were still to be done regarding this matter, you
 SPANISH IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 9

will work towards it as fast as you can, ordering the towns to be built where in your
opinion would be better for the benefit of their inhabitants . . . )

One aspect which differs from those of the Reconquest was the absence of
towns or populated areas in America. In the “New World,” indigenous peoples
was scattered, derramados, all over the land. The concept of civitas was foreign
to them, as well as that of poligia. Poligia was the appropriate way to live in a
“republic of Christians,” that is, in a society formed by families that lived in a
specified location and that had economic bonds to a specific land or to the land
of the lord who ruled it. Thus, in order to enable evangelization when the Con-
quest had just ended, towns had to be built according to the Spanish style.
Along with these requirements, came the way Indians should dress and
carry themselves: “... ansimismo ha de procurar la persona suso dicha que
los indios se vistan e anden como hombres razonables” (“.. . also the person
Just mentioned should make certain that the Indians dress and carry themselves
as reasonable men) (82). Even the food they ate was put into question, and
Spanish food was mandated: “... por ser nuevamente convertidos a la fee y
no tener tantos manjares como los xpianos se les permite que puedan comer
carne y huevos queso etc [leche, manteca] en todo el otro tiempo de la qua-
resma y vigilias...’ (... since they are new converts to the faith and do not
have as many delicacies as Christians do they are allowed to eat meat and eggs,
cheese, etc. [milk, lard] during the remaining time of Lent and vigils... )
(Lisson Chaves 141). The 1509 Instruction commanded that Indians should fol-
low “reasonable” (meaning Spanish) customs in dress, and should also behave
in an appropriate manner, that is, as Spaniards.
The Leyes de Burgos (1512), known as the ordinances for the treatment of
the Indians, dictated by Ferdinand, the Catholic King were designed to attain
success in the evangelization of natives in the Caribbean. The reasons given by
the King made evident the need for the establishment of strict norms of social
behavior:

. el principal estorbo que tienen para no se enmendar de sus vicios y que la

doctrina no les aproveche ni en ellos imprima ni la tomen es tener sus asientos y
estancias tan lejos como los tienen y apartados de los lugares donde viven los espa-
fioles . . . porque al tiempo que los vienen a servir [a los espafioles], los doctrinen
y ensefien las cosas de nuestra fe como después de haber servido se vuelven a sus
estancias con estar apartadas y la mala inclinaci6n que tienen, olvidan luego todo
lo que les han ensefiado y tornan a su acostumbrada ociosidad y vicios y cuando
otra vez se vuelven a servir esté tan nuevos en la doctrina como de primero, . . . y
viendo que esto es tan contrario a nuestra fe y cuanto somos obligados a que por
10 LYDIA FOSSA

todas las vias y maneras del mundo que ser pueda se busque algun remedio...
(Morales Padron 312-13)

(... the main barrier they have for not amending their vices, allowing doctrine to
be useless to them since they do not adhere to it, is having their living quarters too
far from the places where Spaniards live . . When they come to serve [Spaniards],
and be taught the doctrine and other things of our faith after having served, they
return to where they live, and since they are so far away, and with the evil inclina-
tion they have, they soon forget everything they were taught and go back to their
usual laziness and vices. When again they return to serve, they are as new in the
doctrine as they were the first time, . . . and seeing that all this is so contrary to our
faith and since we are obliged to-ook for a remedy to this in all ways and manners
in the world... )

The ways of life found in the Indies, utterly different from those of the
invaders, were the source of numerous legal dispositions written with the
goal of transforming indigenous customs into what Spaniards believed were
“good manners,” the ways used in the Iberian Peninsula. A later Ordinance
from Charles I, dated in 1526, reiterated that the first thing to be done upon
arrival in new lands was “procurar, por lenguas de intérpretes que entiendan
los indios . . . cémo Nos les enviamos para los ensenar buenas costumbres . . .”
(your endeavor should be that Indians have to understand, through interpreters’
tongues, how We send you to teach them good manners . . . ) (Solano 16). The
Crown’s urgency was not only that natives had to be evangelized quickly, but
that they also had to transform the way they lived by adopting Spanish customs.
Christianity thus was not only a faith; it was also a way of life. New Christians
had to adopt both the faith and the mores.!!
In 1526 new Ordinances regarding the appropriate treatment of natives
were made public. King Charles I admonished the men in charge of “entries”
and “new discoveries” that:

... los descubrimientos y poblaciones que de aqui adelante se hubieren de hacer,

se hagan sin ofensa de Dios y sin muertes ni robos de los dichos indios y sin cau-
tivarlos por esclavos indebidamente de manera que el deseo que habemos tenido
y tenemos de ampliar nuestra santa fe y que los dichos indios e infieles vengan en
conocimiento della se haga sin cargo de nuestras conciencias y se prosiga nuestro
proposito y la intencién y obra de los Reyes Catélicos, nuestros abuelos y sefio-
res ... (Morales Padron 375)

(... the discoveries and settlements should be undertaken from now on without
offending God, and without the killings and robberies of the said Indians. and
 SPANISH IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 11

without holding them captive as slaves unlawfully, in a way that the wish we have
had and have of extending our sacred faith and that the said Indians reach their
knowledge should be done without charging our consciences, continuing with our
purpose and the intention and deeds of the Catholic Kings, our grandfathers and
lord Speen)

It goes on to specify, in very clear terms, that further killings, enslave-

ments, and other forms of oppression of the Indians would not be tolerated. The
King insisted that the true intentions of the Conquest were “ensefiar las buenas
costumbres . . . y a instruirlos en nuestra santa fe . . .” (teach good manners . . .
and instruct them in our sacred faith... ) (Morales Padrén 377).!* He clearly
indicated that the two issues were interrelated and also that the first was the
prerequisite for the latter. Learning the appropriate behavior would open up the
way to Catholicism. In this early period, the use of interpreters was expected
and encouraged as the best means for religious instruction.
In Francisco Pizarro’s Capitulation signed by the Queen of Spain in 1529,
the need to take priests with him was reiterated.'’ Spanish authorities had by
then realized that priests were needed to temper the greed of newcomers and
the subsequent violence that surged if gold was withheld from them in any way,
imagined or real.'* The riches were not only anticipated by soldiers and sailors;
the Hacienda, or Spanish tribute agency, was also in pursuit of wealth. Officers
from the Real Hacienda were mentioned before the clergymen, underscoring
their importance and the fact that no expedition would be complete without
them. The Crown wanted the riches and was willing to exchange evangelization
efforts, through the Patronato, for gold. In this Spanish equation, the Crown
won (riches) and the indigenous peoples won (salvation) while the clergy and
the soldiers were left to manage with the surplus, usually independent Indian
labor. For the secular man, this was not negligible, while the religious commu-
nities would thrive on native labor and diezmos as they fulfilled their obligations
of delivering the true faith to the locals.
By 1541, Spaniards had been in the area for almost ten years. Archbishop
Jer6nimo de Loayza, O.P., continued reminding them that in order to justify
their presence in the Indies all of them, laymen and clerics, had to contribute to
make the evangelization pledge a reality:

“ _ Por quanto el titulo y fin del descubrimiento y conquista destas partes a sido la
predicaci6n del evangelio y conversion de los naturales dellas al conoscimiento de
dios nuestro sefior y aunque esto generalmente obliga a todos los xpianos que aca
han pasado, especialmente y de oficio yncumbe a los perlados en sus diocesys...”
(Lisson Chaves 134)
iby LYDIA FOSSA

(... Since the title and end of the discovery and conquest of these parts has been
the preaching of the gospel and the conversion of natives into the knowledge of God
our Lord and even though this generally obliges all Christians who have passed
here, it especially and professionally concerns the bishops in their dioceses . . . )

This insistence on the same objectives was due in part to the fact that new
heathen ethnic groups were being discovered by Spaniards and new territories
were being incorporated into the Viceroyalty of New Castile.
The Nuevas Leyes, written in 1542 and made public in 1543, delineated the
same objectives of the discoveries and colonization, stressing a protective ap-
proach towards indigenous populations.'° They spoke in an admonishing tone
towards those who failed to treat Indians well. This document encompasses an
interesting difference with respect to previous ones: it exhibits a clear intention
to accept some of the natives’ customs regarding land tenure, as if to compen-
sate for previous totalizing prohibitions and interdictions:

... que no se den lugar a que en los pleitos de entre yndios o con ellos se hagan
processos ordinarios ni aya alargas, como suele acontescer por la malicia de algu-
nos abogados y procuradores sino que sumariamente sean determinados, guardan-
do sus usos y costunbres no siendo claramente ynjustos . . . (Morales Padron 434)

(... it should not be allowed that disputes between Indians or against them turn
into ordinary legal processes nor they should be overly extended, as happens
through the wickedness of some lawyers and solicitors, but those disputes should
be summarily determined, in keeping with their uses and customs when they are
not clearly unfair. . . )

This modification of the attitude observed in previous documents owes

its presence to the indefatigable efforts of some outstanding Dominican friars
such as Bartolomé de Las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria. These two men, and
other members of the Order, such as Domingo de Santo Tomas, and Tomas de
San Martin, as well as educated laymen such as Polo Ondegardo and the self-
taught historian Pedro de Cieza de Le6n, supported the idea that indigenous
customs not interfering with Catholicism were to be allowed as long as they
did not “scandalize” or alienate clergy in particular, and Spaniards in general.
This change in attitude gave indigenous peoples more opportunities to continue
celebrating some of their festivities. This tendency to permit some ceremonies
that were not immediately identified as sacred or “infidel” had an important
impact on judicial standards through the acknowledgement of Indians’ Jueros,
 SPANISH IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 13

especially those regarding land tenure and possession, and the ensuing Spanish
litigation.

Evangelization without Language

It soon became evident that land and gold could be obtained without much
linguistic difficulty. However, when it came to evangelizing, things were com-
pletely different.'® The first contacts with Andean indigenous populations in the
1530s had been made with the intervention of interpreters, with a modest level
of success (Fossa, Narrativas). Those first interactions consisted mainly of the
Spanish presenting themselves as vassals of the Spanish King and followers of
the Church of Jesus Christ.'’ Some objects were exchanged, and large meals
regularly provided by the “hosts” were lavishly enjoyed by both locals and for-
eigners.'* Thereafter, Spanish soldiers only wanted to know where the gold was
and how they could obtain it:

“.. . [Candia] dixo que vio cantaros de plata y estar labrando a muchos plateros y
que por algunas paredes del tenplo avia planchas de oro y plata y que las mujeres
que Ilamavan del Sol, que heran muy hermosas. Locos estaban de plazer los espa-
foles de oyr tantas cosas; esperavan en Dios de gozar su parte dello.” (Cieza 60)

(... [Candia] said he saw silver pitchers and many silversmiths doing their craft,
and that some walls in the temple were gold- and silver-plated, and that the women
who were said to be of the Sun were very beautiful. The Spaniards were mad with
pleasure of hearing so many things, and they waited in God to have their share of
it Su)

After 1533, when the soldiers had settled in the Andean region, few mem-
bers of the clergy were available in Ciudad de los Reyes (Lima) to perform the
desired and ordered evangelization. Vicente de Valverde, the Dominican friar
who accompanied Pizarro in Cajamarca, was his cousin (Pérez 44) and political
ally (Pérez 54). He was one of the few clergymen active in those years, though
his activities were reduced to destroying natives’ idols and temples:’”

Y como los Ingas reynaron en esta tierra y sefiorearon este valle aunque por ellos
fue mandado edificar en él templo del sol tan grande y principal como solian en
las demas partes no dexaron de hazer sus ofrendas y sacrificios a este Guaribilca.
Lo qual todo assi lo uno como lo otro esta deshecho y ruynado y Ileno de grandes
hervacales y malezas porque entrando en este valle el governador don Francisco
14 LYDIA FOSSA

de Valverde quebro las figuras

losrro
yPica
dizen los indios que el obispo fray Vicente
ydolos. (Cieza 244)

(And as the Incas ruled in this land and were lords of this valley, even though they
had had the large and important temple of the Sun built as they used to do in other
parts, they did not stop making their offerings and sacrifices to the Guaribilca. All
that, this as well as the other, is now destroyed and ruined and all covered by tall
weeds and brush because upon entering this valley Governor Francisco Pizarro,
Bishop Vicente de Valverde tore down the figures and the idols, Indians say.)

A second source, Fray Juan Meléndez of the Dominican Order (Pérez 67),
confirms Cieza’s information and adds: “... ni fue sola en este genero esta
hazafia del padre Fr. Vicente que cuantas huacas hallaba por el camino las pi-
saba y echaba por el suelo (Ilaman huacas los indios no solamente a los idolos
sino a todos los lugares adonde los adoran . . . )levantando su celo en todas par-
tes el estandarte santisimo de la cruz...” (... this deed of father Fra Vicente
was not an isolated event in this category, since every huaca found on the road
was taken down and stomped over [Indians call huaca not only the idols but
also all the sites where they adore them . . ] raising with his zeal everywhere
the most sacred banner of the cross . . . )(Pérez 67). Other religious orders were
aware of these activities. An Augustinian friar wrote circa 1561: “No por esto
digo que las otras 6érdenes como el Sefior Santo Domingo y Sant Francisco no
an travaxado muncho y sacado munchos ydolos y en la predicacion del evange-
lio hecha como varones apostdlicos” (This is not to say that other orders such
as that of Lord Saint Dominic and Saint Francis have not worked much and
removed many idols, or that their preaching of the gospels has been done as one
would expect of apostolic men) (San Pedro 9). 7°
In addition to temple destruction and image desecration, Valverde was per-
forming his evangelical duty through sermons that were translated by interpret-
eis:

Fray Vicente va derecho a coricancha, casa hecha por los incas antiquisimos para
el hacedor. Al fin la ley de dios y su santo evangelio tan deseado entré a tomar
posesion de la nueva vifia, que estaba usurpada por los Enemigos antiguos. Alli
predica todo el tiempo como otro santo Tomas el apéstol, patron de este reino,
sin descansar, con el celo de ganar almas haciéndolos convertirse, bautizando a
los curacas con hisopos no mas, porque no pudieron echar agua a cada uno. Que
si hubiera sabido la lengua hubiera sido mucha su diligencia, mas por intérprete
hablaba. (Santa Cruz 129; Pérez 67)
 SPANISH IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 15

(Friar Vicente goes directly to the Coricancha, a house built by the very ancient
Incas for the Maker. Finally, the law of God and his so desired sacred gospel en-
tered and took possession of the new vineyard that had been taken by the ancient
Enemies. There he preaches all the time, as a second Saint Thomas the Apostle,
patron of this kingdom, tirelessly, with the zeal of gaining souls, converting them,
baptizing the kuraka only with hyssops because they could not pour water on each
one. Had he known the language his diligence would have been great, however he
spoke only through an interpreter.)

In 1534 Fray Vicente Valverde traveled to Spain (Aranibar 870), and ar-
rived in September 1535 (Pérez 97). His application to be a bishop, whose seat
would be in Cuzco, was presented at that time although he stayed in the Penin-
sula until November 1537. While in Spain, Valverde recruited a group of eight
Dominican priests who arrived in Peru in May or June 1537 (Pérez 97). Bishop
Valverde arrived in Cuzco in November 1538 (Pérez 97). During his absence,
another Dominican priest had visited Peru.
Bishop Tomas de Berlanga arrived in Lima in 1535 with two missions: to
check the accounting systems of the Conquerors to ensure that the King had
received what he was due of the conquest’s pillage, and to observe to what
extent Pizarro had complied with the Capitulacién he had received in 1529 re-
garding the Catholic instruction of the natives as established by the Patronato.
Once he had finished his investigation, Bishop Berlanga wrote a Requerimiento
for Pizarro, admonishing him for not having distributed the Indians to their
encomenderos, except within his own family and for not having established the
tax they had to pay. He also stated that “se ha descuidado la instrucci6n de los
indios en la fe y urge llevarla a efecto, pues ‘los padres de San Francisco han
dicho que, si no dan que hagan, que se irian’” (the instruction of Indians in the
faith has been neglected and it urgently needs to be undertaken, for the Francis-
cans fathers have said that they would leave if it is not made to happen) (Pérez
63). No real evangelization had taken place in New Castile, as far as high-rank-
ing church officers were concerned.
Most of the information available regarding evangelization in the second
half of the 1530s revolves around the figure of Fray Vicente Valverde. There are
few documents that cover his years in Spain during this decade or in the New
World except for letters he sent to Spain when he was in Cuzco as a Bishop
in 1538 and 1539. By that time, he had also been named Protector de Indios
(Lisson Chaves 20) as had been included in his selection of manuscripts from
the Archivo de Indias, a Memorial attributed to Valverde. It is undated and un-
signed, but bears a note saying: “esto para quando el obispo de los Reyes vino y
6rdenes que dio para la doctrina” (this for when Bishop of Los Reyes came and
16 LYDIA FOSSA

orders he gave for the doctrine). This note suffices to date the document around
1536 and to identify Vicente Valverde as the one who had written and presented
it to Spanish authorities. This Memorial was most likely written in anticipation
of what Bishop Berlanga would find in Los Reyes:

—Que se embien luego Religiosos de las hordenes mendicantes para que hagan
monasterios y ensefien a los yndios.
~Que los hijos de los caciques y sefiores, siendo pequefios, esten cierto tiempo en
las casas de los religiosos hasta que sean ensefiados para que ellos ensefien a los
otros en sus pueblos.
—Que en los pueblos de los xpianos aya, junto a la yglesia, una casa que sea como
escuela, donde esten y residan tambien los hijos de los caciques y que aya una
persona particular que los dotrine y ensefie alli porque seria posible que ubiese
tantos que no se pudiesen tener en los monesterios.
—Que los que tuvieren copia de yndios sean obligados a tener con ellos quien los
doctrine en las cosas de nuestra sancta fee catolica y, a los que tuvieren pocos, que
tengan todos juntos un clerigo en comarca de sus yndios, donde todos se Ileguen
a ser doctrinados de manera que por toda la tierra aya aparejo para que los yndios
sean ensefiados. Ay mucha necesidad desto en todas las tierras de los yndios como
vemos que entre los xpianos que aca son en Espafa la tienen, con ser xpianos.
(Lisson Chaves 20-21)

(—Clergymen of the mendicant orders should be sent soon to build monasteries and
teach Indians.
—Children of Caciques and Lords, while small, shall remain for a period of time in
the clergymen’s houses until they have been taught, so they can teach others in
their towns.
—In Christian towns there should be a house to be used as school next to the church
where the children of caciques will stay and live. An appointed person should
indoctrinate and teach them because there might be so many that the monasteries
will not be large enough to house them.
—Those who have numerous Indians should be obliged to have someone indoctri-
nate them in the things of our sacred faith, and, those who have few, should come
together to have a cleric where their Indians live, and where all of them can go
to be indoctrinated in such a way that in all the land there be arrangements for
teaching the Indians. There is a great need of this in all Indian lands in the same
way that among Christians who are here in Spain)

This document spelled out the policy that would guide evangelization and
hispanization activities in the Andean region. It was a plan of action that first
stated the need to have more priests. Those priests would have monasteries
built where doctrinal lessons could be imparted to the children of principales.
 SPANISH IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 7

Then, he mentioned that in every Christians town, adjacent to the church, a

house should be built for the same indoctrination tasks, always singling out
children as their students. Thirdly, Valverde indicated that those who had In-
dians in their charge had to evangelize them. Encomenderos could do this in
two ways: explaining the dogmas of the Church and teaching the prayers to the
natives under their care if they were few, or hiring a cleric to do it if the Indians
were numerous. The responsibility of Catholic indoctrination was then shared
by encomenderos and clerics. In the 1530s, there were very few clerics and a
large number of encomenderos, so it was mainly the responsibility of the latter
to indoctrinate native populations.
Valverde did not mention languages in his plan, but since he wanted chil-
dren to live with Catholic priests fresh from Spain and learn the doctrine from
them, one can infer that he meant evangelization in Spanish to native children.
Valverde himself never learned native languages and was compelled to resort to
interpreters to translate his sermons and to aid him in hearing confessions.
In a letter Valverde wrote to the King in 1539, he recalled that in his trip
to Spain in 1534 he took “ocho o nueve indios ansi chicos como grandes para
lenguas . . . y con poner toda la diligencia posible en curallos no me quedo sino
uno...” (eight or nine Indians, both young and old to be interpreters . . . and
despite being diligent in caring for them, only one was spared...) (Lisson
Chaves 115). Besides the information regarding the transport of Indians to the
Peninsula, I wish to underscore the interest of Valverde in having interpreters
trained and taught in Spain. At the end of that same paragraph, Valverde told
the King that there was no more need to take natives abroad to teach them
Spanish because “aca se pueden ensefiar sin que se Ileven a esas partes, no se
devria sacar de la tierra” (they can be taught here without taking them to those
parts [Spain]; they should not be taken from the land) (115). Priests needed
interpreters to evangelize adults, for the translation of sermons, and to hear con-
fessions. These early sermons in Spanish are barely comprehensible today. One
can only imagine them “translated” into native languages by unskilled /enguas
who were also new to Catholicism, and wonder about the impact those strange
advocations/admonitions had on recent converts. Sermons were preached using
theatrical and rhetorical strategies to people who had a different protocol for
the spoken word.”!
What Valverde’s message meant was that the regular clergy would be re-
sponsible for the indoctrination of children in Spanish while secular clergy or
doctrineros would do the work for encomenderos. Thus, he separated his flock
into two sections, that of the children and that of adults, each with a differ-
ent linguistic approach.” Within the group of children or young men, there
18 LYDIA FOSSA

was another differentiation, that of class. Children of principales would attend

daily classes in houses adjacent to churches or live with the friars; children of
the commoners would be indoctrinated by clerics or encomenderos in church
atria. Secular clergy and encomenderos would deal with adult evangelization in
native languages through the intervention of interpreters until they themselves
learned local languages. The same had been done before in New Spain, where
the Franciscan friars developed this policy (Garrido 56-58), adapting it from
their experience with the Moorish population in Granada.
Valverde also had good news regarding evangelization in his 1539 letter to
the King: “aca ay fundadas iglesias y muchos christianos y se ensenan las cosas
de Dios con toda diligencia y cuidado .. .” (here there are founded churches
and many Christians and the things of God are taught with all diligence and
care...) (Lisson Chaves 115). However, he is contradicted by the Licentiate
Martel de Santoyo, who wrote in 1542 that nothing had been done in regard
to catechization (conversion and indoctrination) by clerics who had not even
learned the indigenous languages.*
The famous Dominican Francisco de Vitoria, in 1536, asked the members
of the academic milieu of Salamanca, in his Relection De Jndiis, quoting Saint
Paul: “;Acaso, dice, no han oido?” (Perchance, he says, you have not heard?)
(Vitoria 206). Those who had not heard were the indigenous populations. Vito-
ria was saying that understanding is another way of interpreting “hearing.” Fur-
ther, that not having heard or understood is not the listeners’ fault, but rather the
fault of those who tell. Lack of hearing and understanding are in the same cate-
gory of causes for the invincible ignorance attributed to the natives: “Esos tales
que nunca oyeron hablar de la fe, por muy pecadores que por otra parte sean,
ignoran invenciblemente, luego su ignorancia no es pecado . .. si no se les ha
predicado la fe, ignoran invenciblemente, porque no pueden conocerla”’ (Those
ones who never heard about faith, as sinners as they can otherwise be, ignore
invicibly, thus their ignorance is not a sin . . . if faith has not been preached to
them, they invincibly ignore because they cannot know it) (Vitoria 206). He
was also referring to the fact that there were no priests in the Indies before
Columbus and to the poor communication between priests and non-believers
afterwards. Vitoria stressed the importance of determining in which language
people were going to be evangelized because their hearing and understanding
and then accepting the word of God depended on that choice. If the word of
God was spoken in a language foreign to those hearing it, how could they be
held responsible for believing, or even understanding, what was said? 4
This is the position most religious orders would hold dear along the first
 SPANISH IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 19

half of the Sixteenth century: teach the natives in their language so they could
hear and understand.» That is why Duverger affirmed:”°

La primera decisi6n estratégica tomada por los misioneros es la de recurrir, siste-

maticamente, a las lenguas indigenas. Se podra objetar que se trata de una elec-
ci6n puramente pragmitica, dictada por las necesidades de la comunicacién. Eso
es absolutamente falso. Se trata de una opcidn que contiene toda una filosofia del
apostolado. Los religiosos hubieran perfectamente podido hacer como los conquis-
tadores: hablar en castellano con los indios. Eligiendo expresarse en las lenguas
del pais, los franciscanos se distinguen netamente de los espafioles presentes en
México y se construyen asi una ‘imagen’ cuidadosamente diferenciada. (163)

(The missionaries’ first strategic decision is to systematically resort to indigenous

languages. This fact can be contested, saying that it is a purely pragmatic choice
dictated by communication needs. That is absolutely false. It is an option that con-
tains an apostolic philosophy. Clergymen could very well have done as conquerors
did: speak Spanish to the Indians. In choosing to express themselves in the lan-
guages of the country, Franciscans appear as distinct from other Spaniards present
in Mexico, thus constructing a carefully differentiated ‘image.’)

This is also true of the Dominicans, the order that had the most friars in the
Andean region between 1536 and 1556. In order to overcome that invincible
ignorance, priests should speak the word of God in the language of the Incas.
This was the position of the Dominican clergy, followers of Vitoria, and other
great thinkers within their Order. From this position, they built their argument
of first learning the language of the inhabitants of the Indies to evangelize the
adults:

D’une facon générale, les missionnaires espagnols aux Indes préféraient apprendre
les langues de leurs ouailles indigénes plut6t que de leur enseigner le castillan.
Pour les Dominicaines, qui avaient plus que d’ autres le souci d’une évangélisation
patiente, progressive et approfondie, la connaissance de ces langues était indispen-
sable en vue de l’administration des sacrements, notamment du baptéme et de la
pénitence. (Saint-Lu 42)

(In a general sense, the Spanish missionaries in the Indies preferred to learn the
languages of their indigenous flock more than teach them Castilian. For the Do-
minicans, who cherished more than others a patient, progressive and deep evange-
lization, the knowledge of those languages was utterly important, considering the
sacraments’ administration, especially Baptism and Penitence.)
20 LYDIA FOSSA

Concurrently, Dominicans evangelized the children of the principales in

their convents or their dwellings and taught them Spanish. Some of those chil-
dren were taken to Spain to be catechized in Spanish. In this respect, Milhou
suggests that evangelization in indigenous languages is a transitory situation that
whould progressively retreat in favor of hispanization. He adds: “C’est pour-
quoi le Conseil des Indes continua, sans se faire probablement trop d’illusions,
de préconiser a la fois l’enseignement du castillan, but ultime, et d’encourager
l’apprentissage des langues indienne par les religieux et les curés doctrineros”
(That is why the Council of the Indies continues, probably without harboring
too many hopes, supporting simultaneously the teaching of Castilian, their ul-
timate aim, and encouraging clergymen and doctrinero priests to learn indige-
nous languages) (35-36). I agree that the ulterior aim is hispanization, but I
believe evangelization in Spanish and indigenous languages was a double-sided
policy that simultaneously worked to achieve results in the minimal amount of
time possible.
Nonetheless, it was soon evident that spreading the word of Christ in
languages other than Spanish caused great confusion among the indigenous
catechumens, for their languages had no words for the main Christian con-
ceptualizations and dogmas. This apparent deficiency provoked that: “. . . les
constitutions synodales et mandements épiscopaux de |’ Espagne des XVIéme
and XVIléme siécles insistaient sur la nécesité de la cathéquisation et de la
prédication dans les langues vulgaires de la péninsule” (. . . the Synod consti-
tutions and bishop instructions of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century Spain
insisted on the need of cathequization and preaching in the vulgar languages of
the Peninsula) (37). In the 1540s, it was still quite difficult for priests to com-
municate with “Indians” despite their efforts to learn native languages and to
hispanize the recent converts.
In 1541, in Ciudad de los Reyes, Archbishop Loayza instructed his clergy,
and Christians in general, to impart the teachings of the Church in any way
possible: “... en la dicha yglesia se junten para . . . dotrinalos en las cosas de
nuestra santa fee y conoscimiento de dios nuestro sefor; por manera que a los
dichos indios se les dira como lo entiendan que . . .” (. . . in the said church they
should get together for . . . indoctrination in the things of our sacred faith and
knowledge of God our Lord; the said Indians should be told in a way they un-
derstand that... ) (Lisson Chaves 136). And also: “.. . les hagan entender en
la mejor manera que se pudiere la general obligacion que los hombres tenemos
a dios por su suma bondad . . . platicandoles el misterio y razones de la encar-
nacion...” (... they should be made to understand in the best possible way
 SPANISH IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 21

the general obligation that as men we have towards God for His supreme good-
ness . . . talking about the mystery and reasons of the encarnation . . . ) (136). In
the early days of the first half of the Sixteenth century this meant evangelizing
through drawings and paintings shown to natives, and later through theatrical
exhibitions would complete the range of teaching materials utilized. As late as
the Seventeenth century, Guaman Poma de Ayala believed it was necessary to
convey religious ideas through paintings: “. . . y asf en las iglesias y templos de
Dios haya curiosidad y muchas pinturas de los santos, y en cada iglesia haya un
juicio pintado alli, muestre la venida del Sefior al juicio, el cielo y el mundo y
las penas del infierno para que sea testigo del cristiano pecador” (. . . and so in
the churches and temples of God there should be particular care and diligence
and many paintings of the saints, and in each church there should be a Final
Judgement painted there to show the coming of our Lord to the Judgement, the
heavens, and the world, and the suffering in Hell so that He [el Sefior] can be a
witness of the Christian sinner) (547-48).”’ There were still very few “lenguas”
friars could count on.
Loayza instructed those who undertook the task of teaching Christianity to
the natives to transform those people of “poor understanding”—“‘los naturales
de estas partes son gentes de poco entendimiento” (—indigenous peoples of
these parts are people of little understanding) (Lisson Chaves 138)—into active
Christians through the use of any and all means accessible to them.

The Colonial Hispanization of Indigenous Languages

Dominican priests, following Saint Paul’s lead in the practice of evangelization

in maternal languages, a time-honored Church tradition, started learning those
languages to be able to instruct natives in their own tongues (Milhou 36). This
project, though urgent, was long-term. Priests soon observed that Tawantinsuyu
was a “mosaic” of languages (Mannheim 2), and that some of those languages,
three or four, were used and could continue to be used as “general languages.’””*
Those common languages were the ones Dominicans and Mercedaries started
learning. Augustinians and Jesuits would later follow suit. The urgency of the
matter and its importance for Spain and for Rome sanctioned this avenue as
adequate and practical.
By 1541, many cartillas (primers) in native general languages, Quechua,
Aymara, and Puquina, were being used in evangelization. In his Instruction
of that year, the Dominican Archbishop Loayza ordered doctrineros to stop
22 LYDIA FOSSA

using the cartillas in the general languages. They were to be replaced with the
ones then in use in Spain, until a model cartilla in native languages could be
developed:

_.. somos ynformados que con santo y virtuoso zelo se han hecho algunas cartillas
en las lenguas de los naturales donde se contienen los principios de nuestra fee y
porque aun no nos consta que las dichas cartillas o algunas dellas este traduzida y
corregida conforme a la propiedad y sygnificacion de la lengua latina o de nuestro
Romance castellano; por ende, queriendo proveer en lo susodicho como en cosa
que al servicio de Dios nuestro sefior y al descargo de nuestra conciencia y officio
tanto ymporta, mandamos, so pena de excomunion mayor Jatae sententie a todos
los que, como dicho es, al presente estan doctrinando los naturales o adelante fue-
ren nombrados para ello asi en esta cibdad de los Reyes como en todo nuestro
Arcobispado que doctrinen y ensefien los dichos naturales en el estilo general que
es en la lengua latina o en Romance castellano conforme a lo contenido en las car-
tillas que de espafia vienen ympresas y por el presente no husen de las dichas carti-
llas hechas en su lengua fasta tanto que por nos juntamente con los autores dellas y
otras personas que entiendan bien su lengua sean vistas y examinadas y de las que
asi estan hechas se reduzgan y hagan una. (Lisson Chaves 138-39)

(.... we have been informed that with saintly and virtuous zeal some reading prim-
ers where the principles of our faith are contained have been prepared in the lan-
guages of the natives, and since we cannot certify that the said reading primers or
some of them have been translated and proofread according to the propriety and
significance of our Latin language or our Castilian romance, thus in the interest
of providing in the above said as in something that is of so much importance in
the service of God our Lord and in the relieving of our conscience and office, we
rule, under penalty of major excommunication latae sententie to all who, as said, at
present are indoctrinating locals or would be appointed to that task in the future in
this city of Los Reyes as in all our Archbishopry to indoctrinate and teach the said
natives in the general style which is in Latin or in Castilian romance according to
the content of the reading primers that are printed in Spain and that at the present
time should not use the primers in their [indigenous] language until they have been
seen and examined by us with their authors and other persons who understand well
their language, and all doctrinal primers that have been made should be reduced to
only one.)

This was one of the first official briefings in which the quality of transla-
tions was questioned. More importantly, with the doubt of having or not having
an orthodox version of Christian dogma in native languages, there emerged an
attitude of suspicion towards indigenous languages. This suspicion rested on the
 SPANISH IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 23

perception of their intrinsic limitation to faithfully express Christian ideas. This

dubious feeling was corroborated and sanctioned as true when clerics studied
indigenous languages and acquired a sizable vocabulary.
Fray Domingo de Santo Tomas, another member of the Dominican Or-
der, arrived in Peru in the late 1530s. Shorthly thereafter, he started compiling
his Quechua Vocabulary, and composing his Quechua Grammar. He had been
working on these books for several years when Pedro de Cieza met him in
1548-49, and mentioned the work in his Primera Parte.*? Santo Tomas’ Lexi-
con o vocabulario de la lengua general del Peri was published in 1560 in Se-
ville, followed that same year by the Arte y Grammatica. In his “Introduction”
to the latter, he stated that he had been writing for fifteen years, between 1540
and 1555 (1995, 6). Santo Tomas was called El Nebrija indiano (Cerr6n-Palo-
mino vii), and compared favorably to the prestigious Fifteenth-century author
Gregorio Martinez, another Dominican (Cerrén-Palomino xv). His effort was
enormous, since fifteen years after the Conquest and ten years after his arrival
in Andean lands, he completed a bilingual Vocabulary of 354 pages long with
approximately 30 entries per page.
Santo Tomas was also the first of many who “translated Spanish ideas into
Quechua” (Itier 1995: 321). Thus, he and others who followed put together
a “repertoire d’équivalences sémantiques a l’usage des prédicateurs” (reper-
tory of semantic equivalences which preachers use) (323), forcing Quechua to
express concepts and ideas that had no representation in that language. Santo
Tomas utilized paraphrases, which incorporated unprecedented uses of roots
and suffixes; similes, which changed the speaker’s perspective from Andean to
European; and loans, which replaced undesired native lexical items. All these
translation strategies were utilized to convey Catholic ideas in that “heathen”
language. In many ways, “general Quechua,” as spoken by missionaries, turned
into a different language.*’ A “manipulated language” is how César Itier de-
scribes it, calling it Colonial Quechua to stress its differentiation from the ad-
ministrative language of Inca times.”!
Santo Tomas advised on the absence of many indigenous words from his
Lexicon, explaining the reasons for it as follows:

Item. Ay en este nuestro vocabulario falta de muchos terminos de arboles, de semi-

llas, de fructas, de aves, de pexes, de animales, de officios, de instrumentos dellos,
de generos de armas, diversidad de vestidos, de manjares, de las cosas de nuestra
sancta fe catholica, de ornamentos de yglesias, de atavios de casas, de diversidad
de vasijas. Y brevemente, carecen los Indios de todos los vocablos de las cosas que
no tenian ni se usavan en aquellas tierras, como assi mismo nosotros no tenemos
24 LYDIA FOSSA

terminos de las que no ay en la nuestra y ay en otras. Y assi como en este caso noso-
tros usamos de los terminos proprios de las otras naciones para significar aquellas
cosas, assi ellos usan de los nuestros . . . (14-15)

(Item: In this our vocabulary many terms are lacking, those that refer to trees, to
seeds, fruits, fowl, fishes, animals, crafts and their instruments, types of weapons,
diversity of dresses, of foods, of the things of our sacred Catholic faith, of church
ornaments, of house decorations, of the diversity of bowls. Briefly, Indians lack all
the terms of the things they did not have or use in those lands, the same as we do
not have terms for those which we do not have in ours and exist in others. And, as
in this case, we use the proper terms of other nations to mean those things, in the
same way they use ours...)

He also announced that he was including words of other indigenous lan-

guages that had current use in the “general language”:

Item como esta lengua (aunque es usada y general por toda la tierra) no es natural
en toda, como esta dicho, estan mezclados con los terminos della y recebidos y usa-
dos ya generalmente quasi de todos, muchos terminos de provincias particulares,
de los quales tambien pongo yo algunos en el vocabulario porque assi se usan ya
comunmente. (15)

(Item. As this language [even though it is used and general in all the area] is not
natural in all of it, as said before, there are terms received from other particular
provinces, mixed with those of this language that are used generally by almost
every one. I am including some of them in the vocabulary because they are thus
used commonly.)

Spanish terms were used for Spanish ideas that could not be conveyed with
Quechua words” without risking undesirable associations with former deities.
These loans, coming from a synthetic language, were subjected to Quechua’s
agglutinant syntax, making it sound awkward, foreign.
The Vocabulario had a curious effect on indigenous readers, especially
those hispanicized and indoctrinated, such as Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala:
“...compuso otro libro y lo escribié el maestro fray Domingo de Santo Tomas
de la Orden de Santo Domingo . . . libro de vocabulario de la lengua del Cuzco,
Chinchaysuyo, Quichiua todo revuelto con la lengua espafiola...” (... [he]
composed another book and it was written by Master Fra Domingo de Santo
Tomas of the Order of Saint Dominic . . . book of vocabulary of the languages
of Cuzco, also of Chinchaysuyo, Quichiwa, all mixed up with the Spanish lan-
 SPANISH IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 25

guage...) (876). This commentary speaks of the awkwardness of the “Que-

chua misionero,” as felt by native speakers of indigenous languages. One can
only imagine the additional effects of this kind of artificial mingling of two or
more languages when used in sermons. Vicente Rafael has studied these issues
in the Philippines, and some of his conclusions can be applied to the Andes:
“Missionary discourse produces in the native devotees a series of mild shocks
that they attend to in a state of distraction. They give in to colonial authority,
but they do not give up. Yet they are able to dodge the priest’s message only to
the extent that they are able to acknowledge words and things Spanish at the
horizon of their own thoughts” (213). Reluctance or laziness to speak native
languages correctly in front of indigenous audiences, or simple ignorance of
those languages on the part of missionaries and doctrineros alike had the added
impact of further estranging the audience: “The result, however, was a kind of
untranslatable discourse that produced not interest but an interminable oscilla-
tion between boredom and random violence” (214).
The author of the Lexicon unequivocally stated that he followed Antonio de
Nebrija, not his Gramdtica castellana (1492) as was hastily inferred by many
researchers and critics,** but rather his Gramdtica latina (1481): “... como el
Antonio de Nebrissa, var6n eruditisimo y de gran ingenio, dize en el prdlogo
del suyo que de la lengua latina hizo . . .” and more explicitly: “.. . este arte se
haze para ecclesiasticos que tienen noticia de la lengua latina; va conforme a
la arte della [de Nebrissa]” (... as Antonio de Nebrissa’s, man of great erudi-
tion and inventiveness, says in the prologue of the one he made of the Latin
language ... and more explicitly: . . . this art is made for clergymen who have
knowledge of the Latin language; it conforms the art of that one [Nebrissa’s])
(Santo Tomas 15). The fact is that the Gramdtica follows a Latin pattern that
molds the language: “premunidos del esquema, que funciona como anteojera,
se tiende a ver, en los hechos lingiifsticos por describir, s6lo aquello que cabe
dentro de la horma. Lo que no encaja dentro de ella o es simplemente silen-
ciado (y a veces ni siquiera advertido) 0, lo que es peor, acomodado de modo
que encuentre cabida” (having conceived a plan, it functions as a blinder that
forces the author to see, in the linguistic facts to be described, only those who
fit in it. That which does not fit in the plan is simply silenced [sometimes it is
not even noticed] or, what is worse, it is accommodated in a way that allows
for its fitting) (Cerrén-Palomino xix). This is why Franz Boas in 1940 observed
“la modification syntaxique des langues amerindiennes sous l’influence de
l’espagnol .. .” (the syntactic modification of Amerindian languages under the
influence of Spanish . . . )(Adnés 59). It should be noted that this hispanization
was carried out through the filter of Latin.
26 LYDIA FOSSA

The Vocabulario is a paradigmatic case in which “Le dictionnaire devi-

ent instrument théologique” (The dictionary becomes a theological instrument)
(De Certeau 232). And, I may add, politique (political). De Certeau’s words
are a categorical description of what Domingo de Santo Tomas had written and
intended. Castafieda-Delgado describes the book as an instrument, synthesizing
the conflation of evangelization and indigenous languages with these words: “Y
asi fue como aparecieron gramaticas, artes, vocabularios, sermonarios, confe-
sonarios ... que son indudablemente joyas para la lingiiistica y la etnologia,
que fueron instrumentos de evangelizacion” (That is how grammars, arts, dic-
tionaries, collections of sermons, treatises, and rules for confession appeared,
which undoubtedly are jewels for linguistics and ethnology, that were instru-
ments of indoctrination) (41).
The Dominican friar’s aim was not to know the language per se; it was to
reduce this language* into a vehicle of Christianization.*° The vocabulary was
chosen as the best way to aid friars in their evangelization tasks: “... mi in-
tenciOn principal en este arte no es ensefiar a hablar cosas superfluas y curiosas
en esta lengua, sino solamente las necessarias para la predicacion y publica-
ci6n del Evangelio y declaracién de los misterios de nuestra redempcion . . .”
(... my main objective in this art is not to teach how to say superfluous or
curious things in that language, but only those necessary for preaching and the
dissemination of the Gospel, and for the declaration of the ministries of our
redemption...) (Santo Tomas 145). To comply with this aim, Quechua was
simplified: “... ay algunos términos de que los indios usan que no se pueden
bien explicar ni declarar en el vocabulario desta lengua donde no se sufre adno-
tar ni poner términos complexos, mas de los términos incomplexos y senzillos
y las significaciones dellos .. .” (... there are some terms that the Indians use
that cannot be fully explained or declared in the vocabulary of this language,
where it is not acceptable to annotate or include complex terms besides those
terms that are not complex, that are simple, with their significations . . . ) (138).
Coincidentally, “superfluous” and “complex” terms were the ones used to re-
fer to indigenous sacrality, areas of knowledge used at first in sermons and
prayers by Catholic priests to convey Christian ideas: “reinterpretaci6n cris-
tiana” (Christian reinterpretation) in words of Itier (130). Where the Domini-
cans included any such words because of polysemantism, Itier’s only cited the
meaning furthest from the sacred. Nevertheless, his selection offers insight into
many indigenous cultural aspects: “Desde el punto de vista semantico ... son
muchisimos los aspectos tocantes a la civilizacién prehispanica que emergen
al conjuro de vocablos y expresiones que no siempre han sido suficientemente
 SPANISH IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 2

definidos 0 explicados en el Lexicon, dada la naturaleza practica de éste” (From

a semantic point of view . .. there are many aspects referring to pre-hispanic
civilization that emerged upon entreatment of words and expressions that have
not always been sufficiently defined or explained in the Lexicon, given its ad
hoc nature) (Cerr6n-Palomino liii).
According to Cerrén-Palomino, “La lengua general habria sido, pues, una
variante del quechua hablado en la costa centro-sur peruana, localizable en el
antiguo senorio de Chincha” (The general language would then have been a
variant of the Quechua spoken in the South-central Peruvian coast, localized in
the old fiefdom of Chincha) (xii). It is coincidental that Fray Domingo de Santo
Tomas erected two of the first convents of his order in that same place, one in
Chicama, and one in Chincha (Cieza 1984: 316) during the 1540s.
When this was the Incas’ administrative language, it had not drowned out
“particular” languages: “Porque puesto que ay en ella [la tierra de los Indios]
otras muchas lenguas particulares que quasi en cada provincia ay la suya, pero
esta es la general y entendida por toda la tierra y mas usada de los sefiores y
gente principal y de muy gran parte de los demas Indios . . .” (Because as there
are in it [Indians’ land] so many particular languages that almost each province
has its own, but this is the general one, which is understood in all the area and
is mostly used by lords and notable people and a large part of the rest of the
Indians ... ) (Santo Tomas 8). Santo Tomas also explained that this “general
language” was not as widely used then as it had been in his day:

...Y nunca esta lengua en los tiempos antiguos fue tan generalmente usada quasi
de todos como el dia de oy. Porque con la communicacion, tracto y grangerias que
al presente tienen unos con otros y concurso en los pueblos de los christianos y
mercados dellos, assi para sus contractaciones como para el servicio de los espano-
les para entenderse entre si los de diversas provincias usan desta general . . . (8-9)

(... And never this language in the old times was as commonly used by almost
everyone as it is today. With the communication, relationship, and profit that at the
present moment have those of different provinces with one another, and with the
towns of Christians and their markets, for their commercial contracts as well as for
the service of the Spaniards in order to understand each other, all use this general
[language]... )

The spread of Quechua is owed to the missionaries who obliterated other

languages and dialects. Previous Spanish experience with multilingualism
showed them that the most prestigious dialects or languages were the ones to
28 LYDIA FOSSA

spread the fastest and had a sharper imprint on its users. Their hispanicizing
noble children had an unacknowledged intention: to utilize their social prestige
for purposes of linguistic and religious dissemination.
Indigenous languages were modified under the imprint of Spanish in all its
aspects, becoming hispanicized versions of them. In particular, Quechua, the
“general language” was then “colonized” from within and from without, im-
porting Spanish concepts and Spanish words, and its syntax adapted to that of
Spanish through Latin. Evangelization and hispanization also have to account
for the ample diffusion of this language created by missionaries to the detriment
of other indigenous languages.

Conclusions

The ideology behind hispanization was the drive to evangelize. Part of the ide-
ology of colonization is control which was actualized through religious indoc-
trination and assimilation to Spanish policia. Spanish linguistic policy in the
Andes was unambiguously attached to evangelization and was twofold: hispan-
ization of the young, and quechuization of clerics to reach mature populations
with a “manipulated” language.
I believe that the Spaniards’ former experience with Moors and Jews was
paramount in putting into practice specific linguistic policies in the Andes.
They had a clear vision of what they wanted and how to obtain it. The Span-
iards had the Reconquest and its subsequent experiences to inform their new
position in America. For the Andes, the previous experiences in the Caribbean
and in Mexico was crucial for the development and implementation of the evan-
gelization/hispanization policy. The millennialist conception and management
of time that pervaded Catholic thinking supported a long-term dedication to a
long-term project: Spaniards were in the Andes to stay, and they had the cer-
tainty that they would prevail.
Their linguistic invasion is a dual movement in which two branches that
radiate from a center form a circle of influence. The center is evangelization
based upon the Reconquest and the American experiences. One of the branches
is dedicated to the hispanization of the young, the other to adult indoctrination
in an artificial language, perversely transformed to suit colonization and evan-
gelization. The indigenization of Catholicism reclaimed the adaptation of Que-
chua, Aymara, and Puquina, languages that had previously been recognized as
“general languages,” and used as such. Spaniards knew what to do in situations
that asked for hispanization and conversion as a means of religious uniformity.
 SPANISH IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 29

Evangelization is so entrenched in Spanish and European culture that with-

out having some characteristics of European daily life, Catholicism proves
difficult to be spread. As far as has been understood, indigenous people were
transient. These movements of people did not correspond to the more stationary
concept of Spanish clerics and laymen who wanted to know how many people
had been baptized and who had paid his diezmo. People in constant change of
location rendered those determinations impossible. The later territorial reorga-
nization initiated by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo in 1570 transformed the so-
cial panorama in the Andes and facilitated taxation and indoctrination of newly
settled individuals organized in nuclear or extended families.
Catholicism holds this kind of family to be a basic social component: it is
a unity and a focus of religious irradiation. As indigenous peoples had a differ-
ent conception from that of a monogamous marriage for life, this fact played
against the desired policia that the Spaniards needed to better administer the
religion. When one considers these facts, it is easier to understand the numerous
references of the need to impart policia to the native population.
Language colonization went farther than linguistic change. It required in-
digenous peoples not just to behave as Spaniards, but also to live, speak, dress,
and eat like them, in order to better absorb Catholic dogma. If these peoples had
not quite become Spaniards, language colonization required that the Andeans
cease being themselves.

Notes

1. The Patronato Indiano was granted to Fernando, King of Spain in 1508 (Garrido 29).
As a consequence of conquering heathen territory, the Pope granted the King funding
to build churches and monasteries in the new lands, and to appoint members of the
clergy to key Church positions. “Es importante resaltar el ambiente fin-reconquista-
dor, junto con la politica de acercamiento a la Santa Sede que imprime un cardcter
reinstaurador de la perdida fe cristiana a la organizaciOn eclesidstica granadina. Cu-
ando se descubre un Nuevo Mundo bastard llevar a esas tierras el esquema juridico de
la Iglesia de Granada, por la que el rey se constituia en director (patrono) de las tareas
organizativas misionales indianas” (It is important to highlight the end-of-reconquest
atmosphere that, together with the politics of rapprochement towards the Holy See,
imprints a restorative character to the Granadine ecclesiastical organization, vis-a-vis
the lost Christian faith. When the New World is discovered it will suffice to transfer
to those lands the juridical organization of the Church of Granada, through which the
King is constituted as the director (patron) of the organization of missionary tasks in
the Indies) (Garrido 29-30).
30 LYDIA FOSSA

. todos quantos yndios ay en todas las Yndias . . . facilisimamente deprendieran

nuestra lengua castellana si se pone por obra el aviso y orden que aqui doy . . . [que]
los yndios de veynte afios para avaxo que el sagerdote los recoxa a todos en vajo de su
mano y que a bueltas de mostrarles la doctrina les muestre y haga deprender la lengua
nuestra...’ (... all of the indians in the whole Indies... will learn our Castilian
language very easily if the recommendation and order that I will give here is put into
action... [that] indians 20 years old or younger should be gathered under a priest’s
care, and at the same time he imparts them the doctrine, he should show and make
them learn our language . . . ) (Ares 140).
“En 1526 se reine en Granada una junta de funcionarios y personalidades con el fin
de reglamentar las oportunas directrices para integrar, de forma rapida, a la poblaci6n
musulmana que vivia, segtin los tratados diplomaticos, acorde con sus propias cos-
tumbres. Se trataba de forzarla a una rapida castellanizacion: una etapa distinta de
aquella que habia seguido a la reconquista (1492), que contemplaba la catequesis en
las antiguas mezquitas, asi como ensefianzas para los hijos de los alfaquies y notables
en colegios y escuelas. Estas didacticas (en lengua arabe) se mantuvieron durante
sdlo un par de décadas; en 1526 se pretendia, sencillamente, la erradicacién de la
lengua arabe, la recogida de libros escritos en esta lengua, asi como la prohibicidn
de formular contratos y escrituras en arabe, y en caso de hacerlo, “fueren ningunos,
de ningtin valor y efecto’; ademas de la eliminacién de vestidos a la moda arabiga,
destruccién de los bafios turcos y prohibicion del uso de nombres y apellidos arabes”
(In 1526 a council of officers and dignitaries met in Granada to establish the regula-
tions to integrate, as swiftly as possible, the Muslim population that lived according
to diplomatic treaties in accordance with their own customs. The idea was to force it
to a quick Castilianization; a different stage from the one that followed the reconquest
(1492), which contemplated catequization in the old mosques, teachings for the chil-
dren of alfaquies and notables in schools and colleges. These teachings (in Arabic)
were imparted for about twenty years; in 1526 the aim was, simply, the eradication
of the Arabic language, the collection of books written in that language, and also the
prohibition of preparing contracts and deeds in Arabic. In case they were done, they
would be considered ‘null, without any value or effect.’ Besides, Spanish authorities
would eliminate clothing in the Arab fashion, destroy Turkish baths, and forbid the
use of Arab names and surnames) (Solano 294).
“... ces ‘nations barbares’ qui apprendrait 3 castillan: moros de Grenade ou
d’ ane du Nord, guanches des Canaires.. 2’ (... those ‘barbaric nations’ that
learned Castilian; moros from Granada or the North of Africa, guanches from the
Canary Islands... ) (Milhou 33).
. debian hallarse ausentes el miedo y la ignorancia que vician toda elecci6n [elec-
cién voluntaria de nuevos sefiores y de la fe]. Pero esto es precisamente lo que mas
interviene en aquellas elecciones y aceptaciones, pues los barbaros no saben lo que
hacen, y atin quiza ni entienden lo que les piden los espafioles. Ademas, esto lo piden
gentes armadas a una turba desarmada y medrosa y rodeada por ellas” (fear and ig-
 SPANISH IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY Shit

norance should be absent [from voluntary election of new lords and faith] since they
vitiate all election. But this is precisely what intervenes most in those elections and
acceptances because barbarous peoples do not know what they are doing, and maybe
they do not even understand what Spaniards are asking from them. Besides, those who
ask are armed men, to an unarmed and fearful horde surrounded by them) (Vitoria
215-16).
Fossa, in press.
“... y amsi escusan agotes palos coges que se les dan a los otros yndios chontales
que no saven nuestra lengua que por su rudeza y poco entendimiento no vienen a la
doctrina y misa como son obligados . . ”’(. . . and in this way they permit whippings,
clubbings, kickings that are given to the other chontales Indians who do not know our
language and who, because of their coarseness and little understanding, do not come
to the doctrine and Mass as they are obliged to do... ) (Ares 140).
Requerimiento fragment: “E sy no lo hizieredes [reconocer a la iglesia por sefiora e
superiora del universo mundo e al sumo Pontifice llamado Papa, en su nombre y al
Emperador e Reyna dona Juana, nuestros sefores, en su lugar, como a sus superiores
e senores y reyes de esas yslas y tierra firme por virtud de la dicha donacion e consin-
tays e deis lugar que estos Padres Religiosos os declaren e prediquen io susodicho]
o en ello dilacion maliciosamente pusieredes certificoos que, con el ayuda de Dios,
nosotros entraremos poderosamente contra vosotros, e vos haremos guerra por todas
las partes y maneras que pudieremos, e vos subjetaremos al yugo e obediencia de la
yglesia y de sus magestades e tomaremos vuestras personas y de vuestras mugeres
e hijos y los haremos esclavos y como tales los venderemos e dispornemos de ellos
como sus magestades mandaren e vos tomaremos vuestros bienes e vos haremos todos
los males y dafios que pudieremos como a vasallos que no obedecen ny quieren recibir
a su sefior e le resisten e contradicen e protestamos que las muertes y dafios que dello
se recrecieren sea a vuestra culpa y no de sus magestades ni nuestras ny destos cabal-
leros que con nosotros vienen . . .” (Requerimiento fragment: “And if you would not
comply with it [recognizing the Church as Superior Lady of the universal world and
the Supreme Pontiff called Pope, in his name and in that of the Emperor and Queen
Dofia Juana, our lords, in their place and unto them as your superiors and lords and
kings of these islands and continental lands in virtue of the said donation and you
would consent and allow these religious men declare and preach the above said] or if
you will exert malicious delay in your consent, I certify to you that, with God’s help,
we will enter powerfully against you, and we will wage war on you from all parts and
in all ways possible, and we will subject you under the yoke and obedience of the
Church and their majesties, and we will take you and your women and children and
we will make slaves, and as such we will sell them and dispose of them as their majes-
ties will command, and we will take your goods and we will do all kind of evil and
harm that we possibly can as disobedient vassals who do not want to receive their lord
and resist and contradict him, and we declare that the death and harm that from this
will happen be your fault and not their majesties’ nor ours nor of these gentlemen that
32 LYDIA FOSSA

come with us... .”) Requerimiento que se ha de hazer a los yndios del Peru (Lisson
Chaves 24).
9. “the more the natives were perceived to be under the power of Satan [a European
construct], the more urgent the European presence became” (Cervantes 9).
“Y luego Cortés mand6 que los despedazdsemos y echdsemos a rodar [los idolos]
unas gradas abajo, y asi se hizo” (And then Cortés ordered that we tear them [the
idols] apart and topple them down some steps, and so it was done) (Diaz del Castillo
45).
“Para Lopez Medel, castellano nuevo de Guadalajara, las medidas para que arraigue
el espafiol entre los indios deben orientarse hacia el fomento del trato entre indios y
blancos, siempre en castellano, a pesar de los posibles errores diplomaticos, porque
la comunicacién fomentaré educaci6n y buenas costumbres: *... y con la continua
conversaciOn aprenderfan nuestra policia de comer, de beber, de vestir, de limpiarnos
y de tratar nuestras personas. Y nuestras cortesias y ceremonias en el hablar y nuestras
>
crianzas y, finalmente, nuestra lengua (For Lopez Medel, new Castilian from Gua-
dalajara, the measures handed down Spanish to take root among the Indians should
be oriented towards the fostering of relationships between Indians and whites, always
in Spanish, notwithstanding the possible diplomatic errors, because communication
would result in education and good manners: * . . . and with the continuous conyersa-
tion they would learn our way of eating, drinking, dressing, washing ourselves, and
treat our persons. And our courtesies and ceremonies in speaking and our manners,
and finally, our language’) (Solano 298).
“., mandamos que la primera y principal cosa que después de salidos en tierra los
dichos capitanes y nuestros oficiales y otras cualesquier gentes hubieren de hacer, sea
procurar que por lenguas de intérpretes que entiendan los indios y moradores de la
tal tierra o isla les digan y declaren como nos les enviamos para los ensefar buenas
costumbres y apartarlos de vicios y de comer carne humana y a instruirles en nuestra
santa fe y predicarsela para que se salven...” (... we order that the first and main
thing that after arriving on land the said captains and our officers, and whichever per-
son should do, is to procure that through tongues of interpreters understood by Indians
and dwellers of the said land, they should be told and declared how we send them to
teach good manners and to steer them from vices and eating human flesh and to in-
struct them in our holy faith and preach it to them so they can be saved . . . ) (Morales
Padrén 377).
“yten. Con condicién que quando salieredes destos nuestros reynos e llegaredes a
la dicha provincia del peru ayays de llevar e tener con vos a los oficiales de nuestra
hazienda que por nos estan y fueren nombrados y asi mismo las personas Religiosas e
eclesiasticas que por nos seran sefaladas para ynstrucion de los yndios y naturales de
aquella provincia a nuestra santa fee catolica . . .” (Item. On condition that when you
leave our kingdoms and arrive at the said province of Peru you should have taken and
have with you our financial officers who represent us and have been thus appointed,
and also the religious and ecclesiastical persons that will be indicated by us in order
 SPANISH IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 33

to instruct the Indians and naturals of that province in our holy catholic faith... )
(Morales Padrén 239),
14. “... se ha hecho tan notable dafio [a estos ynfieles] con los malos exemplos de los
cristianos y Prelados y personas de doctrina que los an consentido sean robados,
privados de su libertad, maltratados de muchos sefiores, muertos a tormentos porque
no daban oro, despojados de sus mujeres y adulteradas; y de sus hijas, corrompidas
y sus hijos, puestos en servidumbre y todos desterrados de sus propias casas, tierras
y heredades. . . .” Asi lo expresa el Licenciado Martel de Santoyo a Su Magestad en
1542 (... such notable harm has been done [on these infidels] with bad examples
from Christians and prelates and persons of doctrine that have allowed they be robbed,
deprived of their freedom, mistreated by many lords, killed under torment because
they would not give gold, stripped of their women and they, adulterated, their daugh-
ters, corrupted, and their sons placed in serfdom and all of them exiled from their
own houses, land and estates. . . . That is how Licenciate Martel de Santoyo expresed
himself in a letter to His Majesty in 1542) (Lisson Chaves 99).
ites “Y porque nuestro principal yntento y voluntad siempre ha sido y es de la conser-
vacion y augmento de los yndios y que sean ynstruidos y ensefiados en las cosas de
nuestra sancta fee catholica y bien tratados como personas libres y vasallos nuestros
como lo son, encargamos y mandamos a los del dicho nuestro Consejo [de Indias}
tengan siempre muy gran atencion y especial cuydado sobre todo de la conservacgion
y buen govierno y tratamiento de los dichos indios .. .” (And since our main intent
and wish has always been and is that of conservation and augmentation of Indians,
that they be instructed and taught the things of our holy Catholic faith, and be well
treated as free persons and our vassals, as they are, we entrust and command those in
our said Council [of the Indies] always to have great attention and special care on all
matters referring to the conservation and good government and treatment of the said
Indians... ) (Morales Padron 431).
16. “ni dadose a saber vocablos de la lengua natural para Ello [conversion y doctrina]
ni desto a avido mas memoria que de una cosa digna de abominacion aunque vocablos
para pedirles oro e negociar en los casos que arriba digo no ay poca destreza.” (...
nor having been inclined to know words of the natural language for that [conversion
and indoctrination]; of this, here has been no other memory than that of something
worthy of abomination, but words to ask them for gold or to negotiate in the above
said cases, there is no little ability). Relacién del Licenciado Martel de Santoyo, 1542
(Lisson Chaves 99).
1/2 “Francisco Pizarro le respondio que venian de Espafia donde eran naturales en cuya
tierra estava un rey grande y poderoso Ilamado don Carlos, cuyos vagallos y criados
eran ellos y otros muchos, porque mandava grandes tierras; y quellos avian salido
a descubrir por aquellas partes como vian y a poner debaxo de la sujegion de aquel
rey lo que hallasen y pringipalmente y ante todas cosas, a dar notiga como los ydolos
en que adoravan heran falgos y sin fundamento los sacrifigios que hazian y como
para salvarse avian de se bolber cristianos y creer en el Dios que ellos adoravan, que
34 LYDIA FOSSA

estava en el cielo llamado Jesucristo, porque los que no lo adoraren y cunplieren sus
mandamientos yrian al ynfierno, lugar oscuro y lleno de fuego, y los que conociendo
la verdad le tuviesen por Dios, solo Sefior del gielo, mar y tierra con lo mas criado,
serian moradores en el cielo donde estarian para siempre jamas” (Francisco Pizarro
answered him that they came from Spain and were natives of that land, where there
was a great and powerful king called Don Carlos, and they and many others were his
vassals and servants because he ruled over immense lands; and that they had left their
country to discover around those parts as they saw fit, and to place under the rule
of that king whatever they found, and above all things, to notify how the idols they
adored were false, and their sacrifices unfounded, and how in order to save themselves
they had to turn Christian and believe in the God they adored, that was in heaven,
called Jesus Christ, because all those who did not adore him or did not comply with
his commandments would go to Hell, a dark place full of fire, and those who know the
truth would accept him as God, only Lord of heaven, sea and land and with all things
created they would will live in heaven where they would stay forever and ever) (Cieza
1989: 56).
“Y como estuviese la comida aparejada les dieron de comer mucho pescado y carne
de diferentes maneras con muchas frutas y del vino y pan que ellos usan. Como ovi-
eron comido los prencipales yndios que alli estaban con sus mugeres por hazer mas
fiesta al capitan [Pizarro] vaylaron y cantaron a su costumbre” (And as the food was
ready they fed them lots of fish and meat in many ways with many fruits and the wine
and bread they use. As the Indian lords that were there with their women had eaten,
in order to better honor captain [Pizarro], they danced and sang according to their
customs) (Cieza 1989: 67).
IK), see Perez OSORG7e
20. “Teniendo en cuenta estos escasos elementos, el religioso que mas se ajusta a ellos
resulta ser Fr. Juan de San Pedro. Los datos son precarios pero resulta factible la hipé-
tesis, por cuanto éstos encajan perfectamente con la vida de aquel religioso” (Taking
into consideration these few elements, the priest that adheres better to them happens
to be Friar Juan de San Pedro. Data is scarce but the hypothesis is feasible since the
evidence matches perfectly the life of that friar) (Castro de Trelles xii).
“... el habla y el silencio estaban estrictamente reglamentados en los Andes” (...
speech and silence were strictly regimented in the Andes) (Fossa, In press).
ine)i) “In Robert Robins and Eugenius Uhlenbeck’s Endangered Languages, languages are
termed ‘moribund’ if they are spoken only by a small group of older people and are
not being learned by children. In contrast, a ‘safe’ language has, at a minimum, ‘a
community of 100,000 speakers’ and the ‘official support of a nation-state’” (Fennelly
65).
bhoWwW “Primeramente toca a nuestra Magestad ser ynformado del cuydado que se ha tenido
e tiene, doze afos ha, que se descubrié e pobl6 esta tierra, de la conversion de los yn-
fieles naturales, e del cuydado que se ha tenido e tiene en doctrinarlos, asy en buenas
costumbres e virtudes naturales como en cosas de nuestra santa fee, pues de la con-
 SPANISH IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 3/9

ciencia de vuestra magestad, primero que otra alguna, depende el cumplimiento desto.
Y lo que en este caso ay que avisar es que fasta oy, principio del afio de quarenta y
dos, no solamente se a dexado tan noble provecho en el camino de la salvacion destos
ynfieles, pero por este fin se ha hecho tan notable dafio con los malos exemplos de los
cristianos y Prelados y personas de doctrina . . .” (First, it is in our Majesty’s interest
to be informed of the care that has been taken for the last twelve years, or since this
land was discovered and populated, to instruct them in good manners and natural vir-
tues as well as in those of our sacred faith. For compliance in these matters depends
primarily on our Majesty’s conscience. And what should be noted is that until today,
the beginning of 1542, not only such a noble benefit of showing the road to salvation
to these infidels has not been accomplished, but so much harm has been done with the
bad example of the Christians, and prelated, and persons of doctrine . . . )Relacién del
Licenciado Martel de Santoyo (Lisson Chaves 99).
24. “C’est le méme esprit tridentin que suivirent, en 1582, les péres du [Iéme Concile
provincial de Lima: ‘El principal fin del cathecismo y doctrina cristiana es percibir
los mysterios de nuestra fee al espafiol en romance y al yndio también en su lengua,
pues de otra suerte, por muy bien que recite las cosas de Dios, con todo eso se quedara
sin fruto en su entendimiento como lo dice el mismo apéstol. ... Cada uno de los
obispos dispute y sefale en su didcesis examinadores que examinen a los que han de
ser curas de yndios y de la suficiencia que tienen asi en éstas como en la lengua de
los yndios . . . para los que han de ser curas le aprendan [le catéchisme et la doctrine
SLE
chrétienne] y entiendan y ensefien por él en la lengua de los yndios (It is the same
Tridentive spirit that the priests of the HII Provincial Council of Lima followed in
1582: ‘The main aim of Catholicism and Christian doctrine is to teach the mysteries
of our faith to the Spaniard in romance and to the Indian in his language, because oth-
erwise, no matter how ell he recites the things of God, all that will be fruitless in their
understanding as the same apostle says. . . . Each one of the bishops should name and
select in his diocese examiners to examine those who will be priests to the Indians and
in the knowledge they have in this language as well as in the Indian’s language . . . so
that those who will be clerics will learn it [the cathechism and Christian doctrine] and
understand and teach through it in the language of the Indians) (Milhou 38).
25) “Les péres du Concile [du Letran] insistaient sur l’importance de I’instruction et de
la prédication en langue vulgaire.... [ls inaugurait ainsi une politique qui devait
s’épanouir au Concile de Trente . . .” (The priests of the Council [of Letran] insisted
on the importance of the instruction and preaching in vulgar languages . . . Thus they
inaugurated a politics that should flourish in the Council of Trent . . . ) (Milhou 36).
26. He was also quoted by Milhou (24) in French.
2 Quoted by Milhou (29).
28. “even though Southern Peruvian Quechua was the administrative language of an
expansionist state, before the European invasion, it never became hegemonic, nor was
it ever standardized, even in the territory immediately surrounding the Inca capital”
(Mannheim 2).
36 LYDIA FOSSA

29) “Y para que mas facilmente conozcan el error en que han bivido y conoscido, abracen
nuestra sancta fe se ha hecho arte para hablar su lengua con industria, para que se
entiendan los unos y los otros. En lo qual no ha trabajado poco el reverendo padre
fray Domingo de sancto Thoms de la orden de sefior sancto Domingo” (An art has
been made to speak their language with industry so they can more easily learn about
the error in which they have lived and known, and embrace our holy faith, so that they
will understand each other. The Reverend Priest Fryer Domingo de Sancto Tomas or
the Order of Lord Saint Dominic has not avoided any travail in doing it) (Cieza 1984:
143).
30. Santo Tomas is probably the first Spaniard to call this language a “lengua general”
in a printed book (Santo Tomas 6). He explains why he says it is “general”: “.. . es
lengua que se communicava y de que se usava y usa por todo el seforio de aquel gran
sefior Ilamado Guaynacapa que se estiende por espacio de mas de mil leguas en largo
y mas de ciento en ancho. En toda la qual se usava generalmente della de todos los
sefiores y principales de la tierra y de muy gran parte de la gente comun della” (. . . it
is the language in which they communicated and was used and is used now in all the
fiefdom of that great lord called Guaynacapac, which extended for over one thousand
leagues in length, and more than one hundred in width. In all of it that language was
generally used, and was a large part of the common people) (9).
Sule “_.. la tradicion oral y la lengua quechuas fueron objeto, de parte de la iglesia pe-
ruana colonial, de una minuciosa e inteligente empresa de manipulaci6n” (... oral
tradition and Quechua were the object, of a meticulous and intelligent manipulation
enterprise by the Peruvian colonial church) (Itier 1993: 172).
32) The experience of Tagalog echoes that of Quechua, Aymara and Puquina: “. . . when
Christian discourse was translated into the vernacular, its key terms retained their
original forms. Tagalog, thus permeated by words that had no equivalents in the ver-
nacular, was made to appear to have a source other than its native speakers. Conver-
sion thereby translated Tagalog into a new language (Rafael 213).
333) “_..y los respectivos programas con que Nebrija justific6 su Gramatica latina (1481)
y su Gramatica castellana (1492): la latinizacion de Castilla, el primero; la castellani-
zaciOn de los dominios del imperio, el segundo” (“... and the programs with which
Nebrija justified his Latin Grammar (1481) and his Spanish Grammar (1492) were
respectively: the latinization of Castile, and, the castilianization of the Empire’s do-
mains) (Mignolo 171).
34. Luis Jaime Cisneros had pointed out this fact in an article published in 1951, and
quoted by Rodolfo Cerrén-Palomino in his “Estudio introductorio” to Santo Tomas’s
Gramatica.
30. He writes in his Prologue to the King: “. . . luego comence a tractar de reduzir aquella
lengua [general] a arte para que no solamente yo pudiesse en ella aprovechar en aque-
lla nueva iglesia ensefando y predicando el Evangelio a los indios, pero otros muchos
que, por la difficultad de aprenderla no emprendian tan apostolica obra, viendola ya
en arte y que facilmente se podia saber, se animassen a ello y con facilidad la apren-
 SPANISH IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 37

diessen, como se comengo a hazer .. .” (““.. . then I started to try to reduce that [gen-
eral] language to an art so that I would not be the only one that could teach and preach
the Gospel to the Indians in that new church, but that many others who, because of the
difficulty in learning it, did not start such an apostolic deed, but seeing it was already
composed and that it could be so easily known, they would be encouraged to do so and
would easily learn it, as they began to do... ) (6).
36. “... quien supiere la grande y extrema necessidad que ay en aquellas provincias de
la predicacion del Evangelio y quantos millares de animas se han ido y van al infierno
por falta de conoscimiento dél y de las cosas de nuestra sancta fe catholica por defecto
de la lengua sin la qual no se les puede predicar, y quantos buenos religiosos y siervos
de Dios ay alla y aca que se retraen desta sancta obra y temen poner el hombro a tan
apostolica sementera como esta, temiendo la difficultad de la lengua y creyendo no
poder salir con ella: quien esto considerare atenta y christianamente y entendiere que
esto que yo hago en querer redduzir esta lengua a arte y querer presentar ante vuestros
ojos la fructa no enteramente madura y parir este concepto imperfecto que de la len-
gua tengo concebido antes de llegar a madurez y perfection es por la gran necessidad
que ay della y para dar alguna lumbre a los que ninguna tienen y mostrarles que no
es difficultoso el aprenderla y a animar a los que por falta de la lengua estan covardes
en la predicacion del Evangelio...” (... those who knew of the great and extreme
necessity there is in those provinces of the preaching of the Gospel and how many
thousands of souls have gone and will go to Hell for lack of knowledge of it and of
the things of our holy Catholic faith for not knowing the language without which
preaching cannot be done, and how many good religious men and God’s servants
there are here and there who refrain from that sacred work and are afraid to put the
shoulder to such an apostolic sown land as this is, fearing the language’s difficulty and
believing they cannot learn it; he who will consider this attentively and christianly and
understand that my work in wishing to reduce this language into an art and wanting
to present before your eyes the fruit not entirely ripe and bringing forth this imper-
fect concept that I have of that language before it reaches maturity and perfection, is
because of the great need there is of it and to give some light to those that have none
and show them that it is not difficult to learn it and to encourage those who for lack of
language feel cowardice in the preaching of the Gospel . . . )(14-15).

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Ares Queija, Berta. “Relacién del licenciado Michael de la Torre (Quito, 1574): Len-
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Cieza de Leon, Pedro. Crénica del Perti. Primera Parte, Introd. F. Pease, Notes M. Mati-
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. Cronica del Pert. Tercera Parte, Ed. Prolg and Notes by F. Cant, Second ed.
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De Certeau, Michel. L’ecriture de l'histoire. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.
Diaz del Castillo, Bernal. Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva Espana I (1632).
Introd. y notas de J. Ramirez Cabafias, 17* ed. México: Porria, 1998.
Duverger, Christian. La conversion de los indios de la Nueva Espana con el texto de los
Coloquios de los Doce de Bernardino de Sahaguin (1564). Victoria G. de Vela, trad.
Ecuador: Ed. ABYA-YALA, 1990.
Fennelly, Beth. “Fruits We'll Never Taste,” originally printed in the Michigan Quarterly
Review, reprinted in Utne Reader, No. 110 (March-April 2002): 64-70.
Fossa, Lydia. Narrativas problematicas: Los Inkas bajo la pluma espaviola. Lima: Instituto
de Estudios Peruanos, In Press.
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en México. México: UNAM, 1980.
Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe. Nueva coronica y buen gobierno [16157], Edicién y prélo-
go F. Pease G.Y., Vocabulario y traducciones de J. Szeminski. Lima: Ed. Fondo de
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ca, Centro Iberoamericano de Cooperaci6n, 1979.
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o® 2

The Pre-Columbian Past as a Project:

Miguel Leon-Portilla and Hispanism

Ignacio M. Sadnchez-Prado

And the problem is that man, perplexed, does not succeed in grasping the
indigenous being. His image becomes faint, his being is oscillating and
blurry; mystery beats behind his pupils and, in every bend of his world,
hidden, the enigmatic, double-faced sign of his profile appears.
—Luis Villoro. Los grandes momentos del indigenismo en México (110)

Defining the state of the Nahuatl literature studies prior to the 1950s is simple:
they were nonexistent. In his classical essay “Visi6n de Anahuac,” for instance,
Alfonso Reyes regrets that the system of the poetry of the ancient Mexicans was
lost and that the only thing remaining is a group of fragments recorded by the
Spanish, fragments that, in Reyes’s opinion, do not give account of the poetry as
an activity in Pre-Columbian times (13). Even as late as the 1940s, in his land-
mark history of Latin American literature Literary Currents in Hispanic Amer-
ica, Pedro Henriquez Urefia completely omitted any mention of Pre-Columbian
literature and began his account with the Conquest. These two examples, com-
ing from some of the most prominent advocates of Latin American culture, are
only random illustrations of the enormous ignorance scholars had of ancient
indigenous culture. This ignorance, needless to say, is even more overwhelming
when one considers that many of those scholars claimed the indigenous past as
a fundamental part of “our identity.” The situation today is quite different, as we
find that the discipline has grown enormously in the past fifty years, in which,
starting almost from scratch, it constructed and institutionalized something we
might call “Pre-Columbian knowledge.” The primary figure responsible for this
shift is Miguel Leon-Portilla.

40
 THE PRE-COLUMBIAN PAST AS A PROJECT 41

Based on the seminal works of Angel Maria Garibay, Leon-Portilla has

written a considerable number of books and essays which provides the foun-
dations for the study of the scarce and complex textualities that compose the
corpus known as “Nahuatl literature.” His contributions range from the pale-
ography of manuscripts to the construction of a theoretical apparatus used to
approach the form, content, and context of the “texts.” He is also one of the
founders of the most important academic institution in the field (the Seminar
on Nahuatl Culture at the National University of Mexico, created in 1957) and
of the most important publication in the field (Estudios de cultura ndéhuatl, a
32 year-old journal published by the Seminar). Moreover, Leén-Portilla is rec-
ognized as one of the most outspoken advocates for indigenous causes, which
has earned him membership in and awards from many important institutions in
Mexico and abroad. In short, the core of the discipline is centered on the work
of this man and the critical school he has founded.!
In the following pages, I will analyze the Hispanist and nationalist founda-
tions of Nahuatl literary studies as represented in Leén-Portilla’s work. This
articulation revolves around three approaches to the Nahuatl question: The re-
covery of Fray Bernardino de Sahagtin’s methodology, the modern appropria-
tions of Bartolomé de las Casas’s advocacy of Indian causes (including its con-
sequences in the constitution of a national discourse in Mexico and in the use of
Pre-Columbian culture in contemporary identity politics), and the role of Span-
ish language in the construction of the relationship between the national project
and the specific agendas of the indigenas, addressing particularly the role of the
Spanish language as lingua franca amongst the different ethnic groups. These
three topics, I believe, fairly represent the essential problems established both
at the conceptual and ideological levels of Le6n-Portilla’s project and the way
in which this project reflects on the objects of study and ideological agendas
surrounding Nahuatl literature.
The first half of the twentieth century in Mexico can be characterized as a
very active ground for discussing the nature of both national and Latin American
identities. From the fertile intellectual activity of the “Ateneo de la Juventud” to
the somewhat inane discussions on the nature of national literature, the culture
of the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath produced considerable national
awareness, and the intellectual need to define the “imagined community” at the
foundation of the new Mexican State.’ The relationship between indigenismo
and Hispanic heritage was one of the key issues in this discussion, since the
ideology of mestizaje started to occupy a preponderant place in the construction
of national narrative. Thus, to properly discuss the role Le6n-Portilla has played
in the construction and consolidation of Mexican indigenismo, the Hispanist
42 IGNACIO M. SANCHEZ-PRADO

and Americanist bases of his work must be taken into consideration. One of the
most important discussions within the field of cultural production in Mexico
and Latin America was precisely the way in which the region should reconcile
its Hispanic heritage with its claims of authenticity. This is why both Reyes and
Henriquez Urefia wrote a considerable number of pages about Spanish culture.
For instance, Alfonso Reyes devoted an important part of his critical work to
reading many of the authors within the Peninsular tradition as a form of reap-
propriation of Hispanic heritage in the constitution of an American specificity.“
In addition, many of the cultural foundations in Mexico were due to Spanish ex-
iles, whose work was key in the creation of the country’s cultural institutions.
Leén-Portilla’s work with Spanish culture is based on his recovery of the
missionary work performed by the Franciscan order during the sixteenth Cen-
tury. The main source of his investigation is the corpus of Fray Bernardino de
Sahagtin’s work, particularly the so-called Cédice Florentino, a manuscript in
which Sahagtin recovered many indigenous practices by presenting them in
three columns: one on pictographic writing, reproducing the Nahuatl writing
system, one in transcriptions of Nahuatl language into the Western alphabet,
and a Spanish translation of the corpus. In other words, the primary reference
for studying the whole corpus of Nahuatl literature is a series of texts produced
by a sixteenth century Spanish scholar. Leon-Portilla regards himself as con-
tinuing Sahagtin’s work, a position with important consequences in his textual
approaches (Hernandez de Leén-Portilla 74-75).
To illustrate this situation, the anthology of Nahuatl literature he compiled
for Biblioteca Ayacucho (Literatura del México Antiguo) offers a good exam-
ple. Some sections of the book include direct quotes from Sahagtin’s Cédice
without any differentiation from the texts attributed to Nahuatl writers. In other
words, the book implicitly considers Sahagtin’s work as not only part of the
corpus of Nahuatl literature in general, but also as a representative text to be in-
corporated in a collection conceived to establish a canon of Nahuatl texts in the
context of Latin American Literature.* Also, the organization of the anthology,
which, at a glance, seems to follow a taxonomy based on the concepts of cuicatl
and tlahtolli, profits from a perception of “Pre-Columbian culture” constructed
by Sahagun. If one reads Sahagutin’s most accessible work, the Historia general
de las cosas de la Nueva Espania, it is clear that the chapter division used by
Leon-Portilla follows a taxonomy similar to the one provided by Sahagtin’s ac-
counts.* This apparently non-critical approach to Sahagtin, present in most of
Leon-Portilla’s earliest work (which implies a denial of the mediations inherent
in both the writing process and ethnographic system developed by the Francis-
can friar),° not only proceeds from the lack of other sources, but also indicates
 THE PRE-COLUMBIAN PAST AS A PROJECT 43

a re-evaluation of Sahagtin’s humanist work, and with it, a reconsideration of

the Spanish cultural approach to the Indians beyond the negative conceptions of
early colonial strategies toward approaching the Other.
The rescue of Sahagtin’s work implies a point of view regarding the process
of the Conquest, which does not necessarily adhere to the colonialist idea of the
“Discovery,” but still has positive connotations towards the notion of “cultural
encounter.” In other words, rescuing Sahagtin’s strategies, such as the question-
naires given to “informants” or the use of Western referents to describe indige-
nous cultural practices,’ as a possibility of reconstructing an “authentic” Pre-
Columbian culture permits for a different perspective on the clash of cultures
in which the Spanish Renaissance’s “high values” incarnated by the Franciscan
intellectuals can be regarded as a repositioning of the Spanish approach to the
Indians, one that goes beyond the one-dimensional vision of the Conquest as
an act of pure violence. Nonetheless, we must not forget that Sahagtin’s work,
as Luis Villoro has noted, lies in a paradox: it allowed the indigenous Other to
enter the realm of “universal” mankind while, at the same time, it became an
instrument for his/her subalternization: “In that time, historical discourse will
reflect the uncanny consciousness of the one who faces a dual world. Thus, the
apparent incoherency in all the theoretical judgements and practical attitudes
of those who lived within that consciousness. Love and protection towards the
Indian come before rejection and condemnation; the respect towards their free-
dom becomes the worst slavery” (109, my translation). I will discuss some
of these ideological implications when I address the question of the relation-
ship between Nahuatl scholarship and indigenous advocacy. Villoro’s remarks
on Sahagtin allow us to see the fundamental operations lying behind Le6n-
Portilla’s use of the Franciscan’s sources. The paradox pointed out by Villoro
(a paradox that in Villoro’s argument underlies any indigenist discourse) is, to
some extent, implicitly denied by Leon-Portilla. For instance, in his book on
Sahagtin, Leén-Portilla seeks to recover his work in terms of his biography,
through a detailed analysis of his humanistic formation, his articulation with
Renaissance projects and the effect this had on his work. This biographic/philo-
logic approach, nonetheless, lacks precisely the factor that enables Villoro’s
remarks: an ideological critique of Sahagtin. Here, of course, I am not implying
that such lack is intentional, but that the fact that Leén-Portilla never really at-
tempts this ideological critique of his sources raises a series of problems, both
methodological and ideological.
In terms of methodology, one of the most common critiques towards Leon-
Portilla’s work is the reluctance he shows in some of his translations to distin-
guish between the Nahuatl text and the mediations and interpolations introduced
44 IGNACIO M. SANCHEZ-PRADO

by the Spanish friars. This is probably one of the most polemic issues regard-
ing Leén-Portilla’s approach to Pre-Hispanic culture. Amos Segala, throughout
his book Literatura Nahuatl, questions the authenticity of the Pre-Columbian
corpus defined by Garibay and Le6n-Portilla by stating that the manuscripts
used as sources are basically testimonies of Spanish colonial and epistemologi-
cal intervention and that they do not offer evidence of being a reliable source
for establishing a rigorously Pre-Columbian “literary” production.’ However,
the approach towards Sahagtin’s work by Leén-Portilla and others carries very
different academic presumptions depending on their position on the relations
between Indians and Spanish friars.
There are basically three ideological approaches to this question. The first
is the one implied in Le6én-Portilla’s work; he attempts to locate an essential
Pre-Columbian culture in Sahagtin’s work. As we have seen before, that is why
he devoted a book, Bernardino de Sahagtin: Pionero de la antropologia, to re-
create Sahagun’s life and give him legitimacy as one of the founders of ethnog-
raphy as a discipline. The entire book seems a defense of Sahagtin’s admiration
of Indian culture as a primary motivation for his work, which also becomes a
defense of his objectivity.'° Even though the book addresses the Franciscan ide-
als and projects (such as the attempt to construct a “pure” society as opposed
to the corrupt civilization of Europe), it never questions the validity of methods
such as the questionnaires Sahagun used to interview his sources. In E/ destino
de la palabra, the book in which, after more than three decades of work, Le6n-
Portilla recognizes the violence of the alphabetical recreations of indigenous
orality (“transvase” is the word he uses), he continues to defend the critical
value of Sahagtin’s work as source (58). The basic problem is that questioning
the validity of Sahagun’s work, the primary source of most of the Nahuatl texts,
would undermine both the possibility of having a Pre-Columbian literature to
recover in the first place, and the methods through which Garibay, Leén-Portilla
and their disciples (such as Patrick Johansson or Ascensién Hernandez) have
studied the texts. Moreover, when Le6n-Portilla claims himself as a follower of
Sahagun, he transfers the validity of applying a humanistic approach towards
the Indian other to his own project. In other words, the methodological appro-
priation of Sahagtin’s work signifies an ideological appropriation: the legitimi-
zation of classical humanism as a form of understanding the Pre-Columbian
heritage as a “culture” in the same sense of other Western cultures. That is why,
for instance, both Garibay and Leén-Portilla apply Western notions such as
“verse” or “philosophy” to the Pre-Columbian corpus."!
Even in approaches that adopt a very radical methodology, such as Bier-
horst’s translation of the Cantares mexicanos, the possibility of recovering an
 THE PRE-COLUMBIAN PAST AS A PROJECT 45

authentic indigenous text is not out of the question. Bierhorst’s main thesis is
that texts do not have a direct interpretation since they are written in a symbolic
language whose logic can only be found within the texts themselves. The book
goes even further by presenting a connection between these texts and the ghost
songs of the ancient North American natives. This hypothesis is very bold and
polemic but still accepts the possibility of finding an “authentic” Pre-Colum-
bian culture in the texts. The difference is that while Leén-Portilla believes in
the possibility of understanding culture through Western linguistic paradigms,
Bierhorst sustains the unattainability of those texts in terms of Western episte-
mology.
Le6n-Portilla’s positions have been questioned both openly and implicitly
by two other approaches to the sources. One of these approaches goes to the
other extreme and denies that the texts may have any relation whatsoever with an
“authentic” Pre-Columbian culture and understands the operations of Sahagtin
and the other friars as the construction of a colonial discourse which imposes
European values and ideas on the newly conquered people. One very significant
illustration of this position is Mignolo and Ebacher’s article on the huehuetlah-
tollis, the texts inherited by Pre-Columbian wisemen. These texts serve as the
foundations of some of the core concepts in Le6én-Portilla’s system, since he
considers them to be examples of the Nahuatl philosophy and one of the most
important evidences of the existence of a Nahuatl wisdom. Mignolo and Ebacher
criticize Garibay’s, and, implicitly, Leén-Portilla’s approach to Pre-Columbian
literature because it “doesn’t problematize the fact that oral discursive genre
had been fixed alphabetically and then comparatively interpreted with discursive
genres of the Greek-Latin tradition” (21, my translation). Moreover, they sustain
that the process of “alphabetization in a colonial situation implies transforma-
tion” and that when one transcribes the huehuetlahtollis into an alphabetical
writing, they enter “a process of transformation, a process that had its beginnings
in that first inventory and rigorous organization of the indigenous languages in
Nebrija’s style” (23, my translation). All of this means that “discursive pieces
from colonized cultures become part of the colonizer’s culture” (27, my transla-
tion). In other words, Mignolo and Ebacher believe that the “colonial semiosis”
produced in the transfer of oral discourses into the alphabetical writing makes
them part of the colonizing process, which leads to the impossibility of consider-
ing them a source of authentic Pre-Columbian culture.
The other position is based on the idea that Sahagtin’s works are some form
of “in-between.” Louise M. Burkhart’s book, The Slippery Earth, for instance,
is based on the idea that Sahagtin’s texts are more productive when considered
as testimonies of the contact rather than recoveries of an authentic indigenous
46 IGNACIO M. SANCHEZ-PRADO

culture (5). Nonetheless, this hypothesis does not exclude any of the previous
approaches, constructing a critical position that does not adopt the standpoint
of the colonizer nor of the colonized, but instead problematizes both positions.
In this sense, Burkhart’s book rediscovers Sahagtin’s work as a process of epis-
temological encounter rather than as a method for approaching the indigenous
texts, thus denying the idea of an “authentic” Pre-Columbian discourse attain-
able through these texts.
It is evident that Mignolo, Bierhorst and Burkhart’s approaches undermine
a considerable number of Le6n-Portilla’s presuppositions. Regarding Le6én-
Portilla’s appropriation of Sahagtin, these two positions raise a series of prob-
lems not directly addressed by Le6n-Portilla. First, they deny, or at least doubt,
the possibility of a Western scholar successfully approaching the Pre-Colum-
bian textualities, because the sources are questionable and such an approach
always implies a violence against the original texts. Second, if Sahagun’s work
is not based on rescuing indigenous culture as such, but on the purely colonial
motivation of “knowing the Other” as a form of domination, then the ideologi-
cal claims of recovering the Pre-Columbian past (which I will discuss next) are
contradictory to methods that appropriate them for a colonizing project. For
example, the invitation that the Seminario de Cultura Nahuatl has extended
to indigenous intellectuals and the use of contemporary indigenous testimo-
nies and records to state the authenticity of the sources’ (two strategies clearly
based on Sahagtin’s educational projects and his use of informants'’), can be
understood as the exercise of disciplinary cooptation of indigenous culture. Fi-
nally, since Sahagtin provides, from Le6én-Portilla’s point of view, most of the
sources, translations and transcriptions, questioning his method means leaving
the discipline with far fewer reliable sources. That would leave the discipline
with the sole possibility of studying the cultural contact and acknowledging,
against itself, that Pre-Columbian culture is ultimately unnattainable.
Concluding that Leén-Portilla’s usage of Hispanic heritage to study indige-
nous texts is nothing more than a form of cultural appropriation of the Pre-
Columbian texts for a Western project or a naive use of problematic textualities
would be easy, but a second Hispanist articulation makes this reading question-
able. If Sahagtin represents a form of approaching the Pre-Columbian Other
from a methodological point of view based on the epistemological instruments
of Renaissance humanism, the archetype of the Western humanist advocating
for the cause of the Indians is Bartolomé de las Casas. As one of the humanists
that came to the New World, Las Casas is a symbol of the struggles for Hu-
man Rights and emancipation of the indigenous peoples even today. Through
an approach to the indigenous question based on the idea of an equivalence of
 THE PRE-COLUMBIAN PAST AS A PROJECT 47

worth between the Nahuatl culture and the classic Western cultures,'* Leén-
Portilla has found a structural base for political agencies regarding the indige-
nous question in the continent as his recovery of indigenous culture has allowed
a formulation of it beyond the notions of the superiority of Western culture as
an argument for colonization. His book, La flecha en el blanco, for instance, is
a historical account of the alliance between an indigenous leader named Fran-
cisco Tenamaztle and Las Casas in the defense of the rights of the Indians in
front of a court of law in Valladolid in 1555. This book has special significance
if one considers that it was published one year after the Zapatista uprising, in
which the question of the indigenous people became a central part of the debate
of the Mexican transition.'° Another good example of Le6n-Portilla’s political
concerns in relation to the indigenous question may be found in a small book,
Pueblos originarios y globalizacion, where he discusses the articulation of the
Indians in current international contexts, defending their position as the original
inhabitants of the American lands. As Bartolomé de las Casas did, Le6n-Portilla
defends the Indians’ Human Rights against the violence exercised by Western
misunderstanding and imposition. In this case, Pueblos originarios y global-
izacion, published in 1997, uses the argument of the indigenas original rights
considering that they were the original inhabitants of the continent, thus stating
the legitimacy of their rights vis-a-vis Western culture. Here, Leon-Portilla’s
work is one of the basic foundations of such a claim since the existence of an
organized culture in American lands prior to the arrival of the Spanish is one of
the fundamental ideas to understand the Conquest not only as an encounter of
cultures but also as a process of political oppression that has lasted more than
five centuries. Therefore, questioning the possibility of reaching an “authentic”
Pre-Columbian culture through the sources used by Le6én-Portilla has conse-
quences beyond purely heuristic considerations, since this possibility seems
necessary to sustain the political agency for the indigenas implied in his politi-
cal positions, precisely because such culture works as a testimony of a civiliza-
tion lost by colonial violence, civilization in which the claims of “origin” by
many indigenous groups today are rooted. Also, the validation of both Sahagun
as scholar and Las Casas as advocate sustains the idea of Western intellectuals,
such as Leén-Portilla, acting as legitimate mediators between cultures.
In this sense, it is important to point out Leén-Portilla’s claims for the
culture and rights of the Mexican indigenas, preceded the Zapatista by decades
cause and that his advocacy, however strenghtened by the uprising in Chiapas,
has its origins in the very first of his works. If Leon-Portilla claims the ap-
preciation of Pre-Columbian heritage in La filosofia nahuatl, the anthologies
published under the titles Visién de los vencidos and El reverso de la conquista
48 IGNACIO M. SANCHEZ-PRADO

are real political statements on reclaiming the “other side of history.” Both,
especially the former, contributed a great deal to the dissemination of Le6én-
Portilla’s work around the world. These works have been translated into a num-
ber of languages and have impacted various debates on Third World literatures
and postcolonial representations. It is important to note that Visidn de los venci-
dos and Reverso de la conquista are anthologies heavily grounded in the Sa-
haguntian method discussed previously because they basically translate texts
recovered by the different Cédices produced by the Franciscan efforts in Tlal-
telolco and, in the case of Reverso, by similar sources in both the Mayan and the
Inca worlds. Nonetheless, their successful inscription in the political agendas of
the 1960s postcolonial and third world-ist academic movements is not so much
due to its accuracy of representing the other, but to its presentation as the recov-
ery of a silenced voice. In other words, the importance of these books rests not
so much on their rigor in recovering the indigenous textualities, but on the very
gesture of recovering those textualities and presenting them as voices silenced
by the colonial process.
This is clear when one reads one of the more enthusiastic approaches to
the “vision of the vanquished” from Third World agendas in the Western acad-
emy: Jorge Klor de Alva’s introduction to Visién de los Vencidos addressed an
academic audience located in the United States. Klor de Alva states four basic
functions of Ledn-Portilla’s works in the international context. First, the docu-
ments collected in the books are inscribed in an agenda of the so-called Third
World by addressing concerns regarding the revision of colonial histories in
postcolonial societies, an inscription that has allowed the book to be hailed in
unlikely contexts, such as Roque Dalton’s reading of La visién de los vencidos
as an inspiration to Latin American revolutionaries. Second, these new textuali-
ties provide instruments for the formation of Mexican identity on both sides of
the border. In other words, Klor de Alva’s statement implies that the “vision of
the vanquished” has not only served to revalue Mexican heritage but also as a
form of cultural empowerment and agency within the Mexican-American com-
munity. Third, Le6n-Portilla’s books, whose later editions included testimonies
from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth centuries, are also part of the discussions
of multiculturalism in contemporary Western society and have been used, for
example, in U.S. classrooms for discussions about racial, ethnic, and multi-
cultural issues. Finally, the manner in which the texts are presented to the West-
ern reader conveys a skillful construction and readability that allows them to
speak eloquently against the “triumphalist Spanish interpretations” of the Con-
quest (Klor de Alva 101-104).
 THE PRE-COLUMBIAN PAST AS A PROJECT 49

Even though this reading does not refer directly to Las Casas, Klor de Alva’s
remarks constitute one of the most interesting examples of the consequences of
the “lascasian” adscription of Le6n-Portilla’s work. Probably the most eloquent
argument in Klor’s interpretation lies in the idea of recovering and re-reading
Pre-Columbian textuality as a form of constructing effective political agency
in today’s causes. If Las Casas provides inspiration by defending the Indian as
part of humankind,'® the validation of the subalternized voice of the Indian as
part of the identity constructed by current political and social movements (such
as the anti-imperialist struggles in Central America or the emergence of a Mexi-
can-American consciousness, as Klor de Alva points out) carries a defense of
such subaltern groups through the recovery of elements in which those groups
dialogue directly with the colonizer.'’ In other words, Klor de Alva’s reading of
Le6n-Portilla is symptomatic of the agendas implied throughout the Mexican
scholar’s work: the importance of recovering Pre-Columbian cultures not as a
form of building a foundational myth for the liberal state,'* but as a strategy of
empowerment for which contemporary indigenas might claim their political
rights.
If Visidn de los vencidos clearly responds to the attempt to recover political
and epistemological instances from the silenced discourse of Pre-Columbian
Indians, the consequences far exceed that because the topics involved in this
project of lascasian nature are not limited to this postcolonial appropriation.
One has to remember that the defense of the indigenous people and the recov-
ery of their cultural origins within a national state constructed and sustained
by a criollo/mestizo ideology after the Mexican Revolution allowed the use
of the Pre-Columbian imaginary in the different discourses that has sustained
the revolutionary regime’s ideology. From the idealization of the Indian and
his culture in works such as Ermilo Abreu Gomez’s Canek to the use of sup-
posedly indigenous traits as a form of defining, and sometimes criticising the
“Mexican self” (i.e., Samuel Ramos’s Perfil del hombre y la cultura en México)
and reaching one of its more paradigmatic points in José Vasconcelos’s work, a
large intellectual tradition of recovery of the Pre-Columbian past as icon of the
agendas of the revolutionary regime has led to a reading of Leon-Portilla’s work
as one of the bases for the constitution of a national ideology. As such, Leon-
Portilla’s recovery and defense of indigenous culture acquires a paradoxical
form of political empowerment that goes beyond the defense of the cause itself,
for the recognition of Pre-Columbian origins allows a prescriptive construction
of notions of national identity through its usage by different instances of the
political hegemony.
50 IGNACIO M. SANCHEZ-PRADO

Thus, despite the implications discussed in Klor de Alva’s account, it is

undeniable that Leon-Portilla’s indigenismo is rooted in a national context that
problematizes it as a form of approaching the Other. In 1950 before the publi-
cation of the first works of Garibay and Leén-Portilla, a key book appeared on
the Mexican cultural horizon: Luis Villoro’s Los grandes momentos del indige-
nismo en México. The focus of Villoro’s book is an intense critique of indigenist
approaches throughout Mexico’s history, stating that it has been, amongst other
things, the construction of a false consciousness supported by an approach to
the Indian based in a set of preconceptions that distort his reality (8-9). Fur-
thermore, Villoro considers that all the indigenismo prior to his book is founded
on the need that the mestizaje ideology had to co-opt the Indian in order to
justify its claims as the sole ideology capable of exercising an agency for the
construction of a nation (216—17).'° Finally, Villoro understands the possibility
of proposing indigenismo as a movement that destabilizes Mexican identity and
functions as a strategy of self-reflection in which Mexico discovers the contra-
dictions within its national being (275).°°
Reading Leon-Portilla through some of Villoro’s insights reveals one of
the most interesting paradoxes of the political articulation of his work. As we
have discussed, Le6n-Portilla’s sources are the texts that lie precisely in the
foundational point of indigenismo understood in Villoro’s book as an episte-
mology that concurrently seeks a defense of the Indian through the external un-
derstanding of his culture while silencing the specificities of that voice through
the process of its incorporation into a larger discourse (from universal mankind
to Mexican nation). Le6n-Portilla’s work has implied, in some cases, an over-
coming of this paradox, particularly in his latest works. Nonetheless, Le6n-
Portilla’s institutional adscriptions have resulted in some lines of interpretation
where the scholarship on Nahuatl literature and culture is understood as part of
a Mexican national discourse rather than the basis for agencies of indigenous
autonomy or specificity.
It is undeniable that Le6n-Portilla openly sympathizes with the contempo-
rary claims of indigenous autonomy, despite the fact that some of his disciples,
such as Patrick Johansson, state the process of transculturation of indigenous
cultures as an inevitable reality and question the fact of imposing a standard
of autonomy to that ongoing process (Johansson, “MLP y el mundo indigena”
213-215).?' Moreover, Mexican official discourse has claimed Le6n-Portilla’s
work as part of the construction of Mexican nationality. Leaving aside Le6n-
Portilla’s performance as an intellectual figure (which includes his efforts to
institutionalize the study of Pre-Hispanic cultures within the context of the
National University and his public functions in government agencies and as
 THE PRE-COLUMBIAN PAST AS A PROJECT S1

Mexico’s UNESCO representative), the Mexican State has used a monumental-

izing interpretation of Nahuatl culture in order to claim the Pre-Columbian past
as the origin of a Mexican nation lead by the Revolutionary regime and in the
middle of a struggle for the recognition of its historical role in the world. This
claim has pre-empted Le6n-Portilla’s approach, shown by the tribute organized
by the government of the Mexican state of Jalisco in 1989. The historian José
Maria Muria, for example, considers that the most important contribution of
Leon-Portilla is the legitimating of Mexican history as a chapter of universal
history (7). Another historian, Guillermo Garcia Oropeza speaks of Leon-Por-
tilla as the agent who has been “the guide of Telemacus’s return to the origin”
(15, my translation). Furthermore, in his speech, the governor of Jalisco ad-
dressed Leén-Portilla by saying: “And you, sir, have given an unmistakable
example that Mexico also has a place to occupy in the concert of the universe”
(“Palabras del gobernador” 22, my translation). Behind the hyperboles, the
rhetoric and the entire performativity of the political act lies an attempt to co-
opt the Pre-Columbian discourse as a form to create what Renan has called the
“mythical origins of the nation.”** This, of course, generates one of the deepest
paradoxes in Leén-Portilla’s work. On the one hand, his attempt to recover Pre-
Columbian culture is founded on the idea of reclaiming the voice silenced by
the colonial process as a form of resistance from the indigenous groups. Yet the
other, its institutional inscriptions provoke the use of this very same recovery in
the construction of legitimacy for the national identity promoted by the state, an
identity that is based on the monumentalization of the Pre-Columbian past in a
national discourse that subalternizes indigenous groups.
Interestingly enough, Le6n-Portilla’s work allows for this second ap-
proach, since it has provided, along with the “scientific” methods of contem-
porary archeology, a consistent narrative of Pre-Columbian culture distanced
at some points from current indigenous practices. If archeology provides an
enormous patrimony of physical monuments dated carefully by a number of
methods, Leén-Portilla and Garibay’s research certainly presents a coherent
cultural system to go along with it. In many works, both proposed chronologies
based on the historical accounts (known basically as the Anales) recollected
both by Sahagtin’s informants and the Indian nobles educated at the school of
Santa Cruz de Tlaltelolco. However, this historical method is not always free
of controversy. One of the most polemic issues is the notion of authorship. In
a series of works, included in his book Quince poetas del mundo nahuatl, he
has established a series of authors of some of the most important poems in
the corpus. The method of establishing this authorship is extensively discussed
throughout Le6n-Portilla’s work, but it is based on two primary strategies: the
a2 IGNACIO M. SANCHEZ-PRADO

fact that the names are usually identified as the poetic voice of the texts (in other
words, that the poems are in first person and usually that first person is one of
the alleged poets) and that the historical records give evidence of the historical
existence of those figures. Nonetheless, this method does not necessarily resist
the criticism articulated by scholars such as Bierhorst, Segala, or Burkhart, in
the sense that most of those alleged authors are actually emperors and that it
does not seem unlikely to think that poets identified them as the poetic voice for
a number of possible reasons, including the pledge of allegiance towards them
or the legitimating of the emperors as power figures. Hence, the actual authors
of the poems might not have been the emperors, but someone within their sub-
jects that used the persona of the emperor as poetic voice in order to pay tribute.
In any case, the assumption of authorship does serve the purpose of creating a
series of cultural heroes to add to the Mexican national pantheon.
An extreme case in the construction of authorship is José Luis Martinez’s
Nezahualcéyotl: Vida y obra. This book, published as a commemoration of the
500th anniversary of Nezahualcéyotl’s death and currently part of the curricu-
lum in Mexican schools at all levels, consists of a narrative recreation of the
Aztec emperor’s life, allegedly based on historical documents and a compila-
tion of poems attributed to him. The book’s fictional rhetoric is a clear example
of the pedagogical uses of the Aztec figures in the reproduction and idealization
of Pre-Columbian sources of national identity. It is also clear that the book
is part of a trend that poses Nezahualcoyotl as an icon of Mexican national-
ity. What is possible to observe here is that a book like this is possible due to
the theoretical foundations Le6n-Portilla has given to the notion of authorship.
Even though it is methodologically questionable, Martinez’s book proves that
the constitution of individual figures in the context of Pre-Columbian studies
provides a necessary fiction in order to create a place for the Indians in the
country’s official history. Thus, we can conclude that Leén-Portilla’s work has
successfully represented a wide range of ideological articulations, and the de-
bate on the indigenous question, both in terms of claims of autonomy and na-
tional appropriation, is far from over.**
A final articulation of Leon-Portilla in the paradigm of Hispanism is his re-
covery of Spanish language in the context of contemporary indigenous claims.”5
In his speech after his entry into the Mexican Language Academy, Leén-Porti-
lla addressed the mestizaje of the Spanish language as a positive factor, since it
paralleled the racial mestizaje on which the nation is founded (“Los maestros
prehispanicos” 3). This first development of the concept of Spanish language as
a fundamental part of the ideal of incorporating the indigenous peoples into the
national paradigm is clearly inscribed in the nationalistic ideology characteris-
 THE PRE-COLUMBIAN PAST AS A PROJECT 53

tic of the indigenismo. Therefore, Le6n-Portilla’s earliest discussion of Spanish

language as part of the constitution of an indigenous agency within the nation’s
discursive limits was presented within the context of his incorporation into the
very Academy that represents the normative aspect of the “national language”
and as an introduction to a lecture that centered on recovering the value of the
“ancient voice.” In this presentation, Le6n-Portilla seeks a connection that may
reconcile the revaluation of Pre-Columbian culture with the hegemonic concep-
tion of Mexican nationality. The relationship he establishes between language
and cultural processes is quite interesting since linguistic claims are a funda-
mental part of contemporary indigenous struggles.
The overwhelming growth of indigenous movements in Mexico, mainly
expressed in the work of anthropologists such as Guillermo Bonfil Batalla and
in the claims of the Zapatistas, has provoked a change in the perception of mes-
tizaje within Leon-Portilla’s work. Probably the most important claim that has
been recovered is the right of cultures to exist within a pluralistic society that
recognizes each group’s right to its own culture (Bonfil Batalla 229-45). Leon-
Portilla, who has openly sympathized with contemporary indigenous struggles,
in 1997 offered a new approach to his posture regarding the Spanish language
as a fundamental part of the political processes of the indigenas in Mexico.
In Pueblos originarios y globalizacion, he defends the Spanish language as
the lingua franca among the different ethnic groups of the country (44-45).
Interestingly enough, in the same essay, Leon-Portilla explicitly states that this
usage of the Spanish language is not exclusive of the plurality of cultures and
languages existent within Mexico because its use as common ground in discus-
sion between cultures does not contradict or challenge their right of existence
or cultural specificity (57).
This posture distances itself from the triumphant exaltation of the linguistic
and cultural mestizaje Ledn-Portilla endorsed in 1962, but it still represents an
implicit ideological problem. One of the first questions one can raise to such a
posture surrounds the implications of considering Spanish as the lingua franca.
The need for using the “national language” in such function operates at two
levels. First, since Spanish is the official governmental language and constantly
used for political negotiation, the knowledge and use of Spanish by communi-
ties is an indispensable tool for the advancement of political agendas, such as
the creation of laws and the everyday relations with the state. However, the
adoption of Spanish by communities implies that bilingualism is also indispens-
able because the indigenous languages are unable to offer effective communica-
tion with a state system where Spanish is not merely the hegemonic language,
but the only language valid for political interaction. Thus, bilingualism, when
54 IGNACIO M. SANCHEZ-PRADO

adopted only because of an imposed political necessity, may be regarded as one

of the factors that obstructs cultural autonomy since it is based precisely on the
subalternization of alternate linguistic systems which are unable to convey a
political agency in the context of the relations with the hegemonic powers.”
Finally, it is necessary to emphasize another factor concerning the Spanish
language in its relationship with Nahuatl scholarship: most “knowledge” pro-
duced about Nahuatl literature and culture is channeled through Spanish and
addressed primarily to Spanish-reading audiences. In terms of specific textual
strategies, this means that the approach that Leon-Portilla has to the texts some-
times follows the intention of constructing legibility for the Spanish-language
reader. For instance, in his recent translation of the Nican mopohua, a Nahuatl
text that narrates the legend of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Le6on-Portilla states
that the purpose of his translation is to reach a version that allows the reader to
perceive the “spirituality” presented in the text (15). In other words, the prior-
ity of the translation is to translate an experience from one cultural horizon
to a very different one. Furthermore, the fact that the scholarship on Nahuatl
literature is primarly addressed to a Spanish-speaking audience is conflictual
with the claims of cultural continuity because readers who actually profit from
this scholarship are not necessarily the indigenas claiming cultural autonomy,
but Spanish-speaking readers who, in most cases, have perceived in the idea
of Pre-Columbian culture as part of a wider Mexican culture. Thus, establish-
ing a connection with the wide Spanish-speaking audience falls into Villoro’s
criticism of indigenismo, since in the end there is still an attempt to identify the
national self with the indigenous other. The possibility of a recovery of these
texts in the context of contemporary indigenous cultures is an urgent item in the
agenda of Nahuatl literature’s criticism.
After considering these three examples of the Hispanist articulation of the
study of Nahuatl literature (the recovery of Sixteenth Century scholarship as the
authoritative source for the Pre-Columbian studies discipline, the reference to
Las Casas as a form of articulating political agendas around the discipline and
the problem of language politics within a corpus of texts where this problem
carries both methodological and political consequences), it is clear that both the
methodological and the ideological foundations of Leén-Portilla’s work carry
a re-evaluation of approaches and concerns inherited by the Spanish humanism
of the sixteenth century. These concerns are recovered through their articulation
with contemporary ideological concerns regarding both the need of a Mexican
and Latin American national/regional narrative and the claims of contempo-
rary indigenous groups. The sometimes paradoxical way in which those factors
interact constitutes the ideological core of the discipline. Therefore, the work
 THE PRE-COLUMBIAN PAST AS A PROJECT BP)

that Leon-Portilla has developed throughout nearly five decades is inscribed,

in its foundations, in a different form of Hispanism. His Hispanism is not so
much about the struggles between Peninsular and Latin American Spanish or
the colonial impositions of the Spanish language but a revision of a legacy that
implies the identification with the Peninsular sources of Mexican and Latin
American culture as a strategy to recover the pertinence of the Pre-Columbian
as a source of our Latin American imagined community. This Hispanism par-
ticipates in a careful revision of the colonial legacy against deterministic and
Manichean approaches to it. It seeks to constitute a postcolonial agenda not by
fully rejecting any intervention of Spanish culture, but by carefully reconsid-
ering some of its contributions as a valuable political instrument to be reap-
propriated in the context of contemporary claims. Within contemporary His-
panism, Le6n-Portilla’s work has been a powerful reminder that the struggles
five centuries ago occupied the Spanish humanists against the violent logics of
coloniality and that the need to reconcile our Spanish heritage and language
with the claims of contemporary indigenous peoples is far from over. Moreover,
Le6én-Portilla’s legacy requires new approaches where the different humanist
ideological paradoxes are interpreted and considered beyond simplistic inter-
pretations that understand Spanish humanism as fundamentally colonial. New
understandings of these colonial foundations, through a reading in which they
appear as a source of productive paradoxes that have constituted many of the
region’s cultural problems, may contribute to one of the most urgent debates in
Latin America today: the relationship between Western and indigenous cultures
in a political context where understanding the indigena as an unattainable Other
or as part of a larger national discourse seems less viable.

Notes

1. Acclear example of this is the tribute /n Jihiyo, in Itlahtol in which many of the most
important scholars on current Pre-Columbian studies name Le6n-Portilla as a primary
source and as the founder of the discipline. The book includes both biographical ac-
counts and theoretical discussions of his work.
2. Foran account of most of the intellectual discussions and their political and institu-
tional origins, see Pedro Angel Palou’s Escribir en México durante los afios locos.
3. A study of this has been conducted by Héctor Perea in his book Espana en la obra de
Alfonso Reyes, which includes an anthology of Reyes’s work on Spanish culture and
its relations to the foundation of an American cultural specificity.
4. The sections I refer to are primarily the ones devoted to the religious rituals and to the
feasts. See Leén-Portilla, Literatura del México antiguo, 48-87 and 238-83.
56 IGNACIO M. SANCHEZ-PRADO

The Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva Espana follows a taxonomy which di-
vides the Nahuas’ world through a scholastic model that goes from the “heavenly mat-
ters,” (that is, the Gods) to the “earthly” ones (feasts, and so on). Some of Sahagtin’s
classifications stand just as presented by the friar in Ledn-Portilla’s anthology.
See the articles by Mignolo and Mignolo and Ebacher.
This method consisted in designing detailed questionnaires in order to obtain infor-
mation from indigenous noblemen about the different cultural practices among the
Nahuas.
This has been noted and analyzed by Todorov, 229-54.
After the publication of the Spanish translation of Segala’s book, Leén-Portilla pub-
lished a review (“Una nueva aportacién’’) in which he argued that Segala’s criticisms
were not valid because the Italian scholar did not speak Nahuatl, thus lacking the basic
methodological tools to make such a criticism. This gave way to a controversy, in
which Segala accused Le6n-Portilla of turning Nahuatl literature into a “coto privado”
(a private preserve) (Segala “La literatura nahuatl’”), to which Leén-Portilla produced
yet another response (“A modo de comentario”). Since this controversy is more re-
lated to academic politics than to the concerns of the present work, I will not give a
detailed account of it.
In contrast, Todorov accepts Sahagtin’s strive for objectivity (235), but also recognizes
his interference in the constitution of the corpus.
Garibay, in his Panorama literario de los pueblos nahuas, applies the classical dis-
tinction between epic, lyric, and didactic discourses to Nahuatl poetry, while Leén-
Portilla’s distinction between cuicatl and tlahtolli, collected in the book El destino
de la palabra, is analogous to the Western distinction between poetry and prose. One
must not forget that Garibay, far from being devoted only to Pre-Columbian textuali-
ties, was also one of the most important editors and translators of Greek and Latin
literature in Mexico.
2s For the former, see Silva Galeana. For the latter, see Leén-Portilla, El destino de la
palabra (63).
. The invitation of indigenous intellectuals to the Seminar has the enormous merit of re-
incorporating them into the debates of Pre-Columbian culture, yet still can be read as
a recovery of the idea of the indigenous informant that provides “authentic” informa-
tion to western scholars. This can also be noted by the method in which contemporary
documents are used to establish the authenticity of sources, just like Sahagtin used the
recounts of Ixtlixdéchitl or Tezoz6moc in the Colegio de Tlaltelélco, without consider-
ing the fact that such documents were already under the influence of Spanish culture.
14. See, for example, the introduction to his first book, La filosofia ndhuatl, where he
claims the existence of a Nahuatl philosophical thought equivalent to Greek produc-
tion (5). This statement, of course, is aligned with similar statements by Alfonso
Reyes, whose studies on the classical culture are part of the claim of the existence of
an American philosophy. See also Dussel’s debate with Appel.
IS\. The introduction of the indigenas as part of the political agenda was due to the
 THE PRE-COLUMBIAN PAST AS A PROJECT a7

Zapatistas. This new centrality has allowed intellectuals aligned with indigenous
causes such as Carlos Montemayor or Leén-Portilla himself to direct their work
towards more concrete political causes.
16. For this, the reference is again La flecha en el blanco.
LT. Just to mention an example, one can see how this claim operates in a project such as
Gloria Anzaldtia’s. In Borderlands/La frontera, Anzaldta constantly refers to the Na-
huatl roots of Chicano culture, to the extent of using some Nahuatl terms as part of her
linguistic performance. The book includes a poetry section named “Ehécatl” after the
Nahuatl god of the Wind, in which she appeals to many symbols of the Pre-Columbian
imaginary. This approach, along with movements such as Aztldn, show the potential
of Pre-Columbian scholarship as a foundation for political agendas within the context
of identity and subaltern politics.
18. As Luis Villoro criticized. See Villoro, 113-209.
LO: Villoro: “The indigenous also appear as a reality in which I can recognize myself,
without disregarding the fact that it is different from me. It is like the surface of a
pound, sometimes dark, sometimes clear, that always allows me to find the outline of
my own figure” (294, my translation). It has to be noted that the first person used here
by Villoro does not convey his own opinions but poses itself in the perspective of some
authors studied in his book.
20. Despite being more than fifty years old, Villoro’s book remains the most insightful
and provocative approach to the politics of indigenismo in the Mexican context, with
notions and observations that can be applied even to contemporary approaches to the
indigenous question all over the continent. However, it is evident that much has hap-
pened in the last fifty years regarding the articulation of the Pre-Columbian cultures in
the Mexican national narrative. For an accessible account of this process in the years
following Villoro’s book, see Florescano, El nuevo pasado mexicano, 15-28.
2h. It is worth mentioning that there has been an ongoing tendency of claiming conti-
nuity between the Pre-Columbian cultures and the contemporary indigenous people
from distinct points of view. The seminal work is Guillermo Bonfil Batalla’s México
profundo, which claims recognition of the indigenous culture against the consistent
denial it has suffered throughout Mexican history. James Lockhart wrote an exten-
sive book, The Nahuas after the Conquest, in which he discusses the continuity and
rearticulating of the Nahuatl culture during the Colonial period. Lockhart’s analysis
engages a wide spectrum of topics, from everyday life and the forms of government
to the changes in cultural production. Finally, Enrique Florescano’s most recent work,
Memoria indigena, claims the indigenous practices of cultural and historical memory
as a form of resistance towards the national constructions and the traditional histori-
ography.
PHL I take the idea from Renan’s classic essay “What is a nation?” where he talks about the
need for a national discourse to create mythological roots beyond a regular temporal-
ity to state the perennial existence of the nation.
23% This incorporation goes as far as including cities and streets named after him and
58 IGNACIO M. SANCHEZ-PRADO

using his image on one of the denominations of the Mexican currency, where the one-
hundred pesos bill includes a fragment of one of his most popular poems written in
fine print.
For a study on how the Mexican state has appropriated the Pre-Columbian past, Luis
Villoro is once again an authoritative source. A broader study on the role of the ethnic
question in the construction of the modern national state is another book by Enrique
Florescano, Etnia, estado y nacién. Another interesting text, that sums up the articula-
tion of the Pre-Columbian, the Hispanic and the “universal” in the context of Mexican
identity is a compilation of classical works assembled by Le6n-Portilla under the title
Raices indigenas, presencia hispdnica. The book recollects texts from some of the
landmark thinkers of national identity, such as Octavio Paz, Alfonso Reyes, Ignacio
Bernal, and Carlos Fuentes. Le6n-Portilla, in a speech later published under the title
México: De su historia, penuries y esperanzas, identifies himself with the celebratory
discourse, by claiming that “thanks to the Mesoamericans we can affirm that Mexico
has been, through the millenniums, a land of books, in which schools existed and
culture flourished” (21, my translation).
A related topic that I will not address for reasons of space is the role that the Spanish
language played in the colonization of the Pre-Columbian culture. This topic is widely
analyzed by Walter Mignolo in his book The Darker Side of Renaissance, where he
discusses, among other things, the role of Nebrija’s linguistic project in colonization
and the diverse roles that the Spanish friars played in this process.
In spite of these political tensions, some approaches to this question have attempted a
conciliatory view of the relationship between Spanish and the indigenous languages.
Pilar Maynez, for instance, has analyzed something in Le6n-Portilla’s work she con-
siders a form of “linguistic indigenismo” in which Pre-Columbian culture acquires
agency through the incorporation of Nahuatl terms into the Spanish language (“El
indigenismo lingtiistico” 412). This approach seems more related to the defense
of a mestizaje project within the field of Pre-Columbian studies, which as we have
seen lies at the bottom in some of Le6n-Portilla’s works, especially the earliest ones.
However, this consideration of indigenismo no longer appears to be at the center of
Leon-Portilla’s discussions as his views have shifted toward an understanding of the
problem from the cultural autonomy perspective.

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e® 3
“Ia hora ha llegado”
Hispanism, Pan-Americanism, and the Hope
of Spanish/American Glory (1938-1948)'

Sebastiaan Faber

How does one justify writing fiction and poetry—or, for that matter, literary
criticism—in a time of international crisis? What legitimacy does creating and
studying literature have when the newspapers are full of war and death? North-
American Hispanists and Spanish-speaking intellectuals facing these questions
in the 1930s and ’40s had a confident, double answer to that dilemma. In the
first place, as scholars and writers, they saw themselves as a powerful force for
peace. After all, they were guardians of Culture, which they conceived of as a
privileged realm of essential “spiritual values” not only transcending econom-
ics and politics, but also national borders. As representatives par excellence of
this realm, they viewed themselves as major players in world history. In 1935
and 1937, for instance, hundreds of Western intellectuals concerned with the
rise of fascism gathered in Paris and Valencia to join forces “In Defense of
Culture”; and when in 1938 almost a hundred professors of Latin American lit-
erature united in Mexico City to found the “Instituto Internacional de Literatura
Iberoamericana” (IILI), they did so under the slogan “A la fraternidad por la
cultura” (toward fraternity through culture).
In the first case, “culture” was directly linked to antifascism, functioning as
an umbrella concept that allowed for an alliance between the liberal bourgeois
 “LA HORA HA LLEGADO” 63

intelligentsia and the more radical leftist sectors associated with the Socialist
and Communist parties—a phenomenon closely connected with the Popular
Front strategy ratified in the summer of 1935 by the Communist International.
The fraternity invoked in the second case, on the other hand, did not primar-
ily refer to antifascism, nor to the universal brotherhood of man, but rather
to the brotherhood of Spanish and English-speaking Americans. To be sure,
the members of the newly founded IILI believed that studying literature was
in itself a practice conducing to peace and progress; they also believed that
this was especially true for the literature of the Americas. Two years after the
Institute’s foundation, while the Second World War was raging through Europe,
the IILI’s journal, the Revista Iberoamericana, optimistically predicted a great
future for the American continent: “;Quiénes habran de recoger el tesoro de
la cultura occidental para salvarlo y glorificarlo?” the editors asked, and their
answer could not have been more confident: “*;La Hora de América ha Ilegado!”
(“Hora” 13) (Who will recover the treasure of Western culture in order to safe-
guard and glorify it? ... The Time of the Americas has come!). If culture was
constructed in spiritual terms as a privileged space of peace and progress, then,
for the members of the IILI, this space had its precise geographical equivalent
in the Americas. The Revista’s editors were sure that “América ha de aceptar
su augusto destino singular: realizar para siempre el ensuefio de las edades y
hacer posible el reino del Espiritu entre los pueblos” (The Americas will accept
their singular, magnificent destiny: to realize for eternity the dream of all ages,
and allow for the reign of the Spirit to rule among all peoples) (“Hora” 13-14).
In other words, they saw culture both as a transcendental tool of peace and
understanding, and as a specific source of pride and glory for their nation, their
language, or, in this case, their continent. As we will see in the following, Popu-
lar Frontist intellectuals celebrated culture in much the same way as a positive
force in both global and regional terms, as both a source of universal values
and concrete, local prestige. Underlying both cases is an unresolved tension
between a universalist, humanist, Enlightenment conception of culture, and a
Romantic, essentialist, or exceptionalist one.
In what follows, we will identify this tension as one of the main prob-
lems underlying the concept of Hispanism. The general purpose of this essay,
however, is to discuss the ideological dimensions of Hispanism in the light
of the transformations it underwent between 1938 and 1948, the turbulent de-
cade preceding the outbreak of the Cold War. In these years, Hispanism was
redefined by three major historical and political events in a crucial way: the
Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and its aftermath of intellectual exile; Roos-
evelt’s Good Neighbor Policy and the accompanying revival of U.S.-sponsored
64 SEBASTIAAN FABER

Pan-Americanism; and the Second World War, which damaged Europe’s power
and prestige, seemingly leaving the Americas as the only hope for humankind.
Three important journals founded during this period will serve to illustrate
these redefinitions: the Revista Iberoamericana, already mentioned, Espana
Peregrina, and Romance.*
The ideological underpinnings of Hispanism are complex, contradictory,
and not always politically sound, as has been argued by several critics in recent
debates on the topic.’ From these debates, four areas have emerged as espe-
cially problematic. Most notable is perhaps the tension between Hispanism as a
transnational concept spanning the entire former Spanish empire, and its role in
bolstering—or negating —different national identities. The academic practice
of Hispanism, it turns out, has been closely connected with different cultural
nationalisms, and with exceptionalist readings of different national histories and
national “missions” or “destinies.” This is especially true for the cases of Spain,
Germany, and the United States.* A second area of controversy is the definition
of “Hispanic culture,” that is, Hispanism’s purported object of study. This defi-
nition has proven doubly problematic. On one hand, different Hispanisms have
alternatively privileged or excluded Peninsular, Latin American, or U.S. Latino
phenomena as belonging to the realm of the “Hispanic.” On the other hand, the
notion of “culture” has privileged or excluded culture in its high, folk, or mass
manifestations. A third area of debate has centered around the relationship be-
tween Hispanism and politics. At stake here are Hispanism’s explicit ties with
political parties, programs, ideals, and interventions; the field’s own implicit
political dimensions or foundations; and the role and status of the Hispanist
qua intellectual or scholar in relation to his or her object of study. Finally, since
its very inception, Hispanism has been significantly shaped by preoccupations
with the status and prestige of the field itself, as well as its object of study; a
sense of injustice, of not having received the appreciation it deserves, seems
never to have been completely absent. It is in this debate that we should situate
the problematic relationship of Hispanism with “theory,” the question whether
Hispanism is “behind” or “ahead” of other disciplines, and whether it can or
should adopt “foreign” disciplinary paradigms or, rather, generate its own.>
This essay will confirm the major arguments made in recent debates around
Hispanism and show that many of the issues at stake now were in fact already
being discussed—though not resolved—sixty years ago, sometimes in quite
similar terms. My approach here is rather critical, and from what follows one
might well conclude that Hispanism, as a term and a disciplinary paradigm, has
long outlived its validity and legitimacy—or, for that matter, its usefulness. In-
cidentally, this is also the view of Sir Raymond Carr, the distinguished historian
 “LA HORA HA LLEGADO” 65

of modern Spain, who expressly refuses to see himself as a Hispanist. In fact, as

he confessed to Santos Julia in El Pais, he outright despises the term. It makes
it seem, he says, “como si un historiador de Espafia tuviera que tener dotes
psicologicas, casi espirituales, para penetrar en el alma de Espafia....” (as if
a historian of Spain would need special psychological, almost spiritual talents
to penetrate Spain’s soul... ). Carr, in other words, disapproves of the term
Hispanism because it is rooted in Spanish cultural nationalism: He rejects its
essentialist connotations implying the existence of a national soul or character
and, more importantly, the corresponding exceptionalist reading of Spain and
its history—an interpretation which Carr and his followers have always force-
fully rejected (Julia).
But, one might wonder, would Raymond Carr normally be considered a
Hispanist? Perhaps not in the realm of the U.S. academy, where the term His-
panism seems to have been monopolized by literary scholars, particularly those
in Peninsular studies.° We should not forget, however, that one of the traditional
meanings of “Hispanism” refers, indeed, to a multidisciplinary field of study
that covers literature, culture, and history. The problem is, of course, that this
is not by far the term’s only definition. In fact, the concept is so vague that this
would in itself constitute sufficient reason to argue against its usage. Is Hispan-
ism, for instance, limited to Spain, or does it also include Latin America? Does
it primarily focus on literature, or rather on history and culture? Is it necessary
for a Hispanist to be a Hispanophile as well? And if so, does that imply a love
and interest for Spain, for Spanish America, or just for the Spanish language?
Are scholars of Catalan or Quechua also considered Hispanists? And perhaps
the most important question: Is Hispanism founded on the very premise that the
former Spanish empire still forms a tightly-knit cultural unity? In other words,
is Hispanism the same as, or closely related to, Pan-Hispanism?
It is important to keep in mind that this terminological confusion stems
partly from cross-linguistic contamination between Spanish and English. His-
panismo and Hispanism do not necessarily mean exactly the same thing, and
neither do hispanista and Hispanist. According to the Diccionario Salvat, for
instance, a hispanismo is in the first place a “giro 0 modo de hablar propio
y privativo de la lengua espafiola” or a “vocablo o giro de esta lengua em-
pleada en otro” (turn of phrase or way of speaking typical of, and restricted
to, the Spanish language . . . word or turn of phrase from this language used in
another language)—the Spanish equivalent, in other words, of a Gallicism or
Anglicism. Salvat only lists as its last meaning of hispanismo the “aficion al
estudio de lengua y literatura espaiiolas y de las cosas de Espana” (fondness
for the study of the Spanish language and literature and other things pertaining
66 SEBASTIAAN FABER

to Spain) (note the amateur status implied by the word “aficidn’”: Hispanists
are “fans” of Spain; Spain is their hobby, perhaps their passion). The defini-
tion given by the Spanish Real Academia is very similar. It defines hispanismo
as, again, an “aficién,” but a slightly more expansive one which includes “las
lenguas, literaturas o cultura hispdnicas.” A hispanista is a person “que pro-
fesa el estudio de lenguas, literaturas 0 cultura hispanicas, 0 esta versada en él”
(the Hispanic languages, literatures, or culture . . . who is a professional student
of Hispanic languages, literatures, or culture, or who is versed in them)—that
is, someone who has turned the aforementioned aficidn into a profession. Ac-
cording to Webster, a “Hispanism” is “a characteristic feature of Spanish ocur-
ring in another language”; but the term is also used to denote “a movement
to reassert the cultural unity of Spain and Latin America”—as a synonym, in
other words, for Pan-Hispanism. A Hispanist, in turn, is “a scholar specially
informed in Spanish or Portuguese language, literature, or civilization.”’ These
conflicting definitions indicate that, apart from the telling hesitation between
hobby and profession, the most indistinct aspect of the term is geographical. It
is especially unclear whether and how Hispanism as a field, and the Hispanist
as its professional representative, include the overseas members of the former
empire. The fact that, in Webster’s definition, Portugal is mentioned while Latin
America is not, is an indication of this point. This is also true of the Spanish
definitions quoted here: Even though the Real Academia is politically correct
enough to speak in the plural of Hispanic languages and literatures, it oddly
refuses to recognize the existence of more than one Hispanic culture.
In historical and ideological terms, Hispanism as a field of study is, indeed,
closely related to Hispanism as a movement that proclaims the cultural unity of
the Spanish-speaking world. And in spite of what the Spanish dictionaries say,
hispanismo was in fact one of the names that this movement adopted in nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century Spain, although it was also known as hispano-
americanismo, panhispanismo, and iberoamericanismo. Peninsular hispanismo
has emerged in many different guises, with political orientations ranging from
outright reactionary to relatively liberal. In the context of Latin America, of
course, hispanismo takes on an even more explicitly political charge as the op-
posite to indigenismo, signaling a literary, cultural, or historical privileging of
the Spanish heritage over the indigenous one (it is in this sense that José Maria
Arguedas is an indigenista and Alfonso Reyes a hispanista). Nor should it be
forgotten that, in Latin America, hispanismo is an opposite of sorts to Pan-
Americanism. While the latter movement believes that Spanish America is,
above all, American and that its destiny is tied up with the United States and
Canada, hispanistas maintain that it should strengthen its cultural, political, and
 “LA HORA HA LLEGADO” 67

economic bonds with Spain. Finally, both Pan-Hispanism and Pan-American-

ism compete with the more narrowly defined, and more explicitly anti-imperi-
alist, Latin Americanism or americanismo of Bolivar, Marti, and others, who
deny the claims to Latin America of both the old empire (Spain) and the new
one (United States), but do argue in favor of a transnational cultural and politi-
cal unity of all Latin-American nations.®
As defined by Fredrick Pike, hispanismo is based on “the conviction that
through the course of history Spaniards have developed a life style and culture,
a set of characteristics, of traditions, and value judgements that render them
distinct from all other peoples” (1). Hispanistas furthermore assume that the
Spaniards, through the conquest of the New World, transmitted these traits to
the indigenous populations, mestizos, and Africans that populated their colo-
nies. Hispanismo manifested itself in different ways throughout the nineteenth
century; and in fact, as Van Aken points out, liberal Spanish hispanistas were
essential in the formation of the anti-yankee disposition of Latin-American
anti-imperialism (59-71). Nevertheless, it was not until the the turn of the
century—in reaction to the definitive liquidation of the Spanish empire—that
hispanismo lived a veritable renaissance in both Spain and Spanish America.
Precisely around this time, when the possibility of a political reunification of
the Spanish-speaking world had disappeared—and when Hispanic intellectuals
on both sides of the Atlantic were made sharply aware of the underdevelopment
of their nations in comparison to their northern neighbors—many intellectuals
expressed the desire of spiritual bonds across the former empire. These senti-
ments were especially strong in Spain, where the definitive collapse of the po-
litical empire was even positively interpreted as a necessary condition for such
a spiritual union. Spanish American intellectuals such as José Enrique Rodo,
meanwhile, tended to shun Madrid and eye Paris instead, in a celebration of
their /atinidad rather than their hispanidad.
Within Peninsular hispanismo there were, in fact, widely divergent ideas
about the form this spiritual unity of the Spanish-speaking world should adopt
and, consequently, about the degree and kind of leadership Spain would have to
exercise over its former colonies. Whereas the right-wing Catholic version of
hispanismo depicted Spain in its traditional role of the guiding, imperial madre
patria, the lay, liberal, and republican hispanistas envisioned a relationship on
a more egalitarian basis. The conservative strain would, over time, develop into
the infamous doctrine of Hispanidad, whose emphasis on hierarchy, tradition,
and empire would form the ideological backbone of the Spanish Falange and,
later, of Francoism. However, to the left of the liberal strain there evolved a
more truly progressive brand of hispanismo. Instead of the hierarchichal social
68 SEBASTIAAN FABER

structures of the right-wing version, this celebrated republicanism, democracy,

and social justice as the political expressions par excellence of Hispanic “hu-
manist” spirituality. This kind of hispanismo was embraced by the intellectuals
of the Spanish Second Republic (1931-1939) and their sympathizers on the
other side of the Atlantic, who received the Spaniards with open arms once,
after the defeat of the Republic, the latter found themselves exiled there.

Mexico City, Cradle of Culture (1938-1948)

Mexico City, especially, was an authentic haven for European refugees, and
as such it was the undisputed cultural center of the Spanish-speaking world
between 1938 and 1948. These years were of crucial importance to the cultural
and political relations between Spain, Latin America, and the U.S., and there-
fore to Hispanism in both its meanings: as a field of study and as the belief in
the cultural unity of the Spanish-speaking world. As indicated previously, three
historical developments made this possible: first, the Spanish Civil War, which
focused the Americas’ attention on Spain and then confronted it with the influx
of tens of thousands of exiled Spaniards, among whom were hundreds of intel-
lectuals; secondly, the revival, in both the United States and Latin America,
of the Pan-American movement which, supported since 1933 by Roosevelt’s
Good Neighbor Policy, gave an important impulse to Latin American studies in
North American academia (Fagg 52); and third, World War II, which seemed to
confirm the demise of Europe as the world’s cultural leader, ceding the scepter
to the Americas. To illustrate the redefinitions and transformations of Hispan-
ism in the context of these developments, I will focus on three journals founded
in Mexico City between 1938 and 1940: the Revista Iberoamericana, first pub-
lished in 1938 by a group of North American and Mexican professors of litera-
ture as the journal of the recently created Instituto Internacional de Literatura
Iberoamericana (IILI); Romance, founded in 1940 by a group of young Spanish
intellectuals, many of whom had also written during the Civil War in Hora
de Espana, and published until late 1941; and Espafia Peregrina (1940-41),
directed by exiled Spaniards Juan Larrea and José Bergamin, and the official
organ of the “Junta de Cultura Espanola.”
It is important to note from the outset that these were three very different
enterprises. The Revista Iberoamericana was conceived of as a professional
journal bringing together scholars of Latin American literature in the U.S. and
Latin America, which primarily hoped to promote intellectual understanding
and exchange between the two Americas. Romance, in contrast, was created
 “LA HORA HA LLEGADO” 69

as an expressly Pan-Hispanic project of difusion cultural, serving to bring the

Spanish, Latin American and, more in general, the entire Western cultural heri-
tage to the Spanish-speaking masses. As such, its goals and premises were as
much political as cultural; Romance’s project was in fact closely connected
to the “cultural front” which, in many parts of the West, had accompanied the
Popular Frontist alliance between Communists, Socialists, and bourgeois de-
mocracy and which hoped, among other things, to overcome or abolish the
separation between “high” and “popular” culture. Espafia Peregrina’s principal
concern was, in a way, more limited. It strove to help preserve and continue
what it defined as “authentic Spanish culture”—that is, the culture of the Span-
ish Republic—in the harsh circumstances of exile and in the face of fascist
censorship and repression. Nevertheless, we shall see that the journal defined
this enterprise with a very specific view of Spanish America in mind. Together
with publishing companies such as Bergamin’s Séneca, Espafia Peregrina con-
stituted one of the Republicans’ important early attempts to meet Franco’s re-
actionary canon with a cultural counteroffensive from exile.’
In spite of these differences, however, the three journals also shared a num-
ber of important traits that makes a comparison among them all the more in-
teresting. First, even though all were founded in Mexico, Mexican intellectuals
played only a minor part, if any, in them. Second, all three possessed what one
could call transnational or continental ambitions, aiming at an audience reach-
ing far beyond Mexico. Third, all three demonstrated an extreme awareness
of the historical moment, marked most importantly by the rise of fascism, the
Spanish Civil War, and, especially after 1940, the apparent decadence of Eu-
rope. Moreover, all three seemed to derive a paradoxical sense of hope from the
bloody chaos paralyzing the Old World. The moment is seen as one of transi-
tion, as the beginning of a new era in which America—either its Anglo-Saxon
or Spanish-speaking part, or both—will lead the world towards greater peace
and justice. In the fourth place, all three journals are dense with an idealistic
rhetoric that barely manages to conceal the contradictory premises on which
they were founded—contradictions which, I would argue, continue to haunt
Hispanism to this day. Next, I will briefly describe the scope, focus, and content
of these journals, with the aim of determining their significance for Hispanism
in terms of the four “problem areas” identified at the beginning of this essay:
the tension between Hispanism as a transnational field and its use to bolster
different forms of cultural nationalism; the precarious definition of its object of
study (“Hispanic culture”); the explicit and implicit politics underlying it; and
the importance of concerns of status and prestige.
70 SEBASTIAAN FABER

The Revista Iberoamericana

In August of 1938, a group of 96 scholars of Latin American literature met

in Mexico City, where they founded the “Instituto Internacional de Literatura
Iberoamericana” and an accompanying journal, the Revista Iberoamericana.
Again, the first issue to address is terminological—a seemingly perpetual curse
of our field. Why, one might wonder, do these scholars speak of “literatura
iberoamericana” and not “latinoamericana” or “hispanoamericana”? The an-
swer is less obvious than it seems, since in reality the adjective iberoamericano
is as vague, confusing, and politically polyvalent as “Hispanism.” As Rojas Mix
explains, the terms “Iberoamérica” and “iberoamericano” began to appear in
Spain towards the end of the nineteenth century and were increasingly common
in the beginning of the twentieth in political and diplomatic circles, as well as
scientific and academic ones (197-98). In the Spanish context, /Jberoamérica
was used to signify a large cultural unity including the entire Iberian Penin-
sula (including Portugal) and the whole of Latin America (including Brazil).
The term was also thought to be more accurate or appropriate than Latino-
américa, propagated since the mid-nineteenth century by the French, because it
more clearly identified the continent’s Iberian roots (Berger, Under 15; Avelar,
“Toward a Genealogy”).'° In Latin America, in turn, the notion of iberoameri-
canismo was used throughout the 1920s as a variant of hispanismo, that is, to
signify the cultural attitude emphasizing Latin-America’s bonds with Spain, an
attitude radically opposed to the Pan-Americanism propagated since the nine-
teenth century by the United States.''
Be that as it may, for the founders of the IILI, “Iberoamérica” was clearly
meant to include Brazil but not Spain, and the bilingual sections of the journal
show that “Iberoamérica” was thought of as the normal Spanish equivalent of
the English “Latin America.”'’ Spain and Portugal were, in fact, emphatically
excluded from the journal’s scope.'* However, while the United States was,
naturally, not thought of as belonging to “Iberoamérica,” the journal did include
articles on North American literature and culture.'* The Revista Iberoameri-
cana, in short, was much more “American” than “Iberian.” This impression is
confirmed by the documents accompanying the creation of the Revista and the
Instituto. Both were initially founded to accomplish three principal goals: to es-
tablish the study of Latin American literature as an autonomous academic field,
independent in terms of status and prestige from that of Peninsular literature: to
improve contact and communication among scholars of Latin American litera-
ture; and, perhaps most importantly, to work toward the intellectual rapproche-
 “LA HORA HA LLEGADO” 71

ment of the U.S. and Latin America, based on the premise that they shared a
common “continental” destiny.!>
Given the location and historical moment of its founding, one would sup-
pose the creation of the Instituto and the Revista to be closely linked to the
Spanish Civil War—which in 1938 was still in full swing and on everyone’s
mind, especially in Latin America (Schuler 57-60)—and the arrival of the first
exiled intellectuals from Spain in both Mexico and the United States. The way
in which the IILI presents itself today, in 2004, confirms this impression. On
the IILI’s Pittsburgh website, for instance, it is stated that the Instituto “fue fun-
dado en 1938 en la Ciudad de México a instancias de personalidades tales como
Pedro Henriquez Urefia y Alfonso Reyes como un intento de reafirmaci6on de
la unidad hispanica en tiempos de la Guerra Civil Espafiola” (was founded in
1938 in Mexico City at the initiative of well-known individuals such as Pedro
Henriquez Urefa and Alfonso Reyes in an attempt to reaffirm Hispanic unity at
the time of the Spanish Civil War). This information, however, which is based
on a version of the Instituto’s foundation as it was established in the 1980s by
the Revista’s long-time director Alfredo Roggiano, does not seem entirely accu-
rate.'° For one, there is no evidence that the role played by Reyes and Henriquez
Urefia in the foundation of the Instituto was anything more than tangential.!”
More importantly, none of the scholars initially involved in the enterprise seem
to have been driven by the kind of Pan-Hispanist ideals mentioned by Roggiano.
They did not want to reaffirm the unity of the Spanish-speaking world—quite
to the contrary. While both the Instituto and the Revista recognized the impor-
tance of the Spanish heritage to Latin American culture, both were, from the
outset, heavily pronounced in favor of Pan-Americanism. The editorial of the
journal’s first issue leaves little doubt in this respect. The first paragraph, to be
sure, exalts the “unidad espiritual” of “América,” and could perhaps, given the
ambivalence of the latter term, be interpreted as specifically celebrating Latin
American unity:

Cargado de portento es el fenémeno que durante estos diez ultimos anos se ha pro-
ducido en la atmésfera cultural de América: este lento despertar de la conciencia a
la realidad de su unidad espiritual. Mientras mejor van logrando las diversas nacio-
nalidades acentuar los rasgos de sus caracteristicas diferencias, mas al descubierto
queda el asiento comin sobre el cual ellas descansan. (“Editorial” 7)

(Full of wonder is the phenomenon that has been unfolding over the past ten years
in the cultural sphere of the Americas: this slow awakening to the awareness of the
reality of its spiritual unity. The better its diverse nationalities are able to accentu-
q2Z SEBASTIAAN FABER

ate their different traits, the more obvious the common foundation on which they
rest will become.)

The second paragraph makes clear, however, that “América” and its “conti-
nental destiny” are expressly meant to include the United States as well:

Es una fuerza interior, a modo de marea, que genera ideas, o interpretaciones, 0

acontecimientos. No se organizan conferencias panamericanas para exaltar la marea.
Antes por el contrario, son ellas plenitudes sintomaticas que acusan la presencia de
un continental destino: sufren, no engendran el influjo. (“Editorial” 7)'*

(It as an interior force, like a tidal wave, that generates ideas, or interpretations,
or events. Pan-American conferences are not organized to exalt the tidal wave. To
the contrary: they are symptomatic peaks that betray the presence of a continental
destiny: they are the product of this influence, not its cause.)

The Instituto’s “hard core” was formed by a group of scholars working in

the United States, of both American and Latin American background, together
with two professors from the Mexican National University. The IILI was led
by Manuel Pedro Gonzalez, Edwin K. Mapes, Julio Jiménez Rueda, John A.
Crow, and John E. Englekirk, with Federico de Onis as one of the vocales; the
Revista’s editors were Roberto Brenes Mesén, Carlos Garcia-Prada, Sturgis E.
Leavitt, Francisco Monterde, and Arturo Torres-Rioseco.'? Among these were
some of the most authoritative spokesmen on Latin-American culture and lit-
erature in the U.S.: Garcia Prada had published a translated anthology of Dario
with MacMillan as early as 1928; Torres-Rioseco and Leavitt, both members
of the Harvard Council on Hispano-American Studies, had compiled a series of
bibliographies of Spanish American literature in the 1930s with Harvard Uni-
versity Press; and Crow published the first edition of his best-selling college
reader Spanish American Life in 1941, followed in 1946 by his much more
ambitious The Epic of Latin America.
The content of the Revista was equally free of references to Pan-Hispanic
unity. Corresponding to the journal’s stated goals, it specifically aimed to pres-
ent Latin America as an autonomous cultural space and continually emphasized
the need and desirability of close contact and improved understanding between
the United States and Latin America. While the Revista paid regular attention
to North American literature in its own right, with introductory texts on Robert
Frost, Walt Whitman, and others,” Spanish Peninsular literature was conspicu-
ously absent from the Revista’s pages—except, that is, when it was viewed in
function of Latin America. In the fourth issue, to be sure, Englekirk published a
 “LA HORA HA LLEGADO” a3

long article on the Generation of 1898, but it exclusively focused on its ties with
and interest in Latin America. Similarly, when Crow wrote about Garcia Lorca
in the second issue, it was about his presence and reception in the Americas.”!
In fact, the importance of the Revista for U.S. Hispanism lies precisely in
its explicit rejection of the idea that Latin-American literature should be seen,
as it had been until then, as a mere appendix to Peninsular literature. More than
a century after the political independence of Latin America, the foundation of
the IILI represents the coming of age of Latin American literature as a field
of study in its own right. As such, its significance cannot be overestimated.
However, this did not mean that the tension between cultural nationalism and
Hispanism as a transnational scholarly practice was resolved. On the contrary,
the emancipation of Latin-American literature and culture from the former col-
onizer was legitimized through a familiar Romantic, “Americanist” or telluric
mythology of Blut und Boden. “El suelo americano,” the editors wrote, “nu-
tre un nuevo espiritu que lucha por manifestarse en formas propias de cultura
original” (The soil of the Americas . . . is feeding a new spirit that is struggling
to manifest itself in forms that are characteristic of an original culture) (“El Se-
gundo” 262). Similarly, in the second issue, Torres-Rioseco published a series
of “Consideraciones acerca del pensamiento hispanoamericano” (Reflections
on Spanish-American Thought), in which he argued that, after centuries of let-
ting itself be defined by foreigners, it was about time that Latin America started
defining itself:

Nosotros .. . hemos sido los conejos de India . . . ; Y qué no han dicho de nosotros
los turistas de todos los tiempos! . . . ;[{C]uanta falsedad, cuanta falta de compren-
sién y de sentido americano! {Cual de estos turistas miré cara a cara al indio, vio
su alma angustiada y perdida en el cruce de cien caminos, descendio hasta lo mas
profundo de su tragedia? ... Sdlo ahora empezamos a sospechar que bien pudié-
ramos nosotros mismos meternos en nuestro yo y explicar luego al mundo lo que
tenemos, pensamos y queremos . . . Ya nos cansamos pues de ser espectaculo. . .
(“Consideraciones” 277-78)

(We... have been the guinea pigs... And what haven’t the tourists of all times
said of us!... Such an amount of falsity, such a lack of comprehension and of
American sense! Which one of these tourists has looked the Indian in the face, seen
his anguished soul, lost on the crossroads of a hundred paths, or descended to the
bottom of his tragedy? . .. Only now are we beginning to suspect that it might well
be us who can penetrate our own self and then explain to the world what we have,
think, and want . . . In short, we are tired of being a spectacle . . . )
74 SEBASTIAAN FABER

It is significant however, that the false, “foreign” view of the Americas that
Torres-Rioseco rejects, is that of Europe. The author specifically criticizes “el
dogmatismo de un Spengler” (the dogmatism of someone like Spengler) and
“el malabarismo verbal de un Ortega y Gasset” (the verbal juggling acts of
someone like Ortega y Gasset) (279). On the other hand, he welcomes North
American philosophy as a necessary corrective to the inherent flaws of Latin-
American thought:

Debemos buscar la soluci6n de [estas preguntas] con un criterio esencialmente rea-

lista, forma de sistema que yo creo tipicamente americana,.... Frente a nuestra
actitud de misticismo contemplativo estan el pragmatismo de James y la Weltans-
chauung del profesor Dewey. Acaso nuestro cadtico misticismo se pueda orientar
por caminos seguros y s6lidamente construidos. (279)*

(We have to find the solution to these questions with an essentially realistic crite-
rion, a kind of system that I believe to be typically American. . . . Opposite our atti-
tude of contemplative mysticism stands James’s pragmatism and the Weltanschau-
ung of Professor Dewey. Perhaps our chaotic mysticism can find its way along
roads that are safe and solidly built.)

The IILI, then, did not cast off the cultural-nationalist heritage of Hispan-
ism. While disconnecting the destiny of Latin America from that of Spain and
its “universal mission,” it substituted it with an pan-nationalist connection to the
United States, with similar invocations of cultural uniqueness, shared destiny,
and future glory. If, as Mariscal has shown, traditional U.S. Hispanism used
Spain’s proverbial “backwardness” as a “spent” cultural force to bolster U.S.
exceptionalist expansionism (3), the IILI represents an attempt to link Latin
American literature to this, now “continental” destiny.
How did the ILI conceive “Hispanic culture,” the second problem area
defined previously? As said, the Instituto was explicitly founded as an orga-
nization for university professors, and, naturally, this professional focus had
implications for both the definition of Latin-American literature as an object of
study and the relationship of the Instituto’s members to it. For the members of
the Instituto, “culture” should function as a conduit for continental “fraternity”
and was neatly defined as an object of the professional academic gaze: It was
an object that could be clearly demarcated; divided up into currents, tendencies,
and “generations”; and described through careful analyses and exhaustive bib-
liographies. Moreover, texts could be measured in terms of both literary quality
and cultural authenticity.** Throughout the Revista, there is an unmistakable
awareness that its contributors are in effect laying the foundation of a whole
 “LA HORA HA LLEGADO” ES)

new field of study; hence, the importance given to the publication of textbooks,
anthologies, and new series of Latin American literature.24
The HLI’s professional, academic-literary focus also implied that it pre-
sented itself as politially neutral. Its members started from the premise that
politics were not a major part of its institutional concerns. The editors declare
as much in their first editorial:

La creaci6n de este Instituto comporta onerosa responsabilidad . . . [Los hombres

a quienes ella se confié . . . ]no han jurado pleitesfa a escuela 0 agrupacion algu-
na. Les ha asociado una comunidad de visién, un grande amor por las Letras de
América, una misma aspiracion de independencia intelectual y una misma elevada
comprensi6n de cuanto implica la unidad espiritual de todas nuestras nacionalida-
des. (“Editorial” 8)

(The foundation of this Institute carries with it an onerous responsibility. . . . [The

men in whose care the Institute was placed .. . ] have not sworn allegiance to any
school or group. What has brought them together is acommon vision, a great love of
American Letters, a shared aspiration to intellectual independence and a shared lofty
understanding of what is implied by the spiritual unity of all our nationalities.)

Politics, then, were deemed less important than the members’ shared love of
literature, desire for cultural independence, and belief in a common continental
identity. Implictly, of course, the IILI was impregnated with politics of several
different kinds, of which its Pan-Americanism is most obvious. Indeed, what did
it mean to be Pan-Americanist in the 1930s and 1940s? In the first place, it im-
plied a lack of fear or apprehension about United States expansionism—a form,
so to speak, of anti-anti-imperialism, or at least a U.S.-friendly form of anti-
imperialism.” Pan-Americanism, after all, is built on the premise that the inter-
ests of the United States and those of Latin America are not at odds, but are essen-
tially the same.”° As said, this automatically excluded the idea, propagated since
the turn of the century by Marti, Rod6 and countless others, that the U.S. could
be a threat to Latin American culture and autonomy. The editors of the Revista
dismissed these concerns as a manifestation of a harmful inferiority complex on
the part of the Latin Americans, and a sign of a shameful lack of interest in U.S.
culture among the Latin American intelligentsia.*’ In the second place, being
Pan-Americanist in the 1930s and 1940s meant being anti-fascist, that is, op-
posed to the infiltration of Germany and Italy in Latin America. This threat was
real, and it was a principal concern in Roosevelt’s policy toward Latin America,
both before and after the entry of the United States into the war (Berger, Under
48; Fagg 59). Thirdly, Pan-Americanism was associated with a commitment to
76 SEBASTIAAN FABER

“democracy” that already implied a certain degree of anti-Communism (but that,

paradoxically, also allowed for the emergence in Latin America of U.S.-friendly
dictatorships [Berger, Under 48-49]). One of the three editorial texts of the sec-
ond issue, written by Brenes Mesén a propos of the death of Lugones, is not
only apologetic of Lugones’ reactionary turn,** but also explicitly identifies the
Soviet Union with the Axis powers: “;Quién, que no mire las apariencias tan
s6lo,” (Whoever, looking beyond appearances) Brenes writes, “no descubre el
casi perfecto paralelismo entre las formas totalitarias de gobierno de Rusia, y de
Alemania y de Italia [?]” (fails to discover the almost perfect parallels between
the totalitarian forms of government of Russia, Germany, and Italy?) (11-12).
Written in November of 1938, the date Brenes Mesén signed this text, this state-
ment implies a radical political stance. At the height of Popular Frontism and the
Spanish Civil War, it was difficult to be both anti-Communist and in full sup-
port of the Spanish Republic—or, for that matter, to adhere to the revolutionary
regime of Mexican president Lazaro Cardenas, which, apart from the U.S.S.R.,
was the only government openly to stand by the Republic, and which in Mexico
itself had implemented a “socialist education,” and nationalized the oil industry
in March of that year (Krauze 448-49, 474).?°
In fact, contrary to Roggiano’s version of events, if the Spanish Civil War
is present at all in the discourse of the Revista, it is as a rather uncomfortable
absence. At the first Congress, to be sure, the Instituto’s members had adopted
a vaguely formulated motion expressing their “mas sincera simpatia por los
paises en que la libertad de pensamiento y el ejercicio de la catedra merecen el
respeto de los Gobiernos, cualesquiera que sea la posiciOn filos6fica o politica de
quienes ejercen la docencia,” (sincerest sympathy for those countries in which
the freedom of thought and scholarly practice are respected by the Government,
regardless of the teachers’ philosophical or political position) and rejected “la
actitud de aquellos Gobiernos e instituciones que han perseguido o separado de
sus catedras, a hombres cuya tnica falta ha consistido en pensar y obrar con li-
bertad” (the attitude of those Governments and institutions that have persecuted
men whose only fault was to think and act in liberty, or removed them from
their professorships) (“Acta” 24142). While this motion could be interpreted
as referring to Spain, the explicit references to the Spanish Civil War in the first
years of the Revista’s existence can be counted on the fingers of one hand.*°
One could say, of course, that the war was a political event that, as such,
had nothing to do with literature as a professional field of study. Yet the whole
anti-fascist movement had been constructed, precisely, on the identification of
anti-fascist politics with culture. As explained previously, the journal’s Pan-
Americanism was also anti-fascist and, as such, could be seen as a version of
 “LA HORA HA LLEGADO” 77

this identification; at the same time, however, it obviously was a rival version
to the Popular Frontist alliance between bourgeois liberals and radical leftists
of which the Spanish Republic was the most tangible embodiment. This partly
explains why the first issues of the Revista contain so few references to the
Spanish Civil War. It also helps explain the almost total absence of exiled Span-
ish intellectuals among the journal’s contributors. To be sure, Spanish scholar
Federico de Onis was among the Instituto’s founding vocales, but he had been
in the U.S. since the 1920s. However, in 1939, Manuel Pedro Gonzélez wrote
a letter to a group of liberal Spanish intellectuals, inviting them to contribute
to the Revista, but the response was rather tepid: Pedro Salinas contributed
twice; Juan Ramon Jiménez and Américo Castro only once.*! Otherwise, the
only exiled intellectual contributing with any kind of regularity was Enrique
Diez-Canedo.
In light of the journal’s ideological foundations and Pan-Americanist aims,
this absence is only logical. In addition, it is important to point out that the
Spaniards generally had little knowledge and interest in Latin American lit-
erature. In spite of their liberal or progressive credentials, their attitude vis-a-
vis Latin America was in fact rather problematic and quite oblivious of Latin
American sensibilities (Rehrmann 544-56). This is all too clear from Castro’s
article, in which the historian cannot help but complain about the “aberration”
of Latin American nationalists who claim the indigenous cultural heritage as
their own: “Hay que decir a México... que en tanto no sienta de veras que
a Hernan Cortés debe el haber salido de la sanguinaria e inerte vida precor-
tesiana, México carecera del esencial equilibrio que tanto necesita” (One has to
say to Mexico . .. that, as long as it does not truly feel that its escape from the
bloodiness and inertia of Pre-Colombian life is due to Hernan Cortés, Mexico
will lack the essential equilibrium that it so badly needs) (“Sobre’” 33-34).**
Secondly, many of the exiled Spaniards were committed to a Popular-Frontist
abolition of the distinction between high and popular culture, as well as be-
tween culture and politics. This, of course, went against the Instituto’s ideal of
a “pure” and professionalized field of literary studies. Finally, many were Com-
munists or philo-Communists and, for good reasons, highly suspicious of the
United States, which was not only the mecca of capitalism, but had also failed
to support the Republic throughout the Civil War.
I would like to close the discussion of the ILII with some comments on
the last of Hispanism’s four “problem areas”: the issue of status and prestige.
As we have seen, this was a central concern of the Instituto’s founders. Their
very goal was to improve the status and prestige of Latin American culture in
the U.S.—but also that of U.S. culture in Latin America. The journal’s lemma
78 SEBASTIAAN FABER

proclaimed that it aspired “a constituir, gradualmente, una vital representacion

de los grandes valores espirituales de la creciente cultura iberoamericana” (to
gradually constitute a vital representation of the great spiritual values of our
growing Ibero-American culture). Similarly, when assuming the Instituto’s
presidency in 1938, Manuel Pedro Gonzalez declared that its creation obeyed
to “una gran fe en las posibilidades y en los destinos de América, y de una
clara conciencia de sus valores éticos e intelectuales” (a great faith in the pos-
sibilities and destinies of the Americas, and a clear awareness of its ethical and
intellectual values), and to “[uJn generoso ideal de fraternidad continental y un
fuerte anhelo de enriquecer y propagar nuestra cultura” (a generous ideal of
continental fraternity and a strong desire to enrich and propagate our culture)
(“Palabras” 229). In the third issue, the editors wrote that “la obra de cultura
continental... , hasta el presente oscurecida e ignorada, debe brillar como
merece y ha de difundirse sin trabas ni miedos de ninguna indole” (the works of
our continental culture... , which until now have been obscured and ignored,
deserve to shine, and should be spread without obstacles or fears of any kind)
(“La Revista” 15-16). For the members of the Instituto, in other words, the
study of Latin American literature was naturally connected with something of a
public relations campaign on behalf of Latin American culture as a whole.
Given the time and circumstances of its creation, the fact that the founders
of the IILI were proud and convinced Pan-Americanists is not at all surpris-
ing.’ As Mark T. Berger has shown, the state-sponsored Pan-Americanism of
the Roosevelt administration was instrumental to the coming of age of U.S.-
Latin American studies between the Wars, and by the early 1940s “Pan Ameri-
canism had become central to the dominant professional discourses on Latin
America” in the United States (“Greater” 45; Under 16). In the framework
of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, initiated in the early 1930s, the United
States had modified its attitude toward Latin America, moving from an arrogant
“Anglo-Saxonism” that viewed Latin cultures as intrinsically inferior, toward a
discourse of mutual respect and understanding, emphasizing the “commonality
of the hemispheric experience in contrast to other parts of the world” (Berger,
“Greater” 55). At the same time, partly in response to the increase in fascist pro-
paganda etforts, the U.S. government realized that it could use cultural relations
to secure its position of power in Latin America. With this purpose in mind, in
August 1940 Roosevelt created the Office for Coordination of Commercial and
Cultural Relations Between the American Republics, soon renamed the Office
of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA). Headed by Nelson Rock-
efeller, this office closely cooperated with the State Department’s Division of
Cultural Relations “to channel US economic and cultural influence throughout
 “LA HORA HA LLEGADO” 79

the hemisphere” (Berger, Under 50; Fagg 61-62). In reality, Berger argues, the
Good Neighbor discourse of mutual appreciation and respect was little more
than an excuse to use “cultural relations as a conduit for the transmission of
North American influence”—a foreshadowing of sorts of the “cultural Cold
War” of the 1940s, ’50s, and 60s: “For the first time, under Roosevelt, the
State Department explicitly pursued international cultural understanding as a
component in its foreign policy agenda” (Under 50-51). Needless to say, the
goals formulated by the IILI almost literally coincided with those of the Roos-
evelt government, and, for that matter, with many other academic efforts of the
late 1930s and early 1940s.*4 Several of the Instituto’s founders were, in fact,
connected with the Pan American movement.*°

Espana Peregrina

At around the same time that the IILI was founded, five distinguished Spanish
intellectuals arrived in Mexico City to become the first inhabitants of La Casa
de Espana en México. The Casa was created for the purpose of housing Span-
ish intellectuals whose work had become impossible in a Spain torn by civil
war.*° If Alfonso Reyes was only tangentially involved with the IILI, it was he,
together with Daniel Cosio Villegas, who were key figures in the creation of the
Casa, as well as its first directors. The project was almost entirely financed by
the Mexican government, and by the end of 1939 it had fifty members work-
ing in thirty different academic and artistic fields. La Casa de Espatia—which
in 1940 was renamed as El Colegio de México, which still today remains one
of Latin America’s most prestigious graduate institutions—stands as a sym-
bol both of President Cardenas’ solidarity with the Spanish Republic, and of
the Spaniards’ lasting impact on Mexican society. Once the Republican defeat
appeared unavoidable, the same sense of solidarity would prompt Cardenas
to open Mexico’s doors to an unlimited number of Spanish refugees. In total,
between 15,000 and 30,000 Spaniards took advantage of this offer, and so a
good part of Spain’s intellectual elite ended up in Mexico City, where they 1m-
mediately displayed impressive, almost feverish, cultural activity. Not only did
they help strengthen Mexico’s cultural institutions, ranging from the Fondo de
Cultura Econ6mica to the National University, but they also created their own
schools, publishing companies, and journals.
One of the first of the exile journals was Esparia Peregrina, founded in 1940
by Juan Larrea and José Bergamin as the official journal of the Junta de Cultura
Espajfiola. The Junta had been created by a group of intellectuals in early 1939
80 SEBASTIAAN FABER

as an organization of “creators or maintainers” of “authentic” Spanish culture,

that specifically aimed at avoiding the dispersal of the exiled Republican intel-
ligentsia, and encouraged the foundation of institutions fostering the “creacion,
expresion y conservacién de la cultura espafiola.” The journal, made by and
for intellectuals, had a circulation of around 1000 copies, was generally some
50 pages in lenght, and was sold in Mexico for the price of one peso (Caudet,
Cultura 68n). Every issue opened with an editorial article that addressed topics
directly related to the situation, significance, and responsibilities of the exiled
intellectuals. The rest of the journal was filled with essays on culture and his-
tory, literary criticism, and poetry. Although a combination of personal conflicts
and financial problems would cause it to collapse after only nine issues, the
foundation of Espana Peregrina was an important event: In the same way that
the Casa de Espajia lived on as El Colegio de México, Espana Peregrina resur-
rected soon after its disappearance in the shape of Cuadernos Americanos.
Even though the Junta de Cultura Espafiola was specifically concerned with
the preservation of Peninsular culture in the face of exile and fascist repression,
Espana Peregrina from the outset saw its cause in connection with the glorious
future of Spanish America. This is already clear in the opening statement of
Espana Peregrina’s very first issue, in which the editors address the “nations of
Spanish America” as follows:

[N]os dirigimos a vosotros, pueblos de América, incorporados materialmente a la

universalidad por el esfuerzo creador de Espana. Bajo el signo de un Nuevo Mundo
a ella nacisteis y en ella habéis ido creciendo desprendidos de Europa. La época
universal que abre en la historia el holocausto de la Madre Espaiia, sefiala sin duda
el tiempo de vuestra madurez en que habéis de desarrollar lo que os es peculiar y
definitivo, la esencia de Nuevo Mundo que continentalmente os diferencia y carac-
teriza. Entre vosotros nos hallamos movidos por un mismo designio histérico, con-
sagrados a una empresa similar de mundo nuevo. . . . Llevamos un mismo camino.
jOjala nos hermanemos en una sola marcha! (“Espafia Peregrina” 6)

(We address ourselves to you, people of the Americas, who were materially incor-
porated into universality by the creative effort of Spain. You were born to univer-
sality under the sign of a New World, and in it, detached from Europe, you have
been growing up. The universal time period opened up in history by the holocaust
of Mother Spain no doubt signals the moment of your adulthood, in which you
will develop that which characterizes and defines you: the New World essence that
continentally differentiates and identifies you. Among all of you, we find ourselves
being moved by the same historic plan, dedicated to a similar new-world enter-
 “LA HORA HA LLEGADO” 81

prise. ... We are going in the same direction. Hopefully we can join in one single
march!)

From this text, whose tone and attitude are representative of the journal as
a whole, the editors’ Pan-Hispanist aspirations are unmistakable. But it is also
clear that these aspirations are ultimately rooted in Spanish cultural national-
ism: If the former colonies are bound for a great future, it is thanks to the ‘“‘cre-
ative effort” of Spain, which had unselfishly insisted on spreading its “spiritual
values” across the New World. This idea is indeed central to the journal’s edito-
rials and a good number of its articles. Together, these formulate a particular in-
terpretation of the Spanish nation and its history, an interpretation most clearly
articulated by Juan Larrea, the main intellectual force behind Espafia Peregrina
(Bary 120). In a series of essays published either as editorials or under his own
name, Larrea tried to prove that the exiled intellectuals had been chosen as the
privileged instruments of Providence.*’ In Larrea’s view, no doubt inspired by
Spengler, Europe was collapsing under the weight of its own civilization. Its
cultural and moral decay had been exemplified, first, by the “betrayal” of the
Spanish Republic on the part of the great Western democracies and, second, by
the outbreak of the Second World War. But according to Larrea, the “death” of
the Republic and the sacrifice of the Spanish people, however tragic, inaugu-
rated a new phase in history in which the cultural hegemony of Europe would
be replaced by that of the Americas.
At first glance, Larrea’s editorials share an important motive with those of
the Revista Iberoamericana, in that both see Spanish America as the redeemer
of mankind. Where the the two diverge, however, is in the role attributed to
Spain, and particularly the Republican exiles, in this historical transition. For
Larrea, the exiles were nothing less than crucial. As the “soul” of the deceased
Republic, they were destined to carry Europe’s, and particularly Spain’s, spiri-
tual essence across the Atlantic towards the promised land of the future. If the
resurrection of a new, higher form of civilization was possible on the American
continent—or, in Larrea’s terms, “el continente del espiritu’”—it was in large
part due to the Spaniards. For Larrea, the historic role of the sacrificial Spanish
pueblo—a collective incarnation of the Christ figure of which the exiles were
in turn the sublimation—was to facilitate access to “ese mundo de civilizacion
verdadera” (that world of true civilization) by being “‘su precursor efectivo e
indispensable” (its effective and indispensible precursor) (“Introduccion” 23).
In the end, then, Larrea’s “Americanism,” is little more than an adapted version
of hispanismo. The main idea underlying it is the familiar claim that Spain, or
the former Spanish empire, represents a particular way of life characterized by
82 SEBASTIAAN FABER

a set of spiritual values, without which the world would not be able to survive
(“Por un orden” 147; “Entereza” 244).
How did the editors of Espana Peregrina conceive of “Hispanic culture”?
It is clear that they saw it as a dynamic phenomenon, strongly rooted in Spain,
but capable of growth and transformation. In the predominant intellectual dis-
course of the Spanish Republic, of which the Junta de Cultura was quite repre-
sentative, culture was seen as a universal tool of emancipation, but also as the
essence or “soul” of a nation and its people, in this case, Spain. The fact that
intellectuals were seen as its representatives par excellence—its “creators and
maintainers’”—points to a fundamental paradox that in fact underlies the whole
of Popular Frontism: While idealizing the pueblo as the source of authentic
culture and national identity, Popular Frontist intellectuals were not willing to
give up their position of cultural power. As a result, they remained caught in a
form of paternalism.
Due in part to this ambiguous conception of Hispanic culture, its relation-
ship to politics as conceived by the Spaniards is also ambivalent. On one hand,
the members of the Junta believed that, as guardians of “authentic” national
culture, intellectuals had an important mission to fulfill, and this also implied
taking a political stand—in this case, against Francoism. As Eugenio Imaz,
the Junta’s secretary, wrote: “Nosotros los intelectuales . . . no creemos que el
mundo esta ahi... para que lo vayamos contemplando con delectacién o con
asco... No hay escape. ... Hay que tomar una postura, . . .” (We intellectu-
als... do not believe that the world exists... for us to contemplate it with
delight or disgust... There is no escape . . . One has to take a stand... ) (17).
At the same time, however, the editors declared, like those of the Revista, that
the cause of culture really transcended party politics. Finally, much like the
members of the IILI, the editors of Espafia Peregrina saw their cause and “mis-
sion” as bound up with the status and prestige of Hispanic culture as a whole.
And yet, while, in the eyes of the Instituto, Spanish America should emancipate
itself from Spain, and would redeem the world in spite of its historical connec-
tion with Spain, for the editors of Espafia Peregrina Spanish America redeemed
both itself and the world because of its essential link with the Peninsula.

Romance

Romance: Revista Popular Hispanoamericana, was as shortlived as Espana

Peregrina—it only published 24 issues between February 1940 and May
1941—but no less important. The journal, of 24 pages on large newspaper for-
 “LA HORA HA LLEGADO” 83

mat, generally appeared every two weeks and was sold for 30 centavos (San-
tonja 59). The first issue had a print run of 100,000, which was for the most part
distributed freely across the whole of Spanish America in an attempt to attract
subscriptions. All of the editors were Spanish, and most of them had belonged
to the group that during the war had published Hora de Espana.* In format and
content, the journal resembled La Gaceta Literaria, published in the 1920s in
Madrid, and, in addition to several editorial sections dedicated to political and
intellectual issues related to Spanish Civil War exile, the topics covered were
quite diverse.*”
The journal’s title expressed its two main goals: to join Spanish and Span-
ish American intellectual forces and to make “culture” accessible to a large
popular audience. In their mission statement, the editors declared that they had
chosen to name their journal Romance because the romance—the traditional
medieval ballad form—was not only a “medio de expresién maravilloso de los
sentimientos populares espanioles, cronica viva de la historia de la nacionalidad
espanola” (marvellous means of expression of Spanish popular sentiment, a liv-
ing chronicle of the history of the Spanish nation), but also the most important
expression of “the popular soul” of Latin America.*°
Like Espana Peregrina, then, Romance was premised on a unitary concept
of Hispanic culture as covering the whole of the Spanish-speaking world, with
a Pan-Hispanic folk tradition as its strongest bond. The editorials of Romance,
too, celebrated the “spiritual” unity of Spaniards and Latin Americans. The
journal itself was presented under aegis of this unity and seen as its confirma-
tion. Much like in Espafia Peregrina, culture was perceived as both rooted in,
and directed towards, the pueblo. Thus, the intellectuals of Romance ended up
proclaiming their desire to emancipate the popular classes by administering to
them a culture whose origins were also assumed to be popular—a culture with
which, we must assume, the pueblo itself had somehow lost touch. In other
words, the project suffered from the paternalist attitude adopted by many of the
Republican intelligentsia, idealizing the people as a premodern, innocent entity
that embodies national identity but is in need of intellectual guidance.
These representations of culture and the folk are of course suffused with
nostalgia—a nostalgia that, in the case of Romance, was closely associated with
its progressive, anti-capitalist politics, but that also allowed for an idealiza-
tion of Spanish America because of its perceived backwardness with respect to
Western Europe. Much like Larrea in Espana Peregrina, the editors of Romance
believed they were living the apocalypse of European civilization and the emer-
gence of a utopian America which would be the cradle of peace, democracy,
and social justice. The peoples of Spanish America, Romance stated,
84 SEBASTIAAN FABER

tienen la suerte ... de que son ain PUEBLOS, es decir, comunidad de hombres
en los que la vida mecdnica y facil no ha secado las més puras fuentes de la ins-
piracion, del poder y la creacién. ... Un pueblo tiene ante si espléndido porvenir
cuando atin conserva un alma pura. (“Sobre la unidad” 7)

(are lucky enough... to still be FOLK, that is, a community of human beings
whose purest sources of inspiration, power, and creation have not yet been dried up
by an easy, mechanical way of life. . . A nation that still preserves a pure soul has
a splendid future ahead of it.)

Thanks to having preserved this “purity of soul,” Spanish America was in

the unique position to remind the rest of humanity of man’s true function in
the world. In Romance’s utopian reading, the Americas were represented as
a “vivo e intacto caudal del espiritu,” “sin horrendas cicatrices que lo defor-
men” (living, intact reservoir of spirituality; not disfigured by horrible scars)
(“Voluntad y destino” 7; “Una paz” 7). Of course, for a Spaniard to claim that
the American continent is free of scars is not only naive, but no doubt offensive
to Latin American ears. In the end, Romance’s Pan-Hispanism was as naively
Eurocentric as that of Juan Larrea’s Espana Peregrina.
Despite the clear political basis of its project, Romance, like the Revista
Iberoamericana and Espana Peregrina, proclaimed that its commitment to cul-
ture was fundamentally disinterested or “spiritual,” transcending both economic
and political concerns. The stress on disinterestedness also allowed the edi-
tors of Romance to counter the broad opposition within Mexican society to the
Spanish refugees by sharply distinguishing the Spanish Republicans from the
economic immigrants that had preceded them. While agreeing with the Span-
ish Americans that it would be unadvisable to open the continent’s doors to
“gentes de un chauvinismo estrecho o de una grosera mentalidad mercantilista,
cuyo objeto principal fuese el enriquecimiento por cualquier medio” (people
with a narrowly chauvinistic attitude or a gross, mercantilistic mentality, whose
principal aim is to enrich themselves by whatever means), they emphatically
declared that

los desterrados republicanos espafoles no vienen a América a enriquecerse, sino a

trabajar, a colaborar; odian tanto, y por las mismas razones que los americanos, a
esa Espana negra y nefasta, cruel, contra la que han luchado de 1936 a 1939 como
hace mas de un siglo lucharon los americanos. El mismo hecho de haber sostenido
en unas condiciones de inferioridad militar absoluta sus convicciones frente a la
demogogia del fascismo, acredita a estos espafoles . . . de gentes nobles y de gran
espiritu. (“Mas emigrados” 7)
 “LA HORA HA LLEGADO” 85

(the Spanish Republican exiles are not coming to Spanish America to become
wealthy, but to work, to cooperate; they share the Spanish Americans’ hate of that
black, ill-fated, and cruel Spain against which they fought from 1936 to 1939, as
the Spanish Americans did more than a century ago, and they hate it for the same
reasons.)

Politically, Romance presented itself as a journal “Sin cardcter de grupo ni

de tendencia, pero claramente partidaria de un aspecto esencial de la cultura:
su popularizacion . . .” (Not characterized by any particular group or tendency,
but clearly in favor of one essential aspect of culture: its popularization . . . )
(“Proposito”). “No ha entrado ni entra en los propésitos de ‘ROMANCE,’”
(What not figures among the aims of Romance is) a later editorial states,

recoger, de manera directa, en sus paginas, los fendmenos politicos que se produ-
cen en forma de lucha o polémica, entre otras razones, porque la raz6n misma de su
existencia esta circunscrita a registrar, en el terreno estrictamente cultural, lo que
esos mismo fendmenos u otros de caracter distinto determinan en las actividades
del espiritu. (“El ejemplo” 7)

(to comment directly in its pages on the political phenomena that present them-
selves in the shape of struggles or polemics, among other reasons, because Ro-
mance’s very raison d’étre is limited to register, in the terrain of the stricly cultural,
the effect of those phenomena, or other phenomena, on the activities of the spirit.)

However, the journal was more interested in political and economic matters
than its editors would admit. First, the fact that the whole editorial team consisted
of Spaniards seemed at odds with its Pan-Hispanist rhetoric. As editor Sanchez
Barbudo wrote in hindsight, “cometimos . .. el gran error de permitir, aunque
ello no fuera en verdad una decision deliberada, que todos los miembros de la
redaccién de Romance fueran refugiados espafioles, lo cual ademas de grosero
era sin duda inconsistente con nuestro proclamado deseo de colaborar intima-
mente con los mexicanos” (we made . . . the grave mistake—although it was not
really a deliberate decision—of allowing Romance’s entire editorial staff to be
composed of Spanish refugees. This was not only rude, but also, undoubtedly,
inconsistent with our proclaimed desire to closely collaborate with the Mexi-
cans) (“Introduccién’”’). Moreover, the editorial team was mostly composed of
Communists and philo-Communists, thus excluding the more moderate sectors
of the Republican intelligentsia. Finally, Romance’s spiritual quest was funded
by the publishing company “Edici6n y Distribucion Ibero-Americana de Publi-
caciones” (EDIAPSA), a quite materially and commercially-minded enterprise
86 SEBASTIAAN FABER

which contradicted the very claim that the Spaniards had not come to America
to become rich. Founded with Mexican capital by the Spanish editor Rafael Gi-
ménez Siles, a Republican exile himself, EDIAPSA soon became an important
publishing house with continental ambitions, modeled on the Compania Ibero-
Americana de Publicaciones (CIAP), which had published La Gaceta Literaria
in the 1920s (Caudet, Romance 21-32). According to Caudet, Giménez Siles
had intended that Romance from the outset would function primarily as the
company’s promotional vehicle (Exilio 120). Still, EDIAPSA itself preferred to
represent its interests in different terms; in one of the issues, for instance, there
appeared a report on the company in which its project was conveniently recast
in anon-commercial discourse: Its goal, the article stated, was to serve the cause
of the spirit, and respond to the “profundo anhelo de union espiritual que existe
arraigado en los pueblos americanos” (profound desire for spiritual unity that is
deeply rooted among the American peoples) (“La difusién” 14). Nevertheless,
these contradictions between spiritual ideals and commercial practice were too
much for the enterprise to bear. After the eleventh issue, two of the editors
left the board, followed five issues later by all the original founders, including
the journal’s director, Communist poet Juan Rejano. In a declaration published
in El Nacional, the editors declared themselves “moralmente incompatibles”
with Giménez Siles, announcing the foundation of a new journal, “libre en ab-
soluto de compromisos de empresa, hecha... sin propdsito alguno de lucro,
por redactores y colaboradores dispuestos a renunciar a toda recompensa ma-
terial mientras sea preciso” (absolutely free of entrepreneurial commitments,
produced... without any aim for profit, by editors and contributors willing
to give up, if necessary, all material reward). This new journal would continue
“el significado espiritual y la pureza moral que siempre hemos defendido” (the
spiritual significance and moral purity that we have always defended) (quoted
in Caudet, Exilio 140n).
Although the journal’s more immediate goal was to foster the sales and
prestige of its publishing company, it was also, as Espana Peregrina and the
Revista Iberoamericana, conceived as a public relations campaign to boost the
prestige of Hispanic culture. Its editors not only signaled the dawn of a re-
newed spiritual unity of the Spanish-speaking world, but explicitly linked it to
its global emancipation. Hispanic culture, they stated, had not yet been able “en
el mundo, alcanzar el respecto debido” (to garner from the world the respect
it is due) but it nevertheless carried promise of a glorious future (“Sobre la
unidad” 7).
 “LA HORA HA LLEGADO” 87

Conclusion: Hispanisms and Its Alternatives

From the first section of this essay it is clear that the concept of Hispanism
suffers from two main problems. First, it seems to deny Latin America any
real form of cultural specificity. Second, it is unclear whether it denotes an
academic discipline or a combination of disciplines (including literature, his-
tory, and culture), a hobby or passion of sorts (“aficién”), an enlightened state
of mind (Carr’s special talent to penetrate the nation’s soul), or a political and
cultural program in favor of reuniting the Spanish-speaking world and securing
for it the cultural prestige to which it feels entitlked—a program with a certain
counterhegemonic quality about it (mainly because of its purported opposition
to Anglo-Saxon modernity), but ultimately stemming from an exceptionalist
reading of Spanish history. These problems are closely related to a series of is-
sues that have been raised in recent discussions on Hispanism as an academic
field of study, particularly in the United States. In addition to the four problem
areas discussed in the course of this article, critics have mentioned the insularity
of Hispanism; its methodological and disciplinary conservatism; and its uneasy
relation to cultural studies, theory, and politics (Mariscal 4, 20; Avelar, “Clan-
destine” 54—55). In the North American academy, the concept of Hispanism is
also put into question by the different agendas and mutual competition between
its Peninsular and Latin-American branches, which has led critics to wonder
whether it is still possible, or even desirable, to maintain the concept of Hispan-
ism as a “strategic alliance” between the two (Resina 118-22).
The developments of Hispanism in the 1930s and 1940s, three instances
of which have been discussed here, might help explain what is seen as today’s
“crisis” of the discipline. For one, they shed more light on the friction or split
between Peninsular and Latin-American literary studies (Avelar, “Clandestine”
57n). Both branches, to be sure, received an important boost in the late 1930s
and early 1940s—one from Pan-Americanism; the other from the arrival of the
Spanish Republican exile scholars in the U.S. But the history of the IILI shows
that the study of Latin American literature and culture has, so to speak, a much
more “organic” relation to the North American academy, in that it sprouted from
truly North American concerns and interests. Peninsular studies, on the other
hand, have never really moved beyond their status of imported discipline, grad-
ually declining in status as Spain stopped being regarded as a world power.
I would argue that the three institutional histories sketched in this essay
shed some light on the current debates on Hispanism in other ways, as well.
With a little bit of imagination, one can conceive the Revista Iberoamericana,
Espana Peregrina, and Romance as representing three alternative Hispanisms,
88 SEBASTIAAN FABER

each attempting to overcome one or more of the field’s flaws. While none of the
three truly succeed in liberating themselves of Hispanism’s ideological baggage,
they do make some important steps toward a liberation of sorts. The Revista
Iberoamericana is the only one of the three to explicitly distance itself from the
imperial underpinnings of Hispanism by rejecting the premise that Latin Ameri-
can literature can only be understood in terms of the Iberian Peninsula. The
IILI also lays the basis of Latin American Hispanism as a rigorous, professional
academic discipline, albeit still shaped according to the philological model. Es-
paiia Peregrina, in turn, views culture as a crucial tool for large-scale political
struggles—in this case, the struggle against fascism and for social emancipation
and national liberation—in which the intellectual (either scholar or writer) is
explicitly called upon to take a political stand. Romance is even more radical in
this respect, arguing that it is the intellectual’s duty to spread culture to a wider,
popular audience, and that culture owes its existence, its life force, to its con-
nection with the popular. Neither of the two, however, is willing to abandon the
fetishized conception of culture as a “‘spiritual” realm rising above politics.
At the same time, it is clear that in their attempts to formulate and legiti-
mize these alternatives, all three enterprises fall into different ideological traps.
The most important of these is the fallacy of cultural nationalism, or rather,
cultural pan-nationalism, which leads them to cloak their goals in a highly ide-
alistic rhetoric that partly undoes the otherwise revolutionary dimensions of
their proposals. While Espafia Peregrina and Romance remain caught in a ver-
sion of Euro-centric, Spanish exceptionalism ultimately motivated by a form
of imperial nostalgia, the Revista Iberoamericana ends up trading one cultural
pan-nationalism for another. Furthermore, in, all three cases the editors’ gran-
diloquent rhetoric serves to gloss over their dependence on interests that they
claim are outside of, or contrary to, their lofty aims—to wit, cultural politics
and market forces. As we have seen, the Revista Iberoamericana, as a vehicle of
a state-sponsored, academic Pan-Americanism, was much more political (i.e.,
pro-U.S., anti-Communist) than its founders were willing to admit. In the same
way, the Spanish Civil War exiles were much more attached to the idea of the
Spanish empire—albeit in cultural terms—than their otherwise quite progres-
sive political orientation would seem to indicate. Their naive but paternalist ide-
alization of Spanish America, moreover, can be interpreted as one more symp-
tom of their Spain-centeredness. Finally, the editors of Romance were slow to
realize their function as a vehicle for the essentially commercial enterprise of
their corporate sponsor.
In different ways, all of these ideological slips make the case against the
concept of Hispanism. Studying the cultures of Spain and Latin America within
 “LA HORA HA LLEGADO” 89

the framework of Hispanism is to open the door to a whole series of mystifica-

tions. One could in fact argue that, to a large extent, the concept of Hispanism
itself is one big mystification. Revisiting our four “problem areas” will help
clarify this point. As we have seen, in spite of Hispanism’s transnational ambi-
tions, it is simply too tied up with cultural nationalism. Raymond Carr was right
to argue that the concept of Hispanism somehow presupposes that Spain, and
by extension the whole of the Hispanic world, is endowed with a unitary “soul”
that sets it apart from the rest of the globe, can only be “penetrated” by espe-
cially gifted specialists (i.e., Hispanists), and holds the promise of a glorious fu-
ture. Like all forms of cultural nationalism, moreover, Hispanism’s vindication
of cultural difference vis-a-vis its external others (specifically the Anglo-Saxon
North) ends up repressing or erasing most forms of internal otherness—an era-
sure of difference in the name of difference. Not only is Latin America denied
its cultural specificity, but so are the continent’s indigenous cultures and, within
Spain, those of Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia (Resina 118-19).
Hispanism encourages similar mystifications in the other three “problem
areas.” It mystifies the idea of “Hispanic culture” as, at the same time, quint-
essentially “popular” (i.e., pure, innocent, suffused with cultural identity), and
exceptionally “spiritual”; similarly, it mystifies the relation of the Hispanist qua
intellectual to that culture, celebrating the popular but refusing to recognize the
pueblo as an agent in its own right. The concept of Hispanism also blinds its
practitioners to the political underpinnings of their discipline, leaving the door
wide open to stealthy political appropriations and mobilizations of various kinds;
Hispanism is easily put at the service of different cultural imperialisms. Finally,
the concept of Hispanism is inextricably tied up with the notion that Hispanic
cultures have been systematically but unjustly excluded from the “universal”
canons, and that it is therefore the Hispanist’s mission to remedy that situation.
Hispanism thus becomes synonymous with a publicity campaign in its own fa-
vor, turning the Hispanist almost automatically into a defender, promoter, or
propagandist of his object of study or, worse, into a cultural diplomat of sorts.
As Resina points out, from there it is but a small step for Hispanism to become
mobilized by corporate interests, and not just of the publishing industry (86).
Perhaps, most importantly, the concept of Hispanism presupposes a com-
monality of interests and aims that is simply not there. The concerns, focuses,
struggles of distinct social classes, ethnic groups, and other communities across
the Iberian Peninsula and the American continent differ widely, and are, many
times, even opposed to each other. The same can be said for the scholars study-
ing those communities. The concept of Hispanism, in other words, should be
rejected precisely because it assimilates a reality whose main characteristic is its
90 SEBASTIAAN FABER

heterogeneity—a heterogeneity that should not be effaced, but celebrated. Those

of us who work in the field of Hispanic studies should be free to choose our po-
litical, cultural, and theoretical affiliations and alliances, and not be forced into
the disciplinary, Hispanophilic straitjacket that the concept of Hispanism seems
to presuppose. To be sure, often these alliances will naturally unite a section of
Latin American studies with one working on the Peninsula—the historical and
cultural bonds between the two of course are real, and much of their respective
development can be fruitfully compared. But there is no need for these trans-At-
lantic connections and cross-fertilizations to be legitimized with the invocations
of “spiritual unity,’ “common soul,” or other lofty, Pan-Hispanist rhetoric.
It is high time, in short, that Hispanic studies emancipates itself from
its Romantic, cultural-nationalist heritage. This does not mean that all of the
Hispanist tradition should be rejected; on the contrary, much can be salvaged,
among other things its interdisciplinary, “holistic” approach to history and cul-
ture, its embrace of culture in both its high and popular forms, and its sense of
commitment to its object of study.*! In this sense, one could argue that develop-
ments in Spanish and Latin American cultural studies are paving the way back
to the committed multidisciplinarity of traditional Hispanism, though this time
without its claims to cultural uniqueness, superiority, and corresponding future
glory. To be sure, cultural studies are not immune to the ideological traps of
Hispanism, most notably its populism, paternalism, and market-driven institu-
tionalization (Avelar, “Clandestine” 50). But I would argue that it is much more
likely to encourage a truly critical scholarly practice.

Notes

1. The first sections of this essay are part of a larger project on the influence of Pan-
Americanism on the study of Latin American literature in the United States. I would
like to thank Mabel Morafia, Erika Braga, Keith McDuffie, and John Beverley for
their generous help. The sections on Spanish Civil War exile are derived from my
book Exile and Cultural Hegemony. (All translations are mine).
i) The analysis I offer here of the field’s transformations in the 1940s is part of the
“inward turn” in Hispanism, a trend in which Hispanists themselves, inspired by Fou-
cault and cultural studies, take a critical look at the institutional history and ideologi-
cal underpinnings of their own discipline. These kinds of institutional histories are, as
Danny Anderson points out, “one of the genres available for work in cultural studies
as scholars shift attention from the literary text as the sole object of study and turn
toward analyses of the conditions and positions from which Hispanists create knowl-
edge” (9).
 “LA HORA HA LLEGADO” 91

The most important contributions to this debate on Hispanism have been by Alonso,
Anderson, Avelar, Beverley, Mariscal, McGaha, Moreiras, Read, Resina, and Round.
Resina and Mariscal have not only shown, for instance, how Hispanism helped
strengthen a Castile-centric image of the Spanish nation at the expense of other Pen-
insular cultures, but also how “the study of Spanish literature in the United States
helped crystallize the national identity by projecting an antithesis,” serving as a coun-
terweight to an exceptionalist and triumphalist celebration of North America: “From
the beginning Anglo-America associated Spanish culture with the decadence of the
Spanish empire. The latter’s downturn—due to essential characteristics which the
scholar could trace in its literature—providentially coincided with America’s growth.
Thus [George] Ticknor elaborated the constrast between both cultures, supporting the
idea of a God-ordained Spanish decline with clear implications for American expan-
sionism” (Resina 1 15—16).
For Carlos Alonso, “resistance to theory has been an integral part of the Hispanic
critical tradition.” He argues, however, that “it has not surfaced merely as a reaction-
ary response to the demand that Hispanic criticism be more responsive to theoretical
speculation”: “Spanish American intellectuals who argue for modernity—and hence
theory—are always in an ambiguous rhetorical position vis-a-vis the discursive model
of modernity that they advance as a desideratum. . . . The history of Hispanic literary
criticism since the late eighteenth century ... can... be understood as being gener-
ated by the simultaneous and contradictory action of two movements, towards and
away from theory, towards and away from modernity” (147-48). See also Avelar,
“Clandestine” 51-52.
Resina, for instance, in his otherwise excellent piece on the institutional histories of
Hispanism in Germany, the U.S., and Spain, decides to use “the term “Hispanism’
to denote primarily the field of so-called Peninsular studies, leaving Latin American
literary and cultural studies out of the picture” (87-88). While understandable from
a practical point of view, this limitation unfortunately prevents him from a full dis-
cussion of Hispanism’s ideological function as an academic form of Spain-centered
cultural imperialism vis-a-vis Latin America.
Historically, the first term to appear in the dictionary of the Real Academia is hispan-
ismo as “modo de hablar particular y privativo de la Lengua Espafiola” (way of speak-
ing that is particular and exlusive to the Spanish language) (1734 edition). Hispanista
does not appear until 1914, when it is defined as “la persona versada en la lengua y
literatura espafiolas” (a person versed in Spanish language and literature). In the 1914
dictionary, hispanismo is still only defined in linguistic terms. The 1936 edition is the
first one to define hispanismo as “Aficion al estudio de la lengua y literatura espanolas
y de las cosas de Espajfia” (interest in the study of the language and literature of Spain
and things Spanish). The 1956 edition specifies that the title of hispanista is com-
monly used for foreigners (“los que no son espafioles”) (those that are not Spaniards),
a qualification that is repeated in the 1970 edition, which still defines hispanista as
“persona versada en lengua y cultura espafolas” (a person versed in Spanish language
92 SEBASTIAAN FABER

and culture), but is left out again starting in 1984, the first post-Franco edition, which
is also the first to define a hispanista as someone “que profesa el estudio de lenguas,
literatura o cultura hispanicas” (who professionally studies Hispanic languages, litera-
ture, or culture). According to the Oxford English Dictionary (2003), “Hispanism” as
an alternative to “Hispanicism” (“a Spanish idiom or mode of expression”), was itself
a Hispanicism (i.e., an import from Spanish into English) and first used by Salvador
de Madariaga in 1949. “Hispanist” made its first appearance in the 1934 edition of
Webster’s dictionary, which defined it as “one versed in, or devoted to, the Spanish
language or the study of Spanish.” The OED’s 1989 edition defines it as “a student of
the literature, language, and civilization of Spain.”
Pan-Hispanism, Latin-Americanism, and Pan-Latinism have many traits in common;
most importantly, they all tend to invoke their culture’s “spirituality” as an essential
trait setting it apart from the “materialist” Anglo-Saxon cultures of Northern Europe
and North America.
Among the first books published in 1940 by Séneca were Garcia Lorca’s Poeta en
Nueva York and Antonio Machado’s Obras.
10. In 1927, Guillermo de Torre published a controversial piece in La Gaceta Literaria,
entitled “Madrid, meridiano intelectual de Hispanoamérica” (Madrid, intellectual
meridian of Hispano-America) in which he wrote: “evitamos escribir el falso e in-
justificado nombre de América Latina. Nombre advenedizo que, unas veces por ato-
londramiento, y otras, por un desliz reprobable—haciendo juego a intereses que son
antagonicos a los nuestros—, ha Ilegado incluso a filtrarse en Espana. ... No hay, a
nuestro juicio, otros nombres licitos y justificados para designar globalmente—de un
modo exacto que selle los tres factores fundamentales: el primitivo origen étnico, la
identidad lingiiistica y su mas genuino cardcter espiritual—a las jo6venes Republicas
de habla espafiola, que los de Iberoamérica, Hispanoamérica o América espafiola” (we
avoid using the false and unjustified term “Latin America.” It is a parvenu term that
has even managed to filter into Spain, at times due to silliness, and at other times due
to a reprehensible mistake, serving interests that are opposed to ours. . . . In our opin-
ion, there are no other licit and justified terms to refer in general to the young Spanish-
speaking Republics—and in a precise way that points out three fundamental factors:
their primitive ethnic origin, their linguistic identity and their most genuine spiritual
character—than those of Ibero-America, Hispano-America, or Spanish America) (1).
11. It is in this sense that José Carlos Mariategui uses it in his 1925 essay “El fberoameri-
canismo y pan-americanismo” (26-30).
Ws Nevertheless, there is some degree of vacillation in the journal’s official discourse.
Thus, the editorial statement of the first issue speaks of the “First Congress of Profes-
sors of Iberoamerican Literature,” while the Revista is presented as offering “the only
complete panorama of Latin American literature in existence today” (“Members”;
my emphasis). The section on “Condiciones de venta” reads: “Consciente el Instituto
de los escasos recursos econdmicos de que tantos las bibliotecas como la mayoria de
los profesores en Hispanoamérica disponen, asi como de la general despreciacién
de la moneda nacional en los paises hermanos, ... ha decidido reducir en un 50%
 “LA HORA HA LLEGADO” Oy)

la cuota de los socios tanto como el precio de subscripcion a la Revista. Esperamos

que nuestros colegas /atinoamericanos sabran apreciar la altruista intencién del In-
stituto y que colaboraraén de manera activa y eficaz en la noble tarea en que estamos
empenados. Es ésta una labor que sdlo a Hispanoamérica beneficia y en particular a
sus hombres de letras” (The Institute, aware of the scarce financial resources of both
libraries and professors in Hispano-America, as well as the general depreciation of the
national currencies in our brother countries, . . . has decided to reduce the membership
fee, as well as the Revista’s subscription rate, by 50%. We hope that our Latin-Ameri-
can colleagues will appreciate the Institute’s altruistic intentions and that they will
contribute actively and efficiently to the noble task to which we are committed. It is a
job that is solely beneficial to Hispano-America, and particularly to its men of letters)
(“Condiciones”; my emphasis).
133 When the distinguished Spanish Republican historian Rafael Altamira, exiled in Paris,
founded his own Iberoamerican Institute, the editors of the Revista Iberoamericana
wrote: “En Europa, con asiento en Paris, se ha creado el Instituto Internacional de Es-
tudios Iberoamericanos, bajo la presidencia de Rafael Altamira. Se propone el estudio
cientifico de los problemas sociolégicos, politicos, econdémicos, juridicos e histéricos
de Espafia, Portugal y los paises de origen hispanoportugués en América. . . . /Hay,
como se ve, una profunda diferencia entre el Instituto presidido por el sefior Altamira
y el que se organiz6 en la ciudad de México en agosto de 1938.... Trata el pri-
mero de establecer y dilucidar los problemas que atafien a la Sociologia, la Politica,
la Economia, la Legislacién de Espafia, Portugal y los paises de origen ibérico en
América. Aspira el segundo a reflejar en las paginas de su Revista Iberoamericana la
conciencia actual de los pueblos de América que escriben en espafiol 0 portugués” (In
Europe the International Institute of Ibero-American Studies has been created, based
in Paris, under the presidency of Rafael Altamira. Its objective is the scientific study of
the sociological, political, economic, judicial, and historical problems of Spain, Por-
tugal, and the countries of Hispanic-Portuguese origin on the American continent. . . .
/A profound difference is apparent between the Institute that is presided over by Mr.
Altamira and the one organized in Mexico City in August of 1938 .. . The first Insti-
tute attempts to determine and throw light on the problems concerning the sociology,
politics, economy, and legislation of Spain, Portugal and the countries of Iberian ori-
gin in the Americas. The second Institute aspires to reflect in the pages of its Revista
Iberoamericana the current awareness of those American nations that write in Spanish
or Portuguese) (“Editorial” 258).
14. The journal’s editorial note to potential contributors explicitly mentions the possibil-
ity of articles “sobre un autor o tema norteamericano” (about a North American author
or topic) (“A los autores” 235-36).
lly. The editorial introduction in the first issue of the Revista states: “In brief, the purpose
of the Instituto is to broaden and intensify cultural relations between the Americas. To
this end it has provided for the publication of a journal of some 250 pages, the Revista
Iberoamericana, which constitutes the only complete panorama of Latin American lit-
erature in existence today. .. . Other activities of the /nstituto are: the maintenance of
94 SEBASTIAAN FABER

a standing committee to promote and direct the exchange of professors, men of letters
and science, artists, and students between the Americas; the printing and distribution
of books and articles on Iberoamerican culture; encouraging the creation of chairs of
Iberoamerican Literature in the United States, and chairs of North American literature
in Latin American Universities” (“Members”).
16. In an interview with Sonia Mora, Roggiano said: “[El Instituto s]urgi6 de una con-
versacion entre Pedro Henriquez Urefia y Alfonso Reyes, como necesidad, en tiempos
de la Guerra Civil espafiola, de mantener 0 re-establecer (los dos términos son apli-
cables) la unidad hispdnica, en ese momento mas que amenazada” ({The Institute]
emerged from a conversation between Pedro Henriquez Urefia and Alfonso Reyes, as
a need, at the time of the Spanish Civil War, to maintain or re-establish (both terms
are applicable) the unity of the Hispanic world, which at that moment was more than
threatened) (Mora 711). When addressing the participants of the IILI’s 23rd Congress,
in Madrid in 1984, Roggiano said that the Instituto “se establecié en 1938, durante la
guerra fratricida mas cruenta del mundo hispanico, como un corolario que se proponia
corregir ese horror . . . de la desmembracion . . . de la familia hispanica” (was estab-
lished in 1938, during the bloodiest fratricidal war the Hispanic world has known, as
a corrolary aiming to repair that horror .. . of the Hispanic family’s . . . dismember-
ment) (15).
ive The only time they are mentioned is in a list of writers to whom the Instituto is send-
ing a “mensaje de simpatia” (message of sympathy) at the time of its first Congress in
1938 (“Acta” 241).
18. Nevertheless, within the same editorial text there is some curious slippage between
“América,” “América Hispana,” and “Iberoamérica”: “Este Instituto se propone coor-
dinar y revelar el sentido de la obra literaria de América mediante la elaboracién del
conjunto de la historia de las ideas que han prevalecido en el Continente . . . [El Insti-
tuto] esta formado por los catedraticos de Literatura Jberoamericana, asi en los Esta-
dos Unidos, donde hay mas de cien de ellos, como en la América Hispana, en donde,
ademas buscamos la colaboraci6n de los escritores y el apoyo de quienes aman estas
cosas del espiritu en América./La creaci6n de este Instituto comporta onerosa respon-
sabilidad . . . [Los hombres a quienes ella se confié . . . |no han jurado pleitesia a es-
cuela 0 agrupacion alguna. Les ha asociado una comunidad de visi6n, un grande amor
por las Letras de América, una misma aspiracién de independencia intelectual y una
misma elevada comprensi6n de cuanto implica la unidad espiritual de todas nuestras
nacionalidades./[En las paginas de la Revista] se tratara de registrar . . . la obra lite-
raria que con tanta hermosura se va desenvolviendo en las naciones de [beroamérica”
(This Institute intends to coordinate and reveal the significance of the literature of the
Americas by assembling the whole of the history of ideas that have prevailed on our
continent . . . [The Institute] consists of professors of Jbero-American literature, both
in the United States, where there are more than a hundred of them, and in Hispanic
America, where, moreover, we seek the collaboration of writers and the support of all
those who love these things of the spirit in the Americas./The foundation of this Insti-
tute carries with it an onerous responsibility. . . . [The men in whose care the Institute
 “LA HORA HA LLEGADO” 95

was placed . . . |have not sworn allegiance to any school or group. What has brought
them together is a common vision, a great love of American Letters, a shared aspira-
tion to intellectual independence and a shared lofty understanding of what is implied
by the spiritual unity of all our nationalities./[In the Revista’s pages] we will try to
register . . . the literature that is unfolding with so much beauty among the nations of
Ibero-America) (“Editorial” 8—9).
Wy, Gonzalez and Crow were affiliated with the University of California-Los Angeles;
Mapes with Iowa State; Englekirk with the University of New Mexico; De Onjs with
Columbia; Brenes Mesén with Northwestern; Leavitt with the University of North
Carolina; Garcia Prada with the University of Washington; Torres Rioseco with Uni-
versity of California-Berkeley; and Jiménez Rueda and Monterde with the National
University of Mexico.
20. Starting in 1941, Alfredo Ortiz-Vargas published a series of “Perfiles angloamerica-
nos” on Archibald MacLeish, Edna St. Vicent Millary, Edgar Lee Masters, Eugene
O’ Neill, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, and Robinson Jeffers. Other contributors wrote
articles on Stephen Crane, Henry David Thoreau, and Florence Hall.
ile “[N]uestro poeta ofrecid a la huérfana América Hispana algo que no ha podido
ofrecer . . . ningtin otro escritor espafiol de nuestros dias: esa luminosa fragua de con-
centracion lirica y dramatica que es la herencia popular de Espafia. Este ‘regreso a
la sangre’ hubo de conmover a los hijos del Nuevo Mundo, separados durante tan
largo tiempo del tronco que nutre el fruto tradicional . . . Hispanoamérica, debido a su
fuerte fondo andaluz, se moria de hambre por este manjar y extendi6 las manos avidas
hacia el duro vastago de la raza que le habia dado nuevo ser. ../...En conclusion, es
curioso notar que esta es la primera vez en la historia de las influencias literarias entre
Espafia e Hispanoamérica, en que la vieja madre patria ha expresado sus valores en tér-
minos de una juwventud tan rebosante. Asi la peninsula volvi6 a conquistar este nuevo
mundo literario con la misma energia cabal de los conquistadores, . . .” (Our poet
offered the orphan Hispanic America something that no other Spanish writer of our
time .. . has been able to offer: that luminous forge of lyrical and dramatic concentra-
tion constituted by the popular legacy of Spain. This “return to the blood” was bound
to move the children of the New World, who had for so long been separated from the
trunk that feeds the fruit of tradition ... Hispano-America, due to its strong Andalu-
sian background, was starving for this feast, and avidly extended its hands toward this
robust child of the raza who had breathed new life into it.../... In conclusion, it 1s
curious to note that this is the first time in the history of the literary influences between
Spain and Hispano-America that the old Mother Country has expressed its values in
terms of such a boundless youth) (307-308, 317-18).
DD: Curiously, this celebration of North-American pragmatist philosophy 1s combined in
the same article with a rejection of global capitalism: “Desde luego, . . . Bolivia no es
sino una colonia del capitalismo internacional. Esta es la tragedia de América, tragedia
provocada por los grandes capitanes de la industria mundial. Ellos nos observan, nos
sonrien, nos adulan, para luego despojarnos de nuestras mas queridas posesiones . . .”
(Of course, . . . Bolivia is nothing but a colony of international capitalism. This is the
96 SEBASTIAAN FABER

tragedy of the Americas, a tragedy provoked by the great captains of global industry.
They observe us, they smile at us, they flatter us, only to strip us of our most beloved
possessions . . . ) (“Consideraciones” 284).
He In an article on new tendencies in the Latin American novel, for instance, Torres-
Rioseco wrote: “Creo que en estos treinta y nueve afios del siglo presente el sentido
americanista de nuestra literatura nos ha dado una alta representaci6n en las letras
universales y debemos mantener este tono de sinceridad, pero al mismo tiempo se nos
impone, como necesidad absoluta, la variedad tematica y la diferenciaci6n estilistica”
(I believe that during these first thirty-nine years of this century, the Americanist con-
sciousness of our literature has given us a high representation in universal letters,
and we should maintain this tone of sincerity; but at the same time we are confronted
with the absolute necessity of thematic variety and stylistic differentiation). For To-
rres-Rioseco, Jorge Icaza’s novel Cholos was “genuinamente americana” (genuinely
American) but it also suffered from a “flojedad en la forma” (weakness of form) and a
“confusi6n de propésitos” (confusion of intentions) (“Nuevas” 92-94). The reviewer
of Gerardo Gallegos’ novel Embrujo y desembrujo de Haiti similarly characterized
it as “un libro de pura sangre americana” (book of pure American blood) that “tra-
duce alientos verdaderos del genio de América” (expresses true spirit of the Ameri-
can character). The novel’s connection with Uncle Tom’s Cabin was for this reviewer
“un intensisimo hilo de vida a lomos del cual se levanta un mundo: el del totalitario
sentimiento de América” (an extremely intense slice of life in whose wake a world
emerges: the world of a totalizing feeling of Americanness) (Magdaleno 14546).
24. As one of the first editorials states: “Este Instituto se propone coordinar y revelar el
sentido de la obra literaria de América mediante la elaboracién del conjunto de la his-
toria de las ideas que han prevalecido en el Continente . . . Sefialando las lagunas po-
dra sugerir la obra por hacer: bio-bibliografias, estudio de las bibliotecas particulares,
monografias . . . ediciones de obras dignas de sobrevivir . . .” (This Institute intends to
coordinate and reveal the significance of the literature of the Americas by assembling
the whole of the history of ideas that have prevailed on our continent . . . Pointing out
the gaps will suggest what work remains to be done: bio-bibliographies, the study of
private libraries, monographs . . . editions of works that are worthy of survival. . . )
(“Editorial” 8).
In an open letter written in August of 1939 to six Spanish liberal intellectuals, ILI
director Manuel P. Gonzalez states that Latin America “Ha de vivir. . . alerta y ha de
forjar vigilante su propio destino” (Has to be .. . alert and has to be vigilant in the
forging of its own destiny) adding that “[e]n esta misma pugna con que se la disputan
varios imperialismos solapados, encontraré probablemente nuestra América su propia
defensa . . . El peligro real consistiria en entregarse confiada a uno solo; pero creo que
vamos rebasando ya esta estapa y este riesgo” ([i]n this same struggle in which sev-
eral overlapping imperialisms are fighting over it, our America will probably find the
means of its own defense . . . The real danger would be for our America to surrender
itself to only one of those imperialisms; but I believe that we are already overcoming
that phase and that risk) (Letter 21).
 “LA HORA HA LLEGADO” Of

26. As Berger points out, in the 1930s and 1940s “the Pan-American system served pri-
marily as a means by which the U.S. could maintain its hegemony in the Western
hemisphere” (Under 50).
Dele “Las Américas no pueden seguir desconociéndose mutuamente ... El suelo ameri-
cano nutre un nuevo espiritu que lucha por manifestarse en formas propias de cultura
original. Es preciso fortalecer ese espiritu, que nos ofrece vida mds rica en conteni-
do humano y un ascenso libre y gallardo de fuerza y plenitud. ... En Estados Uni-
dos existe un grande interés por la joven cultura de los paises iberoamericanos. . . .
Este plausible interés... no ha sido plenamente correspondido por los estudiosos
del Sur. En las universidades iberoamericanas no se dictan cursos ni de historia, ni
de geografia, ni de economia, ni de literatura norteamericanas. Los pueblos del Sur
desconocen casi por completo la cultura del Norte en sus aspectos mas nobles. Alla
se contentan con temer, 0 con recelar... como si todos se hallasen bajo la funesta
accion de un complejo de inferioridad que niega o destruye, sin aspirar a construir.
Esta situacién debe modificarse. A la amistad respetuosa y a la cooperaci6n fecunda
sdlo iremos los americanos por el conocimiento mutuo. El Instituto . . . quiere que tal
conocimiento sea una realidad viva, eficaz, creadora, integrante ... /En los Estados
Unidos, los agentes oficiales de los paises de muy antiguo prestigio, tales como In-
glaterra, Francia, Alemania e Italia, gastan ahora sumas enormes de dinero por hacer
conocer sus respectivas culturas, y dotan de libros y obras artisticas las bibliotecas
y museos de las numerosas universidades norteamericanas, y les conceden los altos
honores especiales a los profesores que en ellas dedican la vida a la ensefianza. . . .
/S6lo los paises iberoamericanos han permanecido indiferentes, 0 Ilenos de pueriles y
absurdas sospechas, ante la labor de difusién que de su cultura hacen los hispanistas
de Norteamérica . . . /Los paises del Nuevo Mundo quieren conocerse mutuamente, y
comprenderse, porque quieren hacer germinar y fructificar las semillas ya sembradas
de una cultura propia, continental” (The Americas cannot go on not knowing each oth-
er... The American soil is feeding a new spirit that struggles to manifest itself in its
own forms of an original culture. It is necessary to strengthen that spirit, which offers
us a life richer in human content, and a free, gallant rise of force and plenitude... .
In the United States, there exists a lively interest in the young culture of the Ibero-
American countries. ... This commendable interest has not been corresponded by
the scholarly community of the South. At Ibero-American universities, no courses are
taught about North American history, geography, economy, or literature. The peoples
of the South are almost completely ignorant of the noblest aspects of Northern cul-
ture. Inthe South, people are content just to feel fear or distrust . . . as if they all were
under the ill-fated influence of an inferiority complex that either negates or destroys,
but that does not aspire to construct anything. This situation needs to change. Only by
knowing each other can we Americans move toward a respectful friendship and fruit-
ful cooperation. The Institute ... wants such mutual knowledge to be a living, effi-
cient, creative, integrating reality . . . /In the United States, the official representatives
of countries of ancient prestige, such as England, France, Germany and Italy, spend
enormous sums of money in order to foment the knowledge about their respective
98 SEBASTIAAN FABER

cultures, they donate books and works of art to the libraries and museums of the many
universities of North America, and they bestow high honors on the North American
professors who dedicate their lives to teaching./Only the countries of Ibero-America
have remained indifferent, or filled with childish and absurd suspicion, with respect
to the spreading of knowledge about their culture by North American Hispanists .. .
/The countries of the New World wish to know each other, and understand each other,
because they want the seeds of their own, continental culture, which have already
been sown, to sprout and bear fruit) (“El segundo congreso” 261-65).
28. “Lugones no ha cesado de ser la gloriosa ensefia de Almirante de las letras de Améri-
ca... . [E]1 sabe que si la justicia alza en su mano izquierda la balanza, con su derecha
empufia la espada. Y pues que las democracias no han sabido ni querido establecer
una paz de justicia y de derecho humanizado, puede que haya llegado la ‘hora de la
espada.’... Pero no ven, quienes ven en su actitud de la ‘hora de la espada’ un ret-
roceso ideolégico” (Lugones has not ceased to be the glorious Admiral standard of
American letters. . . . [H]e knows that Justice, while sustaining the balance in her left
hand, with her right hand grasps the sword. And given that the democracies have been
unable and unwilling to establish a peace characterized by justice and humanized law,
it is possible that the “time of the sword” has come. . . . But those who see [Lugones’ ]
stance of the “time of the sword” as an ideological step back, are blind) (10-11).
Sy. In this respect, it is important to remember that, in the 1930s and 1940s, the Mexican
National University was a bulwark of conservatism, and that the relationship between
the university and the revolutionary regime during these years was a difficult one
(Guevara Niebla 176; Krauze 585).
30. The few mentions of the Spanish Civil War are, however, all sympathetic to the Re-
public. Crow opens his article on Garcia Lorca with the statement that the poet “fue
fusilado en Granada . . . por los falangistas de Franco” (was executed in Granada...
by Franco’s falangistas) (307). Pérez Domenech uses a review of German Arciniégas’
Los comuneros to point out the Pan-Hispanic affinities between the struggle of “‘co-
muneros” and that of the Republic: “Este hondo sentimiento de la dignidad y de la
independencia es una virtud imprescriptible y sin latitudes en la hispanidad: es quizas
el vinculo mas recio y fértil que abraza a este manojo de reptblicas altivas con la
republica espafila, asaetada hoy por las mayores infamias” (This profound sense of
dignity and independence is among the peoples of the Hispanic world a widespread
and spontaneous virtue: perhaps it is the sturdiest and most fertile bond that unites
this bunch of haughty republics with the Spanish republic, which today is the target of
the most criminal attacks). (Pérez Doménech 207). In 1943, Jerénimo Mallo, defining
himself “[c]omo escritor espanol que ha vivido en su patria hasta que Espafia dejo de
ser un pueblo libre, como hispanoamericano que en México encontré una segunda
patria y como profesor que en Estados Unidos ensefia disciplinas relacionadas con su
lengua nativa” (as a Spanish writer who lived in his fatherland until Spain ceased to be
a free nation, as a Hispano-American who in Mexico found a second fatherland, and
as a professor who in the United States teaches subjects related to his native tongue)
 “LA HORA HA LLEGADO” YY)

argued that Pan-Americanism and Pan-Hispanism were not incompatible, while at the
same time rejecting the anti-yankee propaganda of Francoist Hispanidad (369-76).
Si In his letter, directed to Amado Alonso, Américo Castro, Enrique Diez-Canedo, T.
Navarro Tomas, Federico de Onis, and Pedro Salinas, Gonzalez emphasized that Latin
American literature coming into its own did not imply “antagonismo ni mucho menos
divorcio entre la cultura peninsular y la que en América se gesta’: “En mi concepto,
cuanto mas evolucionemos en América hacia una cultura propia, que sea expresion
auténtica de nuestra naturaleza, de nuestro paisaje y de nuestra idiosincrasia ameri-
cana, y a la vez reflejo de nuestra madurez espiritual, mas cerca nos encontraremos de
la corriente mas valiosa que Espafia ha producido: la popular” (any antagonism, nor
any separation between the culture of the Iberian Peninsula and the culture being born
in the Americas, to the contrary: In my view, the more we in America evolve toward
our own culture—a culture which is the authentic expression of our character, our
landscape and our American idiosyncrasy, while at the same time a reflection of our
spiritual maturity—the closer we will be to the most valuable current that Spain has
produced: the popular) (Letter 18).
32. In December of 1940, when accepting his professorship at Princeton, Castro held an
inaugural speech on “The Meaning of Spanish Civilization,’ in which, among other
things, he presented a highly idealized interpretation of the Conquest. In the Ameri-
cas, Castro said, Spain had spent three centuries expending “the best part of herself
in a creative effort”: “Mexico, Peru, Colombia, the Antilles were not colonies, but
were, rather, expansions of the national territory that were enriched with rare artistic
and ideal generosity.” The Spanish colonizers were not acting out of self-interest, but
“on behalf of the Pope for the purpose of christianizing the Indians,” only exploiting
the gold and silver mines “because precious metals were needed for the furtherance
of religious, moral and vital ideals.” “In Mexico and other Spanish American coun-
tries,” Castro said, “there are numerous monuments representing this tendency toward
harmony. ... The Spaniards, however, destroyed the ‘teocalis, because in them the
Mexicans performed their ritualistic human sacrifices. ... Some historians still say
that the Spaniards destroyed Mexican civilization. But the Mexicans did not know
the wheel and the domestic use of light when the Conquistadors arrived” (Meaning
25-27).
538 The history of the Revista Iberoamericana can be divided in three main periods: pre-
Roggiano (1938-1955), Roggiano (1955-1991), and post-Roggiano (1991-present).
As far as I have been able to determine, only the first period (1938-55) can be char-
acterized as predominantly Pan-Americanist. When Roggiano took over Revista in
1955, Pan-Americanism was replaced with more Pan-Hispanist tendencies, which
were intensified in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1975 and 1984, the Instituto celebrated its
conference in Spain, and on the latter occasion, Roggiano reverted to familiar Pan-
Hispanist commonplaces: “Espaiia nos descubrié, nos propuso un camino para un ser
en el mundo, y nunca dejé de seguir descubriéndonos, . . . Y, lo que importa en [las]
relaciones literarias de Espafia y América . . . no es sdlo lo que Espafia dio de si—que
100 SEBASTIAAN FABER

fue lo mejor que tuvo—sino (y sobre todo) lo que nos ensefio a poseer, a descubrir
y a valorar como nuestro propio ser, desde sus mismas raices, en las que perdura
Espajfia; porque lo hispdnico—su esencia Unica y distintiva—nunca se nos quit6 del
todo, como tampoco Espafia nos conquist6 total y definitivamente. . . . Si es verdad
que Cortés arrojé las naves al mar para quedarse en la nueva tierra descubierta, lo fue
acaso para que aqui arraigaran los dioses de la confraternidad humana, y se unieran
las razas y los pueblos para hablar una lengua comin y rezar a un Dios universal
en procura de un ideal de Eternidad. . . . Espafia, lo hispanico, ahora con todos sus
cachorros vivos allende del océano—’sangre de Hispania fecunda, inclitas razas ubé-
rrimas’—esta atin viva, ‘atin reza a Jesucristo,’ y habla mejor que nunca el espafiol.
{Relaciones de Espafia e Iberoamérica? No. Algo mas, unidad de todo lo hispanico en
un ideal de los ideales que nos asegure la fe en el hombre y su salvacion . . .” (It was
Spain who discovered us, proposed a road for us to be in the world, and never stopped
discovering us... And the important thing in the literary relations between Spain
and the Americas . . . is not only what Spain gave of itself—and it gave us the best it
had—but (and above all) what it taught us to possess, to discover, and to value as our
own being, starting with our very roots, in which Spain lives on, because the Hispan-
ic—its unique and distinctive essence—is something that we never completely lost,
in the same way that Spain never totally and finally conquered us .. . If it is true that
Cortés threw his ships into the ocean to stay in this newly discovered land, perhaps he
did this so that the gods of human brotherhood would take root here, and so that races
and peoples would unite and speak a common language and pray to a universal God
in pursuit of an ideal of Eternity. ... Spain, the Hispanic, with all of its cubs living
across the ocean—“blood of fecund Hispania, illustrious fertile races” —is still alive,
“still prays to Jesus Chirst,” and speaks its Spanish better than ever. Relations between
Spain and Ibero-America? No. Something more: the unity of all things Hispanic in an
ideal of ideals that assures us faith in man and his salvation . . . )(13-15).
34. In August of 1939, a group of scholars at the University of Florida at Gainesville
founded the Revista Interamericana: Revista dedicada al estudio de la cultura
iberoamericana, which presented itself as “un alba de la era nueva en este gran mo-
vimiento Panamericano” (a dawn of the new era in this great Pan American move-
ment) (Ramirez 1). The journal was sponsored by the University of Florida’s “In-
stitute of Inter-American Affairs,’ whose aims were, among other things: “to foster
international good will between the Americas, .. . to promote the teaching of West-
ern Hemisphere languages and civilizations in schools, colleges, and universities, . . .
[and] to promote an inter-play of cultural ideals” (“Institute” 2). The overlaps with the
Revista Iberoamericana, both in content and stated goals, are evident.
In 1942, the Pan-American Union published two articles by Manuel Pedro Gonzalez:
both Jiménez Rueda and Onis partipated in a 1942 conference in Texas on “Cultural
bases of hemispheric understanding”; and Englekirk participated in a Conference on
Education Problems in the Southwest sponsored in part by the CIAA. Furthermore,
Américo Castro’s article mentioned above, first published in the Revista, was reprinted
 “LA HORA HA LLEGADO” 101

in the first issue of the Pan American Union’s periodical Viewpoints. In the 1950s, the
Union, which by then had already turned into the Organization of American States,
published an index for the Revista and the Instituto’s conference proceedings, cover-
ing the years 1939-1950.
36. This first group consisted of philosopher of Law Luis Recaséns Siches; poet Le6n Fe-
lipe; painter, poet and critic José Moreno Villa; philosopher José Gaos; and historian
and lawyer José Maria Ots Capdequi.
Sik These were later compiled in Rendicién de Espiritu (1943).
38. From February through December 1940, the editorial board, presided over by poet
Juan Rejano (1903-1976), consisted of painter Miguel Prieto, poet and prose-writer
José Herrera Petere, philospher Adolfo Sanchez Vazquez, poet Lorenzo Varela, and
Antonio Sanchez Barbudo (editor of Hora de Espana and co-founder of El Hijo Prédi-
go in Mexico). In addition, Romance boasted a prestigious “Consejo de colaboracién”
which, with the exception of Enrique Diez-Canedo, consisted wholly of prominent
Spanish-American writers: Enrique Gonzalez Martinez, Martin Luis Guzman, Pedro
Henriquez Urefia, Juan Marinello, Romulo Gallegos, and Pablo Neruda.
3Uy, The first three issues, for instance, carried articles on José Clemente Orozco, Goethe,
Tolstoi, Goya, Shaw, Wilde, Valle-Inclan, Gracian, Picasso, Racine, Hieronymus
Bosch, and Antonio Machado, and also articles on film and science. Gonzalez Boixo
estimates that roughly a third of the journal was dedicated to Spanish America, one
third to Spain, and other third to other cultural fields (757).
40. In his letter to six Spanish liberals, Manuel Pedro Gonzalez had also referred to the
romance as one the principal elements binding Spanish and Latin American culture
together (Letter 18).
41. According to Anderson, cultural studies can be defined by for main characteristics:
“First, work in cultural studies questions disciplinary boundaries. Second, such schol-
arship displaces ‘literary’ texts as the traditional or sole objects of study and opens the
way to academic consideration of other cultural expressions. Third, a cultural studies
approach contends that all forms of cultural production have a political dimension, . . .
And fourth, cultural studies makes a claim for political participation, for solidarity
with excluded or oppressed groups . . .” (5-6).

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Iberoamérica. XXIII Congreso del Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoameri-
cana. Madrid, 25-29 de junio de 1984. Madrid: ICI, 1987. 13-15.
Rojas Mix, Miguel. Los cien nombres de América. Eso que descubri6é Coldén. Barcelona:
Lumen, 1991.
Round, Nicholas G. “The Politics of Hispanism Reconstrued.” Journal of Hispanic Re-
search | (1992-93): 134-47.
Sanchez Barbudo, Antonio. Introduction. Romance. Repr. Glashiitten im Taunus: Detlev
Auvermann, 1974.
Santonja, Gonzalo. Al otro lado del mar. Bergamin y la editorial Séneca (México, 1939-
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“Sobre la unidad espiritual de los pueblos de América.” Editorial. Romance 1.4 (1940): 7.
Torres-Rioseco, Arturo. “Consideraciones acerca del pensamiento hispanoamericano.” Re-
vista Iberoamericana 1.2 (1939): 277-86.
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Van Aken, Mark J. Pan-Hispanism; Its Origin and Development to 1866. Berkeley: Univer-
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“Voluntad y destino de los pueblos americanos.” Romance 1.8 (1940): 7.
Part I
Consolidation and Transformations of Hispanism:
Ideological Paradigms
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Rapping on the Cast(i)le Gates:

Nationalism and Culture-Planning
in Contemporary Spain

Thomas Harrington

On December 18, 2001, two members of Spain’s ruling conservative party,

Maria San Gil, a city councilor from the Basque Country and national party of-
ficial, and Josep Piqué, the Catalan-born Minister of Foreign Affairs, presented
their much awaited ponencia on “Patriotismo Constitucional” to the press in
Madrid.' As the pre- and post-presentation spin generated by the Partido Popu-
lar made quite clear, the proposal, which was ostensibly rooted in Habermas’
notion of Constitutional Patriotism, was designed with the outsized pretension
of closing the debate on how best to guarantee comity between the state’s vari-
ous nationalistically-defined political communities.
That debate had begun (in a formal sense at least) 24 years earlier (in Au-
gust 1977), when a commission of seven newly-elected members of parlia-
ment (Miquel Roca, Jordi Solé-Tura, Manuel Fraga, Miguel Herrero de Mifion,
Gabriel Cisneros, José Pedro Pérez-Llorca, and Gregorio Peces-Barba) came
together in the hope of crafting Spain’s first democratic constitution since the
Second Republic (1931-1939). The draft that emerged from their meetings in
the fall of 1977, which would form the kernel of the Constitution which was
ratified by popular sovereignty in December of 1978, sought to steer a middle
path between Spain’s deeply rooted, and highly antinomic centralizing and

107
108 THOMAS HARRINGTO

decentralizing legacies. Aware of the dangers of tilting too strongly to one side
or the other on this contentious issue, which had wreaked havoc on Spanish po-
litical and civic life for over a century, they sought refuge in calculated vague-
ness:

La Constitucién se fundamenta en la indisoluble unidad de la nacién espanola, pa-

tria comtn e indivisible de todos los espafioles, y reconoce y garantiza el derecho a
la autonomfa de las nacionalidades y regiones que la integran y la solidaridad entre
todas ellas. (“Constituci6n” s.n.)

(The constitution is rooted in the undisolvable unity of the Spanish nation, common
and indivisible fatherland of all Spaniards. It also recognizes and guarantees the
right of autonomy for all of the nationalities and regions contained therein as well
as bonds of solidarity between them). (My translation)

Aware of the key role that language and cultural symbols have in mediating
juridical abstractions the authors went on to state that:

El castellano es la lengua espafiola oficial del Estado. Todos los espanoles tienen
el deber de conocerla y el derecho a usarla. Las demas lenguas espafolas seran
también oficiales en las respectivas Comunidades Aut6nomas de acuerdo con sus
Estatutos. La riqueza de las distintas modalidades lingiifsticas de Espafia es un
patrimonio cultural que sera objeto de especial respeto y proteccidén. La bandera de
Espafia esta formada por tres franjas horizontales, roja, amarilla y roja, siendo la
amarilla de doble anchura que cada una de las rojas. Los estatutos podran reconocer
banderas y ensefias propias de las Comunidades Auténomas. Estas se utilizaran
junto a la bandera de Espafia en sus edificios ptiblicos y en sus actos oficiales.
(“Constitucién” s.n.)

(Castilian is the official Spanish language of the State. All Spaniards have the ob-
ligation to know it and the right to use it. The other Spanish languages will also be
official in particular Autonomous Communities in accordance with their Statutes.
The richness of the distinct linguistic modalities of Spain is a cultural inheritance
that will be given special respect and protection. The Spanish flag is formed by
three horizontally positioned fields whose colors are red, yellow, and red, with the
yellow field being twice as wide as each of the red ones. The statutes allow for the
recognition of the Autonomous Communities’s own flags or standards. These will
be used along with the Spanish flag at public buildings and in official ceremonies).
(My translation.)
 RAPPING OM THE CASTULE GATES 109

These ambiguous passages from the Constitution’s “Priminary Tithe”

were designed to express the new polity’s core presumplions, along with Tithe
VIII, devoted to questions of its territorial organization, paves the way lor the
__» \ ¢reation and ratification, between December 1979 and April 1961, of statutes
of autonomy for Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia. In the first two of
these three “Autonomous Communities,” historistically-defined nationalist par-
ties (Convergencia i Unid in Catalonia, the Partido Nacionalista Vasco in the
Basque Country) quickly accended to political power because they were com-
_Mitted to maximizing local control over economic and political resources. Vince
then, neither party has relinquished its control of their respective autonomous
parliaments. In contrast, the Galician autonomous government has always been
controlled by parties or by coalitions whose missions are state-wide in profile
and thus considerably Jess energetic in terms of their autonomist demands.
In this context, we can speak of the period between 1960 and the present
as one in which both Catalan and Basque nationalists sought (with Galicizns
essentially riding on their coattails) to establish through political thrust and
parry the full parameters of the vaguely defined prerogatives accorded them
in the Constitution of 197%. The transfers of power in cach case have been
~considerable, and include, among many other things, autonomic control over
education and health care, and in the particular realm of the Basque country,
the right to levy taxes. However, during much of the \atter half of this twemty-
year period, a time during which the spell of exhilaration and caloulated forget-
ting (el pacto de olvido) which made the Spanish transition possible began to
wear off, the long-term sustainability and desirability of this largely ad hoc and
highly opportunistic arrangement has been frequently questioned by important
centralists as well as a significant number of their nationalist counterparts on
the so-called periphery.
The “solution” to this dilemma proposed by Pigué, San Gil, and the Aznar
government is basically to say that “enough is enough,” that is, that there was
no further need for devolution of powers from the center to the periphery.
But rather than propose a change in the Constitution aimed at rigorously and
straightforwardly codifying the current level of decentralization, they instead
sought to establish the essential inviolability of that purposely vague 197% text,
and in so doing, to suddenly reverse their party's own tradition of open scorn for
many of its decentralizing provisions. They sought to justify this abrupt about-
face by invoking Habermas’ progressive ideas on reconciling voluntaristic and
organicist notions of identity within a single polity.
What they failed to talk about, however, was the intense campaign that
the same Partido Popular (PP) had waged to re-deploy the historically-charged
110 THOMAS HARRINGTO

signs and symbols of Castilian cultural hegemony since coming to office in

1996, and with more intensity still, since achieving an absolute parliamentary
majority in May 2000. Perhaps more importantly, they blithely ignored the fact
that Habermas’ idea of constitutional citizenship presumes, indeed absolutely
depends upon, a pitiless examination of the past, especially of the abuses com-
mitted in the name of nationalisms constructed on the basis of a shared lin-
guistic, ethnic or racial traits. There is no acknowledgement anywhere in the
PP proposals on Spain’s future shape concerning the Castilian center’s fairly
constant, albeit always unsuccessful, attempts to cripple and/or eradicate the
“other” linguistic cultures of the state during the past. Indeed, there are few
lexical resources even available for articulating such a point of view.”
I believe that an awareness of this “silence” maintained by the Madrid-
centered establishment is one of the keys to developing an overall understand-
ing of the complex and highly problematic interactions between movements of
national identity in Spain not only today, but during the entire contemporary
era. In the pages that follow, I hope to show that each of the four primary move-
ments of national identity within the Spanish state (Castilian, Basque, Galician,
and Catalan) have been deeply and fundamentally imbued with the logic of
historicist essentialism. In the so-called ‘peripheral’ nations of the state, this
fact may have been strategically obscured from time to time, but never widely
denied. Within the Castilianist discourse of identity, however, a similarly frank
appraisal of this reality has never truly emerged. This ongoing denial, which has
been frequently camouflaged by the language of state prerogative and the type
of pseudo-progressivism recently invoked by the Aznar government, has served
to virtually guarantee that brinksmanship rather than reasoned negotiation be
the /eitmotiv of Spain’s ongoing search for more cohesive, representative (and
hence enduring) social and political institutions.
When we speak of national identity issues, there is a tendency among many
observers to fixate primarily on juridical questions such as those that I have
briefly touched on thus far. However, if there is one thing that has become
increasingly clear over the last two decades of study on the genesis and evolu-
tion of nationality issues,* it is that such political constructs, and the debates
that attend to them, are located, more often than not, on the trailing edge of
social change. The leading edge of that process is what Even-Zohar has termed
“culture planning.” For the Israeli theorist, culture planning is “regular activity
in the history of collective entities of any size, be they ‘family,’ ‘clan, ‘tribe,
‘community,’ or ‘nation’” (“Culture Planning” s.n.) whose principle goal is the
creation of a repertoire of options aimed at channeling the human energies of
 RAPPING OW THE CASTILE GATES 111

the collective toward a sense of both internal cohesion and differentiation from
such other groups.

What is generally meant by ‘cohesion’ is a state where a widely spread sense of sol-
idarity, or togetherness, exists among a group of people, which consequently does
not require acts enforced by sheer physical power. The basic, key concen 9 such
cohesion is readiness, or proneness. Readiness (proneness) is 2 mental disposition
which propels people to act in many ways which otherwise may be comiary to
their ‘natural inclinations.’ For example, going to war ready to be killed in fighting
against some other group would be the ultimate case, amply repeated throughout
human history. To create a large network of readiness (proneness) on 2 {air num-
ber of issues is something that, although vital for any society, cannot be taken for
granted by that society. (“Culture Repertoire” 395-96)

A key presumption here is that the aforementioned types of communities

are not, and should not be characterized as, “natural” or “spontaneously created”
entities. Rather, they are the end result of a process of conscious organization
marked by both “native invention” and the strategica\ly motivated importation
of tropes, texts, ideas, and cultural models from non-native cultural systems.
“Another premise is that the literate, or perhaps more accurately today, “semioti-
cally savvy” elites, working in variously explicit degrees of complicity with the
collective’s (or would-be collective’s) economic and political power brokers,
play a preponderantly important role in these efforts.’ Such an approach obvi-
ously dispenses with the largely romantic—but stil) widely propagated—con-
struct of the individually powerful cultural producer and focuses instead on the
broader issue of how his or her “inspiration” is stimulated and/or mediated by 2
carefully created and vigorously maintained set of institutional structures.
For Even-Zohar, late medieval Spain is the locus of a key quantitative
transformation in the history of such activities. It was there that proponents of
culture planning, whose history he considers to be coterminous with the tra-
jectory of organized societies dating back to Sumer and perhaps beyond, first
successfully imparted “socio-cultural cohesion to a large population which had
long been divided” (“The Role” 26). In other words, the Castilian monarchy
led the world in taking techniques of strategic textual manipulation beyond a
limited circle of adepts to a plurality of a much larger and broader scheme of
social organization. This proselytizing ambition is perhaps most succinctly ad-
duced in Nebrija’s Prélogo a la Gramdtica de la lengua castellana (1492). She
grammarian makes absolutely clear that he sees standardized Castilian writing
as an absolutely indispensable—if not the indispensable—pre-condition for the
112 THOMAS HARRINGTO

execution of an extremely wide-ranging Castilian political project. In this way,

he added the “nation” to the list of entities that could be fortified by a well-run
campaign of culture planning.
However, it should be pointed out that the concept of the “nation” in Ne-
brija was not the neatly parsed and heavily glossed construct of today’s political
theorists and philosophers. Rather, throughout his short but remarkable treatise
on culture planning, he regularly conflates his concept of the Castilian “nation”
with that of the Castilian “empire.” Thus, to be a possessor of Castilian was
for him not simply to be different from, but also superior to, the “other,” a cat-
egory which not only included “los enemigos de nuestra fe” (the enemies of our
faith) but also “los vizcainos, navarros, franceses, italianos, y todos los otros
que tienen alguin trato y conversacién en Espafia” [the Bizcayans, Navarrrese,
French, Italians, and all the others who have any type of dealings or conversa-
tion in Spain.” (Nebrija s.n.] (My translation). Indeed, he sees the linguistic
subjugation of the other Christian peoples of the peninsula as the crowning
element in a centuries-long campaign for peace:

[Castilian] tuvo su nifiez en el tiempo de los juezes y Reies de Castilla y de Leon,

y comen¢o a mostrar sus fuergas en tiempo del mui esclarecido y digno de toda la
eternidad el Rei don Alonso el Sabio, por cuio mandado se escrivieron las Siete
Partidas, la General Istoria, y fueron trasladados muchos libros de latin y aravigo
en nuestra lengua castellana. La cual. se estendid después hasta Aragon y Navarra
y de alli a Italia, siguiendo la compafifa de los infantes que embiamos a imperar en
aquellos Reinos. I assi crecié hasta la monarchia y paz de que gozamos, primera
mente por la bondad y providencia divina; después por la industria, trabajo y dili-
gencia de vuestra real majestad. En la fortuna y buena dicha de la cual, los miem-
bros y pedagos de Espaifia, que estavan por muchas partes derramados, se reduxeron
y aluntaron en un cuerpo y unidad de Reino. (Nebrija s.n.)

({Castilian] had its childhood in the time of the magistrates and Kings of Castile
and Leon, and began to show its strength in the age of the very illustrious and eter-
nally praiseworthy King Alfonso, the Wise, under whose orders were written the
Seven Divisions, The General History, and translated into our Castilian language
many Latin and Arabic books. Our language later was spread to Aragén and Na-
varra, and from there, to Italy, following the presence of the princes that we sent to
rule in those kingdoms. It grew from that time right up to the monarchy and peace
that we now enjoy, firstly because of goodness and divine Providence and there-
after through the industry, work and diligence of your Royal Highness. Thanks to
his fortune and good luck, the limbs and pieces of Spain, which had been scattered
across many realms, were subdued and joined together in one body and a single
royal unity. (My translation)
 RAPPING ON THE CAST(I)LE GATES Vth)

In keeping with its late-medieval provenance, Nebrija’s vision of the Cas-

tilian nation was also heavily inscribed with religious imperatives. However, its
messianic tone—evidenced perhaps most clearly in the parallels he draws in
the prologue between the historic missions of Jews and Castilians—would ap-
pear to be extraordinary even by the standards of that age. For him, the great
triumph of the Hebrews was that of establishing a written language supple
enough to transmit the well-ordered laws of God into a humanly accessible
form. He subsequently makes clear later that he sees Castilian, and those that
speak it, as his era’s intermediaries between the province of transcendent logic
and “muchos pueblos barbaros y naciones de peregrinas lenguas” (Nebrija s.n.)
(many uncivilized peoples and nations of odd languages) (Nebrija s.n.) (My
translation).
That Nebrija and the Castilian elite for which he spoke had stumbled upon
a winning geopolitical formula was made abundantly clear over the ensuing
two centuries. The bundled combination of linguistic fundamentalism, religious
fervor and hegemonic ambition, fueled the creation of the largest empire that
the world had ever seen. There can be no doubt that the Castilian emphasis on
linguistic standardization and explicit cultural hierarchies greatly facilitated the
task of extending and managing the vast and far-flung empire.
So impressive was the success of this Castilianist model of culture planning
that other European polities began imitating its most salient features, especially
its obsession with linguistic homogeneity, and from there, bureaucratic cohe-
sion. Perhaps owing to their lack of first-hand contact with the memory and
tradition of the Reconquest, however, few of the imitators could match its
extremely high level of overtly bellicose religiosity. Further diluting the reli-
gious content of the Castilian culture planning model as applied in other Eu-
ropean polities was the need for leaders in many of those places to enter into
dialogue with the ideas of the Protestant Reformation, which had as one of its
prime thrusts the drastic diminution of the role of the Church in public life and
governmental affairs. This is not to say that the desire for religious transcen-
dence disappeared for the nationalist culture planning efforts in those places.
Rather, simply that it began to be subsumed by new social and metaphysical
constructs.
Emblematic in the first regard was the ever-more centralized and secular-
ized France of Louis XIV (1638-1715), where the Catholic Church, while still
important, saw its prerogatives increasingly subjugated to the “reason” of the
state. By the time of the French Revolution, some 75 years after the disappear-
ance of the Sun King, things had advanced to the point where many Frenchman
no longer viewed an overt connection with the almighty as an indispensable
114 THOMAS HARRINGTO

trope for the maintenance of social cohesion. Representative of the second ten-
dency was late eighteenth-century Prussia. There, Herder, clearly troubled by
the potential cultural effects of the universalizing pretensions of the French
philosophes and their revolutionary descendants, basically reiterated Nebrija’s
belief in the transcendent origin and power of language. However, whereas the
Spaniard had viewed the church-state conglomerate of Isabel and her succes-
sors as the prime guarantors of this continuing flow of vital civilizing energy,
the German placed his trust in the decidedly non-sectarian vehicle known as
“nature.” Only by maintaining active and conscious contact with the land, the
prime sources of a people’s vital and social rhythms, one could expect to main-
tain the “timeless” character and cohesiveness of the individual nation.
Few people or social organisms possessed enough tenacity and ego strength
to presciently engage in the ongoing revision of a core social concept that they
themselves engendered. And so it was with the Castilian-centered Spanish mon-
archy which remained remarkably blind to these apparent “upgrades” in the na-
tionalist pedagogy program it had pioneered at the end of the fifteenth century.
True, the ascension of the Bourbons to the Spanish throne in 1715 brought with
it a brisk dose of French-style juridical centralism. However, it was not accom-
panied, as it was north of the Pyrenees, by a concomitant rise in the production
of secular creeds of universal social organization. A similar pattern of admin-
istrative reform with only tepid advances in new theories of national identity
was evident during the reign of Carlos III. The growing gap between the two
principal strains of nationalism (contractual vs. metaphysical) came to a head in
the Spanish case upon the arrival of Napoleonic troops to the Peninsula in 1808.
Though the liberal Constitution of Cadiz was certainly a noteworthy component
of the famous patriotic backlash of the Spaniards to the French invasion, the
strain of thought it represented was, as subsequent events showed, quite far
from ever being hegemonic within the early nineteenth-century Spanish and/or
Castilianist discourse of national identity. Indeed, when we contemplate the
semantics of the widely employed traditionalist epithet of afrancesado, with its
implication that those who embrace liberalism (and reject the social structure
of the Old Regime) somehow become apostates of the national community, we
can see just how much influence the overtly religious culture planning model
enunciated by Nebrija, and subsequently enacted by the educating clergy and
state bureaucrats, continued to have three centuries after its inception.
The period between the restoration of Bourbon absolutism in 1814 and the
outbreak of the Glorious Revolution in 1868 is often portrayed as an ongoing
oscillation between extremely liberal and traditionalist concepts of the nation.
While this is in some sense true, it can lead to certain misleading assumptions.
 RAPPING ON THE CAST(I)LE GATES Lats)

The first, eagerly and understandably promoted by contemporary progressives,

is that there was a rough equivalence between the strength and predominance of
liberal and traditionalist elites during this period. It is perhaps more accurately
viewed as a long stretch of relative political, social, and cultural conservatism
punctuated by brief but intense periods of progressivist predominance (1820—
1823, 1835-1837, 1854-1856). The existence of Carlism meant that the en-
tire Spanish spectrum of cultural, and from there, political options was located
much farther to the right than it was in France and other European nations.
For example, none of the intermittent progressivist projects mentioned previ-
ously (and not even the grandfather of them all, the Constitution of Cadiz) ever
seriously considered an abrogation of the long-standing relationship between
church and state. As a result, the bundled discursive relationship between faith
(with its strong undercurrent of monistic logic) and national identity developed
in the time of Nebrija was never seriously challenged. Another common mis-
conception, perhaps induced by a tendency to use the Second Republic (1931-
1939) as a prism through which to view the entire history of the Spanish left, is
that this so-called liberalism of the mid-nineteenth century was notably more
sympathetic than mainline Bourbon absolutism to the non-Castilian cultures of
the peninsula. In fact, if anything the administrative reforms of this “version
muy conservadora del liberalismo” (very conservative version of the liberalism)
(Tusell 45)—the institution of the provincial system, the founding of the Guar-
dia Civil, and the Ley de Moyano among many others—greatly strengthened the
bureaucratic hand of those who were seeking to impose the notion that Spanish
identity was essentially and fundamentally Castilian in nature.
The first notable alteration in Castilianism’s rigidly exclusivistic cultural
logic came during the Sexenio Revolucionario (1868-1874) when Prim’s lead-
ership coalition offered Dom Fernando, father of Luis I of Portugal, the possi-
bility of acceding to the Spanish throne, a move that would have led inexorably
to the (re) creation of a multilingual kingdom. However, Fernando refused the
offer owing, among other things, to his doubts about the ability of the Castilian
political class to guarantee the cultural integrity of Portugal under such an ar-
rangement. The monarchy was eventually reconstituted in unitary terms under
Amadeo I. However, when he resigned in early 1873, the First Republic was
established, and with it, the beginning of an even more radical and far-reaching
break with the Castilianism’s dominant set of cultural assumptions.
The Federalism that would dominate the short-lived Republic (which until
1870 or so had existed as a splinter tendency of the mid-century “liberalism”
outlined previously) was, as one would expect, inherently hostile to the designs
of centralism. This does not mean, however, that it was necessarily sympathetic
116 THOMAS HARRINGTO

to the historistically determined identities of Spain’s non-Castilian cultures. In-

deed, if there was one thing that appears to have doomed the First Republic to a
short life, it was its general negligence in the realm of culture planning, that is,
its leaders’ naive proudhonian belief that a population’s sincere desire to form
both local and supra-local polities was enough to guarantee the coherence and
survival of the very same entities. This extreme faith in the voluntaristic capaci-
ties of the citizenry meant that the “management of memory”—be it the well-
codified cultural repertoire of the center or the incipient cultural repertoires of
the periphery—was largely ignored. In this context then we can speak of the
First Republic as a time within which the circulation of the time-tested reper-
toire of monistically-inspired tropes of national identity was not replaced, but
rather momentarily suspended.
A recognition of this culture-planning failure inspired Almirall’s particu-
larisme, the first modern iteration of the family of socio-political theory we
refer today as Catalanism. Originally attracted to public life by the ideas of Pi 1
Margall, the prime ideologist of the failed Federal Republic, Almirall under-
stood instinctively that his mentor’s vision was doomed to future failure if it
did not take into account the important role of historically inscribed linguistic
and cultural artifacts, (as well as the autochthonous the institutions necessary
for reproducing and distributing them) in the creation of enduring political al-
legiances. In 1879, for example he founded E/ diari catala, the first daily news-
paper ever written in the language of that region. Through this and other initia-
tives, he sought to effect a fusion of the dominant features (minus the marked
centralism) of the French nationalistic tradition (universalism, egalitarianism)
and Romantically inflected German historicism with its emphasis on the endur-
ing power of language and local customs.
Yet if the disruption of the Castilianist discourse during the First Republic
was for Almirall a useful, if flawed, incitement to a potentially wide-ranging
redefinition of the Spanish state, it was for Canovas, the prime architect of the
political order of the Restoration, a frightening anathema. In his Discurso so-
bre la naci6n (1882), for example, he resurrects all of the key elements of the
hierarchical, imperialistic, and religiously imbued concept of Castilian identity
that had enabled both Spain’s meteoric rise and its agonizingly slow fall, go-
ing so far at one point to characterize the less widely extended linguistic codes
of a nation as the “plantas pardsitas” (Canovas s.n.) (parasitic plants) (Céno-
vas S.n.) (my translation) in the nation’s otherwise ordered and fundamentally
united linguistic ecosystem. For all his embrace of principles forged in the past,
however, Canovas avoided his conservative predecessors’ tendencies toward
intellectual insularity and olympian disdain of modern progress. For example,
 RAPPING ON THE CAST(I)LE GATES Wy

he was acutely aware of the latest developments in nationality theory such as

Renan’s “What is a Nation?” And rather than simply ignore that famous talk de-
livered to great effect in Paris six months before his own, he forcefully refutes
it. Through this speech and hundreds of others like it, the fearsome wordsmith
greatly updated and expanded Spanish traditionalism’s dialectical toolbox. In
doing so, he was implicitly recognizing the increasing importance of urban in-
tellectuals (like himself) and their institutions (like the Ateneo of Madrid where
he gave the speech) in the creation and maintenance of any future consensus on
the issue of national identity.
Canovas’s efforts to effect a rhetorical facelift of Castilian traditionalism
in the political arena were paralleled by those of Menéndez y Pelayo (a fellow
Conservative member of parliament) in philology, the new “science” of culture
whose genesis and development is intimately linked to the rise of a largely her-
metic, hegemonic, and temporally infinite concept of German nationalism dur-
ing the early and mid-nineteenth century. In keeping with the comparative na-
ture of the German model of philology pioneered by thinkers such as Friedrich
Schlegel and Franz Bopp, Menéndez Pelayo demonstrated a sincere interest in
all of the linguistic traditions of the Peninsula. However, (and here again we
see his kinship with his German disciplinary forebearers), he was, nonetheless,
possessed of belief in the existence of a clearly hierarchical relationship be-
tween them. Similarly, as a devout Catholic, he was strongly imbued with Span-
ish traditionalism’s long-standing belief in a link between this Castilian-forged
unity and the Church. In short, the prodigious labor of Menéndez y Pelayo was
to become the cornerstone of a whole new and revitalized Castilianist culture
planning project. In terms of its core postulates, it differed surprisingly little
from the embraced enunciated four hundred years before by Nebrija. However,
its ostensibly “scientific” and “dialogic” nature appealed greatly to a growing
urban intellectual class that wished to expunge its long-standing sense of infe-
riority versus the cultures of Northern Europe. In this sense, the cultural project
of Menénedez Pelayo and that of his political correlate, Canovas, might be
compared with those of the sixteenth-century Jesuits and the twentieth-century
members of Opus Dei. In all three movements, the leadership recognized a need
to modernize both the theory and practice of Spanish intellectual and civic life.
However, none was willing to dispense with any of their fundamental socio-
religious convictions to make this happen.
The success of this philologically-fueled revival of the Castilianist reper-
toire of cultural options was not lost upon the generation of Catalanists that fol-
lowed Almirall and began to come of age during the late 1880s and early 1890s.
Like the neo-traditionalists of Castile, Prat de la Riba, Camb6, Puig i Cadafalch,
118 THOMAS HARRINGTO

and Torras i Bages were conservative and Catholic, and, consequently naturally
given to monistic and hierarchical conceptualizations of national and social
identity. Not surprisingly, they tended to view with suspicion Almirall’s social
progressivism and disposition (however theoretical) to multipolar, pan-Iberian
solutions to the nationalities problem. It was thus not long before they began
creating an explicitly historicist apology for the singularity of what they saw as
their one and only true nation: Catalonia. The first great public demonstration
of this newly politicized organicist vision of the Catalan nation was the famous
political manifesto of La Unié Catalanista, Les Bases de Manresa (1892). Ar-
guably more important in the long-run, however, were initiatives such as the
Cercle Artistic Sant Lluc, an artists collective run under the theoretical tutelage
of Torras which sought to give expression to what they viewed as the “essen-
tial,” spiritually-inspired elements of Catalan identity, and in this way, counter-
act modernisme’s “foreign” brand of secular cosmopolitanism. It would be this
brand of Catalanism that would be politically ascendant from 1888 onward.°
The first formulations of Basque national identity, generated by Sabino
Arana during the same decade, grew out of a similar social and religious envi-
ronment. The major difference in the Basque case was the movement’s much
higher degree of distrust toward both universalizing modernity and the Castilian
center, the latter of which it saw (quite mistakenly) as being wholly dominated
by the former. This stridency can be traced, in great measure, to the effects of
the long-standing Carlist movement in that part of Spain, and more specifically
still, the family of Arana. Unlike the conservative Catalan bourgeoisie which
had been enticed into a certain complicity with the Castilian center through the
granting of relatively new mercantile privileges in the Caribbean, the rightward
extreme of the Basque social spectrum had been pursued by Castilianist armies
during the same period. Further differentiating the two movements was the fact
the emergent ideological and cultural praxis of La Unié Catalanista had been
forged in active, and often quite personal dialogue, with both Almirall’s group
and the “worldly bohemians” of modernisme, interchanges made possible by
“bridge” institutions and figures such as E/ Ateneo, El Centre Catala Maragall,
Ramon Casas, Joaquim Casas-Carb6, Masso i Torrents, and Donénech i Mon-
taner. No such comparable intramural dialogue was present in the incipient
Basque movement of national identity.
Like his Castilian and Catalan counterparts, Sabino saw language as the
central force in the creation of national solidarity. However, unlike them, he
had an extremely limited repertoire of autochthonous linguistic artifacts at his
disposal. One reason for this was the relatively advanced state of castilianiza-
tion in society. Another was that in those areas where the Basque language was
 RAPPING ON THE CAST(I)LE GATES 119

spoken, it was far less standardized than either Castilian or Catalan in their
particular realms. Finally, and perhaps most decisively, its written manifesta-
tions were relatively few, owing to the tradition of granting bards (bertsolaris)
rather than scribes the central role in the preservation of the shared cultural
patrimony. Though such oral records often have great intrinsic value, they gen-
erally fail to generate the same level of socio-semiotic cohesion that written
texts can provide.° In order to fill this evident /acuna in an otherwise classically
historicist apology of the nation, the early Basque nationalists recurred, much
like Irish nationalists caught in the same bind at the same time, to the promotion
of traditional sports as a banner of communal cohesion. Of far more transcen-
dence in the long run, however, was Sabino’s embrace of an expressly racial
understanding of Basque exceptionalism. For Arana, Basques were a noble race
whose prime goal must be that of cleansing themselves of the genetic and social
contamination suffered during the previous centuries of Castilian subjugation.
Needless to say, he does not address how such a view is compatible with the
centuries-long history of apparently willing Basque collaboration in Castilian-
ist enterprises, nor the fact that his much-cherished Catholic faith was undoubt-
edly transmitted to his countrymen through the good offices of yesteryear’s
version of the maketo.
During the 1880s and 1890s, Galeguismo lagged well behind these two
movements of national identity in political impact. As was the case with their
counterparts in other areas of the peninsula during this time (with the possible
exception of the remaining core of Pii Margall-inspired federalists in Catalonia),
the logic of discourse was fundamentally historicist in nature, placing a great
deal of emphasis on the importance of building upon the linguistic renaissance
set in motion by the poets of the Rexurdimento (Rosalia, Pondal, and Curros
Enriquez) from the mid-1860s onward. However, neither of the two great theo-
retical figures of the movement, Manuel Murguia nor Alfredo Brafias regularly
wrote, or demanded that their supporters regularly write, in the autochthonous
code of the region. Perhaps for this reason, they, like early Basque nationalists,
showed an uncommon interest in the example of Ireland. But the British colony
was not the only source of “fraternal referents” for their nascent cultural reper-
toire. Portugal and Catalonia are also primary sources for the tropes, symbols,
phrases, and discursive strategies used to justify the historic singularity of their
people. Particularly striking in terms of its reliance on conservative Catalanism
is Brafias’ El Regionalismo (1889), which is often presented as the movement’s
first great systematic declaration of principles.
The American defeat of the Spanish in 1898 had the effect of placing propo-
nents of the hegemonic Castilianist discourse of the Restoration, with its hard-
120 THOMAS HARRINGTO

wired imperial logic, on the defensive. Quick to seize on this opening were the
Catalanists under the direction of the still quite youthful Enric Prat de la Riba.
As mentioned earlier, heavy involvement in the Caribbean market during the
latter half of the nineteenth century had served to moderate the autonomous
demands of many among Catalonia’s conservative bourgeoisie; moreover, they
were willing to maintain their allegiance to the central government as long as
it continued to safeguard their exploitation of this key market. With this benefit
now gone, they began to channel their energies increasingly toward the institu-
tionalization of the culture planning concepts that they and their more progres-
sive Catalanist rivals from the particularist and modernista camps had been
espousing for more than a decade. Notable among numerous happenings in this
initial explosion of culture planning activities, was the founding or initiation of
La Veu de Catalunya (1899) and the Barcelona Football Club (1899), La Lliga
Regionalista (1901), September 11th commemorations (1901), Estudis Univer-
sitaris Catalans (1903), and the Palau de la Musica Catalana (1905).
These activities took a quantum leap forward after the November 1905
sacking by Spanish army officers of the building that housed Cu-cut, a satirical
Catalan language journal, and La Veu de Catalunya.’ In addition to the founding
of Solidaritat Catalana in March of that year, 1906 saw the publication of Prat
de la Riba’s famed catechism of national identity, La nacionalitat Catalana,
the organization of the first Congrés Internacional de la Llengua Catalana, the
founding of the Museu de Belles Arts and Eugeni d’Ors’s debut as the “glosa-
dor” Xénius in the pages of La Veu de Catalunya. This last event was of tran-
scendent importance as d’Ors would utilize his platform in the nationalist paper
as well as his keen cosmopolitan sense of taste to greatly fill out and then order
the canon of nationalist signs and symbols. Along the way, he would also reno-
vate Catalan prose stylistics, transforming a heretofore archaic and poetically-
oriented language into a supple tool for everyday communication. The intense
wave of culture planning continued in 1907 with the creation of the Junta de
Museus de Barcelona, La Biblioteca de Catalunya, and the Institut d’Estudis
Catalans. This last institution created a beachhead for Catalan in world schol-
arly and scientific linguistic codes and would later underwrite Pompeu Fabra’s
effort to normalize the spelling and grammar of Catalan.
With this extraordinary burst of energy, Catalan nationalism had, in effect,
leap-frogged centralist efforts in the realm of nationalist pedagogy. The irrita-
tion felt by those who identified with the Castilianist project of national identity
can be seen in the peevish articles written by UnamunoS on his 1906 trip to
Barcelona and Ortega’s disparaging comments on Prat, Cambé, and the core
legitimacy of the entire Catalanist movement.’
 RAPPING ON THE CAST(I)LE GATES 121

The Castilianist counterattack was not long in materializing. In January

1907, the Junta para Ampliacién de Estudios (JAE) was founded by Royal
decree. It later gave life to the Residencia de Estudiantes (1910), the Centro
de Estudios Histéricos (1910), and the Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Fisico-
Naturales (1910). Core members of these institutions later played important
roles in the Liga de Educacion Politica Espafola (1914) and its official organ,
Espana (1915).
In his study of the impact of these important cultural institutions, Inman
Fox has gone to great pains to stress their “liberal” orientation; that is, their
drive to serve as a counterweight against the hermetic traditionalism of the
nineteenth century Spanish right. In their important analysis of the history of
the JAE, Laporta, Miguel et al, take a similar line, highlighting the institution’s
close links with Giner and the Jnstitucién Libre de Ensefanza. On one level,
there can be no denying this set of interlocking institutions did affect an impor-
tant break with the traditionalist cultural project in terms of its open embrace
of the scientific method, European culture, and, in the case of the more politi-
cally-minded, democratic processes. Nor can their links to the progressivism of
Krausist circles be understated. Finally, it can be assumed that most, if not all,
of the brilliant constellation of thinkers involved (1.e., Menéndez Pidal, Ramon
y Cajal, Azcarate, Altamira, Ortega, Castro) clearly had an image of themselves
as transforming liberals.
Yet, if there is one thing that the twentieth-century history of ideas (and
more immediately our own recent academic history of political correctness)
has shown with great clarity, it is that reformist movements also often contain
“black boxes,” areas of inquiry (usually quite close to home psychologically)
into which their leading cultural actors cannot, or will not, extend the critical
acuity that marks their theorizing in other realms. For all of their efforts to
deconstruct and rectify the long-standing Spanish tradition of obscurantism,
xenophobia, social hierarchy, and hostility to science, the thinkers of this newly
founded set of cultural institutions did virtually nothing to problematize the
“naturalness” of the unitary and Castilian-centered conception of Spanish na-
tionalist life. In fact, they did quite a bit to reify the assumptions inherited from
the traditionalist discourse first articulated by Nebrija.
Nowhere is this tendency more evident than in the work of the Revista de
Filologia Espanola, the marquee publication of the Centro de Estudios Histort-
cos. The research agenda of this publication shows an uncommon interest
in demonstrating the essential “timelessness” of the Castilian “character” as
evidenced in its language and literature, and from there, the center’s anointed
role as the prime organizer of Iberian life. The key figure at the Revista was
122 THOMAS HARRINGTO

Menéndez Pidal, the great chronicler of the Spanish epic and erstwhile dis-
ciple of Menéndez y Pelayo. Though he would suggest, in contravention to
the hierarchical ideals of his mentor, that E/ Cid, and the Castilian Romancero
demonstrated the existence of strongly democratic tendencies within “el pueblo
espafiol,” he in no way sought to challenge or to deconstruct “the people’s”
proclivity toward religiously-inspired warfare. Indeed, that aim was viewed
by him to be one of the defining features of lo nacional. In other words, Me-
néndez Pidal’s vision of the past put a very slight liberal patina on a very old
story. Those reading his scholarly articles and/or the famous Clasicos Caste-
llanos series produced for the broader public by his co-researchers and disciples
would receive very few messages disabusing them of the belief that, should the
need arise, the center and its “people” were entitled to use institutional coercion
against those they viewed as denying their set of historically ratified preroga-
tives.
Despite this Castilianist counter-offensive, the Catalanist culture planning
drive continued unabated during the second decade of the twentieth century.
It was during this period that Eugeni d’Ors solidified the esthetic and moral
canons of Noucentisme and Prat de la Riba leveraged the scarce resources of
the Mancomunitat, inaugurated after a protracted political battle in 1914, to
further multiply the number of institutions dedicated to widening the repertoire
of Catalan cultural options. The evident success of the Lliga’s in this realm,
as well as Prat’s famous call for the creation of /’Espanya Gran in 1916, em-
boldened those with similarly structured discourses in the Basque provinces
and Galicia.'° In the first case, this was translated into a re-doubled emphasis,
especially within the branch of the movement linked to one of the late Arana’s
more trusted collaborators, Engracio Aranzadi, to the creation of autochthonous
cultural artifacts. Aranzadi’s efforts culminated with the publication in 1918
of his “breviary” of national identity, La nacién vasca. In Galicia, the Catalan
example, along with the notions of a re-born Portuguese identity (a cultural
commerce largely catalyzed by the writings of the Catalan Iberianist Ignasi
Ribera i Rovira) gave birth to that region’s first overtly nationalist (as opposed
to regionalist) movement.!!
Like the dominant discourses of national identity in all of the other areas
of the peninsula, the Galician discourse of identity was profoundly marked by
both the logic of Herderian nationalism and a frank admittance of religion’s key
role in the maintenance of social cohesion. Its foremost theorist and cultural
impresario was Vicente Risco who, quite consciously following the examples
of Prat de la Riba and Aranzadi, as well as their Portuguese correlate Teixeira
de Pascoaes, sought to capture the “essence” of his people in a single “popular”
 RAPPING ON THE CAST(1I)LE GATES 23

essay: Teoria do nacionalismo galego (May 1920).'? If there was a salient dif-
ference between this text and the models that had preceded it, it was on the level
of mimesis. Like Brafias and Murgufa before him, Risco was much more heav-
ily indebted than his non-Galician counterparts to the vocabulary and tropes of
nationalist activists in other places.
A very short time after the publication of Teoria do nacionalismo galego,
Ortega began publishing a series of articles in El sol that would later come to be
known as Espajia invertebrada. As a man who took pride in his ability to be “a
la altura de los tiempos,” we can assume that as he sat down to write the series
he was deeply aware of the growing consolidation of the cultural repertoires
of national identity on the so-called periphery of the peninsula. Adding to his
concern was the ongoing Irish struggle for independence, Wilson’s calls for
the right to national self-determination (issued in January 1918), and closer to
home, the apparent radicalization of Catalanism following the defeat of Cam-
bo’s bid for a statute of autonomy the year before. As has been noted, Ortega
had been for a number of years a harsh critic of historicist nationalisms who
was deeply implicated in generating a supposedly new “liberal” justification
of the Spanish state. After three years in which he had somewhat drifted away
from the public forum to attend to the more intimate concerns showcased in E/
espectador, Ortega clearly sought to make a resounding statement on Spain’s
“nationalities problem.”
True to his widely professed liberal sympathies, he began by making a
convincing case (using the example of the Roman Empire) for the superior-
ity of voluntaristic (as opposed to ethnic, territorial, or linguistic) conceptions
of national identity. However, when he expanded his analysis to the particular
realm of Spanish history, his liberal sang-froid unexpectedly starts to boil, fore-
ing him to emit openly historicist justifications of past Castilian comportment.
Just as the “black box” of reflexive Castilianism had led Menéndez Pidal to
sustain—in apparent contradiction of the truth—that the Castilians were unique
among the peninsular peoples in having had the grandeur of vision necessary
for generating epic poems, Ortega sustains that “sdlo cabezas castellanas tienen
6rganos adecuados para percibir el gran problema de la Espana integral” (only
Castilian minds have the necessary organs to perceive the great problem of inte-
gral Spain) (61).'* Moreover, this special leadership talent is, he tells his reader,
not a function of human factors but rather a “quid divinum” (55). So much for
the Renanian ideal of a public space and governed by earthly prerogative free
from a priori notions of ethnic privilege!
Although Ortega and the vast majority of those involved in the Castilanist
culture planning thrust begun in 1907 were deeply opposed to the Primo de
124 THOMAS HARRINGTO

Rivera dictatorship, it can be argued that their brand of “sanitized traditional-

ism” and/or “black box liberalism” provided the regime with a certain degree of
intellectual justification. When we exclude the admittedly large and important
issue of civil liberties, the two projects saw pretty much eye-to-eye on the need
to pursue technological and economic progress, “clean up” corrupt government,
and re-establish the unquestioned protagonism of Castile in peninsular affairs.
Ina sense, Primo accomplished with his loyal divisions and his calculated court-
ing of the monied elite what that army of historians and philologists had wished
to do with their pens: consign the so-called “peripheral” movements of national
identity to a place of clear marginalization and institutional bankruptcy.
This forceful rollback of the culture planning initiatives of the socially con-
servative nationalist parties in Catalonia, Galicia, and the Basque Country only
speeded up the radical turn that had begun among them in the wake Cambo’s
failure in Madrid. Emblematic in this regard is the trajectory of Francesc Macia.
A career officer in the engineering corps of the Spanish army who had first
been elected to Parliament in 1907 as a part of Solidaritat Catalana, Macia,
like the majority of his fellow solidaris, possessed an outlook that was essen-
tially ameliorative in nature; ultimately he believed that in time Madrid would
have no choice but to cede to the reality of a culturally distinct Catalonia and
a bipolar conception of the state. After several years in Madrid, however, he
became increasingly convinced that this outlook was naive, as it did not take
into account the visceral anti-Catalanism of the majority of the Castile-based
political and cultural elite. Eventually, he became openly separatist in orienta-
tion, founding Estat Catala in 1922, an event which would lead, in turn, to his
wildly unsuccessful attempt to foment an armed insurrection at Prats de Moll6
in the Pyrenees in 1926. A similar shift took place in 1922 in the Basque coun-
try when the so-called grupo aberriano of Gallastegui established hegemony
over Aranzadi’s more accidentalist faction of the movement. With the onset of
the Primo dictatorship, important operations of these new more strident groups
were carried out in exile.'* In Galicia culture planning activities of the type that
had defined the decade of the teens continued apace. This can probably be ex-
plained by the fact that the link between such activities and real political change
had always been much more tenuous there than in Catalonia or the Basque
Country. Thus, the regime allowed initiatives like the Seminario de Estudos Ga-
legos to proceed with minimal interference. But even still, the movement suf-
fered schisms. For instance, the more militant Jrmandade Nazionalista Galega
(ING) split off from the Jrmandades de Fala in 1922.
For those on the periphery, the centralist intolerance under Primo and
Berenguer merely proved what they had always feared, and what a close read-
 RAPPING ON THE CAST(I)LE GATES 2/5

ing of the contemporary history Iberian discourse of national identity makes

crystal clear: Castilianists perennially reserve for themselves the prerogative to
use institutionalized violence when they feel that their hegemony is called into
question by one or more of their peninsular others. As the numerous civil con-
flicts of the nineteenth century indicate, the general tendency had been to main-
tain the pressure on the so-called “periphery” until such time as the “threat”
is deemed to be extinguished, or to put it in culturalist terms, until such time
as the centralist repertoire of signs and symbols successfully displaces those
repertoires generated by groups on the periphery. However, the sudden flight
of Alfonso XIII in April 1931, unexpectedly truncated this exercise in “forced
forgetting.” Yet the short length of the dictatorship was not the only problem.
Throughout his years in control, Primo had consistently harassed and deni-
grated the Madrid-based intellectual class. They had responded by denying the
regime their valued services in the realm of culture planning. Thus, the dictator
found himself in the awkward role of having nothing much to offer the periph-
ery (in terms of compelling myths of collective identity) in exchange for their
forced abandonment of cherished autonomous institutions.
With the declaration of the Republic, the situation became cruelly reversed.
As we have seen, the latent threat of violence, or at the very least, the right
to invoke some supernatural prerogative in relations with peninsular “others,”
had always formed part of even the most progressive versions of the Castilian-
ist discourse of identity. Now, due to their acrimonious “divorce” from Primo
and the power structure he represented, the liberal intellectuals of Madrid who
had charged themselves with the duty of creating a new framework for intra-
peninsular cohesion no longer had that vaunted tool at their disposal. In effect,
they were in the difficult position of having to quickly and radically re-invent
a centuries-old discursive model along completely non-coercive lines. Their
failure to effectively do so is not surprising. Owing to this reality, the center was
now at the mercy of the now more cohesive culture planning models of the pe-
riphery. That Catalonia remained part of the Spanish state in the spring of 1931,
for example, has much more to do with Macia’s sense of calculated restraint
than the inherent powers of the center. When the Cortes finally did grant the re-
established Generalitat a Statute of Autonomy in 1932 (stripped of the penin-
sula-wide federalizing provisions with which it had originally been proposed),
it was approved over the objections of Castilianist intellectual lions such as
Unamuno and Ortega. The narrowness of the “enlightened” Castilianist vision
can further be seen in the Azafia government’s harshly negative reaction to the
Galeuzca pact of August 1933, in which leaders of all of the major Catalan,
Basque, and Galician nationalist parties agreed to cooperate in promoting the
126 THOMAS HARRINGTO

regular exchange of cultural artifacts between the three nations. Far from see-
ing this as a new and credible way to perhaps begin reshaping the nation from
the periphery, the “liberal” Republican government attacked it stridently in the
press.
In many ways, the pact was the high point of attempts to fundamentally
reconfigure the parameters of the Spanish repertoire of cultural options. It was
also the beginning of the end of the tradition of pseudo-cosmopolitan Castil-
ianism begun by Cénovas and practiced through the Primo de Rivera dictator-
ship. In November of 1933, the coalition formed around Gil Robles’ CEDA
movement assumed power. This change, in turn, encouraged the re-emergence
of the type of reactionary and frankly anti-modern Castilianism practiced in-
termittently in the early 1800s, and more assiduously still, in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. In the eyes of military leaders and most of the Catholic
right, the mere existence, however tenuous, of composite visions of national
identity such as those that were uneasily tolerated by the Republican center-left,
proved that the liberal political class had lost whatever bona fides it might have
had in its sacred role as guarantors of national cohesion. Though both Basque
and Galician statutes of autonomy were proposed (with the Galician one actu-
ally gaining a preliminary plebiscitary approval at home) during the pre-war
Popular Front government, it was already clear to most that the moment to
peacefully implement a radical re-alignment of the relations between Spain’s
major culture-nations had already come and gone.
As had been widely demonstrated, the Francoist culture-planning efforts
were rooted, from quite early onward, in a frank revival of Spain’s pre-modern
repertoire of nationalist signs and symbols. Like the arrows held tightly in the
talon of the Falangist eagle, causes of the Army, Church, and the Castilian lan-
guage were re-bundled and proffered as a cultural package that would enable
a new Imperial crusade like the one that had first expelled the infidels from the
peninsula, and later made possible the “civilization” of the overseas territories.
“Hablame en cristiano,” the widely utilized insult/response used by Francoist
troops with those using or known to favor the use of one of the non-Castilian
languages, reveals quite succinctly the contours of its logic. When we consider
the frequent insinuations concerning the “Jewishness” of the Catalans, and the
habitual canards about the devious dealings of protestant Great Britain and
Masonic cells, Francoism’s Tridentine and even pre-Tridentine logic becomes
more apparent. It was a desire to inculcate the population with this very particu-
lar Castilianist view of the peninsular past, that animated the production of the
famous wave of historicist films produced by directors such as Juan de Orduia.
Rafael Gil, and Saenz de Heredia in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
 RAPPING ON THE CAST(I)LE GATES 127

As mentioned earlier, Camb6’s failure to gain a statute of autonomy in

1918-1919, combined with rightist oppression of the Primo years, engendered
a change of orientation in all of the peripheral discourses on identity. There is a
tendency, especially when we look at the Catalan case and Barcelona’s famously
“red” comportment during the Civil War, to characterize these transformations
in terms of a simple migration from the left to the right side of the political spec-
trum. While it is certainly true that the causes of nationhood and egalitarianism
came together in Catalonia, and to a lesser extent, Galicia, in the period 1931-
1937, it would be a grave error to overstate the case. For all of their apparent
ideological transformations in the public arena, the discursive architecture of the
nationalist discourses of the Macias and Castelaos remained heavily indebted to
the logic of historicism, with its emphasis on the pre-eminent role of language,
place, and the work of lettered elites in the creation of social cohesion. This, of
course, served as a built-in brake on their long-term ability to truly adopt univer-
sal notions of social justice. Moreover, with a few notable exceptions, the source
of leadership in these now seemingly leftist movements of national identity was
what it had always been: the comfortable urban upper-middle class which had
a long record of cooperation with clerical authority. While these contradictions
were either downplayed or papered over in Catalonia and Galicia during the
Republic, the same could not be said of Euzkadi. There, the strongly historicist
and confessional cast of the PNV (Partido Nacionalista Vasco) caused it to clash
repeatedly with its supposed republican “allies” within the country.
It is important to bear all this in mind when we look at the evolution of the
major Iberian discourses of national identity over the last half-century. Accord-
ing to a vision that is still widely circulated today, the clash of national culture
planning projects during this period went something like this. From 1939 to the
early 1950s, Franco utilized the cinematic, journalistic, and literary resources
at his disposal (not to mention those having to do with the employ of state vio-
lence) to expunge and/or simply overwhelm with religiously-imbued Castilian-
isms any remaining signs of Catalan, Basque, and Galician identity. As he did so,
the non-Castilian leaders and artistic producers kept the flame of their national
cultures alive in exile. As good Republicans, these exiled patriots felt a strong
affinity toward egalitarian politics and a generalized aversion toward confes-
sionally-informed social thought. As the 1950s wore on, it became clear to the
Franco regime that some entente with instrumental modernity was necessary.
The first step in this process was the entry of the so-called “technocrats” of Opus
Dei into the government. It was followed, in the early sixties, with the country’s
decision to make tourism one of the prime engines of its economic development.
As a result of these changes, Spaniards born after 1940 began to fall increas-
128 THOMAS HARRINGTO

ingly into step with the dominant social-democratic views of Spain’s European
counterparts. As the regime’s ideological vehemence declined in the mid-sixties,
numerous exiles returned home. In dialogues with them, and with their new
trans-pyrenaean interlocutors, the post-war generation began re-connecting with
its country’s “lost” history of progressive politics and cultural diversity. It was
out of this ferment that recovery of the Catalan, Basque, and Galician cultural
systems arose during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
While such a vision holds some truth, it pays short shrift to the important
role played by home-based, religiously-informed nationalist organizations in this
renaissance. This was especially the case in Catalonia, the place which, in one
form or another, had always served as vanguard of nationalist mobilization of the
Iberian periphery. While figures like Tarradellas ambled through solitary and of-
ten humiliatingly inconsequential exiles, Jordi Pujol and other Catholic national-
ists like him were busy reconstructing the basis of the Catalan identity through
their participation and leadership in groups such as the brotherhood of La Mare
de Déu de Montserrat, Crist Catalunya, and the Grup Torras i Bages. In these
organizations, the example of Prat de la Riba was valued much more highly than
that of Company’s or even Macia, and Marxist forms of analysis were generally
shunned. In Galicia, the process of nationalist regeneration followed a similar
route with the catholically-inflected Galaxia Group, led by Ram6n Pineiro, Gar-
cia Sabell, and Carballo Calero, gradually reviving the goals and works of the
largely conservative Xeneracion Nos of Risco. In the Basque Country, the model
of analysis outlined above conforms somewhat better to reality. There, the PNV
of the post-war was hobbled, just as it had been at the turn-of-the-century, by
an inability to generate and place into wide circulation among the intellectual
class (never mind the general public) a compeling repertoire of unquestionably
“native” cultural materials. This culture planning failure was one of the prime
reasons why a younger generation of impatient activists felt the need to break
from the PNV and found ETA in 1959, filling this “cultural gap,” as it were, with
armed violence heavily informed by Marxism and anti-colonial theory. How-
ever, when we look a little closer, we can see that for all its apparent interest
in non-confessional and ostensibly left-leaning ideologies, ETA and its present
political arm, EH, have discourses that are heavily indebted to highly mystical
notions of communal identity. In many ways, the constructs of abertzale sacri-
fice and martyrdom are as close as one gets in the so-called Western world to the
militant religious fervor found in some branches of Islam.
The seemingly natural symbiosis between historistic and religiously im-
bued politics and nationalism has been made readily manifest in the years since
 RAPPING ON THE CAST(I)LE GATES 129

the ratification of the 1978 Constitution. In the months previous to the inaugural
autonomous elections in Catalonia (March 1980), it was widely believed that
one of the major leftist groups (PSC-PSOE or the PSUC) would gain a leading
plurality of the votes. To the surprise of many, it was Pujol’s coalition (CiU)
with its strong, and largely complex-free, relationship to the culture planning
repertoire engendered by Prat de la Riba, d’ Ors, Cambé, and others at the outset
of the twentieth century that carried the day. A similar process can be seen in
the Basque Country. In the 1980 autonomous elections there, the PNV, linked
like Pujol’s coalition to confessional social thought and early twentieth-century
culture planning repertoires, quickly reasserted its hegemony (unbroken until
today) within both the nationalist camp and the country as a whole. The story
has been pretty much the same in Galicia, except for the fact the long domi-
nant right-wing party is a “sucursal” of the state-wide PP. But even this is very
much in keeping with the early twentieth-century history of Galeguismo, within
which claims for self-rule were always much less strident than in Catalonia or
the Basque Country owing to: a) the relative weakness of the urban bourgeoisie,
and b) the continuing grip of a Madrid-oriented caciquista regime over public
life in many rural areas.
Owing to both its own experience as a persecuted party under Franco as
well as its acute awareness of the need to engender a workable civic consensus
after years of one-party rule, the PSOE adopted a largely “hands-off” policy to-
ward both Castilianist culture planning and the movements of national identity
in Catalonia, Galicia, and the Basque Country during its long stay in office. In
its reluctance to use centralist power for blatantly centralist ends, it can be com-
pared to the Republican government of the period 1932-1934. However, it was
also like that government in terms of its general refusal to work pro-actively
towards the development of a more fully articulated and truly multi-polar model
of intra-state cultural relations.
During its firm term in office, a time when its working majority depended
on support from Pujol’s CiU, the Aznar government more or less continued
with the line established by the Socialists. But even while maintaining this os-
tensibly non-committal posture in the realm of day-to-day tactics, it was deeply
engaged in a culture planning effort aimed at reigniting the dormant flames of
Castilianism. One key element of this campaign was the rehabilitation of the
historical legacy of CAnovas del Castillo and the politics of the Restoration.
This was accomplished through a barrage of government-backed commemora-
tions, studies, and reissues of his work. In this way, the PP prepared the ground
not only for a re-legitimation of his peculiar brand of governance by an elitist
130 THOMAS HARRINGTO

minority, but the return of his pseudo-dialogic approach to the problem of deal-
ing with progressivism and Castile’s peninsular others.
Another was the creation of the La Fundacién San Millan de la Cogolla,
dedicated to “investigar. documentar y difundir los origenes de la Lengua Cas-
tellana y la utilizacién de las nuevas tecnologias para la difusion y actualizacion
del castellano en el mundo” (“Origen y constitucién” s.n.) (research, document
and disseminate the origins of the Castilian Language as well as the use of new
technologies for updating and spreading Castilian throughout the world) (“On-
gen y constitucién™ s.n.) (My translation). San Millan, located in Old Castile is. _
of course. the site of the Monasteries of Suso and Yuso which. according to the
late-nineteenth and twentieth- century philological school. was the “cuna de la
lengua espafiola™ (cradle of the Spanish language) owing to its link with Glosas
emilianenses and later on. the poetry of Berceo. The monasteries possess the
added symbolic advantages of having been definitively put out of business by
the desamortizacién of Mendizabal in 1835. Thus, in creating the foundation in
1998. the Aznar government was not only creating an institutional bulwark for
Castilianism. destined in time to become the “atalaya de nuestra cultura” (~“On-
gen y constituci6n™ s.n.) (watchtower of our culture) (My translation) but also
righting what in traditionalist eyes was one of lay progressivism’s most egre-
gious assaults on the church’s nghtful place in Spanish society. In the ensuing
years, it has become a launching ground for all types of centralist culture plan-
ning initiatives. In July 2000. the government finally released its long-awaited
white paper on the teaching of humanities with its call for a “vertebration™ of
the national educational system: nevertheless, it did so at the newly renovated
monasteries. It has also played host to events such as the Encuentro de Emba-
jadores Iberoamericanos. Reunién de las Academias de la Lengua Espanola,
an Exposicion Pictérica en Homenaje a la Lengua Espanola y a San Millan
de la Cogolla, Presentacién oficial de la nueva edicién de la Ortografia de
la Lengua Espafola. At this last event, the then Minister of Culture Mariano
Rajoy said:

Espana no es una potencia econémica ni industrial, pero si una colosal potencia

cultural gracias al castellano, que hablan en el mundo unos 400 millones de per-
sonas . . . Espafia es inexplicable sin su proyeccién hacia América y a esa cultura
comun hispanica debemos hoy nuestro lugar en el mundo (“Presentacién oficial”
$n.)

(Spain is not an economic or industrial power but rather a giant cultural power
thanks to the Castilian language, which is spoken by over 400 million people in the
 RAPPING ON THE CAST(I)LE GATES 13)

world... Spain cannot be explained without taking into account its drive toward
America. It is thanks to this common Hispanic culture that we occupy the place we
do in today’s world). (My translation)

Could the drive to re-bundle the fundamental building blocks of the cen-
turies-old tradition of Castilanism (language, faith, tradition, and a “universal”
imperial mission) be any clearer?
In El bucle melancolico, the Basque writer and former member of ETA,
Jon Juaristi, suggests that the self-pitying hermeticism of the contemporary
Basque discourse of identity has virtually guaranteed the failure of substantial
and constructive dialogue between its adherents and those of the peninsula’s
other nationalist projects. Similarly in Catalonia, intellectuals such as Alejo Vi-
dal-Quadras from the centralist right and Josep Ramoneda from the Catalanist
left have long railed against what they see as conservative Catalanism’s inher-
ent inability to engender a meaningful ecumenical dialogue leading to the con-
struction of a truly plural Spain. In Galicia, figures such as Alfredo Conde and
Marcial Gondar Portasany have criticized Galeguismo’s tendency to greatly
overplay its hand on the issue of linguistic uniformity. Implied in all of these
criticisms is a belief that the discursive structure of historicist nationalisms—
which as we have seen have been the dominant strains of nationalist thought in
the Iberian periphery during the contemporary era—carry within them a need
for exclusivity, and from there, a tendency toward institutional coercion, that is
fundamentally antithetical to the construction of a functioning multi-national
polity. These criticisms, especially those of Juaristi and his countryman Mikel
Azurmendi, have been enthusiastically received and re-circulated by the cur-
rent conservative government in Madrid. Yet, while they celebrate these “de-
constructions” of the peripheral culture planning projects, they do nothing to
encourage a similar analysis of Castilianism’s ample tradition of historicisti-
cally-justified exclusivity.
In the wake of the Piqué and San Gil’s ponencia, Aznar himself has stressed
that the time has come for Spaniards to live “sin prejuicios, ataduras ni cuentas
pendientes con Ja historia” (Huesca s.n.) (without prejudice, ties, or unresolved
historical business) (Huesca s.n.) (My translation). These are certainly strange
words from a man whose administration has shown such a keen interest in Ca-
novas, Academias de la Lengua, the Monasteries at San Millan de la Cogolla,
and the “vertebrated” teaching of history in public schools. What he really
means, of course, is that non-Castilian Spaniards should dispense with their
“unhealthy” obsession with the past and cede to the “natural fact” of Castilian
historical supremacy. In doing so, he is tapping into a deep well of Castilian
132 THOMAS HARRINGTO

exceptionalism which has been institutionalized to the point of being impercep-

tible to many who uphold its main aims. Yet while it may be inperceptible to
him and his core group of support, the reality of Castilianism’s hegemonic logic
will never disappear for most on the periphery. He is, of course, free to engage
in the politics of the rrdgala. But before employing the sword that is concealed
behind the colorful muleta of his Patriotismo Constitucional, perhaps he should
reflect a bit more on the scant level of lasting success achieved by his ideologi-
cal forebearers. If Canovas and Primo, whose regimes had far more repressive
machinery at their disposal, could not eradicate the “unnatural” reality of the
so-called peripheral movements of national identity, why should he expect to
be able do so now? Would it not be easier for everyone involved if the Neo-Cas-
tilianists of today would simply admit, and base any and all negotiations over
the future of Spain’s civil society, on the unassailable fact that today’s Spain
contains not just three, but four major, historistically-defined movements of
national identity?

Notes

1. In this context, ponencias are reports commissioned by the leadership of the party for
the purpose of framing discussion at its annual convention. They might be compared
to the so-called “planks” within political platform of a party in the U.S. The annual
convention of the PP took place in Madrid from January 26—28, 2002.
bo The critical discourse attendant to nationality issues in Spain has, in its Spanish-lan-
guage iteration, long included the use of terms such as catalanismo, galleguismo,
bizcaiatarrismo and even vasquismo (although “el nacionalismo vasco” is now much
more common than these last two terms employed by Ortega and Unamuno respec-
tively). However, the term castellanismo has never really achieved the status of a com-
mon linguistic currency. I believe this omission is quite telling. In an attempt to spur a
leveling of the semantic playing field, I will use the term Castilianism throughout the
remainder of the paper.
3. Until the mid-eighties, there was still a relatively high level of critical unconsciousness
among most scholars whose work centered on nationalist discourses. One either tend-
ed to accept and thus “work within” the prima facie claims of essentialists concerning
the spontaneity and “timelessness” of nationalist belief systems or to simply dismiss
such discourses as pesky and illogical vestiges of a soon-to-be-extinguished system of
social meaning. It was a situation that, in many ways, mirrored the tendency in liter-
ary studies to either accept the canonicity (another metaphor for “timelessness”) of
certain works on the basis of previous critical pronouncements or to reject the whole
system of relative literary value as nothing more than a feeble and fundamentally self-
interested bourgeois imposition. Thanks to Bourdieu and others like him who have
 RAPPING ON THE CAST(I)LE GATES 133

concentrated on the broader dynamics of the economy of symbolic goods, and the
far from disinterested role that intellectuals and intellectual institutions play within
it, many literary scholars have distanced themselves from such facile posturing and
have begun to examine the full range of processes through which “taste” is generated.
Benedict Anderson is, of course, the most frequently cited exponent of such “critical
reflexivity” in the realm of nationality studies. However, scholars from the Tel Aviv
and Leuven schools, trained in literary and translation studies, have taken the Cornell
historian’s fecund intuitions to a much higher level of specificity and rigor. The reason
would appear to be clear. While historians and political scientists often possess ample
tools for macro-theorizing, they often lack the level of linguistic competence, global
cultural experience, and attention to textual nuance that is common among scholars
of literature. When we consider the importance of intersystemic “cultural commerce”
and the need to push intra-cultural “hot buitons” on the successful creation and main-
tenance of such schemes of identity, we can see that these abilities are of absolutely
crucial interpretive importance.
Applying these postulates to present circumstances in the U.S. (albeit in admittedly
crude and reductionist fashion) it might be argued, for example, that the outpouring
of patriotic fervor following the events of September 1|1th, far from being a spontane-
ously occurrence or the result of a profound appreciation for the qualities of President
George Bush or Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, was the logical result of a
culture planning entente forged in the 1980s and 1990s between the small and increas-
ingly interrelated concentrated group of major audiovisual producers and an evermore
unilateralist and militarized political establishment. Aware that the so-called Vietnam
Syndrome was a direct result of the fact that many Americans were “too intimate”
with the gruesome carnage of war and the moral grayness of neo-colonialist adven-
turism, the national security establishment (greatly strengthened by new funding for
conservative Washington think-tanks) desperately hoped for a new repertoire of mor-
ally unambiguous story lines that minimized or caricaturized armed conflict’s human
toll and portrayed political deliberation as an unnecessary drag on “decisive” and “he-
roic” action. Hollywood, increasingly aware that introspection and moral angst of The
Deer Hunter vintage simply did not sell as well as manichaeanism, readily obliged
in providing such “uplifting” and cartoonishly simplistic images and plots. The mas-
sive implantation of this newly established repertoire of tropes and symbols (with its
systematic degradation of the non-U.S. “others”) has been fundamental to generating
the apparently overwhelming “proneness” for the type of foreign policy the U.S. is
pursuing post-September 11. In short, if we were really serious about explaining our
current way of acting in the world, we would be far less interested in the insider gossip
concerning the ascendancy within the Bush Adminstration of Condoleeza Rice or Co-
lin Powell and far more interested in how people like Jerry Bruckheimer, Menachem
Golans, Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, Arnold Schwartzenegger, and Chuck Norris
substantially re-engineered many Americans’ perception of the core terms of engage-
ment between “us” and the world outside our borders.
See Castellanos, 25-35.
134. THOMAS HARRINGTO

6. See Even-Zohar “Repertoire,” 389-92.

7. Despite fervent Catalan cries for justice, the central government not only exoner-
ated the rioters, but passed a statute, La Ley de Jurisdicciones (March, 23 1906) that
insured that army officials would be exempt from prosecution should they engage in
similar activities in the future.
8. See Unamuno, “Solidaridad” and Dendle.
9. See Ortega, “Pidiendo” and “Diputado.”
10. However, in making his famous call for a multipolar form of Iberian unity, the leader
of the Lliga was, in fact, co-opting ideas that had long been popular among Catalanists
such as Ribera-Rovira, Casas-Carb6 and Joan Maragall who tended to identify not so
much with noucentisme and its implied orthodoxies, but rather with the Republican
and/or modernista branches of the movement.
11. See Harrington, “Risco.”
12. See Harrington, “Risco.”
13a See HOxaL 05:
14. For more on this phenomenon, see Harrington, “Agents.”

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@ 5

Beyond Castro and Maravall:

Interpellation, Mimesis, and the Hegemony
of Spanish Culture

Anthony J. Cascardi

With certain notable exceptions, Hispanism in the twentieth century labored

under the reputation that it was a backwater of literary and cultural studies.
For reasons that seem at once very old and very new, Spanish studies outside
of Spain long seemed to lag at some significant pace “behind” that of cognate
fields. If there is reason to hedge this broad-based claim, it is not so much be-
cause the picture inside Spain was so very different but because some of the
relevant perspectives were. While it may seem too familiar a historical truth to
bear repeating, the development of Hispanism in the twentieth century was bur-
dened by two rather ponderous weights. One was the legacy of Franco, the last
major dictator of the World War II era to remain in power in Western Europe,
and the other was Spain’s ongoing attachment to the “problem” of its own past.
But that attachment was at least as old as Quevedo, who was already writing
about Spain’s decline at the height of the Golden Age. And yet Quevedo was as
given to exaggerated boasting about the prestige of Spanish culture as he was to
talking about Spain’s decline. In either case, his literary posture was bound up
with ideas about Spain’s cultural hegemony, whether in the form of hyperbolic
praise, as in his claims about the antiquity of the Spanish language relative to
all other modern tongues, or in the form of elegiac lament about the demise of

138
 BEYOND CASTRO AND MARAVALL 139

Spain’s cultural dominion, as in the famous sonnet “Miré los muros de la patria
mia.”
Quevedo’s contradictory stance is remarkable, but its divided vision is
not atypical. Even in the twentieth century, Spanish writers and intellectuals
sought to reinforce images of Spain’s cultural hegemony by strenuously de-
fending against notions of decline. Often that defense took the form of efforts
to separate and preserve a core of things purely “Spanish” from those not. Vig-
orous attempts to resolve the “problem of Spain” often masked a much deeper
traditionalism whose key points of reference were the Middle Ages and the
Golden Age. Little wonder that Menéndez Pidal devoted massive efforts to a
historical reconstruction of the Spain of the Cid, that writers of the Generation
of °27 mounted a literary campaign to “return” to the poetry of the baroque,
or that both Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset produced major
philosophical works oriented around Don Quijote. But attempts to fortify an
essential Spanish identity could not easily come to terms with the cultural and
ethnic contradictions of what Spanish “national” culture was comprised nor
could they adequately represent the many regional interests that remained in
contention despite the political unification of the country. Likewise, the task of
articulating the relationship between Spanish cultural nationalism, the politics
of Absolutism, and the Spanish imperial project remained on the margins, even
while it was often said that the twentieth-century “crisis of Spain” was pre-
cipitated by the loss of Spain’s last remaining colonies. It is more or less well
known that the formation of a Spanish “national identity” was staked on the
political suppression of the differences among the various cultures, languages,
races, religions, and histories that came together on the Iberian peninsula. The
elevation of the interests that centered in Castile and in Christianity into a na-
tional ideology was a crucial part of this process.
While these issues reach back at least to the time of the Reyes Catolicos,
the reactions against them are as current as Basque separatism and the resur-
gence of Catalan as a regional language on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees. Yet
in part because the writing of cultural history is typically given to the “victors,”
scant attention has been paid to many of these questions in mainstream Spanish
studies. This is not altogether surprising. The Franco regime hardly provided a
climate in which the critique of ideology and empire could flourish. In spite of
the influx of exiled Spanish intellectuals to the United States during and after
the Spanish Civil War, Hispanism in the U.S. remained too far removed from
the political stakes of these issues and too enmeshed in the practices of close
reading and textual scholarship for them to have had much of an impact. To
be sure, the close reading of a sonnet by Garcilaso or the disentanglement of
140 ANTHONY J. CASCARDI

Gongora’s intricate syntax are endeavors without which the broader social and
political interpretations of literature would be impossible. But reading that is
blind to history is as far from the truth about literature as is a kind of criticism
that regards texts as nothing more than bearers of reigning ideologies. There
must be some way to locate productive discrepancies and contradictions even
within an ideological framework as apparently homogeneous as that of Spain
at the height of its empire.
This is not to say that the complex and conflictive nature of Spanish culture
went completely unnoticed in Spanish studies. On the contrary, Américo Castro
was responsible for crafting an approach to Spanish history whose core insight
centered around the convergence and conflict of three district racial/religious
groups on the Iberian peninsula (Christians, Moors, and Jews). Since the fun-
damentals of the Castro thesis are well known there is scant need to recapitu-
late them here. But I would point out that underlying Castro’s views was the
notion that Spanish history was shaped not just by the presence of these three
groups but by the fact that the pattern of their interactions was based on the
principles of caste, not class. Viewed in purely structural terms, caste societies
are relatively fixed. They encourage sedimented differences for what may be
obvious reasons: to the extent that one’s affiliation with a particular caste is ra-
cially determined, movement from one caste to another is virtually impossible
to achieve in any legitimate sense. A society of castes can function well only if
the differences among the various groups comprising it are imagined as clear
and distinct. Moreover, those differences are conceived to be constitutive of the
social order itself. In societies based on divisions of caste, ideology gains power
via the representation of social relations as if they were natural phenomena.
Scholars whose work has yet to be incorporated into Spanish studies, such
as Franz Fanon, have demonstrated how race can be linked to physiognomy in
ways that bind the physical to the imaginary; but the fact remains that when
it comes to the differences between Christian and Jew the “essence” of race
cannot itself be seen.' The criteria for making such caste distinctions in Spain
were invisible. There was thus a potential for Spanish society to be haunted by
fantasmatic worries that were generated by the desire to seek certainty about the
uncertifiable. As is manifestly evident both in the workings of the Spanish In-
quisition and in the “honor plays” of the Golden Age, the impossible pursuit of
unattainable certainties generated a collective psychology of suspicion and fear
that the analysis of caste in purely structural terms could not fully explain. As
accounted for by Castro, the quality of this fear was “existential”; and yet one
can hardly overlook the fact that the “existential” content of such experience
was dependent upon the structural conditions in which subjects came to exist.2
 BEYOND CASTRO AND MARAVALL 141

I will return to some of these matters in connection with the more recent
debates over the questions of subject formation, social structures, and discur-
sive practices. For now I wish simply to note that Castro’s thesis about the
primacy of caste led him to a view of Spanish history that attributed existential
qualities to the collective subject of Spanish history. Consider the following
remarks from the introduction of one of the first translations of any of Castro’s
major works into English (The Spaniards), in which he argues for the primacy
of the personal dimension of national history over and above all others: “This
new title, The Spaniards, indicates that I wish to accentuate and emphasize the
personal, rather than the structural, nature of this history. It is not sufficient
merely to narrate and evaluate what was done by the Spaniards. It is imperative
especially to determine the identity of a great people. The ser (being) and the
hacer (doing) of the Spaniards refer to their very mode of existence” (v). Con-
sider, likewise, Castro’s account of what it means for a work like Don Quijote
to be a quintessentially “Spanish” book. Castro writes:

It is difficult to understand the peculiarity of this book [Don Quijote] without first
making comprehensible the human reality represented by the word Spaniard. As I
have tried to explain, it is not a matter of naively establishing a relation of identity
between men and the land on which they dwell. What is authentically Spanish orig-
inated and was formed as a consequence of the intercrossing of Christian, Moorish,
and Jewish people on the Iberian Peninsula. But in addition to being Spanish, the
Quijote was produced at a particular time in Spanish history—the beginning of the
seventeenth century. That is to say, it was produced in the wake of certain human
situations . . The themes and literary forms (ways of seeing and expressing what
was passing through human lives) that prior literature could offer were filled with
Muslim, Hebrew, Stoic (Petrarch), Neoplatonic (Marsilio Ficino), and other reso-
nances. All this, however, did not simply pour over Cervantes as a rain of culture,
but was reflected and refracted by the Spanish situation of 1600 and above all by
Miguel de Cervantes, as a self that had to find its place in the Madrid of 1600. Only
an authentic biography could clarify this situation. (Idea 127)

The question that Hispanists had long left unanswered was what allowed
for the formation of the collective “we” that Castro counts as the only legitimate
“subject” of history. Castro was himself well aware of the question: “algun lec-
tor tal vez se pregunte por el papel del individuo, del ‘yo,’ dentro del ‘nosotros’
de las historias. . . . Bastaria ahora con apuntar que el ‘yo’ y su obra historiable
adquieren sentido al ser enfocados y entendidos desde el punto de vista del
‘nosotros’ en que existen” (some reader may perhaps wonder about the role of
the individual, of the ‘I’ within the ‘we’ of history and histories. . . . It should
142 ANTHONY J. CASCARDI

be sufficient for now to point out that the ‘I’ and its historiable work acquire
meaning by being brought into focus and understood from the point of view of
the ‘we’ in which they exist) (“El ‘nosotros’” 274).’ And yet his best responses
were more or less reiterations of the question itself, albeit cast in the language
of expressivist historicism whose roots lie in Ortega and Dilthey:

el “nosotros” adquiere dimensi6n historica, digna de historia, como un proyecto de

vida colectiva, como un hacer dirigido hacia ciertas metas, como un proceso en el
cual es inseparable el hacer y el hacerse de quienes van infundiendo realidad de
vida—de vida nuestra—al construir ciudades, naciones, formas de pensar, de creer,
de embellecer. El fendmeno cultural es inseparable del propésito de la situacién de
vida colectiva expresados o latentes en él. (263)

(the “we” acquires a historical dimension, one worthy of history, as a project of

collective life and as a process of doing directed toward certain goals, as a process
in which the “making” and the “becoming” of those who are in the process of infus-
ing the reality of life, our life—building cities, nations, ways of thinking and belief,
forms of beauty—are inseparable. The phenomenon of culture is inseparable from
the purpose of collective life expressed or latent in it.)

By personalizing collective history, by phrasing it in vitalistic terms, and

by identifying the racial-religious underpinnings of Spanish society with the
principles of caste, Castro’s work tended to foreclose the possibility of linking
Spanish history to that of the rest of Western Europe. But even more revealing
is the fact that Castro regarded the racial uniqueness of Spain as a fact that was
invisible to the Spaniards who were living it. If there is any hint in Castro’s
work that the social structure of caste secreted an ideology, it is because the
reality of caste was both ever-present and repressed: “What we forget is that the
Spaniards were—and are—Islamic-Hebraic-Asiatic as much as they were—
and are—Christian-European. This is a reality, however much Spaniards would
prefer to be unaware of it. It is a reality that I have found both agreeable and
truth-revealing, but that others have found repellant” (Jdea 112).
Critics of Castro opposed his work on many grounds, but Castro’s most
significant adversaries may not in the end have been those who explicitly re-
sisted his interpretation of the role of the Jews and Jewish conversos in Spanish
history (e.g., Claudio Sanchez-Albornoz, author of the avowedly anti-Castro
book Espana, un enigma histérico, 1956), but social historians of a younger
generation like José Antonio Maravall, whose work stands much closer to the
perspectives of Weberian sociology and the history of mentalités. Maravall is
only a literary critic in a very limited fashion, but with the publication of La cul-
 BEYOND CASTRO AND MARAVALL 143

tura del barroco in 1975 (English translation, 1986) and the appearance of La
literatura picaresca desde la historia social in 1986, Maravall’s work became
of increasing importance for North American Hispanists interested in under-
standing the dynamics of literary history in relation to social structures, particu-
larly in his work on the baroque, Maravall attempted to view culture as a whole
without privileging the aesthetic field, in this case by relating considerations
about baroque art and literature, the strategies of war, urban society, and mass
culture, to a vision of state power centered on the role of Spanish Absolutism.
One of the significant advantages of this approach was that it removed
literature and the arts from the isolation in which textualist scholarship had
kept them. In most of Maravall’s work, the boundaries between literature and
the non-literary domains of culture are treated as flexible and fluid. He thus
provided the opportunity for subsequent critics to investigate some of the links
between the formation of a national identity and the development of an autono-
mous literary sphere within that social whole.* But one striking limitation of
this work was that aesthetic designations (e.g., “baroque”) served mainly as
umbrella terms for historical phenomena that could not easily be imagined as
associated on other grounds. Maravall revived the notion of historical periods
and did so in a way that placed literature among the many different discourses
of a given cultural epoch.° And yet Maravall remained relatively unable to ex-
plain the structuring elements that shaped or limited a particular cultural period,
such as the baroque. For example, he proposed that

it’s not that baroque painting, the baroque economy, the baroque art of war, [and so
on] don’t resemble one another . . . but rather, given the fact that they develop in the
same circumstances, under the same conditions, answering the same vital needs, re-
sponding to the modifying influence of all the other factors, each one of them finds
itself thus transformed, and comes to depend on the epoch as a whole... . These
are the terms in which one can ascribe the definitive character of a period—in this
case its character as baroque—to theology, painting, the art of war, physics, to
an economy in crisis, monetary upheaval, the uncertainty of credit, and economic
wars, along with which came the growing control of agricultural property by the
nobility and an increase in poverty among the masses; these factors created a feel-
ing of uncertainty and instability in personal and social life, which was dominated
by repressive forces that in turn shaped baroque man and that allow us to call him
by this name. (28-29, my translation)

Maravall’s invocation of the category of “baroque man” resonates all too

deeply with notions of transcendental subjectivity. It is bound to seem vapid
unless one supplants it with an account of the ways in which institutions, dis-
144 ANTHONY J. CASCARDI

courses, and practices enable concrete subjects to exist. Louis Althusser’s argu-
ment about the role of interpellation and of “Ideological State Apparatuses” in
the process of subject-formation is very much to the point in this regard, and
yet Althusser’s work has rarely been incorporated into peninsular Spanish stud-
ies.° One of the key questions that Althusser posed bears directly on Maravall’s
description of the “culture of the baroque”: how can so many different social
“institutions” of society be knitted together? What enables religious institutions,
the family, literature and the arts, and the political system (all of which Althusser
calls “Ideological State Apparatuses”’) to function in a unified fashion? And how
do these in turn enable the formation of concrete subjects? (110-111).
I will comment on how answering Althusser’s questions can contribute to
Hispanism, and also on how Spanish Golden Age and Colonial studies might
help nuance Althusser’s views. But first I will point out that despite its limi-
tations, Maravall’s work was important for Hispanists interested in thinking
about the embeddedness of literature in social and historical circumstances in
part because it did not hinge upon the kind of personalized interpretations of ra-
cial and religious categories that pervaded Castro’s work. If some of Maravall’s
writings, such as his magnum opus on the picaresque, seem to invest too heav-
ily in a kind of social analysis that takes literature into account primarily for
its documentary value (Maravall calls it “testimonio”), his views on historical
change, on the political context of much of the literature of Spain’s “hegemonic”
period, and on the culture of Spanish Absolutism, all left an important mark
on a branch of literary studies that was just beginning to think about its place
among the debates about literary subjectivity and social/historical structures.’
Indeed, Maravall’s perspectives helped some American Hispanists gain access
to issues about the ways in which historical and political structures condition
literary production—issues concerning state power, ideology, the institutional
mechanisms of social control, and the circulation of social power.
In spite of the fact that Maravall’s work helped create these openings, it
suffered from a number of drawbacks. If Castro tended to predicate subjec-
tivity of the structures of history, Maravall’s focus on institutions and ideas
tended to efface subjectivity at the concrete level. Maravall makes it difficult
to see how the manner in which individual subjects inhabit social or politi-
cal structures might in fact alter the constitution of those same structures. The
link between individual subjects and the collective subject of Spain (the his-
torical “we”) remained somewhat obscure in Maravall’s work, in part because
the social whole, of which literature is a part, is so comprehensively defined;
concrete subjects seem, as a result, transformed into types. Literature, for its
part, “no es retrato, mas sf testimonio en el que se refleja una imagen mental
 BEYOND CASTRO AND MARAVALL 145

de la sociedad... . Nos traslada el conjunto de creencias, de valoraciones, de

aspiraciones, de pretensiones que se reconocian en el mundo social y aque-
llas atrevidas negaciones de las mismas en las que se estimaba desmoronarse
gravemente el sistema establecido” (is not a portrait but rather a testimonial in
which a mental image of a society is reflected. . . . It brings us the conjuncture
of beliefs, values, aspirations, and of pretensions which were recognized in the
social world as well as the daring negations of those same things, in which the
established order was deemed to be crumbling) (Literatura 13). To be sure,
Maravall’s longstanding interest in Spanish Absolutism—which dates back to
his 1944 work on the political thought of the seveteenth century—opened the
door for a consideration of the repressive nature of culture in the Golden Age
and of the instabilities within that same culture. This is equally so of his work
on the picaresque, on Golden Age theater, and on the culture of the baroque.
The baroque, for instance, is not just a cultural phenomenon of the masses but
of a controlled society (“una sociedad dirigida”’). Perhaps more importantly, the
picaresque registered tensions among social groups within the social whole. La
literatura picaresca desde la historia social provides an unusually detailed map
of these currents and counter-currents, but the theoretical salience of the work
can be epitomized in a phrase: “Las versiones de la literatura venfan a definir y
a dar expresiOn a los temores que, segun la estimacién de los conformistas, se
provocaban en la esfera de relaciones entre individuos de estratos diferentes;
por tanto, en alguna medida, lo que aquellos estaban significando en la vida
cotidiana” (Literary versions came to define and to give expresion to fears that,
according to the opinion of conformists, were provoked in the sphere of rela-
tions among individuals of different social strata; and therefore, to some degree,
what they were meaning in their daily life) (13).
How, then, does Maravall read the “individualism” of the picaro? His
answer is given in no uncertain terms:

Se me ha preguntado alguna vez como se puede afirmar una vinculaci6n tan deci-
siva al estado de una sociedad por parte de un género narrativo basado en una forma
de redacci6n autobiogr4fica que resulta tan significativa de aquél, ya que en una
autobiografia la originalidad del yo individual asume todo protagonismo. Siempre,
sin embargo, es un ente social el yo y ese ‘ego’ picaresco lo es superlativamente
y esto se potencia si pensamos que, a diferencia de los protagonistas anteriores, el
picaro posee personalidad, aunque sin embargo, carezca todavia de propia intimi-
dad. El picaro es, fundamentalmente, una respuesta a la sociedad de la que surge
y ala que se enfrenta, condicionada, mejor dicho, contorsionada en su caso, por la
presiOn asfixiante del entorno colectivo y de los instrumentos de poder que operan
en éste. (772)
146 ANTHONY J. CASCARDI

(I have sometimes been asked how such a decisive link to the state of a society can
be affirmed on the part of a narrative genre based on an autobiographical form of
writing that turns out to be so laden with meaning about it, since in an autobiography
the orginality of the individual “I” takes on the complete protagonist role. The “T” is
nonetheless always a social entity and that picaresque “ego” is such par excellence;
this empowers it if we believe that, unlike previous protagonists, the picaro has a
personality, although he may nonetheless lack any interiority of its own. The picaro
is, fundamentally, an answer to the society from which it emerges and which it con-
fronts—conditioned, better said in this case, distorted, by the soffocating pressure of
its collective surroundings and by the instruments of power operating there)

Whatever the picaresque novel may do to oppose the hegemonic culture

surrounding it does not diminish the fact that Maravall regards it as rooted in
the desire to give expression to the newly revealed category of “individuality”:
“La autobiografia no es un documento “intimo’ de confesiones, que nos permita
conocer la evolucion de un pecador hacia su irremediable pérdida; si es un claro
testimonio de interés hacia una individualidad, lo que siempre supone ponerla de
relieve, destacarla” (Autobiography is not an ‘intimate’ confessional document
which allows us to know the evolution of a sinner toward his irredeemable per-
dition; it is indeed a clear statement of interest in individuality, which of course
presupposes bringing it into relief, making it stand out) (298). It has sometimes
been thought that one of the tasks facing Hispanism is to allow the historical ex-
pressivism of Castro and the socio-economic analyses of Maravall to engage one
another more fully than they have done so far. But examples such as this suggest
that the distance between the two perspectives may not be as great as was some-
times supposed. Indeed, Maravall operates within the framework of a historical
expressivism, sometimes linked to the history of “mentalities,” that can be just
as powerful as Castro’s, and equally attached to the pre-eminence of the subject
as a center of value and experience: “Cualquiera que sea su valor moral tradicio-
nal, tiene el valor irrepetible y en ciertos aspectos supremo de ser un individuo
centro de experiencias. Por ello es, si se quiere, una visién antropolégica que
deriva de la moral del egocéntrico, de la preeminencia, a todos los respectos, del
yo” (Whatever its traditional moral value might be, it has the unique and in some
ways supreme value of being an individual center of experiences. Therefore it is,
if you will, an anthropological vision that derives from a moral egocentrism, that
of the preeminence, at all costs, of the ‘I’) (298).
Given the fact that both Castro and Maravall leave the question of sub-
ject-formation unaddressed, a step beyond their work would require a renewed
engagement with the contemporary debates over subjects and structures. One
goal of such an effort would be to discover the points of articulation between
 BEYOND CASTRO AND MARAVALL 147

collective entities of an ideal sort—the national/historical ““we’—and the indi-

viduals who support or oppose them. How is a collective identity or national
image-ideal inscribed in the individual, and how is the individual in turn capable
of challenging that process of inscription? Louis Althusser’s notion of interpel-
lation can help explain some of these things; nevertheless it is up to Hispanists
to explore the possibility that Althusser’s notions should be revised in light of
the circumstances of Imperial Spain. The Althusserian notions of ideology and
interpellation may help explain how subjects—Imperial/Peninsular and Colonial
alike—were fashioned through their interaction with various cultural institutions
and “Ideological State Apparatuses.” However, facts such as the existence of a
colonial culture that mirrored and distorted its Peninsular counterpart also direct
our attention back to those moments in Golden Age culture where the unifying
force of ideology was far less seamless than the Althusserian notion of interpel-
lation might allow. Indeed, the culture that emerged under Spanish Absolutism
on the Iberian peninsula itself turns out to be less the perfect mirror of state
ideologies than is sometimes supposed. One suggestion open for Hispanists to
pursue as they work beyond the perspectives of Castro and Maravall is this: sub-
ject-formation in Imperial Spain occurred as part of a fractured mimesis, which
is to say that the mirror-like moid of social production was broken or otherwise
transformed in the course of its re-production.
The concept of mirroring in relation to subject-formation can hardly dis-
pense with Lacan’s discussion of the “mirror stage” in the process of develop-
ment. In relation to social production, however, the mirror paradigm was most
famously invoked by Jean Baudrillard in 1973. However, his well-known work
entitled Le Miroir de la production was meant to break the spell of the Marxist
notion of production rather than to replace it by the paradigm of mirroring.’
When, in a very different context, and at a much more recent moment, Carlos
Fuentes invoked the mirroring relationship between Spain and the New World,
it was with reference to the ways in which mirrors can reflect existing images
and generate different ones (11). The preponderance of Fuentes’ examples are
indigenous and register the role of mirrors in the culture and cosmology of the
Aztecs. Yet the indigenous fascination with mirrors remains in an inescapable
dialogue with its peninsular counterpart. Fuentes notes the mirrors of polished
black slate found buried at El Tajin as well as others in the circular temple of the
Toltec pyramid at Teotihuacan, but mirrors are virtually unavoidable in some of
the central examples of the peninsular baroque—in Velasquez’ “Las Meninas,”
in Cervantes (the “Knight of the Mirrors”) and in Saavedra Fajardo’s Emblemas
morales, to mention but a few. Indeed, Hispanists have yet to take full stock
of the ways in which peninsular modes of subject-formation were themselves
148 ANTHONY J. CASCARDI

rooted in a process of cultural (re)production that involved the fracturing of

mirrored images.
Some examples may help support the rationale for working past the per-
spectives of Castro and Maravall, through Althusser, toward a model of frac-
tured mimesis in Imperial Spain. The first is drawn from the well-known begin-
ning of the Lazarillo de Tormes, in which Lazarillo presents himself as a subject
who has been created through what can indeed be recognized as the process of
interpellation. Lazarillo is “hailed” as a subject in advance of fully becoming
one, and the process of this “hailing” is also what defines him as a concrete
individual; it makes that concrete existence possible. As Althusser remarks in
explaining interpellation,

we all have friends who, when they knock on our door and we ask, through the
door, the question “Who’s there?,” answer (since it’s obvious) “It’s me.” And we
recognize that “it is him,’ or “her.” We open the door, and it’s true, it really was
she who was there. . . . In this preliminary remark and these concrete illustrations, I
wish only to point out that you and I are always-already subjects, and as such con-
stantly practise the rituals of ideological recognition, which guarantee for us that
we are indeed concrete, individual, distinguishable and (naturally) irreplaceable
subjects. ... All ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete
subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject. (130-31)

At the beginning of the text, Lazarillo speaks in a manner that suggests how
the rhetoric of self-assertion can provide a very effective cover for the ideologi-
cal work of interpellation. On one hand, there is the bold public address made by
a figure who is in other respects quite abject: (3). “Yo por bien tengo que cosas
tan sefialadas, y por ventura nunca ojdas ni vistas, vengan a noticia de muchos,
y no se entierren en la sepultura del olvido; pues podria ser que alguno que las
lea halle algo que le agrade y, a los que no ahondaren tanto, los deleite” (I think
it’s right that such important events, which may perhaps never have been seen
or heard, should come to the attention of many and not be buried in the grave of
oblivion; since it might appear that someone who might read them might find
pleasure and that those who don’t delve too deeply into them might find delight)
(3). Indeed, it has sometimes been claimed that the protagonist of this picaresque
novel transforms the act of addressing a guardian of the “ideological” structures
of society into a declaration of his autonomy from those very same structures.
Maravall’s views of the “individualism” of the picaresque suggest this much, as
does Castro’s argument that all the characters in the book except Lazarillo are
types—“a blind man, a squire, a friar, etc., all of them externally known and
deprived of an inner life.”'° But rather than credit Lazaro with the achievement
 BEYOND CASTRO AND MARAVALL 149

of autonomous subjectivity, it would be more accurate to say that this picaresque

subject is produced by the process of interpellation. Indeed, the opening of the
Lazarillo lays bare the mechanisms that make interpellation possible in its most
classic form. Lazarillo does not say “Me llamo Lazarillo de Tormes ...” but
rather “A mi llaman Lazarillo de Tormes . . ”” Furthermore, the condition of his
existence is constituted by what “Vuestra Merced” calls for from him, i.e., an
account of the “caso.”
To be sure, interpellation works. There is no creation of the individual
(Lazarillo) without the pre-existence of the master-signifier (V. M.), the fig-
ure who holds the ideological framework in place. For Althusser, this figure is
typically a member of the “ruling class,” and considering him as such certainly
adds depth to Maravall’s sociological reading of the picaresque. It allows us to
shift from the more literal ways in which social differences are portrayed, to the
ways in which social power takes root in the relational “space” between one
subject-position and another, and on terms that neither may be able to control
independently. This may, in turn, provide the ideological support for the ap-
parent “sympathy” that Lazarillo expresses for the impoverished squire, who
sacrifices his private “self” in order to maintain his “public” image before the
abject picaro. Says Lazarillo, “tanta lastima haya Dios de mi como yo habia
dél, porque senti lo que sentia” (37). While Althusser would lead us to believe
that power typically rests with those who are empowered to speak, the Lazarillo
suggests something more complex: that power shows up principally by means
of its effects, and in this case it is refracted through a mirror that also distorts
it. Moreover, the tale of the caso turns out to sting the one who requested that it
be told. This is the reason Lazaro decides to tell in its complete form—not just
amply, as V.M. requests, but from the very beginning (ab ovo), indeed, from a
moment that seems to pre-date the “beginning”:29.11

Suplico a vuestra merced reciba el pobre servicio de mano de quien lo hiciera mas
rico, si su poder y deseo conformaran. Y pues vuestra merced escribe se le escriba
y relate el caso muy por extenso, pareciéme no tomarle por el medio, sino del prin-
cipio, porque se tenga entera noticia de mi persona, y también porque consideren
los que heredaron nobles estados cuan poco se les debe, pues fortuna fue con ellos
parcial, y cudnto mas hicieron los que, siéndoles contraria, con fuerza y mafia re-
mando, salieron a buen puerto. (4)

(I beg Your Grace to receive this little gift from the hand of one who would have
made it richer if his desire and his abilities had coincided. Since Your Grace writes
that I should write and tell him about the matter extensively, it seemed to be best
not to begin in the middle but rather from the beginning, so that he might have full
150 ANTHONY J. CASCARDI

knowledge of who I am; and also so that people of highborn status may consider
how little of that is owing to them, since fortune was favorable to them, and how
much more worthy are those who have come to land in a happy port by dint of hard
work and wits, in spite of ill fortune.)

The possibility of a distortion in the mirroring process of cultural repro-

duction exists only because cultural production takes place on the symbolic
plane. The subject’s “ascent” into culture (which in the Lazarillo is figured as a
death-like “descent”) occurs as the world of material needs is transformed into
the domain of symbolic desires. To be sure, Lazarillo confronts the problem of
physical survival, and at one level the Lazarillo appears to be “all about” the
need to meet the body’s basic requirements of food, shelter, etc. Moreover, as
the episode with the squire so clearly suggests, the point at stake in this book
is hardly survival in the “natural” world. What Lazarillo learns is how to sur-
vive as a subject, how to continue his existence in the symbolic domain. (His
question is roughly the same as Hamlet’s: to be or not to be, though not as a
“natural” being, but as a subject). Culture is not produced “naturally,” but oc-
curs only through a symbolic process that permits the fracturing of the mold
through which its reproduction takes place. Althusser writes that there is no
prospect for transforming culture other than by the efforts of those few teachers
who might choose to resist it, but the learning process visible in the Lazarillo
suggests a different possibility: the “learning” that reproduces society’s means
for reproducing itself involves a process in which the subject reflects critically
upon the mirror of its production. This, I would argue, is the source of the biting
irony that is mixed into the prideful tone of Lazaro’s letter to V.M. It signals the
moment at which the reflection of a hegemonic discourse becomes something
counter-hegemonic.
For Américo Castro, however, the mixture of bitter irony and pride—lo-
cated in the exaggerated humility with which Lazaro describes his text (“el
pobre servicio”)—is a symptom of conflictive national emotions and a sign of
the “problem of Spain.” It takes root in what he describes as “a feeling con-
substantial with the very existence of the Spanish people, especially since the
fifteenth century: they were what they were, and, at the same time, many were
not pleased with their way of existing. This feeling should be called anguish—
‘tragic sense of life,” as Unamuno says.” It is no coincidence that the Lazarillo
concludes with the evocation of a proud moment in national/imperial history,
that is, of the time when “our victorious Emperor entered this great city of
Toledo and held the Cortes here, and there was much rejoicing.” As clearly as
anything in the text, this reference aligns the author’s ironic double vision of
 BEYOND CASTRO AND MARAVALL Asya

Spanish culture with a critical reflection on Spain as an imperial power. Even

though Castro’s existentializing may be dubious, he was far from wrong to have
reminded us that “that day was long past in 1554, when, as a writer as excel-
lent as he was daring, exposed to the public view a false and illusory picture
of Spanish life, on which a fading but still respectable hidalguia cast a melan-
choly light. Positive artistic values emerged, as in other outstanding Spanish
creations, from anguish and uncertainty” (“Introduction” xii).
The second example is drawn from the figure who is both the most “ca-
nonical” of all Spanish authors and the best-known among non-Hispanists: Cer-
vantes. Indeed, among Golden Age figures only Velasquez has a comparable
stature. Both Velasquez and Cervantes are often cited for the way in which their
work epitomizes the greatness of Spanish culture while also quintessentializing
the fleetingness, the evanescence, of Spain’s time of cultural glory. In them,
there seems to be both limitless pride in Spain’s cultural prowess and an aware-
ness of Spain’s debility. Both Castro and Maravall have ways of dealing with
this ambivalence in the case of Cervantes, Castro by linking the historic-exis-
tential conditions surrounding Cervantes as a writer to the projection of a prob-
lematic selfhood in the Quixote, and Maravall by refracting the issues through
Cervantes’ critical response to the utopian visions that were associated with
the romances of chivalry, the pastoral novel, and works of non-fiction such as
Antonio de Guevara’s Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea.'* Althusser’s
notion of interpellation might well be of assistance in determining how concrete
subjects were formed in relation to such utopian visions, but something else is
needed in order to grasp the contradictory nature of the subjectivity that was so
formed, i.e., the way in which images of greatness or prestige, or the nostalgia
for a more perfect age, created a consciousness that was divided both with and
against the hegemonic culture surrounding it.
Consider what seems to be the blank slate that Cervantes seems to give
his self-fashioned character, Don Quixote. Out of the vagueness of historical
records emerges the profile of a character who seems to have the power to name
the essential things of the world around him. Interpellation, the naming that
forms subjects in advance, seems to be blocked or undone. And yet the reader
remains well aware of the Althusserian truth that “authentic” self-creation of
the naming subject occurs only in relation to models that pre-exist him. They
set the condition of possibility for his existence, call him into being. Moreover,
it would seem that there is no bridge between heroic self-assertion that is ca-
pable of bearing the standard of national pride and the dull reality of imitation
in which the mirror of praise reflects the image of a fading past. Consider as
well Cervantes’ mix of unbridled praise for the Spanish imperial mission—and
152 ANTHONY J. CASCARDI

his own participation in it—with a wry sense of the slipperiness of the historical
self-assertion that the task of empire required. The boasts about his own role in
the battle of Lepanto in the Prologue to the Novelas ejemplares are unmistak-
ably encomiastic, perhaps excessively so. Indeed, this rhetoric of inflated praise
is reflected back in a mirror that seems to deform the hegemonic force of the
imperial power it appears to support. Cervantes adheres to a relatively conven-
tional linguistic form of address in describing himself (“Llamase comtinmente
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra”), but this self-description is passed through a
filter that magnifies it to the point of hyperbole:

Fue soldado muchos ajfios, y cinco y medio cautivo. . . . Perdié en la batalla naval
de Lepanto la mano izquierda de un arcabuzazo, herida que, aunque parece fea,
él la tiene por hermosa, por haberla cobrado en la mds memorable y alta occasion
que vieron los pasados siglos, ni esperan ver los venideros, militando debajo de
las vencedoras banderas del hijo del rayo de la guerra, Carlo Quinto, de felice
memoria. (63)

(He was a soldier for many years, and for five and a half a captive. . . . In the naval
battle of Lepanto he lost his left hand from a gunshot, a wound that, although it may
seem ugly, he holds to be beautiful for having earned it on the highest and most
memorable occasion that has been seen by past centuries or that future ages might
hope to see, fighting under the victorious flags of the son of the lightning bolt of
war, Charles V, of happy memory.)

In passages such as this, Cervantes makes it clear that the mechanisms by

which culture is (re)produced are discursive just as they are institutional. Indeed,
Cervantes helps us see that virtually all of what Althusser describes as “Ideo-
logical State Apparatuses” function discursively. Furthermore, going beyond
Althusser, he also demonstrates that those same discourses may undermine or
reverse themselves in the process of shaping the subjects who “must” conform
to them. Discourse does not just “hail” subjects, but, as in the case of this enco-
miastic rhetoric, it weakens the reigning ideology by forming aggrandized im-
ages. Reading Cervantes’ hyperbolic praise of imperial deeds in the light of Don
Quixote—the first Part of which had been published some eight years before the
preface to the Novelas ejemplares—it seems that the very same language that
reinforces the cultural hegemony of Spain’s imperial power ends up undermin-
ing its intended effects. This is especially clear as one tracks the reflection of the
“glories” of the historical battle of Lepanto through the Captive’s story in Don
Quijote, Part I. Set aside, for the moment, the fact that Cervantes never devoted
any major narrative work to an account of the battle he claims was the most
 BEYOND CASTRO AND MARAVALL 153

glorious military moment of all time, the famous battle passes swiftly by in the
episode of the Captive.'’ Indeed, one of the most noteworthy traits of the account
of Lepanto as it appears in Don Quijote I, 39, is that it is riddled with clichés.
The presentation of this supreme moment of national pride is not only concise
but also reductive and formulaic: “aquel dia, que fue para la cristiandad tan di-
choso, porque en él se desengafié el mundo y todas las naciones del error en que
estaban, creyendo que los turcos eran invencibles por la mar, en aquel dia, digo”
(that day, which was so fortunate for Christanity because on it the world and all
its nations were disabused of the error in which they stood in believing that the
Turks were invincible by sea, on that day, I say) (477). Mary Gaylord writes of

la cualidad formulaica, de frase hecha, que ostenta el homenaje en miniatura que

Cervantes dedica al magno encuentro. Podriamos preguntarnos por qué no se es-
forzara el ‘raro inventor’ a fin de representar de una manera mas original aquel
dia de dias. No es €sta, sin embargo, la Unica marca de reductividad que lleva este
segmento del relato. Para evocar una batalla inmensa en la que perecieron muchos
miles de hombres, el personaje narrador sefiala una sola accion, su propio salto
atrevido; y saca de su propio destino oximorénico, el cautiverio en la victoria, la
figura emblematica que estructura el resto de su historia. (27-28)

(the formulaic quality, the cliché nature, which displays in miniature the homage
that Cervantes accords the great encounter. We might wonder why the ‘rare inven-
tor’ does not make an effort to represent this day of days in a more original way.
But this is not, nonetheless, the only mark of reductivism that this segment of the
story carries. To evoke an immense battle in which many thousands of men per-
ished, the narrator points out a single action, his own brave leap, and from his own
oxymoronic fate, that of captivity in victory, he makes the emblematic figure that
structures the rest of the story.)

The internal rifts that Castro reads as existentialized reflections of histori-

cal anxiety in Cervantes’ prose are thus better seen as signs of a split subject:
one who is divided for and against empire, for and against the Spanish past, for
and against heroic self-assertion, for and against the national-cultural project.
Moreover, this splitting in turn registers something that Althusser failed to theo-
rize about the process of subject formation, i.e., the fracturing of hegemonic
demands that occurs as the subject responds to them.
The notion that the Spanish Golden Age subject may have been divided in
contradictory ways has been countenanced by only a relatively few Hispanists,
George Mariscal and Malcolm Read among them.'* Few have transferred this
model of contradictory subjectivity from the peninsular field to the colonial
154 ANTHONY J. CASCARDI

context or have considered the way in which colonial discourses were shaped
by fractures and splits already existing within the “hegemonic” culture of Impe-
rial Spain. It is of course well known that colonial authors often re-made many
of the European cultural models and materials given to them, in the way, for
instance, that Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz re-fashioned Gongora’s sonnet on the
evanescence of beauty in her sonnet “Este que ves, engafio colorido.” But the
formation of a colonial subject that evolves, in its height, as “baroque,” depends
upon something that more closely resembles the mechanisms of fractured mi-
mesis just described.
Consider in this light a final example from the colonial context in which the
question of “mirroring” in relation to the hegemonic culture of the Spanish pen-
insula comes into the foreground: the triumphal arches erected to honor the ar-
rival of the recently appointed Viceroy to New Spain, the Marqués de la Laguna.
Both Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Carlos Sigiienza y Géngora wrote texts for
the occasion, each describing not only the arch they had designed but each also
in honor of the Viceroy. Sor Juana’s text is allegorical (the “Neptuno alegérico”)
while Sigtienza’s (the “Theatro de virtudes politicas”) is dominated by an un-
usual syncretism. In it, Sigiienza illustrates the Christian virtues and celebrates
the Viceroy in a most incongruous way—by referring to the twelve Aztec rulers.
The text of the ““Theatro” is largely taken up with attempts to explain the connec-
tions between these rulers and New Spain. For this reason, the “Theatro de vir-
tudes” has been seen as part of Sigiienza’s attempt to establish an identity for the
criollo inhabitants of New Spain by locating their origins in an ancient Mexican
“empire.” This is certainly true. However, Sigiienza attempted to link the Indians
with the ancient civilizations of the Hebrews and the Romans through a series of
tropes that stretch the basis of historical plausibility beyond the limits of belief
(one recalls Quevedo’s claim that the linguistic roots of Spanish reaching back
to Hebrew). Anthony Pagden interprets Sigiienza’s text as follows:

This elaborate, at times highly unstable, edifice of synecdoche, analogy, and allu-
sion linked the Indians with the Old World of the Hebrews and the Romans (and
even at a later point with the ancient Egyptians). By so doing, it offered the criollo
an association with an indigenous classical antiquity, a continuity between their
present and the Indian past which . . . bypassed the Indian present; and it reinforced
the idea that Cortés himself had tried to establish: that the Spanish conquerors were
the Indians’ legitimate and natural rulers. (96)

Two points need to be added to this account. The first is that there is a glar-
ing mis-alignment in the “Theatro de virtudes” between the manifest purpose of
 BEYOND CASTRO AND MARAVALL S'S

the triumphal arch (to honor the King’s “double,” the Viceroy) and Sigiienza’s
effort to construct a legitimizing vision of criollo identity. The second is that
in writing a text about this arch, Sigiienza was taking up a familiar continental
tradition of designing and/or describing ceremonial arches and other similar
monuments. Sigiienza notes that, by his day, the tradition of building trium-
phal arches in the New World was already well established. In the “Theatro,”
he says that Mexico City, “with inexpressible magnificence, has erected such
triumphal arches or facades since December 22, 1528—the day the first Au-
diencia that came to govern the lands was welcomed—until the present time”
(13). Cervantes himself made a noteworthy contribution to this tradition in his
burlesque sonnet on the catafalque of Philip II (“Voto a Dios’’). What Cervantes
and Sigtienza share, beyond their common inheritance of a celebratory and en-
comiastic tradition rooted in the circumstances of empire, is a sensibility for
the ways in which that tradition could undermine itself, generate its apparent
opposite, or topple from its own weight, even as it appeared to offer “mirrors”
designed to reflect and magnify the character-qualities of imperial heads of
state. And yet Sigtienza’s promise to sing the praises of the Viceroy ushers in a
project to legitimize criollo identity. How much would this swerve have been
apparent to the Viceroy or his delegates? To what degree would the fact that
Sigtienza’s encomium undermines itself have been visible to the addressee of
the arch and its descriptive text?
This is not the place to embark on an exegesis of Sigiienza’s “Theatro.”
Suffice it to say that behind the exorbitant syncretism that characterizes Sigiien-
za’s work, there also lies the European tradition of offering written “mirrors”
for princes and magistrates, a tradition in which mirrors were thought as pre-
senting the ideal image of the figure reproduced in it. Indeed, the word espejo
carried the sense of “example, exemplar” as well as “mirror” (Cervantes, in
“El celoso Extremefio,” describes his story as an “ejemplo y espejo de lo poco
que hay que fiar de llaves, tornos y paredes cuando queda la voluntad libre’).
In the tradition informing Sigiienza’s effort, there are also examples in which
the mirror reflecting the King was presented as fractured. A case in point is of
Saavedra Fajardo’s “emblems” in the Emblemas morales showing the image
of a lion reflected in a broken mirror. The text of the emblem reads “siempre
el mismo,” thus re-constructing an idealized image of unity above and beyond
the splitting of the subject.'° The production of this unity is a “distortion” (and
also, inevitably, an ideological one) as great as any other. But it serves a pur-
pose. It allows the subject to preserve an integrated image of itself in the most
fragmented of circumstances, even if only in order to enable articulation to take
place. Although it occurs on a very different social plane, this is what allows
156 ANTHONY J. CASCARDI

Lazaro to articulate his life as a whole and present it to V.M. Likewise, it may
be what has allowed critics to feel justified in making ethical claims about Don
Quixote’s commitment to the ideals of virtue and justice, in spite of the unpre-
dictable, quixotic nature to his actions. It is what permits the Viceroy to accept
Sigiienza’s legitimation of criollo identity as praise of himself, and it is likewise
an element in the construction of “Spain” as an imaginary entity that remains
intact in spite of the historical contradictions of which it is comprised.
To see such ideas and ideals of integrity emerge out of the fracturing that
happens in the course of cultural (re)production returns us full circle to the
question of Hispanism’s relationship to the cultural materials with which it
deals. The “problem of Spain” has long been associated with existential con-
tradictions, with the failure of Spain to fit the models of bourgeois capitalism,
or with Spain’s reluctance to embrace modern science and the Enlightenment.
National pride, the defense of cultural hegemony, and the encomiastic treatment
of the deeds of empire all seem to cut two ways, and each serves as a reminder
of the “decline of Spain” just as it offers testimony of Spain’s glorious Golden
Age. Critics have espoused both these views and have likewise attempted to
construct narratives reconciling them. My suggestion here is that Hispanists
might move beyond these efforts by taking the materials of Imperial and co-
lonial Spanish culture as diagnostic resources for their own efforts to shape
a unified image of Spanish culture. The existential historicism of Castro and
the socio-economic analyses of Maravall can be supplemented by Althusserian
models of subject-formation, and these in turn can benefit from an awareness of
the process of fractured mimesis in the production and re-production of Span-
ish/colonial identities. However, the success of any such endeavor will require
us to remain alert to the ways in which Spanish culture may run in advance of
where Hispanism as a discipline has arrived, offering insights that have yet to
be fully incorporated into Spanish cultural studies on a theoretical plane.

Notes

1. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. See especially pp. 115-16: “The Jew can be un-
known in his Jewishness . . . He is a white man, and, apart from some rather debatable
characteristics, he can sometimes go unnoticed . . . But in my case everything takes on
anew guise. I am given no chance, I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave
not of the ‘idea’ that others have of me but of my own appearance.”
i) I believe that it would be better to say that this psychology registers two linked facts:
 BEYOND CASTRO AND MARAVALL NST

on the one hand, the force of the subject’s attachment to the social system, and on the
other, the way in which the social structure is inscribed in the subject.
Regarding the formation of a unitary collective subject, Castro writes: “La conquista
de las tierras musulmanas fue para los futuros espafoles empresa tan lenta y compleja
como la forja de un ‘nosotros, de un nombre que auténticamente los incluyera en
una unidad de conciencia colectiva” (270). “Los nombres de los ‘nosotros’ de di-
mension historiable son aberturas hacia perspectivas problematicas del vivir humano.
Recordemos la situaci6n de los catalanes, los vascos y los gallegos en Espaiia; la de
los irlandeses, galeses y escoses en el Reino Unido; la de los bretones, alsacianos y
catalanes en Francia” (The conquest of Muslim lands was for future Spaniards as
slow and as complex a task as forging a ‘we,’ with a name that would authentically
include them within a collective unity of conscience. The names of the ‘we’ that are of
a historiable dimension are openings toward problematic perspectives on human life.
Let’s recall the situation of the Catalans, the Basques, and the Galicians in Spain; that
of the Irish, the Welsh, and the Scots in the United Kingdom; that of the Bretons, the
Alsatians, and the Catalans in France) (p. 272).
See, for example, Nicholas Spadaccini and Wlad Godzich, eds. Literature Among
Discourses.
See also Maravall’s essay “From the Renaissance to the Baroque: The Diphasic Sche-
ma of a Social Crisis,” 3-40.
Among the few who have recognized his work are, Juan Carlos Rodriguez, professor
of Spanish literature at the University of Granada, and Malcolm Read, at SUNY Stony
Brook.
La Literatura, 13.
See Spadaccini and Godzich, Literature Among Discourses and the English language
edition of La cultura del barroco: The Culture of the Baroque.
The phrase “mirror of production” belongs to Jean Baudrillard (Le miroir de la pro-
duction). However, his book of that title concentrates on a critique of the Marxist
paradigm of production rather than on the development of an alternative model based
on mimesis.
10. See Castro, “Introduction” to the Lazarillo (ix).
Hale As Francisco Rico very astutely pointed out, the opening of the book is written as if
Lazarillo is already in full possession of the insights he gains only through the “ex-
perience” achieved at the culmination of the text. The growth-chart of the character
is not one of linear progress from innocence to maturity, or from a naive moral opti-
mism to a resolute cynicism, but rather a circle in which the very condition of moral
optimism is overwritten by Lazaro’s insights into the “illusions” of ideology. See La
novela picaresca y el punto de vista.
12: See Maravall, Utopia y contrautopia en el “Quijote.”
13% See Gaylord, “El Lepanto intercalado de Don Quijote,” especially pages 27-28.
14. See Mariscal, Contradictory Subjects and Read, Transitional Discourses.
158 ANTHONY J. CASCARDI

15. Cf. Cicero’s notion, widespread among Golden Age authors, that comedy was a “mir-
ror of human life.”
16. My remarks on the relevance of the Saavedra Fajardo emblem to Sigtienza’s text are
directly indebted to the work in progress of Anna More, in a dissertation on Sigiienza
and creole identity.

Works Cited

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Salvoj Zizek, Mapping
Ideology. London: Verso, 1994.
Baudrillard, Jean. Le miroir de la production; ou, L’illusion critique du matérialsime his-
torique. Tournai: Casterman, 1973.
Castro, Américo. The Spaniards. Trans. Willard King and Selma Margaretten. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1971.
. An Idea of History: Selected Essays of Américo Castro, Trans. and ed. Stephen
Gilman and Edmund L. King. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1977.
“El ‘nosotros’ de las historias” Revista de Occidente 2nd Ser. 11, no. 15 June,
1964.
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Novelas ejemplares. Ed. Juan Batista Avalle-Arce. Madrid:
Castalia, 1982.
. El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha 1. Ed. Luis Murillo. Madrid:
Castalia, 1986.
Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Mask, trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove
Press, 1967.
Fuentes, Carlos. The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World. New York:
Houghton Mifflin/Mariner Books, 1999,
Gaylord, Mary. “El lepanto intercalado de Don Quijote” in Volver a Cervantes: Actas del
IV Congreso Internacional de la Asociacion de Hispanistas. Palma: Universitat de les
Illes Balears, 2001.
Lazarillo de Tormes [1948], Ed. Everett Hesse and Harry Williams. Madison: University
Wisconsin Press, 1961.
Maravall, José Antonio. La Cultura del barroco. Barcelona: Editorial Ariel, 1998.
. La Literatura picaresca desde la historia social. Madrid: Taurus, 1986.
. “From Renaissance to the Baroque: The Diphasic Schema of a Social Crisis”
in Spadaccini and Godzich. Literature Among Discourses: The Spanish Golden Age.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
. The Culture of the Baroque, trans. Terry Cochran. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1986.
- Utopia y contrautopia en el “Quijote.” Santiago de Compostela: Editorial Pico
Sacro, 1976.
 BEYOND CASTRO AND MARAVALL 159

Mariscal, George. Contradictory Subjects: Quevedo, Cervantes, and Seventeenth Century

Spanish Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Pagden, Anthony. Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1990.
Read, Marvin K. Transitional Discourses: Culture and Society in Early Modern Spain.
Ottawa: Ottawa Hispanic Studies/Doveouse Editions, 1998.
Rico, Francisco. La novela picaresca y el punto de vista. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1969.
Sigiienza y Gongora, Carlos de. Theatro de virtudes politicas que constituyen a un principe,
advertidas en los monarchos antiguos de México imperial in Obras con una biografia.
ed. Francisco Pérez Salazar. México: Sociedad de Biblidfilos Mexicanos, 1928.
Spadaccini, Nicholas and Wlad Godzich, eds. Literature Among Discourses: The Spanish
Golden Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Zizek, Slavoj. Mapping Ideology. London: Verso, 1994.
oe 6

Whose Hispanism?
Cultural Trauma, Disciplined Memory,
and Symbolic Dominance

Joan Ramon Resina

The Cant of Universality

A crucial function of the humanistic disciplines is to foster and preserve cultural

memory. The memory thus preserved depends not only on each discipline’s cri-
teria of relevance but also on the force exerted by the discipline itself—through
its investments, tradition, and incorporated assumptions—on the selected ma-
terials, that is, on its record. Before anything else, disciplines are competitive
spaces for the definition of social memory: they decide what will be transmit-
ted as legitimate knowledge, and in the process they determine the value of
symbolic assets according to the position of the latter in the disciplinary field.
That is why disciplines are also fields of struggle for their own definition. The
more redundant the definition, the more easily it will be accepted, although that
does not mean it will necessarily impose itself. Hispanism, for example, can be
defined without much disagreement—although without great consequence—as
the academic game that sets the rules and arbitrates the practices that endow
with value the cultural memory of and about Hispania.' This definition, how-
ever, merely displaces the field of struggles to the scholastic entity Hispania,
a fallacious universal which in turn begs definition. The abstraction and intel-

160
 WHOSE HISPANISM? 161

lectualizing drift of the term removes it from the sphere of everyday forces and
values, which alone endow with meaning the events that come to pass within
an institutional field of knowledge. In practice, though, Hispanism operates as
if “the Hispanic World” represented a somewhat variegated but strictly mono-
lingual territory on the modern, i.e., institutionally relevant, cultural cartogra-
phy. By adopting such a spurious universal—a practice that, with regard to the
Anglo-American academy, George Mariscal has dated in the nineteen thirties
(9)—the discipline contributed to naturalize a cultural monopoly. It appropri-
ated the cultural law of a successful particularity, one that attained its hegemony
through the negation (and, in some cases, the annihilation) of other cultural
norms. Subalternity, although cast as part of the eternal order of things, was the
flip side of the cultural law that Hispanism furthers.
Historically, Hispanism has been an expansive idea. There is reason to think
that it exists solely for this idea. From Nebrija’s understanding of language as
an instrument of subjection, to Miguel de Unamuno’s “evangelio hispdénico”
(Spanish gospel) (Castro 1948, 640), to contemporary state-funded efforts to
add Brazil and the United States to the roster of Spanish-speaking countries,
Hispanism has always conceived itself as a proselytizing enterprise. Swinging
ambiguously, like Christianity, between a redemptive role as “el rumor de los
desheredados” (the murmur of the disinherited ones) and a dogmatic civiliz-
ing project, it has never been free from ulterior motives. As a consequence, it
has never been able to found an autonomous scholastic field. An emanation of
empire, Hispanism is the earliest instance of a postcolonial ideology engaged
in promoting hegemonic ambitions by cultural means. The paramount role as-
signed to the Spanish language in this ideology has turned the field into a prime
site for symbolic struggles: struggles against neighboring fields for academic
space,” internecine struggles that reproduce the conflicted yet complicit self-as-
sertion of former metropolis and former colonies,’ and the looming struggles
between Hispanism as a whole and the suppressed multiculturalism represented
by the other indigenous languages of Spain and Latin America.
It is convenient, at the outset, to dispel an ambiguity from which Hispanism
still profits. I refer to the discipline’s claim to an universal and, so to speak, uto-
pian point of view, a claim it puts forth while repressing the memory of its origin.
Hispanism operates as if it were the natural outcome of a civilization process co-
alescing around a language deemed superior to the ones it came into contact with
and thus foreordained to replace them on its ascension to Peninsular, continental,
and some day cosmic preeminence.‘ “Castilla,” wrote the illustrious philologist
and President of the Real Academia de la Lengua, Ramon Menéndez Pidal, in
1950, “muestra un gusto actistico mas certero, escogiendo desde muy temprano,
162 JOAN RAMON RESINA

y con mas decidida iniciativa, las formas mas eufOnicas de estos sonidos vocali-
cos” (Castile evinces a finer acoustic taste, choosing from early on and with a
clearer determination the most euphonic sounds for these vowels) (486).° By vir-
tue of its phonetic appeal and other advantageous features, says Menéndez Pidal,
Castilian earned the privilege to be called Spanish and to guide the evolution of
the language in its global dissemination. Playing up the notion of this language’s
inherent charm, the current director of the Cervantes Institute, Jon Juaristi, has
asserted that Spanish expanded not through imposition but through seduction.
Thus, the drive for global hegemony is naturalized through the alleged self-evi-
dence of the acquired positions, while concealing the internal logic of the field.
The mystification is accomplished through the players’ purported removal from
the historical field of action to a timeless universal sphere. Never mind that this
sphere comes into existence through the players’ success in the contingent space
they claim to have left behind.°
Repression of the field’s social history, in turn, discourages the explicit
articulation of the conditions of participation in the game. The illusion of objec-
tivity, though, persists only as long as the players’ unquestioning adherence to
the institutional rites. Sooner or later, it collides with the existence of competing
memories, the most damaging of which, for the scholar’s aloofness from the
worldly implications of her work, is the memory of the field’s historical ori-
gins. Tapping on this memory soon reveals the field’s determinations, the dis-
cipline-specific constraints that circumscribe Hispanism as a social subspace,
while enabling it to endlessly reconstruct social space through its power of
representation.
The order of representation specific to Hispanism, and, above all, the re-
flexes that constitute the practical ideology of this field, are ultimately invested
and authorized by a historical violence that has been codified and transvaluated
into humanistic tokens of the tradition’s superior worth. This permanent sym-
bolic struggle is practically confirmed even by those participants who adopt
a critical standpoint, as the field’s existence does not depend on the sign of
its internal self-evaluations but on the perpetuation of its discourses. In fact,
the more critical and sophisticated the discourses are, the better they validate
the field, for the latter accrues relevance not from the value of the judgement
but from its ratifying effect. Whatever its sign (critical or apologetic), criticism
confirms its object and sanctions the field, endorsing its exclusions. Ultimately
guaranteed by the violence that lies at the root of the social, the field’s hierarchy
of values and their regulated play constantly reproduce the power relations on
which the Hispanistic mode of knowledge is predicated.
Symbolic dominance works best when it denies its connection to social
 WHOSE HISPANISM? 163

violence. Cultural agents are, therefore, encouraged to repress not only the link
between cultural universality and violence but even the historical traces of the
latter. For the dominated and the excluded, the possibility of reclaiming a space
of their own within the field of legitimate culture depends on their ability to roll
back the forces that make them invisible or, when that is not possible, reduce
them to a dispensable anecdote. Only if the excluded succeed in neutralizing
the strategies of concealment, can they emerge from the margins and gain ac-
cess to the universal spaces of representation. Access is never the reward for
cooperating with the rules of the field, since the forces enshrined in the logic of
scholastic procedures do their utmost to deflect the demands of the dominated
to participate on the same footing. They do so by blocking the bids of marginal
players and, given the opportunity, by expelling them from the game.
In the case of Hispanism, it would be a mistake to account for this disci-
plinary disposition by retaining the notion of a field warped by the particularism
of the Francoist era—although the latter’s contribution to the doxa of the fait
accompli should not be underestimated. Hispanism rose in the nineteenth cen-
tury, together with the national philologies, as a compensatory strategy to offset
Spain’s staggering territorial losses in America. As José de! Valle and Luis Ga-
briel-Stheeman point out, conferences and symposia, as well as “transatlantic”
publications like La Revista Espanola de Ambos Mundos and La Ilustracion
Espanola y Americana were examples of many efforts made to create a sense
of acommon Hispanic civilization anchored in Spain but extended over the for-
mer colonies (6). These linguists offer as a minimal definition of Hispanism its
belief in: “The existence of a unique Spanish culture, lifestyle, characteristics,
traditions and values, all of them embodied in its language; the idea that Span-
ish American culture is nothing but Spanish culture transplanted to the New
World; and the notion that Hispanic culture has an internal hierarchy in which
Spain occupies a hegemonic position” (Their emphasis, [6]). This definition
should be modulated to conform with Hispanism’s gradual accommodation to a
more fluid arrangement that includes Latin American complicity with Hispanic
universality.
A candid, if quaint, definition of Hispanidad was offered by Alfredo San-
chez Bella, first director of the Instituto de Cultura Hispanica, the Francoist
forerunner of the current Instituto Cervantes. He described it as:

la proyeccin de la sintesis espafiola lograda dentro de la Patria por una milenaria

tarea, lanzada con impetu sostenido desde hace cinco siglos sobre la redondez de la
tierra, esta Hispanidad se multiplica en partes al producirse su dispersion geogra-
fica. No dispersi6n babélica, si evangélica, apostolica. (94)
164 JOAN RAMON RESINA

(the projection of the Spanish synthesis accomplished inside the fatherland through
the work of a millennium, broadcast with unflagging force over the entire globe
during the last five centuries, this Hispanicity multiplies everywhere through its
geographical dispersion. Not a Babel-like dispersion but an evangelical, apostolic
dispersion.)

Notice the care with which the meaning of “dispersidn” is confined to

the Catholicity of the Hispanic mission; the care with which any confusion of
tongues is conjured in advance. “Dispersi6n” here is an euphemism for the ide-
ological radiation which, emanating from a “millenarian” center, reaches global
proportions. Nothing is scattered; everything is collected under one dispensa-
tion. Within the Iberian Peninsula, Hispanic culture is the patriotic “synthesis”
that supersedes the diverse historical cultures, while outside, it is a “sustained
impetus” projected through conquest, empire, and cultural community towards
a goal that is coterminous with the Earth’s limits. Reference to an apostolic mis-
sion neatly condenses the religious sense intended by the founding of Spain’s
national holiday, the Dia de la Raza, on the anniversary of the “Discovery”
(Serrano 314). Notwithstanding the holiday’s ethnic signification, soon after its
promulgation on June 16, 1918, officialdom emphasized discovery and empire
as historical assets justifying the pursuit of Spain’s insatiable ambitions.’ Thus,
the cover of Raza espanola, a journal founded in 1919, displayed a caravel em-
blazoned with the date October 12, 1492 and sailing between Hercules’s pillars,
to which the legend PLUS ULTRA is attached.
Emblems associating mission and empire were honored by the American
upper classes, doubtless because they provided legitimacy for their own hege-
mony over the indigenous populations. In a section entitled “Ecos de la Fiesta
de la Raza,” (Echoes from the Race Holiday) the journal reported the celebra-
tion of Spain’s new national holiday in various American countries. A society
of Bolivian students sent “un saludo reverente” (a reverential greeting) to Span-
ish youth, represented, they said, by the University of Salamanca, “fecundo y
magno sol que nunca se pone” (great and fertile sun that never sets). Invoking
next the geniuses of Columbus and Cervantes, and thus the confluence of lan-
guage and empire, the association of Bolivian students “levanta a la Providen-
cia fervientes votos por la fusion de los ideales de gloria de Espafia y América”
(elevates fervent vows to Providence for the fusion of the ideals of glory of
Spain and America [116]).
The journal’s editor took the opportunity to stress the empire’s civilizing
mission. At a time when the writers of the Generation of 98 were scouring
the Castilian landscape for the soul of Spain, the journal traced this soul to the
 WHOSE HISPANISM? 165

venerable university, presenting the colonial adventure as the natural issue of

Castilian learning.

Raza Espanola recoge con fervorosa gratitud el reverente saludo de la hidalga ju-
ventud de Bolivia a su hermana la juventud espafiola, representada en la gloriosa
Alma Mater salmantina, donde se formaron aquellos hombres de tantas almas,
soldados, legistas, te6logos y misioneros que llevaron a América, con la eterna luz
del Evangelio, la floracion magnifica del Renacimiento espafol. (116)

(Raza Espanola accepts with fervent gratitude the reverential greeting that Bolivia’s
noble youth sends to its sister, the Spanish youth, represented by Salamanca’s glo-
rious Alma Mater, which educated those men of so many souls, soldiers, lawyers,
theologians, and missionaries, who conveyed to America the magnificent flowering
of the Spanish Renaissance together with the Gospel’s eternal light.)

Regardless of the fantasy of a colonial army provided with university de-

grees, the editor was right to emphasize the connection between knowledge and
power, for the empire still underlay Spanish self-representations and ideals.

Espana ha podido perder, por culpas propias y por injusticias ajenas, la posesion
material de aquel Imperio colonial, el mas grande que ha tenido pueblo alguno en
la vida de la Humanidad; pero ni la misma fuerza material ha sido suficiente ni po-
dia serlo, a arrebatarla la representaci6n moral ante el Mundo de aquellos pueblos
descubiertos por el genio espafiol, conquistados por el heroismo de sus hijos, y
colonizados por la fe y por la cultura de nuestro espiritu. (Bécker 1919, 13)

(Spain may have lost, through its own fault and foreign injustices, the material pos-
session of its former colonial Empire, the greatest that any people has ever had in
human history. But material force has not been able, nor could it ever be, to deprive
Spain of the moral representation before the World of the peoples that the Spanish
genius discovered, the heroism of its sons conquered, and the faith and culture of
our spirit colonized.)

From the missionary zeal pervading Spain’s imperial project, Hispan-

ism acquired a religious pitch and a sacred language. From the beginning,
the core of the nationalistic religion was the Spanish language. Although the
Spanish Cortes settled for the name Dia de la Raza, there were proposals to
make it a holiday of the Spanish language and even to call it “fiesta del Idioma”
(language holiday) (Serrano 321). And so, in July 1918, Unamuno’s idea of a
language-based “evangelio hispanico” received official sanction with the insti-
166 JOAN RAMON RESINA

tution of the national holiday. The religious model for this linguistic celebration
was never too far from the surface. As Carlos Serrano remarks, “Colon habia
tenido el buen gusto de tocar tierra en América en una fecha que coincidia con
las fiestas del Pilar, de marcado signo nacionalista en toda la historia espanola
de los siglos XIX y XX” (Columbus had the good taste of landing in America
on a date that coincided with the holiday of [the Virgin of] el Pilar, a date with
acute nationalist signification throughout nineteenth and twentieth century
Spanish history) (322). Thus, when a Spanish priest, writing for a Buenos Aires
weekly, proposed to rename the national holiday Dia de la Hispanidad, Ramiro
de Maeztu commented approvingly in the first issue of Accién Espanola:

Si el concepto de Cristiandad comprende y a la vez caracteriza a todos los pueblos

cristianos, ,por qué no ha de acufiarse otra palabra, como ésta de Hispanidad que
comprenda también y caracterice a la totalidad de los pueblos hispanicos? (8)

(If the concept of Christianity includes and also characterizes all Christian peoples,
why should we not coin a new word, such as “Hispanicity,” to include and charac-
terize all Hispanic peoples?)

Not surprisingly, the first question to which this proposal led Maeztu was
that of inclusion and exclusion; that is, the question about the definition of the
field. More important, though, was the question concerning its law. Hispanidad
was a globalizing force, second only to Christianity, which, being embedded in
it, endowed it with universality:

Al descubrir las rutas maritimas de Oriente y Occidente hizo la unidad fisica del
mundo; al hacer prevalecer en Trento el dogma que asegura a todos los hombres la
posibilidad de salvaci6n, y por tanto de progreso, constituy6 la unidad de medida
necesaria para que pueda hablarse con fundamento de la unidad moral del género
humano. Por consiguiente, la Hispanidad creo la Historia Universal, y no hay obra
en el mundo, fuera del Cristianismo, comparable a la suya. (15)

(By discovering the ocean routes to the East and the West, [“Hispanicity”] physi-
cally unified the world. By imposing in Trent the dogma that guaranteed the pos-
sibility of salvation, and thus of progress, for all men, it constituted the necessary
yardstick for any reasonable talk about the moral unity of humanity. Consequently,
“Hispanity” created Universal History, and there is no achievement in the world,
except for Christianity, that can compare to it.)
 WHOSE HISPANISM? 167

Hispanidad’s universality, and therewith the much vaunted universality of

its language, are rooted in this double claim of being both the creator-spirit
of the world system and the only system that guarantees historical salvation.
Again this is Unamuno’s Hispanic gospel. From this religious point of view,
there is no civilization, no culture, and no modernity outside its Church. “El
camino hacia la libertad transita por la hispanizacién” (the road to freedom runs
through Hispanicization) wrote Manuel Alvar, a member of the Real Academia
Espafiola, in reference to the indigenous peoples of America in 1991 (qtd. del
Valle and Gabriel-Stheeman 208); Mario Vargas Llosa, a fellow académico,
agrees. That is why, when the post-Franco constitutional regime confirmed the
12th of October as Spain’s national holiday, it stressed that, besides the “Dis-
covery,” the nation celebrates “el origen de una tradici6n cultural comtin a los
pueblos de habla hispanica” (the origin of a cultural tradition common to all
the Spanish-speaking peoples) (Royal Decree of 27 November 1981, qtd. In
Serrano 327). Hispanidad is, according to this definition, the lowest common
denominator ascribed to the manifold, disparate, even incompatible cultures
coexisting in the Darwinian space of posthistorical Hispanism.
This phantom imperialism overarches modern Spanish history from Res-
toration to Restoration. No matter how virtual it may appear at times, it is the
firmest ideological ground for Spanish nationalism, as Ortega y Gasset’s project
for national salvation eloquently reveals. For it is surely revelatory that pre-
cisely the Spanish thinker who is often credited with the clearest vision of Eu-
ropean integration would offer a Hispanic ““Transatlanticism” as the single most
important goal for Spain’s “vertebration.” Arguing in 1921 that a nation can
only exist as long as it engages in great historical adventures, he claimed that
the only possible future for Spain lay in “la unificaci6n espiritual de los pueblos
de habla espafiola” (the spiritual unification of the Spanish-speaking peoples)
(Espana invertebrada 75, n.). Either Spain strove for that “international des-
tiny,” or it would face its dissolution. In other words, Spain could remedy its
alleged political breakdown only by pursuing a policy of “spiritual” central-
ization supported by its former colonies. The link between imperialism and
aggressive nationalism, between the response to an internal crisis of the state
and the unimaginative recourse to regressive solutions could hardly be more
eloquent.
True, Spain found itself once more isolated through its neutrality in World
War I, and sought a scope for its ambitions in pan-Hispanism. Moreover, it
sought, as Ortega’s book shows, a means to re-center the state in its decaying
imperial center, and, thus, in the time-worn imperial idea. As we have seen,
168 JOAN RAMON RESINA

the Cortes’s institution of the national holiday two years earlier had the same
significance. Since the war, the state had been in crisis, and the prospect of
a military coup loomed large. It would materialize in 1923. In that context,
patriotic exaltation apropos the old imperial glories cleared the way for an au-
thoritarian settlement of internal tensions dressed as the resumption of Spain’s
world-historical mission.
Similar conditions surrounded the inauguration of the Instituto de Cultura
Hispanica during the Quincentennial of the birth of Queen Isabel I of Castile on
October 12, 1951. Spain was re-emerging from its isolation since the decline
of the Axis powers in 1942, and the Francoist regime, eroded by the disastrous
economic conditions of the forties, was critically unstable. At that time, the
Hispanic community was the only international platform on which Spain could
hope to play an influential role. By commemorating Castilian Queen Isabel in
the presence of the Latin American diplomatic corps on the Dia de la Raza, the
regime visualized the affiliation of the Latin American nations to a Hispanic
community gathered, like Isabel’s yoke and arrows, in its genealogical cen-
ter. With Franco also in attendance, Spain’s minister of foreign affairs, Alberto
Martin Artajo, spelled out the purpose of Hispanidad:

Su misi6n es un obrar comtn en la ancha 6rbita internacional en funcién con los

restantes grupos regionales, una accidn conjunta de todo lo hispanico en el campo
de la gran politica mundial y universalista, una actitud colectiva ante problemas de
interés universal. Y sus nexos, toda una red o trama de ideas, de sentimientos, de
modos de concebir la vida. (141)

(Its mission is to act in common in the wide international sphere in conjunction

with the other regional groups, [to undertake] a common action of all things His-
panic in the area of the great world and universal politics, [and to have] a collective
attitude before the problems of universal interest. And its links [will be] an entire
web or mesh of ideas, feelings, and worldviews.)

Martin Artajo did not reveal who would establish the guidelines for com-
mon action, nor how the divergent interests would be reconciled with the uni-
versal interest that appeared self-evident to him. Nevertheless, the material
translation of the ideal links in the web of ideas, feelings and Weltanschauun-
gen invoked, would eventually transpire in the preferential investment oppor-
tunities demanded by Spain in the name of its “especial” relationship to Latin
America. The claim of a “special” relation of this sort must have appeared odd,
not to say absurd, from the American perspective. In the wake of a conflictive
 WHOSE HISPANISM? 169

history and of Spain’s failure to supply usable societal models for the newly
independent republics, that relation could consist of little more than a common
language and, potentially, a shared linguistic ideology. The dearth of influen-
tial models explains the anxiety that the possibility of linguistic fragmentation
evoked among Spanish intellectuals (del Valle 96-97) and the heavy-handed
policies of support (often amounting to bribery) to Latin American intellectuals
and collectives in solemnly staged and media-amplified performances of Span-
ish leadership. In 1991, the Principe de Asturias prize, an award nominally
bestowed by the Heir to the Spanish crown, was granted to Puerto Rico after its
Governor declared Spanish the island’s only official language.* Spain, smarting
from an antithetical move by the state of California in the mid-1980s, saw itself
vindicated and forgot the criticism (including that of King Juan Carlos in an
official visit to the Western state) that it had poured on California for passing
monolingual legislation.
Notwithstanding the ideal webs of feelings and viewpoints invoked by
Martin Artajo, his concept of Hispanism was uninhibitedly imperialistic. If in
1918 Hispanidad had awoken hopes of an international realignment, now it was
conceived as an instrument for Spain’s intervention in the block politics of the
Cold War. The Franco regime looked forward to the day when a Hispanic block
would challenge the superpowers: “pero esas naciones nuestras bien unidas for-
man un conjunto tan poderoso, en todos los 6rdenes, que nuestro Mundo His-
panico podra, con verdad, llamarse la mas grande entre las grandes potencias
del mafiana” (but our nations, provided they are united, will form such a power-
ful coalition in every domain, that our Hispanic World will truly be the greatest
among the great powers of the future” (Martin Artajo 144).
From the perspective of Hispanism’s political articulations, it is possible to
perceive not only the stakes but also, and more importantly, the motives behind
its maneuvers in the global arena. The discipline feels it must come to terms
with global pressures which spell the obsolescence of the national philologies.
However, this recognition need not pave the way for cut-throat Realpolitik in
the present-day academic environment. Hispanism is a long-term project with a
substantial trajectory behind it, and while its symbolic arrangements and practi-
cal commitments can be modified, they are nowhere near disappearing. Tempo-
rary influences and crises come and go without upsetting the field’s structural
dispositions. One of these dispositions, the linguistic monism, must be revised
if the discipline is to be loosened from its foundational imperialism and steered
towards a more complex and encompassing framework for concrete sites of
knowledge, which need not be coterminous with state cultures.
170 JOAN RAMON RESINA

The Epistemic Unfit

It is remarkable how, as soon as new circumstances challenge the field, epis-

temocentric aloofness gives way to practical reactions.” On such occasions,
competition, not only in the field but also for its definition, emerges as one of
Hispanism’s durable dispositions. Such reactions to a broad challenge reveal
the a priori stakes. The implicit consensus among the players surfaces very
quickly when called upon to protect or expand the common turf. Furthermore,
such consensus needs to be reasserted periodically in spontaneous expressions
of adherence to the norm, or, what amounts to the same thing, in the ritual
expression of belligerence against heretics or outside competitors. Although
generally unspoken, the underlying consensus provides disciplinary conven-
tions with the self-evidence of orthodoxy.
There is no need to posit a totalitarian intervention in the cultural sphere in
order to identify the source of certain imperatives; the rapport between scholas-
tic reason and the internal homeostasis of the state can be documented along the
history of the discipline in almost genealogical fashion.'® I have referred to the
doctrine of Hispanidad as promoted by the anti-Republican right and, later, by
the Franco regime. Yet, before the Civil War, Spanish intellectuals embodying
different degrees of liberalism were in agreement about the state’s priorities re-
garding a unified, post-imperial state. Barely three months had passed since the
proclamation of the Second Republic, when Américo Castro warned the new
government: “Lo mas urgente, Cataluna. Ain mas apremiante que las huelgas y
el orden publico” (The most urgent problem, Catalonia. Even more urgent than
strikes and public order) (1990, 229). In 1932, Ortega vigorously combated
the project of Catalonia’s Statute of Autonomy in the Cortes, warning that the
slightest implication of shared sovereignty would quickly lead to a national
catastrophe (Discursos 239). Like Unamuno, Ortega opposed official status for
the Catalan language, insisting on the preservation in Catalonia of a monolin-
gual university system in Spanish despite, or rather because of the fact that, as
he himself declared, the vast majority of students there were Catalan-speaking
(Discursos 276).'!
Why did these figures, often revered as Spain’s finest intellectuals, align
themselves instinctively with a reactionary post-imperial ideology? We must
conclude that the foundational figures of contemporary Hispanism never re-
flected about the empirical constraints on their points of view. Apparently, they
remained ignorant of the extent to which their scientific truths were beholden
to a particular conception of the state. In part, this is understandable: no one
can jump over his own shadow. More remarkable is that contemporary exegetes
 WHOSE HISPANISM? 171

Shen (2 toperceive thes object's long shadow and rebuff those who do, dis-
massing then views as “ideological” Never mind that such systemic reactions
«Kaa invert the meaning of ideology. Ideology does not refer to explicit po-
«Sic iter ventions in the sphere of culture. On the contrary, asMarx and En-
«chs defined the term in The German Ideology, ideol is the expression
ogy of
dominan relations in the realm of ideas. Prec Hispanism isy
whatisel about.
it is true. 2s Bousdiew remarks. that ~[njo one can forge weapons to be
«used against his opponents without having those weapons immediately used
agen tan by them or by others” (119). What is surprising in the reversal of
2 Mique is not the reversal itself. but the reinforcement of the illusion of ob-
jectvaty resulting from the scholar’s alignment with the dominant view. Such
scholars may smmply call the disciplinary doxa to the witness stand, sparing
themscives the trouble of mecting the critique in its own ground. Furthermore,
, eaGiazns A the orthodoxy can rely on the disciplinary mechanisms to work for
them. A long decanting has finally solidified former surmises into unassailable

F Giscapline’s
common sense impersonally.

| test
The onic of orthodoxy is always forced into personal positions, with the
that the ends up underscoring
her isolation. Always potentially pilloried
for hes Geviztion, she must continuously restate the obvious truth of her periph-
j aad positions. lest those who strive 0 conceal theirs own inscription in the social
odes accuse ber of bad faith. And so, at every turn. she runs the risk of being
Gsqualiiies on account of ber position. This practical weakness is, neverthe-
fes, ber theoretical strength. for although every viewpoint is grounded in par-
tioularity, 2s 2 rule only those who engage in controversy against the structure
& the G20 face the truth that all positions are invested in the distribution of
value throughout the discipline. From this, itcan be inferred that marginal and
Gscondest critics tend to escape scholastic idealism by presenting their moves,
Sen on A necessity, 2s the antithesis of disinterested participation in an objec-
ive contest offaculties.
And ye. 2 skeptic could ask if the participation of disenchanted players does
aot prove the field's neutsrality—prove, that is, theimpersonal regulation of com-
| peting viewpoints. 1 would venture that the existence of venues for counter-dis-
Ciplinary work is an indication of the field's capacity to readjust itself after every
oitique. Orthodox players need only misinterpret the challenge to institutional
comm ores to (23) back upon the familiar order of things. Given this
sense inon
hasty encouraging dservation, the fact that some players take uncomfortable
Aocutionary positions may seem paradoxical, and one may wonder about the
| peychological Gepositions that incline them to doso. Players in marginal posi-
172 JOAN RAMON RESINA

tions continuously experience the truth that intellectual discourse alone cannot
alter, much less undo, the dispositions that are routinely incorporated by those
newly initiated into the field. Such dispositions are all the more intractable in
that they define the conditions of symbolic capitalization and, as a result, power-
fully influence the making and unmaking of scholarly reputations.
In times of crisis, however, explicit breaks with a discipline’s organizing
principles have a chance of gaining some currency, particularly if those moves
take into account the fact that the discipline’s practices have no intrinsic neces-
sity. What they have going for them is the far from negligible power of inertia.
Scholastic practices have developed in the course of time and changed over time.
An epistemic crisis is the surest sign that they have reached the point of obso-
lescence. A renovation of the rules of the game becomes possible if challengers
succeed in exposing the contradiction between the discipline’s epistemological
pretense and its actual scope. However, the necessary negative work of the dia-
lectic must be complemented with indications of a more positive nature. It be-
hooves the critic of the institution to refine the instruments of incorporation of
the structures of the world in which the discipline acts. A change of scope inevi-
tably means a change of cognitive structures, and this, in turn, means a permuta-
tion of practical dispositions and intellectual tools. In short, a crisis-confronting
critique entails a revision which, if thorough or radical enough, may lead to a
complete overhaul and the appearance of a new disciplinary field.
Stated plainly, the most pressing question highlighted by the crisis of so-
called “Peninsular” Hispanism (which signals, although this is hardly obvious
yet, the crisis of Hispanism as a whole) is how to turn this discipline into a venue
for the open, plural, and equitable coexistence of the various cultures that have
developed and exist today within the territory of the Spanish state and America.
In what follows, I concentrate on the Peninsular stage of the Hispanic ideology;
nevertheless, the critique applies also to a Latin Americanism that often seems
invested in the expansionist monism chartered by the erstwhile metropolis.
For the discipline to evolve into a framework for the in-depth, multicultural
study of the geopolitical areas that it claims for itself, mere assertions of the
goal’s desirability, of its fairness and legitimacy will not suffice. It is indis-
pensable to neutralize the disciplinary logic that leads most players to suppress
fundamental parts of the history and cultures of the peoples of Spain. Attaining
this goal will require more than goodwill and condescending nods of recogni-
tion towards the dominated “minorities.” First of all, it will require an intrinsic
expectation that players survey the entirety of the field and subject competitive
viewpoints to the test of demonstration against the sum of the available record,
as is procedurally standard for more rigorous disciplines. In the meantime, a
 WHOSE HISPANISM? 173

preliminary approach could prove helpful: turning explanatory reason to bear

on those who consider themselves socially authorized to do the explaining. This
work, which has already produced some lucid studies showing how the social
atmosphere inscribed itself in the “scientific” work of Spanish philologists, still
needs to be extended to the more perilous terrain of contemporary practices."
Here, rather than in the easier option of retrospective unveiling, lies the true
engagement with the field’s logic, for it is in the contemporaneity of practices
that propositions for change will be resisted or silenced by those who shun the
consequences of reflexivity.
Unlike scientific disciplines, where struggles are mainly over methodologi-
cal or theoretical dominance, Hispanism’s bias turns its very object into a re-
sistance to the discipline’s ambition to establish universal principles of under-
standing. This condition is not noted here in order to bemoan it; in the final
analysis, it is irreducible and shared by all humanistic disciplines. However, the
bias must be recognized and held in plain view, lest it becomes a blind spot in
the vision of the realities which the discipline claims to show to advantage. The
persistence of this socially generated bias can be gauged by tracing the nation-
alistic footprint not just of the classic figures—Menéndez Pelayo, Menéndez
Pidal, Unamuno, Ortega, Sanchez Albornoz, Madariaga, Castro—but also of
authors whose sensibilities are too close to those of the field’s current practitio-
ners to be subjected to the same detached scrutiny.
It befits the researcher of Hispanic ideology to stand outside the dominant
mode of explanation in order to elucidate what that mode does not explain.
This epistemic move cannot be accomplished without breaking the ranks with
even the more iconic “deviations”; breaking ranks, that is, with the unorthodox
orthodoxies that govern the field. One way to perform this task is to question
the validity of the traditional division between conservative and progressive
figures in a linear conception of Spanish history which, like Hegel’s adventures
of the idea, presumes the gradual self-disclosure of a politically correct Span-
ishness. Still efficient during the long Transition, this analytical scheme is now
superseded by the coming to the fore of issues that demand an entirely different
approach. Furthermore, such a scheme cannot recognize itself for what it is,
because it ignores the privilege that unifies conservatives and progressives as
beneficiaries of the historical path towards universality; a path which, as Hegel
knew, is teleologically guided by the state. To put it differently, the state’s rela-
tive democratization has allowed the issue of the nationalities to re-emerge. As
a result, the condescending expressions of understanding for diverse national
rights uttered during the Transition have been put to the test by demands for
effective cultural and political autonomy as well as for actual representation
174 JOAN RAMON RESINA

in the state’s organisms and in those of the European Union. The urgency of
these demands disrupts the coziness of established critical reputations which
now must shape up in reference to a different paradigm.'’ At present, the deci-
sive and divisive issue is no longer the clash between Church and secular state,
between public and private ownership of the means of production, or between
individual and society. The stakes now are for and against the democratic exten-
sion of the means of access to cultural universality to all statutorily recognized
constituencies, a process that cannot be accomplished without simultaneously
revoking the cultural extraterritoriality of dominated groups.

Memory bien entendu

In the emergent political paradigm, the relation between language and ideo-
logical position is becoming ever more conspicuous, to the point of affecting
the perception of the past: the much invoked, feared, and belabored historical
memory. Evidence that the representation of the past depends to a not negligible
degree on the linguistic medium employed is, in my mind, a strong argument
for the renovation of the field in the multicultural sense suggested before. It
simply will not do to continue to ignore or suppress experiences that are re-
corded in alternative languages.
The discipline’s monolingualism needs to be recognized not as an effect
of Hispanism’s ideology but as its main vehicle. The voiding of entire tracks
of historical memory is one of its consequences. This can be seen in the thin-
ness of the approaches to the cultures and experiences of Spain’s non-Castilian
peripheries, which are often subjected to formulaic patterns of understanding,
if they come into purview at all. What would be scandalous in any other area
of knowledge is here the norm: incidental comments or sweeping judgements
with little or no substantiation, ignorance of the scholarship in the relevant lan-
guages, and a complete lack of interest in the cultural agents themselves. The
result is the construction and circulation of a new doxa that differs from the old
in paying lip service to cultural pluralism. New meets old, however, in presum-
ing a cultural awareness that the critical practices belie.
One example of scholarly shallowness in selected areas might be the list-
lessness (or incapacity for critical reaction) which meets the erasure of the mem-
ory of cultural victimization.'* Revisionist books like Juan Ram6n Lodares’s El
paraiso poliglota and instances of flat denial, like Juaristi’s declaration cited
previously, have gained some currency not only among the less educated but
also among the guardians of the legitimate knowledge. This example refers to
 WHOSE HISPANISM? 7S

the tension between institutional location and historical dynamic, and to the
relation between the state’s monopoly on universality and the anthropological
treatment of non-state cultures. In the last analysis, two broad antagonistic ap-
proaches can be discerned. On one side, an effort to keep history open and to
understand the implications of cultural genocide for the scholarly present. On
the other side, the desire to close it, suturing the wound as if the violence had
never occurred. Nevertheless, such suturing is itself violent, for it can never be
the result of an agreement between equal forces.
For those who opt for the second of these approaches, the war and the dic-
tatorship produced victims but not perpetrators. Or, what amounts to the same
thing, the matter is considered settled once and for all by the Transition. Peter
Burke observes that history is not just written by the victors, but it is also for-
gotten by them (106). Is it then surprising that memory, the memory of cultural-
specific aggression, is keener in the linguistic archives of the victims?!> There
is a subtle, but for that reason highly effective, relation between knowledge and
the linguistic medium in which knowledge is legitimated. The fact that for the
most part studies and documentation about the extent of Catalonia’s victimiza-
tion have appeared in Catalan indicates that language is not a neutral conveyor
of information but a space for investments of memory, of intellectual disposi-
tions, of affective inclinations, and pragmatic choices. Those investments may
further or preclude the apprehension of the situation in which individual agents
are implicated. If choosing the wrong linguistic medium prevents scholarly
work from having the status of legitimate knowledge, those scholars who chal-
lenge the established model are disenfranchised, not because their theses are
necessarily wrong or poorly argued, but because they do not accord with the
operative model. In his classic study on the structure of epistemic paradigms,
Thomas Kuhn showed that it is in the logic of an existing paradigm to ratify
the margins and fend off intrusions in its scheme of intelligibility. Homeostasis,
which Jean-Francois Lyotard considers the principle that governs the institu-
tion of knowledge (63), is a fortiori the social law to which the state owes its
self-preservation. In both fields, the epistemic and the political, homeostasis
works by silencing or attempting to silence those who challenge the rules of
the game.

Strategies of Denial

Like other humanistic disciplines, Hispanism is limited methodologically by the

culture it mediates. This makes it difficult to transcend or even question those
176 JOAN RAMON RESINA

limits from the inside. Between the official denier and the academic Hispanist
who feels aloof from the cultural genocides perpetrated in the name of Hispanic
culture, there is solidarity, a visceral attachment, as Bourdieu defines the esprit
de corps (145). Hispanism, as an academic discipline, extends a concrete social
body of Hispanic culture, into which Hispanists are inducted through profes-
sional rites of passage and from which they can detach themselves as if from
their own skins.
The sociology of denial merits a study on itself. Without even broach-
ing the subject, it is possible to surmise that deniers’ main purpose is to deter
the possibility of redress. Denial involves a form of symbolic power. Deniers
double the pleasures of dominance with their ability to suppress the victim’s
memory and concentrate the accumulated historical violence in the mainte-
nance of repression. The violence inherent in denial illuminates the otherwise
unexplainable forfeiture of the rules of arbitrated reasoning. Flying in the face
of academic standards for debate, deniers lightly deploy ad hominem assaults
and pass sentences of academic death. Sometimes they fall into the paradox of
denouncing their opponent’s participation in the game because she complies
with the game’s legitimate procedures. Statements such as “it was an affront
to bring up those citations,” or “wasn’t the dishonesty even worse when she
spoke publicly?” betray the denier’s annoyance at the adversary’s recourse to
the same privileged venues of elocution that he, the denier, enjoys. The bottom
line in such denunciations is never methodological; quite simply, it amounts to
the communication of a verdict.
Denial denies itself. If it cannot sweep the facts under the historical carpet,
it will arrange them into a pattern and pretend they are part of the wool. His-
tory can be normalized by means of rhetoric. Turkey denies the genocide of
Armenians with a foolproof argument: there is no Armenian nation. If only
Turks died in the course of a Civil War, then, from the state’s point of view,
victims and butchers were all in the same boat. No need for remorse or apolo-
gies. Another strategy of denial consists in restricting the term “genocide” to a
few instances of world-historical proportions such as the Holocaust or the Cam-
bodian Kmer Rouge, and refusing to mobilize ethical judgement around less
conspicuous cases. Yet another strategy consists in denial through quantitative
arguments (it was not six million but only four, or three, or. . . ) or by trivial-
izing the attempt on a people’s specificity if it falls short of wholesale physical
extermination. Some people dispute that the deliberate destruction of a culture,
a language, a religion, or the economic basis of a society ranks as a crime of
genocidal proportions.'® This form of denial ignores that the physical destruc-
tion of an ethnic group always aims at the destruction of a culture, that groups
 WHOSE HISPANISM? ee

are targeted not on account of the individuals they consist of but of the cultures
whose carriers those individuals are.
Those who deny the past often gloss over the facts by inverting the rela-
tion between the factors, no matter how senseless the resulting picture might
be. Repeated often and loudly enough, any absurdity will end up gaining cur-
rency.'’ Another strategy is to replace the uncomfortable facts with more ac-
ceptable “place holders.” This can be done, for instance, by portraying Spanish,
the state’s symbolic fetish, as the exilic idiom par excellence, as Paul Ilie did
in a revealing article published during the Transition (“Exolalia’”’). Such a view
not only conceals the facts of linguistic deterritorialization, but also inverts their
logic by presenting the aggression against the peripheral nationalities as a his-
torical incident. That incident is even produced ex post facto with the remark
that “Indeed, the danger of minority consciousness to the dictatorship was rec-
ognized by Francoist ideologues immediately after the Civil War” (Ilie 231).
By speaking of a post-War “recognition” of the “danger” posed by the de-
feated and repressed nationalities to the Francoist State, Iie disingenuously ma-
nipulates the facts. In reality, dictatorship was the “solution,” or more exactly,
the institutionalization of the violent response to the modest gains obtained
by the “minority consciousness” under the Second Republic. Long before the
Civil War, the ideologues of Hispanidad had “recognized” the danger posed by
“minority consciousness” for their imperial idea. That idea, entrenched in the
Spanish tradition, was deeply rooted in the institutions and widely shared by
large sectors of the intelligentsia.'* Hispanists, insofar as they let the history of
cultural repression come into their purview, often treat it as a localized episode,
neglecting its long-term effects in contemporary legislation, media propaganda,
and judicial practices.
A related and, widely used, strategy consists in “symmetrically” appor-
tioning the responsibility for symbolic aggression among different players,
denouncing both the “centralist” logic (without, however, tracing its specific
practices or representations) and the centrifugal “excesses” (assumed to be self-
evident). Yet, on the historical ground the actual dynamic looks quite different.
Not a vague centralism but Spanish nationalism, which could not be shed by
fiat—and now camouflages itself behind an imported “constitutional patrio-
tism’’!°— is at the root of the hegemonic consciousness. Forever reborn, like
the imperial eagle from its ashes, this consciousness leaves no stone unturned
in its search for ideological weapons.
For two decades, but with growing intensity over the last one, a reaction
has set in against the efforts to produce a critical break with the traditional rela-
tion of domination. The hatred wells from the pages of national-journalism as
178 JOAN RAMON RESINA

well as from more “scholarly” sources, and, as in the 1930s, it numbs the public
conscience against the deadliness of rhetorical passions. Against the tendency
to recast intellectuals who were committed to the idea of a uniform Spain as
liberals, it must be said that the aggression against the non-state cultures in the
1930s was fed by dispositions cultivated by generations of intellectuals, who
contributed to the formation of what Carl L. Becker, following Alfred North
Whitehead (57), called a climate of opinion. “Whether arguments command
assent or not,” said Becker, “depends less upon the logic that conveys them
than upon the climate of opinion in which they are sustained” (5). In the cli-
mate of Hispanidad, the logic of pluralism and of historical right did not stand
a chance.

Encounters in Heteronomous Space

Whence come the dispositions that intellectuals ratify? The importance of this
question for understanding corporate rationalizations can hardly be exagger-
ated. Notwithstanding a widespread presupposition, the source of those disposi-
tions does not lie in the psychology of individuals but in objective mechanisms.
Bourdieu has called the sum of such mechanisms a habitus—a solidified set of
responses which, being acquired historically by a society, are appropriated by
individuals through their participation in institutional life. Turning his attention
to the field of Hispanism, Rafael L. Ninyoles explains the political conformity
of many Spanish literary scholars by focusing on their status as civil servants,
funcionarios. According to Ninyoles, the psychological adjustment required of
civil servants by the conditions of realization of their group-specific modality of
self-fulfillment (including, especially, the requirement of geographic mobility)
contributes to their alienation from the cultural and linguistic pluralism encoun-
tered in the discharge of their duties.
There is no recourse to mentalism in this diagnosis: “psychological adjust-
ment” refers to the subjective adaptation to causes that lie deep in the social or-
der. It is in this order, not in ethno-psychology, that the conceit of “being above”
the particulars of life has its source. Thus, Ninyoles accounts more plausibly
than Américo Castro for the tendency which the latter observed in many Span-
iards to behave like the discharged civil servants (“funcionarios ‘cesantes’”’) of
an imperial establishment (1973, 385). What produces this particular kind of
civil servant is not the unutilized balance of personal or collective energies, as
Castro believed, but the persistence of imperialistic structures in the social order.
That is to say, the abundance of functionaries and would-be functionaries seek-
ing to spend the least amount of energy possible in a discharged imperial estab-
 WHOSE HISPANISM? 79

lishment. In this context, subjective traits and dispositions are better accounted
for as a function of the state, as funcionariado. Individuals tend to adopt the
viewpoint required by their actual or intended function within a system.
Given the prominence of the institutional component in their mindset, fun-
cionarios often display a pretended higher, but in truth homogenizing perspec-
tive, on the conflicts of interest between the state’s cultural components (Nin-
yoles, Mare Espanya 89). Although this tendency is shared by all civil servants,
from the police officer to the judge, from the minister to the tax collector, Nin-
yoles considers professors of Spanish history and Spanish literature (Hispanists
par excellence) the paradigmatic instances of the logic of state service. Unlike
the minister, who regulates the affairs of the state, the policeman and the judge,
who enforce that regulation, or the tax collector, who extracts from citizens
the means to run the state, the literature professor does not deal with primary
administrative mechanisms. She contributes, instead, to adjust the conscious-
ness of citizens for the smooth operation of the other “services.” Her task is
to produce subjective consent through the diffusion of the cultural paradigm
promoted by the state.
Notwithstanding the civil servant’s ideological encapsulation, geographic
mobility brings this person into contact with other habitus shaped by different
historical legacies. Thus, geographic mobility, while promising the fulfillment
of institutionally generated expectations, can also create a predicament for the
civil servant who is stationed as an outsider in Catalonia or Euskadi. Inevitably,
this person’s conception of “Spanish” history or literature is challenged by the
realities with which she comes into contact. A common response is for the civil
servant to assign subaltern importance to the cultures of the places to which she
is destined, a temptation as powerful as that of overvaluing the already acquired
homogenizing perspective. As a result of the confrontation between previous
investments and new experiences, the state’s antagonism to plurality is often
compounded by the aversion developed by many civil servants toward the, from
their standpoint, refractory reality of the places in which they are stationed
(Mare Espanya 90).
Crossing the ocean between Spanish and North American, Hispanism cre-
ates visible problems for the preceding analysis. How does civil service behav-
ior reproduce itself, if at all, in an academic structure characterized by mar-
ket-driven mobility rather than by the protocols of ascent on the bureaucratic
rung-ladder? The difficulties for any comparison are compounded by the belief,
still in force in the U.S. scholastic sphere, in rational communication rather than
historical privilege as the nomos that regulates a university in permanent trans-
formation. Nevertheless, it is precisely this difference that offers a clue to the
180 JOAN RAMON RESINA

constants in the North American scholastic system. As Bourdieu warns, sym-

bolic violence imposes itself most expeditiously through the power exercised
in rational communication. For it is through the use of rationalized force that
the most effective submission is extorted, reinforcing the objective relations of
domination with a rationality that sets those relations above the arbitrariness of
ordinary discourse (Bourdieu 83).
The most basic trait that U.S. Hispanism shares with state Hispanism is the
discipline’s narrow linguistic foundation, which is exacerbated in the United
States by the scholar’s dependence on language instruction for her clientele. Al-
though there is an inverse value relation between the discipline’s linguistic base
and its cultural superstructure, language training has always been Hispanism’s
primary legitimation. Extrinsic factors such as a favorable demography or the
appearance of heritage students do not affect the discipline’s epistemic merits
(which is surely one reason why it has failed thus far to actualize the desired
leap in status). Hispanism’s main source of political clout exposes the field’s
fallacy, namely the sublimation of lobbying power into an alleged scholarly
advance. Arguing from the numerical strength of a potential constituency may
or may not be a democratic gesture (it not always is, as Spain’s constant incan-
tation of the trescientos millones of Castilian speakers as an “argument” for
its hegemonic goals demonstrates), but it is a poor epistemic strategy. More
problematically, the reliance on exclusively demographic factors linked to mi-
gration blurs the complexities of the cultural spaces that Hispanism purports to
mediate, fatally undermining its claims to epistemic vigor.
This weakness is related to a second paradox under which the U.S. His-
panist labors. The situation often described as academic marginality amounts,
more accurately, to a dead-end exercise in the transmission of decontextualized
knowledge. This is truer of the U.S. Peninsularist than of the Latin American-
ist. The former, to a greater extent than the latter, and for structural reasons that
are as historically complex as they appear to be sociologically simple, finds
herself in an area of knowledge with very little resonance in the field.2° That
means that the hierarchies of prestige that the field bemoans in relation to other
fields are internal to it. Geopolitical regulation of academic priorities is objecti-
fied not only in the disparity among individual reputations when considered
by area of expertise, but more seriously in the growing disparity of access to
ordinary academic channels. It suffices to mention here the virtual disappear-
ance of publication venues in the foremost academic presses, which over the
past decade have been dropping Peninsular subjects from their catalogues. It
should be a matter of concern for the field, as a whole, that its chronic deficit
 WHOSE HISPANISM? 181

of resonance within the U.S. university is being gradually corrected only to the
extent that this area of knowledge is nativized, that is to say, legitimated through
its nationalization.
Despite the U.S. Hispanist’s substantial elbowroom in designing the pro-
grams of study that shape scholastic thought and mold the field’s future trust-
ees, American Hispanism has until now failed to embody the multiculturalism
and multilingualism of Spanish and Latin American societies. Notwithstanding
its different ethos, based on a long tradition of academic freedom rather than
centralized government planning, U.S. Hispanism overlaps considerably with
its Spanish counterpart, even if it has decidedly moved away from the philologi-
cal and historical methodologies that reign unabated in the Spanish university.
Foremost among the factors contributing to the overlap are canonical criteria,
which circumscribe research and instruction to a fairly predictable set of au-
thors and interests enshrined in the foundations of the field.*! Equally important
are the material pressures brought to bear on the scholar who departs from the
doxa. It follows that the maverick scholar, who breaks with the routines of sym-
bolic production, is likely to experience a blockage of ordinary channels of dif-
fusion and a freezing vacuum around her work. In the United States, more than
in countries with a centralized educational system, professional goals and pri-
orities are maintained through corporate self-regulation. Although a premium
is placed on individual initiative and field renovation, the overall consensus is
ensured through highly personalized hiring practices, manipulation of student
interest, and diffuse censorship linked to the politics of publishing. While uni-
versity presses are likely to appeal to the balance sheets, subsidized journals
encode the field’s value domain through editors’ discretionary powers, often
shielded by the alleged objectivity of anonymous referees against whom there
is no appeal. Despite its commendable use of “checks and balances,” refereed
arbitration can also safeguard entrenched biases under the guise of impersonal
procedures. Other influences on the direction.of scholarship are motivational.
Official and semi-official incentives channel research into certain directions and
contexts, as do various forms of recognition that play on the scholar’s vulner-
ability to adulation. This foible is rarely perceived as such, for, in principle,
scholars believe themselves worthy of every distinction and do not question the
source or ulterior implications of their privilege.
While U.S. Hispanism has developed variegated lines of research and, in
some cases, marshaled considerable creativity and theoretical ingenuity, it re-
mains tied to its foundational ideologies in its self-positioning as a globalizing
(that is, an aggressively competitive) cultural force. Enticed by the ambiguous
182 JOAN RAMON RESINA

benefits to be culled from the dogma of its language’s alleged universality, U.S.
Hispanism is neglecting the intellectually more fertile investigation of the rich
multiculturalism and multilingualism in the territories of what still passes for
the Hispanic world.

Notes

1. The historical origin of the term is irrelevant. Whether it originated as a formalization

of the activities of foreign hispanophiles or from a domestic pan-Hispanic ideology,
the term now stands for an international network of conventions and interests that
relies on its academic niche for its definition and continuity.
2. Hence, the turf wars, for instance, when faculty in English departments teach His-
panic texts.
3. Festering tensions exist between Latin Americanists and so-called Peninsularists vying
for the balance within a field that oscillates between historical depth and geographic
extension. The apex of absurdity, from the standpoint of the field’s self-interest, is the
restriction of one of the axes. In the past, the geographic axis was restricted through
a merely symbolic inclusion of Latin American culture; at present, it is history that is
being dilapidated by catering to a narrow-minded consumerism. In these skirmishes,
however, the fundamental exclusions are left in place. In this sense, the skirmishes
themselves are surface activity designed to conceal deep immobility.
4. No sarcasm is intended. The cosmic dimension is present in José Vasconcelos’s vi-
sion of Hispanism’s “ethnic mission” (25), the creation of a globalized race that will
culminate Hispanism’s world historical destiny. Vasconcelos makes it clear that this
“universal era of Humanity” (52), marked by cultural and racial homogeneity, can
only be achieved by the Iberian part of the American continent. He even foresees the
day when, from Univers6polis, the world capital on the banks of the Amazon River,
airplanes and armies will make sorties to continue the old Hispanic task of incorporat-
ing far-off places into “la sabiduria” (wisdom) (35). Although he does not broach the
question of what universal language will be used in this late-day civilizing crusade,
it is plain that his cosmic race will speak one of the two Iberian languages spoken in
South America, or a mixture of the two. Through its policy of promoting Spanish in
Brazil without a symmetrical effort to turn Portuguese into a common language for
Latin Americans, the Spanish government is trying to settle the question, left open by
Vasconcelos, of what language shall convey the “buenas nuevas” (good news) of the
universal synthesis of cultures.
5. The translation of quotations is mine unless otherwise indicated.
In Juaristi’s case, it is the space of nostalgic nationalism. See his book, El bucle me-
lancélico.
7. Although it was the raving delusion of a decadent imperial people, the editorial state-
 WHOSE HISPANISM? 183

ment in Raza espanola’s first issue hardly differed from recent statements by twenty-
first century academicians and politicians: “a la geografia que traz6 la espada sobre
el haz de la Tierra, se impone otra geografia mas fuerte [... ] la geografia animada
y dominadora de las lenguas, que contienen infuso el espiritu de las razas; asf, en
la actualidad son y lo seran mas cada dia dos grandes lenguas, dos grandes razas
representada y unida cada cual por su lengua: la Raza espafiola y la Raza inglesa, las
que se disputan el dominio del mundo” (the geography drawn by the sword is now
replaced by a stronger geography [ . . . ] the lively and commanding geography of the
languages that are pervaded with the spirit of the human races. Today—and this will
become even clearer in the future—there are two great languages, two great races,
each represented and unified through its language, that struggle for world domination.
These are the Spanish race and the English race) (De los Rios 8-9).
The previous year, the General Assembly of the Asociacién de Historia de la Lengua
Espanola had unanimously approved a proposal of the Asociacién de Lingiifstica y
Filologia de la América Latina to request the Spanish Ministry of Education and Cul-
ture to implement courses on “American Spanish” in all Spanish universities. Concur-
rently, the General Assembly defeated the proposal of the departments of Catalan,
Galician, and Basque to offer courses in these languages throughout Spain. Some
members of the Assembly, like the linguist Gregorio Salvador, considered the discus-
sion of this matter in the assembly “intolerable” and “unacceptable” (Romero).
On epistemocentrism, see Bourdieu, especially the chapter “The Three Forms of
Scholastic Fallacy” in Pascalian Meditations. | am indebted to this book throughout
this essay.
See Resina, 1996.
Il. “[Y] espero que nadie al oir esto, no ya diga pero ni siquiera piense: ‘jah!, si es su-
perior el ntimero de estudiantes que prefieren la lengua catalana, entonces es justo
que ésta prevalezca.’ No; ése es precisamente el planteamiento de la cuestion que
no podemos aceptar: el Estado espafiol, que es el Poder prevaleciente, tiene una sola
lengua, la espafiola, y ésta es, por ineludible consecuencia, la que juridicamente tiene
que prevalecer” (“And I hope that upon hearing this, no one will not just say but even
think: “if there are more students who prefer instruction in Catalan, then justice de-
mands that this language should prevail.” No; that is precisely the way of presenting
the issue that we cannot accept. The Spanish State, which is the dominant Power, has
only one language, Spanish, and this is, ineluctably, the language that must prevail by
law”) (Discursos 276).
The already mentioned book by José del Valle and Luis Gabriel-Stheeman, and
Jacques Lezra’s article “La mora encantada’” come immediately to mind.
I adapt the idea of “paradigm” from Thomas Kuhn’s analysis of the rules of scientific
practice, where he defines a paradigm as a social constraint that obliges people to
think in agreement with a dominant logic or mode of explanation.
This is not the place to substantiate this statement. Hard data abound, but the need to
184 JOAN RAMON RESINA

provide it in the context of Hispanism is in itself a symptom of the state of affairs that
I am denouncing.
15. Confinement of memory to an alternative code that is then declared non-essential
amounts to shelving the uncomfortable issues. Thus, José Marfa Aznar, in an inter-
view with the Barcelona daily La Vanguardia, asserted that “no sé como estaba el
catalan durante la época de Franco” (I don’t know the situation of Catalan under
Franco) (Strubell). Aznar’s plea of ignorance was disingenuous. It is not just that any
reasonably curious person would find ample documentation, but Aznar would have
had privileged information. His father, Manuel Aznar Zubigaray, a personal friend
of Franco, had directed the very same daily from 1960 to 1963. Franco’s Council of
Ministers had nominated him for the post.
16. For a denial of the inaugural violence of Hispanism, in tandem with a denial of the
Holocaust, see the recent book by a Spanish state employee, Juan Luis Beceiro Gar-
cia, La mentira hist6rica desvelada: ;Genocidio en América? Ensayo sobre la accion
de Espafia en el Nuevo Mundo (1994). This book received support from the regional
government of Galicia through the purchase of copies for distribution in the region’s
public libraries and reading centers (Hermida). Perhaps not coincidentally, the book
includes an epilogue by that government’s president, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, a former
minister in charge of state security under Franco.
We Insisting that Spanish ought to be the language of instruction in Catalan schools (the
very situation mandated by Franco), sociologist Amando de Miguel declared that
schooling the children of immigrants in Catalan would amount to a “cultural geno-
cide” (“De la Babel”).
18. In his prologue to the 1983 edition of his first book, Notas marruecas de un sol-
dado (1923), Ernesto Giménez Caballero asserted that, after reading the manuscript,
Américo Castro, had congratulated him “effusively” (5). He also claimed that Una-
muno had saluted him as a “national writer” and praised the book in the newspaper El
liberal, as well as in Madrid’s Ateneo. Further attention was given to it by Ramiro de
Maeztu in El Sol and by Eugenio d’Ors in Nuevo Mundo.
19. Cf. Aizpeolea. For a discussion of the origins and plausibility of “constitutional patrio-
tism” as a substitute for nationalism, see my article “Postnational Spain? Post-Spanish
Spain?” And for the ideological continuity between Francoism and post-Francoism,
see my “Nationalism and Anti-Nationalism. Semantic Games for the Definition of the
Democratic State.”
20. I have analyzed some of these reasons in “Hispanism and its Discontents.”
2A Noting the large variation in the composition of graduate reading lists among depart-
ments of Spanish, Brown and Johnson conclude that this is bad news, since “our small
canon may not serve the graduate students whose reading lists we have compared”
(19). It may be that, in observing wide discrepancies in the titles of works incorpo-
rated as mandatory graduate reading, the authors of this survey do not sufficiently
estimate the importance of the higher rate of coincidence by author. Thirty-nine Span-
ish authors and 24 Latin American ones (a total, therefore, of 63 authors appearing
 WHOSE HISPANISM? 185

75% of the time in all reading lists) is a high yield of coincidence when one takes
into account the enormous possibilities for variation offered by the cultures involved.
Nevertheless, the truly significant information is the one the survey keeps discreetly
to itself. Variation in the lists is firmly checked by a fixed center of agreement on the
language in which the works must have been written to count as required or even
recommended Hispanic reading.

Works Cited

Aizpeolea, Luis R. “Partido Popular y PSOE pugnan por aduefarse del ‘patriotismo con-
stitucional.’” El Pais Digital. November 3, 2001.
Beceiro Garcia, Juan Luis. La mentira hist6rica desvelada: ;Genocidio en América? En-
sayo sobre la accion de Espafia en el Nuevo Mundo. Madrid: Ejearte, 1994.
Becker, Carl L. The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1932.
Bécker, Jer6nimo. “La reconquista moral de América.” Raza Espajfiola. 1 (1919): 13-19.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Pascalian Meditations. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2000.
Burke, Peter. “History as Social Memory.” Memory: History, Culture and the Mind. Ed.
Thomas Butler. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989: 97-113.
Card6, Carles. El gran reftis. Barcelona: Claret, 1994.
Castro, Américo. “El asunto catalan.” De la Espana que aun no conocia. Vol. 1. Barcelona:
Prensas Universitarias, 1990: 229-33.
. “De la insatisfaccién a la magnificacion.” Sobre el nombre y el quién de los espa-
foles. Madrid: Taurus, 1973: 379-85.
. Espafia en su historia: Cristianos, moros y judios. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1948.
De los Rios de Lampérez, Blanca. “Nuestra Raza.” Raza Espanola. | (1919): 7-12.
De Miguel, Amando. “De la Babel a la Pentecostés.” ABC, 1 October, 1993.
“Ecos de la Fiesta de la Raza.” Alma espanola. 13-14 (1920): 107-16.
Giménez Caballero, Ernesto. Notas marruecas de un soldado. Barcelona: Planeta, 1983.
Hermida, Xosé. “Fraga patrociné un libro que cuestiona que los nazis cometieran el holo-
causto.” El Pais Digital. May 5, 2000.
Tlie, Paul. “Exolalia and Dictatorship: The Tongues of Hispanic Exile.” In Hernan Vidal
(ed.) Fascismo y experiencia literaria: reflexiones para una recanonizacion. Minne-
apolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature, 1985: 222-52.
Juaristi, Jon. El bucle melancélico: Historias de nacionalistas vascos. Madrid: Espasa-
Calpe, 1997.
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Second ed. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1970.
Lezra, Jacques. “‘La mora encantada’: Covarrubias in the soul of Spain.” Journal of Span-
ish Cultural Studies. 1, 1 (2000): 5-27.
186 JOAN RAMON RESINA

Lodares, Juan Ramon. El paraiso poliglota: Historias de lenguas en la Espana moderna

contadas sin prejuicios. Madrid: Taurus, 2000.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Maeztu, Ramiro de. “La Hispanidad.” Accidn Espafiola. 1.1 (1931): 8-16.
Mariscal, George. “An Introduction to the Ideology of Hispanism in the US and Britain.”
In Peter W. Evans (ed.). Conflicts of Discourse: Spanish Literature in the Golden Age.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990: 1-25.
Martin Artajo, Alfredo. “Presente y futuro de la comunidad hispanica.” Presente y futuro de
la Comunidad Hispdnica. Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispanica, 1951: 131-44.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. Collected Works. Vol. 5. New
York: International Publishers, 1976.
Menéndez Pidal, Ramon. Origenes del espajiol: estado lingiiistico de la Peninsula Ibérica
hasta elsiglo XI. Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1950.
Ninyoles, Rafael L. Mare Espanya. Aproximaci6 al nacionalisme espanyol. Trans. Eduard
J. Verger. Valencia: Tandem, 1997.
Ortega y Gasset, José. Discursos politicos. Ed. Paulino Garagorri. Madrid: Alianza Edito-
rial, 1974.
. Espana invertebrada. Ed. Paulino Garagorri. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1988.
Resina, Joan Ramon. “Hispanism and Its Discontents.” Siglo XX/20th Century 14. 1-2
(1996): 85-135.
. “Nationalism and Anti-Nationalism. Semantic Games for the Definition of the
Democratic State.” Revista de Estudios Hispdnicos. 37 (2003): 383-400.
. “Postnational Spain? Post-Spanish Spain?” Nations and Nationalism, 8.3 (2002):
377-96.
Romero, Justo. “La pasion por la lengua.” El Pais, March 12, 1990.
Sanchez Bella, Alfredo. “La Hispanidad y sus obras.” Presente y futuro de la Comunidad
Hispdnica. Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispanica, 1951: 91-113.
Serrano, Carlos. El nacimiento de Carmen: Simbolos, mitos y nacién. Madrid: Taurus,
[99o%
Valle, José del. “Menéndez Pidal, national regeneration and the linguistic utopia.” In José
del Valle and Luis Gabriel-Stheeman (eds.), The Battle over Spanish between 1800
and 2000. London and New York: Routledge, 2002: 78-105.
Valle, José del and Luis Gabriel-Stheeman. “Nationalism, hispanismo, and monoglossic
culture.” In José del Valle and Luis Gabriel-Stheeman (eds.), The Battle over Spanish
between 1800 and 2000. London and New York: Routledge, 2002: 1-13.
Vasconcelos, José. La raza césmica: Mision de la raza iberoamericana. México: Espasa-
Calpe Mexicana, 1948.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. New York: The Free Press,
1967.
Part III
Latin Americanism and Cultural Critique
 e® #7

Latin America in the U.S. Imaginary:

Postcolonialism, Translation,
and the Magic Realist Imperative

Sylvia Molloy

The programmatic categories of my title attempt to summarize a discomfort,

an ideological blind spot in the construction of “Latin America” by the United
States academy and by the public at large. Academically, I refer to the discom-
fort felt by many Latin American intellectuals when presented with a postcolo-
nial “model” to which Latin America is expected to conform; a model whose
terms have been formulated from, and in reference to, a “center” whose inter-
ventions, however well intentioned, continue to be seen as imperialistic and/or
simplistic. This is a postcolonialism with which modern Latin American in-
tellectuals and scholars have, at best, a mediated relation, one necessitating
multiple reformulations and translations. Furthermore, this is a postcolonialism
which very much depends on its site of enunciation, a postcolonialism that
is constituted by shifting perspectives. In other words, it is a postcolonialism
which, formulated “over here” (and by this I mean the U.S. academy), signifies
one thing while “over there” (in Latin America, itself a site of multiple enun-
ciations), it signifies something quite different; or, better said, signifies many
different things.
As a Latin American studying in France back in the early sixties (I should
say as an Argentine, therefore a Latin American: these things happen in two
stages), I received a fairly traditional training in comparative literature. When

189
190 SYLVIA MOLLOY

the time came to write my dissertation, I gravitated towards an adviser and was
practically assigned a dissertation topic: I was from Latin America, I would
therefore write on the reception of Latin American literature in France, a proj-
ect I remember my adviser describing as “immensely useful,” although it was
unclear who or what (myself, my reader, the discipline?) would benefit from
my compilation, conclusions and, mainly, conjectures. I protested I knew very
little Latin American literature, having been trained in French, and was curtly
told: “Vous l’apprendrez” (you will learn). Even then, I knew that I was being
assigned the role of the native informant, a role I have been asked to play more
than once since then, a role many scholars from other countries working in the
United States no doubt find familiar.
What certainly was “immensely useful” to me was to study certain precon-
ceived French notions of what Latin American literature “should” be. In other
words, I noted early on how, even as Latin American literature became available
in France, it was already spoken for. Thus, for example, Jean Cassou, as early
as 1900, regretted that Rubén Dario had opted for what he, Cassou, considered
derivative symbolism, instead of writing about what he termed, with consider-
able geographical license, “ce dont nous révons, sa forét et sa pampa natales”
(Molloy, Diffusion 58). The writer who discredited these preconceptions was
of course Borges, a figure that puzzled French critics to no end because he
did not fit. “Ne cherchons pas en lui un “écrivain argentin’— bien qu’il aime
et évoque souvent son pays—Borges n’est pas un représentant de la littérature
argentine, il est un monstre et un génie” (We do not seek an Argentinean writer
in him—even if he loves and often evokes his country—Borges is not a repre-
sentative of Argentinean literature, he is a monster and a genius), wrote a re-
viewer (Molloy, Diffusion 219). Borges did not match French expectations of a
Latin American specificity and was, therefore, a monster (albeit a brilliant one)
devoid of nationality. Dario, had he written “regional” poems, probably would
have matched those expectations. Alejo Carpentier certainly did, partly because
of magic realism (to which I shall return) and partly through reverse snobbery:
he was erroneously believed to be Afro-Cuban. “M. Alejo Carpentier qui, sauf
erreur de ma part, est un écrivain noir’ (Alejo Carpentier who, unless I am mis-
taken, is a black writer), wrote Max-Pol Fouchet in his enthusiastic review of
The Kingdom of This World (Molloy, Diffusion 191). Parallel to the construction
of the “Orient” there was a very active fabrication of a Latin American “South,”
one that had to be, of necessity, free of Western alliances so that Western fanta-
sies could generously play themselves out.
I have gone back to personal history, and to that first shock of recogni-
tion—I was, on the one hand, the native informant, on the other, the native
 LATIN AMERICA IN THE U.S. IMAGINARY Syl

spoken for—because some aspects of that same vexed construction of Latin

American literatures and cultures (I use the plural deliberately) is often at play
today in a different but not unrelated setting, that of departments of literature
and/or comparative literature in the United States, intent, if not on “exoticizing”
Latin America, at least on acritically, even ahistorically, “postcolonizing” it and
channeling it through magic realism. The two gestures have more in common
than it would, at first, appear.
Mexican anthropologist Jorge Klor de Alva has written astutely on the pit-
falls of applying post-1960 constructions of colonialism, imperialism, and post-
colonialism retroactively and anachronistically to the Americas in general, and
to Latin America in particular. I will not go into his arguments in detail, but will
retain what is obvious to historians and is often neglected by theoreticians and
literary scholars, namely, the specificity of the Latin American colonial experi-
ence both temporally, politically, and ideologically. With the exception of parts
of the Caribbean, Spain’s colonies seceded very early in the nineteenth century;
the confrontation was not between indigenous peoples and metropolitan colo-
nizers (although it may have been that too) but between Euro-Americans (crio-
llos), Westernized mestizos, and even some Europeans (Peninsulares) against
other Europeans; an experience more akin, say, to the North American experi-
ence, than to that of the British colonies a full century later. As Latin Ameri-
canists working on nineteenth-century literature know full well, the points of
contact and friction between the two Americas, their literatures and cultures in
the nineteenth century, even in their relations to Europe, are many and fruitful,
yet remain largely underexplored. In the nineteenth century that Latin American
cultures “‘write back,’ then they plagiarize, translate and misread, with the dif-
ference that there is no real “empire” to write back to nor to substantially dissent
from.! Even before secession, Spain, a decaying metropolis already superseded
by its energetic colonies, was no longer a model to subvert; she had long been
replaced by France (and, to a point, by England) in the cultural imaginary of
Latin America. So, if Latin America is “writing back” anywhere—and, given the
identification of its new national cultures with Enlightenment models, one won-
ders whether the expression applies—one could argue that it is writing back to
the “wrong” address. It is not striking back, in name of a recuperated indigenous
past,’ but constructing itself afresh, as an alternate, transculturated West.*
The distinctiveness of Latin American postcolonialism, which does not
necessarily exclude neocolonial situations within its very boundaries (a situ-
ation the United States itself should not be unfamiliar with), does not have
a place, however, in the legitimating narrative the U.S. academy usually tells
itself about Latin America. Instead, in that narrative, Latin American literature
192 SYLVIA MOLLOY

“begins” at another time and in another place, is made to “emerge” (“emerge”

into U.S. awareness, as in “emergent” literatures which always seem to emerge
when the First World discovers a need for new cultural goods) in the early
1960s, an emergence coinciding, roughly, with the Cuban revolution—a “new”
beginning—and with the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude—a
“new” genre, magic realism, a genre against which a// Latin American literature
would be read in a sort of ahistorical, postcolonial present. This is a literature
endowed with a new, snappy genealogy and new interlocutors: Perry Anderson
“dates” One Hundred Years of Solitude by calling it a typically Third-World
“shadow configuration” of First-World modernism (Garcia Canclini 44) and
relates Garcia Marquez’s novel to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and
Yilmiz Giiney’s Yol. “It is necessary to question above all the mania that has
almost fallen out of use in Third World countries: to speak of the Third World
and include in the same package Colombia, India, and Turkey,” observes Néstor
Garcia Canclini of Anderson’s homogenizing gesture (45), echoing the con-
cerns of other Latin American critics and not a few postcolonial theorists from
non-Western countries.* Above all, it is necessary to question the short-sighted
view that Garcia Marquez’s novel, in this new configuration, is the symptom of
Latin American modernism when that modernism, as Garcia Canclini rightly
argues, has been the subject of cultural reflection and aesthetic experimentation
in Latin America since the turn of the century. Familiar to any Hispanic reader,
this earlier modernist experimentation, however, was only spottily translated
into English.
Crucial in this recycling of Latin America into a “new” postcolonial, which
sacrifices the thick texture of a process to the superficial similarity of its effects,
is, I think, a problem of language, more specifically, with language. Critiquing
the metropolitan urge to homogenize so-called “Third-World Literatures” and
contain their representations, leveling them with “the rhetoric of Otherness,”
Aijaz Ahmad, in a by-now famous essay, reflected on the problematic avail-
ability of certain cultural traditions. These texts may become available directly,
through translation, wrote Ahmad; more often, however, they arrive indirectly,
in critical essays about those texts that offer “versions and shadows of texts pro-
duced in other spaces of the globe” (127). Despite an admirable effort to tease
apart “Third-World Literatures,” Ahmad drew a not altogether convincing dis-
tinction between these unavailable texts (mainly from the Indian subcontinent)
and Latin American literatures, whose “direct” availability he stressed:

Literatures of South America and parts of the Caribbean are directly available to the
metropolitan critic through Spanish and Portuguese, which are after all European
 LATIN AMERICA IN THE U.S. IMAGINARY 193

languages. Entire vocabularies, styles, linguistic sensibilities exist now in English,

French, Italian, for translations from these languages. Europeans and American
theorists can either read those literary documents directly, or in case one is not
entirely proficient in Spanish or Portuguese, he/she can nevertheless speak of their
literatures with easy familiarity because of the translatability of the originals. (127;
my emphases)

The notion of easy familiarity is both rich and problematic here, since it
appears to be based on a translatability that is presented, at the same time, as
a trope and a linguistic reality. As we know only too well in foreign languages
departments, linguistic competence is a highly charged ideological issue and
nothing is “easy.” If Spanish and Portuguese are “after all” European languages,
they may be a little less European than others. And, even if they are “after
all” European, I would argue that they are certainly not considered metropoli-
tan languages and that their complex cultural traditions, on both sides of the
Atlantic, are largely ignored. In this country, the purported “easy familiarity”
and “translatability” of Spanish (Portuguese, a less “familiar” language is in a
different situation), usually work to its detriment, crediting the language with
an unwarranted transparency that seriously limits its range. Rarely, if at all,
does the academy view Spanish as a language of authority or of intellectual
exchange: Latin American critics who have debated long and hard on postco-
lonialism from Latin America, specifically addressing Latin American differ-
ence—say Nelly Richard in Chile, Néstor Garcia Canclini in Mexico, Jestis
Martin Barbero in Colombia, to name but three—are rarely if ever brought into
general debates about postcolonialism, even when their texts are available in
English, i.e., when “real” translations of their works exist. Despite this very
direct availability, their interlocutors in this country (with a few notable ex-
ceptions) seem to be other Latin Americanists working on postcolonial issues,
such as Walter Mignolo, Mary Louise Pratt, George Yidice, or John Beverley,
scholars who, themselves, are not always recognized as productive participants
in the more general postcolonial debates.”
Let me then render Ahmad’s statement a little more complicated and say
that Latin American texts appear to offer the illusion of an easy familiarity, the
illusion of translatability, and thus create the i//usion of cultural competence, not
to mention the il/usion of institutional expertise, usually based on a smattering of
texts. This apparently “easy” translatability is further complicated by ideologies
of reception that “choose,” as it were, certain vehicles (but not any vehicle) for
that translatability, certain representations and texts (but not any representation
or text). Selected Latin American texts are thus uncoupled from their particular
194. SYLVIA MOLLOY

mode of functioning within their respective Latin American traditions and then
turned into a corpus that purports to be “fully” representative of an “entire . .
sensibility” called “Latin America,” “Third-World modernism,” or “postcolonial
literature.” (What exactly does it represent, who selects the criteria of represen-
tativity, and from where, ideologically speaking, is that selection being made,
are of course the key questions that should be asked here). What is missing from
these reductive attempts at reconstructing “entire... sensibilities,” is the un-
derstanding of culture as relation. “El libro no es un ente incomunicado: es una
relaci6n, es un eje de innumerables relaciones. Una literatura difiere de otra,
ulterior o anterior, menos por el texto que por la manera de ser leida,” writes
Borges (Obras 747). “A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis
of innumerable relationships. One literature differs from another, prior or pos-
terior, less because of the text than because of the way it has been read” (Laby-
rinths 214). The experience that Borges proposes across time should be equally
possible across space. Yet the end result of the presumably “direct” contact with
Latin America literature is not modes of reading but a dehistoricized, “manage-
able” corpus, deprived of cultural genealogies or theoretical speculation.
Many years ago, Juan Goytisolo, in a melancholy piece in the New York
Times Book Review, pondered on the politics of cultural representation in gen-
eral, the reception of Spanish-language literatures in particular, and their place
in a dialogue of literatures and, importantly, the marketing tactics of publish-
ers. He spoke mostly of Spain, a country, he said, that was doomed to being
a single-faced culture, allowed only one image that would “translate well” in
the international market and “represent” Spain. The image might change with
the passing of time but there was always a quota: one image. Latin America, in
itself a more fluid cultural composite, suffers from readings that are even more
reductive, at least when they come from the North. Real geographical proximity
seems to increase the cultural divide; the nearer the border, the more anxious
the containment and policing of cultural representativity becomes.
The history of magic realism has been written elsewhere, and it is not my
intention to retrace its long and tenacious life. It should be recalled, however.
than from its very inception, this figuration of Latin America was a self-con-
scious, literary effort by a self-conscious, literary writer, Alejo Carpentier. An
excrescence of French surrealism transculturated to Cuba and, by extension, to
the rest of Latin America, magic realism was a strategic, polemical element in
a transnational literary quarrel, it was Carpentier’s response both to the Surreal-
ists’ conception of poetic image and to the Avant-Garde’s discovery of “primi-
tive” art. More than sprouting then “naturally,” from Latin American “reality,” as
 LATIN AMERICA IN THE U.S. IMAGINARY 195

Carpentier himself, in a burst of nativistic fervor, would have his reader believe,
magic realism was born on the same operating table on which Lautréamont’s
umbrella hobnobbed with the sewing machine.° A transculturated mode, in the
way Fernando Ortiz and Angel Rama (two other Latin American critics rarely
cited in postcolonial debates) understood the notion of transculturation, one
more product of what Gustavo Pérez Firmat has called Latin America’s “trans-
lation sensibility” (1), magic realism in Latin America is a mode of literary
figuration among many others; yet it has been singled out by First World read-
erships to signify, as surely as Carmen Miranda’s fruity cornucopias, “Latin
America.” What magic realism loses, in this cultural transaction that privileges
one form of representation to the detriment of others, is precisely its relational
quality. Latin American magic realism becomes a regional, ethnicized commod-
ity, a form of that essentialized primitivism which continues to lurk in the minds
of even well-intentioned First-World critics.’ For a country which persists in
representing itself as a Western country (I speak of the U.S.), it is also a handy
way of establishing spatial distance and, perhaps more importantly, temporal
distance vis-a-vis a region that may be too close for comfort, a way of practic-
ing what Johannes Fabian has called “the denial of coevalness.” Magic realism
is refulgent, amusing, and kitschy (Carmen Miranda’s headdress; José Arcadio
Buendia’s tattooed penis)—but it doesn’t happen, couldn’t happen, here.
With its exotic connotations, its potential for stereotypical casting, its ““po-
etic” alienation into the realm of the “magical” i.e., the very far away, the very
other, magic realism has become, for the United States, a mode of Latin Amer-
ican representation, not a mode of Latin American production. As such—as
representation, not as production—it is used to measure Latin American Jit-
erary quality. It is used to both effect and confirm First-World “discoveries”
of undetected Latin American talent: readerly expectation (abetted by canny
publishing strategies) explains, for example, the huge success of Isabel Allende
outside Latin America, a phenomenon akin to the reception of Jerry Lewis in
France. Applied retrospectively, magic realism may be used to enhance past
texts: witness the way in which, in many reviews written in this country, magic
realism rubs off on Borges, recycled as a “precursor” of sorts, the scope of his
work considerably diminished. More alarmingly, magic realism serves to ban-
ish many Latin American writers to the wasteland of the “different-but-not-in-
the-way-we-expect-you-to-be-different” or, even worse, to the ever-expanding
purgatory of the forever untranslatable. I particularly remember a book review
of a novel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, one of Argentina’s most subtle, ironic and
inventive writers. The review, negative in a half-hearted sort of way, concluded
196 SYLVIA MOLLOY

that Bioy, who occasionally collaborated with Borges, was not a very good dis-
ciple of the master. Furthermore, it also concluded that, although dealing with
the fantastic, Bioy Casares was really not a very good practitioner of magic
realism.® In sum, the author was found wanting on both counts. He did not
confirm the expected image, he was somewhere in-between, and his literary
distinction, quite literally, could not be read.
That perception of Latin American literatures should primarily be confined
to an essentialized magic realism is unfortunate; that, by extension, magic real-
ism should be seen as the expression of a homogenized postcoloniality exclu-
sively representative of “Latin America” is additionally regrettable.’ Post-colo-
nial studies should afford a way of teasing apart differences instead of erasing
them, of unpacking preconceived notions instead of pre-packaging cultural
commodities. Unfortunately, they seldom do.
I would like to mention very briefly the predicament of the Latin American
writer in the complicated reception scene I have described, a scene ignoring the
heterogeneous composition of Latin American literature, its distinctive, medi-
ated relations to its diverse metropolitan centers, its transculturated Westernism.
A well-meaning observer, Timothy Brennan, notes, for example, that among
Third World writers there “has been a trend of cosmopolitan commentators on
the Third World, who offer an inside view of formerly submerged peoples for
target reading publics in Europe and North America in novels that comply with
metropolitan literary tastes. Some of its better known authors have been from
Latin America: for example, Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Alejo Carpentier,
Miguel Asturias [sic], and others.” (63) This notion of a metropolitan “taste”
waiting to be satisfied with “an inside view of formerly submerged peoples,” a
view so redolent of an imperialist anthropological approach, does not even con-
template (cannot even imagine) that the target reading publics of Latin Ameri-
can writers are, primarily, Latin American; that it is for the literary taste of those
publics, and not to comply with metropolitan demands, that the Latin American
writer primarily writes. Awareness of the conditions of production and recep-
tion of texts in Latin America, awareness of what Spivak calls “the staging of
the language as the production of agency” (187), would show precisely how the
text functions in relation to its many contexts and not as a token commodity.
Reduced often to the role of the native informant by First-World unaware-
ness, the Latin American writer, in his or her dealings with that readership, has
often no recourse but ironic assent and creative distortion. An early example of
this ironical “writing back,” this pandering to First-World preconceptions the
better to explode them, may be found in Jules Supervielle, the Uruguayan-born
French poet, who invented a Créolopolis for his French readers, an “Améri-
 LATIN AMERICA IN THE U.S. IMAGINARY 197

que d’hyperbole,” as he describes it in a poem pointedly entitled “Le Goyavier

authentique.” Hyperbole, of course, reigns supreme in the fictions of Garcia
Marquez, who turns the imposture of magic realism into high art. The down-
side of such Latin American posturing, however, is that the writer may end up
caught, for whatever reasons—fame and acclaimed authority being two impor-
tant ones—in the very hyperbolic fiction he has contributed to create. Carlos
Fuentes, for example, writing in the New York Times on the uprisings in Chia-
pas, and giving one more tired turn to the reality-imitates-fiction cliché, referred
to the history of this repeatedly oppressed region as “something invented by the
great-grandfather of Gabriel Garcia Marquez” (January 9, 1994),
I am not proposing quick fixes, just calling attention to these operations
in the hopes of generating a more thoughtful debate on Latin America from
within the U.S. academy, a debate (and exchange) recognizing in Latin Ameri-
can cultural production not only multiple representational strategies and aes-
thetic practices but also a theoretical and critical agency that, until now, has
gone unnoticed. This appears particularly urgent at a time when the growth of
Spanish has reached uncalculated highs in this country, when it is no longer
possible to dismiss it as a merely utilitarian language, although the temptation
to do so may persist; particularly urgent when border-crossings and bilingual-
ism are no longer “mere” sociological issues but have become, in many cases,
aesthetic choices demanding competent readings; particularly urgent, finally,
because Latin American literature, both as creative and institutional practice,
and its relation to other literatures, are also being reformulated in specifically
Latin American settings, and those “outside” reformulations (“outside” the US
academy) should be an integral element of a truly transnational debate.'® If the
U.S. academy, and within it, not just Departments of Spanish and Portuguese
but Departments of Literature at large, cannot relate to such reformulations
and debates and cannot engage in exchange, if only to realize the importance
of the local in any transnational dialogue, then we will have little more than
incidences of cultural tourism.

Notes

1. See Molloy, “Scene,” and Sommer.

2. Carlos Alonso persuasively reflects,on the “narrative of futurity” that informs Latin
America’s secession from Spain and blots out the recuperation (or in some cases the
invention) of an indigenous past: “(T]he indigenous populations received the same
treatment in this ideological narrative of Creole hegemony as their erstwhile Span-
ish oppressors: they as well as the Spaniards were simply written out of it by being
198 SYLVIA MOLLOY

subsumed under the mantle of the preterit, by being assigned to what from the per-
spective of the narrative of the future could only be described as the non-place of the
past” (16). The fact that mestizaje was a most distinctive effect of Spanish colonialism
in Latin America further complicates the notion of recuperating a “pure” indigenous
past.
I take this notion of alternate Westernness from George Yiidice’s excellent essay, “We
Are Not the World.” He writes: “There is a well-founded reaction against Eurocen-
trism within multiculturalism that seeks to valorize other, non-Western cultural ex-
periences. The transfer of this tendency to Latin American cultures, however, can
produce serious distortions, not the least of which is to argue that Latin America is
non-Western. ... Latin American cultural experiences, I would like to argue, consti-
tute alternate was of being Western. .. . [It] is not that Latin American cultures are
Western in the same way as the U.S. or France but, rather, that they are inscribed in a
transcultural relation to Western modernity just as much as, say, Eastern Europe (or
for that matter multicultural U.S.) (209-10).
As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes, “[AJll the literature of the Third World gets
translated into a sort of with-it translatese, so that the literature by a woman in Pal-
estine begins to resemble, in the feel of its prose, something by a man in Taiwan”
(180).
None of these names appear, for example, in the “Postcolonial theory” bibliographical
section of Susan Bassnett’s Comparative Literature. As a matter of fact, there are only
three entries related to Latin America in that bibliography: Carlos Fuentes (who can
hardly be claimed as a theoretician), a rather old anthology of Chicano fiction (Som-
mers-Ybarra Fausto 1979), and a more recent collection of essays in Chicano cultural
studies (Calder6n-Saldivar 1990). The pertinence of the last two to Latin America is,
at best, indirect. The inclusion of Fuentes as a Latin American postcolonial thinker is
one more case of what Yudice calls “a politics of reception of so-called Third World
figures that gives priority to high profile positions and gestures and neglects the con-
tradictions of those figures in their national settings” (204).
A position murkily echoed by Miguel Angel Asturias, in an interview after receiving
the Nobel Prize, in which magic realism is strangely equated with social justice (See
Morris).
To give but one example: Susan Bassnett, when speaking of Nicolas Guillén’s book,
Motivos de son, concludes that these are “‘sound’ poems”—misinterpreting the word
son which refers to a highly sophisticated musical composition and not to mere sound.
Carrying the primitive sound motif even further, she adds that in Alejo Carpentier’s
The Lost Steps, the protagonist is “led to the primeval forests of his origins ostensibly
by the search for a primitive instrument” (84). The observation is worthy of Cassou’s
demand for forests and native pampas from Rubén Dario. For an acute analysis of
Cuban son as a transculturated form, see Pérez Firmat, 67—79.
This exemplary exercise in non-recognition, doubled by testy efforts to classify Bioy
Casares no matter what, brings to mind a wonderful passage in Borges: “[E]n 1403
 LATIN AMERICA IN THE U.S. IMAGINARY 199

[una sirena] paso por una brecha en un dique, y habit6 en

Haarlem hasta el dia de su
muerte. Nadie la comprendia, pero le ensefiaron a hilar .
. Un cronista del siglo XVI
razono que no era un pescado porque sabfa hilar, y que no
era una mujer porque podia
vivir en el agua. In 1403, [a mermaid] slipped through an
opening in a dam and lived
in Haarlem till the day she died. No one understood her
but they taught her how to
spin... A sixteenth-century chronicler reasoned that she
was not a fish because she
knew how to spin and that she was not a woman because she could live in the water”
(Obras 228).
9. To quote Spivak again: “[T]he interesting literary text might be precisely the text
where you do not learn what the majority view of majority cultural representation or
self-representation of a nation state might be” (“Politics” 187). The apparent lack of
interest in “non-representative” Latin American texts in this country is reflected in its
particularly problematic translation politics.
10. “Departments of Spanish may flourish, but not because of the attraction of Latin
American literature courses,” contends William Moebius (253). While this may or
may not be true, the mere possibility that cultural reasons and not base pragmatism
might explain the success of Spanish departments seems to worry the author. Interest-
ingly, in quoting the MLA statistics for English and foreign language majors in the
year 1993-1994, Moebius only reports statistics for French, German, and English.

Works Cited

Ahmad, Aijaz. “‘Third World Literature’ and the Nationalist Ideology,” Journal of Arts and
Ideas 17-18 (1989): 117-36.
Alonso, Carlos. The Burden of Modernity. The Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in Spanish
America. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Bassnett, Susan. Comparative Literature. A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell,
1993.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Discusidén. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1964.
. Obras completas. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974.
. Labyrinths. Selected Stories and Other Writings. Donald A. Yates and James E.
Irby, eds. New York: New Directions, 1962.
Brennan, Timothy. “The National Longing for Form,” in Homi K. Bhabha, ed. Nation and
Narration. London and New York: Routledge, 1990: 44-70.
Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983.
Fuentes, Carlos. “The News,” New York Times. January 9, 1994.
Garcia Canclini, Néstor. Hybrid Cultures: Strategiesfor Entering and Leaving Modernity.
Trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. Lopez. Foreword by Renato Rosaldo.
Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
200 SYLVIA MOLLOY

Klor de Alva, Jorge. “Colonialism and Postcolonialism as (Latin)-American Mirage.” Co-

lonial Latin American Review 1:1—2 (1992): 3-23.
Millington, Mark. “On Location: The Question of Reading Crossculturally,” Siglo XX/20th
Century Critique and Cultural Discourse 13: 1-2 (1995): 13-39.
Moebius, William. “Lines in the Sand: Comparative Literature and the National Literature
Departments,” Comparative Literature 49: 3 (1997): 243-58.
Molloy, Sylvia. La diffusion de la littérature hispano-américaine en France au XXe siécle.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972.
. “The Scene of Reading,” At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish
America. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991: 13-76.
Morris, Ira. “Interview with Miguel Angel Asturias,’ Monthly Review, March (1968): 50—
56.
Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. The Cuban Condition: Translation and Identity in Modern Cuban
Literature. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Sommer, Doris. “Plagiarized Authenticity: Sarmiento’s Cooper and Others,” Foundational
Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley-Los Angeles-Oxford:
University of California Press, 1991: 52-82.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “The Politics of Translation,’ in Michéle Barrett and Anne
Phillips, eds. Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates. Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1992: 177-200.
Supervielle, Jules. Poémes. Paris: Eugéne Figuiére, 1919.
Yudice, George. “We Are Not the World,” Social Text 31-32 (1992): 201-16.
 Mules and Snakes:
On the Neo-Baroque
Principle of De-Localization

Alberto Moreiras

Baroque Practice

The baroque theoria or procession, not only attends to the passion of the god.
Fundamentally, as the saetas show, it is also an adventure, an exposure to the
open. The baroque paso, as a passion in the open, is the site of an event. Some-
thing happens (pathos) that establishes a relationless relationship with the out-
side. The baroque pathos, if St. Teresa of Avila or St. John of the Cross can offer
a possible model, is the trace of an undefined pilgrimage against the background
of a lit house or of a dream of community. The protagonist of Peter Handke’s
On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House, a novel written after a long stay in
Castile and in deep reference to St. John’s experience, has two dreams: “In one
of them, adjacent to the small cellar in his house were suites of underground
rooms, one grand hall leading to the next, all sumptuously decorated, festively
lit, yet all of them empty, as if in expectation, awaiting a splendid, perhaps also
terrible event, and not just recently, but since time immemorial” (40). In the
second dream, “the hedge barriers to the neighboring properties were suddenly
gone, removed by force or simply fallen away, and people could see into each
other’s gardens and onto each other’s terraces, and not merely onto them, but
also into every corner of their houses, now suddenly laid bare, and likewise one

201
202 ALBERTO MOREIRAS

neighbor could see the other, which in the first moments caused immense mu-
tual embarrassment and shame, but then gradually gave way to a kind of relief,
almost pleasure” (40-41). On the basis of that second dream, we must perhaps
reinterpret Vélez de Guevara’s “devil on two sticks” as a cipher of the longing
for a transparent community, a baroque utopia, whose sinister reverse is the
anticipation of the society of control as prefigured in sixteenth-century Spain.
But the first dream inverts utopia and gives us its key: the community is empty,
it is only the potential site of the drive towards an event that does not happen.
The baroque pilgrim—the pilgrims, in Handke’s novel—“outside the commu-
nity, tied to no community” (29), start their banishment in the awareness that it
has always already happened. “What they shared, however, was their condition,
or their consciousness: of an adventure, dangerous in some unspecified way,
one in which a great deal, indeed, everything, was at stake, an adventure, fur-
thermore, on the verge of the forbidden, the illegal, even of a criminal offense.
Against the law? Against the way of the world? And none of them could have
said where this shared consciousness came from. In any case, what they were
doing, or especially would be doing in the future, could bring punishment down
on their heads, a punishment without mercy. But turning back now was out of
the question for them. And accordingly, in spite of everything, they really expe-
rienced their journey as something new and unprecedented” (72-73).
The step of the pilgrim, “ship-wrecked, and love-sick though spurned,” in
Luis de Gongora’s famous description, is de-localizing. Its relation with any
possible community is de-localizing. Hence the necessity, also baroque, of its
containment. Or it is perhaps containment itself that forces the pilgrim to be a
pilgrim—hence the danger. Everything can bring on punishment, but without
risking punishment, there is no adventure. If localization seeks in every case
tendentially the constitution of a community, and if all community seeks com-
munion—a communion regarding the localizing parameters—then the step or
the work of de-localization is against communion: it moves towards the inven-
tion of a countercommunitarian or de-communitarian space, towards a relation-
less relation. As a relationless relation, the baroque paso is also a love relation:
“Write nothing but love stories from now on! Love and adventure stories, noth-
ing else!—Someone went away. The house became silent. But something was
still missing: I hadn’t heard a certain door close” (186).
How can we think de-communication politically? How does one de-com-
municate or excommunicate politically? Through exodus, or affirmative renun-
ciation. There is perhaps a way in which the renunciation or abandonment of
positions, rather than antipolitical, unconceals the disciplining conditions of the
political and can thus claim a repoliticization. In the name of what? One can
 MULES AND SNAKES 203

only think of an absolutely precarious response to that question: in the name of

a principle of affective freedom, of a liberation of affect, in the name of biopo-
litical de-disciplining, in the name of a refusal of what is, what will be, what
was, because temporality itself has come to be experienced as lack, as debt: sad
passions.' A sad passion is, for Spinoza, the passion that cooperates in its own
enslavement—on the basis of a perverse compensation for an absence.” If our
academic practice is or can be thought as a sad passion, then our academic prac-
tice is a sinister university passion for self-discipline and self-domination: an
antipolitical passion. In that case, the only properly political thing regarding our
academic practice is renunciation and exodus. Where to? Is there an exterior-
ity to university discourse? If our academic practice is nothing but a localizing
and disciplining apparatus of capture, can renunciation and exodus determine a
non-capturable exteriority? Can the Neobaroque be one of its names?
It would not be just any name. For some decades the Hispanic Baroque has
been theorized, on both its Spanish and its Latin American sides, as a cultural
principle of modernity, of a certain modernity in our socio-political traditions.
Rehearsing the history of that critique, John Beverley extracts from the deep
imbrication of the Baroque with the Spanish modality of imperial reason the
conclusion that the Baroque may be a sort of non-erasable Latin American cul-
tural unconscious, in its many manifestations as “American baroque, mestizo
baroque, creole baroque, new-world baroque, ‘real-marvelous’ baroque, neo-
baroque, postmodern baroque” (9). The Baroque is for Beverley the trace of a
curious structure in double register: if on one side, it responds to its determina-
tion as the cultural form of Spanish imperial domination, both in the colonies
and in the metropolitan space, on the other side, it generates a lettered excess or
supplement that moves towards the dissemination of sense and makes it work
towards a radical immanentization of experience: “the paradox of baroque art
is that it is an aristocratic-absolutist technique of power and at the same time an
awareness of the limitations of that power” (24). For Beverley, following Louis
Althusser, the ideological state-apparatuses are the sites of a conflict, and con-
tradictory as such. To think on the Baroque is to think about literature and the
state in early Modernity. The very contradiction at the heart of baroque practice
turns the baroque field into a field of immanence, that is, into the possibility of
a theoretical practice that will not be reducible, to use Alain Badiou’s terms,
either to an archi-aesthetics or to an archi-politics.’ The Baroque announces
rather the metapolitical conditions -of a practice of truth. As a truth procedure,
the Baroque is the site of a subject-constituting struggle. The baroque subject, if
it truly dictates the Hispanic appropriation to/of modernity, marks both its self-
inscripting possibilities and its possibilities for de-inscription or ex-surrection.
204 ALBERTO MOREIRAS

But the ex-surrected subject is a subject in exodus and a subject in self-disso-

lution: a subject in crisis of faith, the baroque subject-in-withdrawal. Already
in Géngora, the pilgrim of Soledades, like Handke’s pilgrim, is a subject in
withdrawal: “he is a hero... whose action consists of becoming different than
he is” (Beverley 46-47). The baroque field of immanence constitutes a subject
whose peculiar form of presence is its withdrawal, “confused solitude.” “That
is why the ruin comes to symbolize Soledades itself’ (54). And thus, concludes
Beverley,

At the end of Soledades we have not yet reached the direct description of the court
or the empire. Both will become the tragic fatherland of the pilgrim ‘the follow-
ing day.’ The historical experience of usurpation and disaster tacitly conditions
the form of Soledades. In baroque narrative legitimacy necessarily implies an im-
mersion in the bucolic that will serve the Prince as an apprenticeship in the rules
of prudence and virtue. In order to govern his own people well, he must know the
capacity for freedom of the latter, the extension and kind of the people’s suffering,
the vital and communitarian alternatives that survive in the country. The geometric
and social labyrinth of the city hides all of that from him, so he must abandon it,
together with his identity and his class, in order to become ‘one of them’ . . [IJn
Gongora the pastoral golden age is no longer a landscape outside of history, that is,
an impossible dream of totality and naturalness, but rather an intra-historical land-
scape, a painting that must be read in the court’s walls, where its social and moral
redemptive value will need to be deciphered. Soledad/edad de sol: the deluge that
will abolish present disorder and prepare the return to the golden age is the poem
itself, by erasing the normal terms of experience and by sending us back to our
origins, by atomizing and reforming. (69)

This is one of the two faces of the Baroque: the excessive face, the back
face or the immanent antagonism of the Baroque against the containment that
situates it as an imperial instrument for state affirmation. From this face, in
Goéngora, for instance,

the work that remains is the creation of a fragmentary sense of the hispanic,
delinked from an ideology of exploitation and repression . . . perhaps for this rea-
son Latin American writing carries Géngora’s strong influence, since it shares with
Soledades the function of seeking a possible culture and society departing from
the mutilation that colonialism and imperialism have inflicted upon their subjects.
For Gongora and the Spain of his time, such an appeal was unfruitful; the poet will
withdraw to the night of exile and the sad wisdom of disappointment. But the ap-
peal will have to be repeated, since the disappearance of the pilgrim at the end of
the work will reveal that we ourselves occupy the stage of the present. (75)
 MULES AND SNAKES 205

What would the conditions of appropriation be of this baroque practice of

the imperial subject in withdrawal for the present? Hispanism, like any other
epistemic apparatus, is a site of expropriation. If Hispanism seeks, in every case,
something like an appropriation of the Hispanic object, the distance between
the object and the appropriative intention remains irreducible. Expropriation
happens on both sides: the gaze does not fully capture the object and the object
does not exhaustively resist its partial appropriation. We can call that distance
constitutive fissure. The fissure between theoretical discourse and the field of
reflection is constitutive. There are moments in the history of knowledge when
the fissure remains in the background and is practically forgotten or disavowed.
But there are moments when not just the fissure but its very denegation come to
be thematized as proper objects of reflection. It is true that thematizing the fis-
sure and thematizing the denegation of the fissure are different things—one can
do the former without the latter, although not the latter without the former. But
one can do both at the same time, and that would be the properly baroque fold in
academic practice. We are in one of those moments. They are always paradoxi-
cal times because they are times of epistemic deconstitution, when knowledge
comes to understand itself through its very default or withdrawal, that is, as a
relation to non-knowledge. Knowledge understands itself then in its nakedly
expropriatory relation—it understands itself as an expropriating relation. This
has some inconveniences, but it also has advantages.
The conditions of possibility of Hispanist university discourse have shifted
over the last two decades. Only a few years ago, Hispanism was still fairly sta-
bilized at the crossing between our-Americanist drives—we can give José Mar-
ti’s expression its full appropriative force—or, in the case of Spain, drives that
were exceptionalist regarding the history of Europe, and the centripetal forces
of scientific universalism. The Baroque has been overwhelmingly understood
that way: as a field of identitarian expression concerning the peculiar Hispanic
experience of modernity. Our academic practice could still understand itself
as the systematic application of identity discourse at the crossing of specific
histories and general epistemologies, or of general histories and specific epis-
temologies. Poststructuralism and postcolonial studies have harshly attacked,
if in different ways, the very concept of a general epistemology. There is a
dimension of that critique which is not always duly acknowledged: the shadow
of the reflexive subject has always fallen upon the object of reflection. Just
like Nietzsche told us that the disappearance of the “true” world would end up
destroying the very possibility of thinking appearance, the failure of epistemic
certainty at the hands of poststructuralist and postcolonialist critique also buries
the very possibility of thinking the specificity of the specific.* So postcolonialist
206 ALBERTO MOREIRAS

critique cannot open the way to a re-appropriation of the object: the destruction
of a general critical subject implies the dissolution of the specific critical object.
We were able to recognize the constitutive fissure between theoretical discourse
and field of reflection, but we were unable to sustain that first intuition and we
moved towards a new denegation: we buried our head in the illusory sand of a
new object of re-appropriation. Epistemic deconstitution is erased as such in the
contemporary (postcolonialist) repetition of the essentially appropriative—and
thus essentially colonizing and colonialist—gesture of modern university dis-
course.
In its geopolitical or regionalist dimension, we can date that gesture from
its American inception in the first baroque, criollo attempts to undo European
imperial sovereignty in the Americas. Beverley notes that this practice followed
a complicated process of colonial reaffirmation that started with the mystifying
spread of imperial Gongorism. If Gongorism, considered a heterodox practice
in Spain, becomes a sort of official aesthetic discourse in the Colony, this is
because it has come to be recaptured by the state apparatus and turned into
a ‘‘a kind of magical accumulation theory that masks the real ‘primitive ac-
cumulation of capital’... harmonizing it in appearance with the religious,
aristocratic, and metropolitan presuppositions of Spanish imperial ideology: a
specular discourse that allows the colonizer the luxury of thinking that his situ-
ation of privilege and power is a natural and providential phenomenon, that he
inhabits a social space which is in principle harmonious and utopian, where
all rebelliousness and all dissidence would be automatically disqualified as the
product of forces of evil that threaten to destroy that order” (92). Criollo, or
proto-nationalist, Baroque consists for the most part of the displacement and
reappropriation of the very same apparatus of capture by the criollo elites. Its
precise beginning can be found in the abandonment of the epic forms in poetry,
always associated with military conquest or state foundation, and their substi-
tution with forms of “minor” poetry. For Beverley, these minor forms, “‘occa-
sional sonnets, romances, villancicos, loas, satiric letrillas’” (104), which were
assiduously cultivated by Gongorism, offered the possibility of a new literature
where practices of everyday life could be represented. The first edition of Juan
de Espinosa Medrano’s Apologético (1662), with its explicit purpose of “found-
ing the ideological (a nascent creole consciousness) upon the aesthetic,” marks
“the epistemological birth of the lettered city” in Latin America (115).
From those modern beginnings, regional thinking constitutes itself in the
Latin America lettered city in three ideological clusters that might turn out to
be one and the same: let us call them identity, mimesis, and difference. We can
understand all of them to be modalities of self-projection of colonial Gongor-
 MULES AND SNAKES 207

ism as state apparatus. On the first cluster, identity, the regionalist gesture has
been the attempt to transform cultural-historical discourse, that is, the archive,
into a machine for the production and containment of identity: we can be more
precise, at some cost, and refer to this first moment as “construction of the na-
tion.” But identity, in order to become praxis, must undergo a positivization, an
embodiment. The embodiment of identity is also the limit of identity and the
moment in which identity turns into appropriative mimesis. Mimetic appropria-
tion is always already a critique of the identitarian theft, a critique of translation
as always necessarily translation into the dominant, and at the same time, and
crucially, a critique of critique: mimetic appropriation is also a restoration of
identitarian theft and a celebration of translation. We can call this second mo-
ment cultural anti-imperialism if we do not forget that anti-imperialism lives
off what it is against, in the same way in which colonial Gongorism was made
possible by its previous heterodoxy: state reason always moves through the
incorporation of its own critique. A third moment then ensues, the moment in
which identity reasserts its right against mimetic appropriation: the moment of
difference. We no longer need identitarian representations but rather differential
representations. Identity is now difference, and it is no longer major and na-
tional, but minor and fragmented: translation is self-translation, and subjectivity
is now transcultural and hybrid. Its stasis, the point of closure of this ideological
formation, is now the essence without essence of the local in resistance, that 1s,
the merely representational against other representations, where representation
represents nothing but the representational struggle itself, brings nothing new
to presence, only re-presents (itself) against. Let us call this moment: globaliza-
tion, or the moment of cultural studies.
Can we retain the notion that these three gestures are in fact not sequen-
tial from a historical or chronological perspective, although that too, but rather
co-incidental and co-temporal? No identity without mimesis and difference; no
mimesis without identity and difference, and so forth. These are the three ges-
tures of the regionalist intellectual—or rather, the three gestures of the regional-
ist ideologue, since thinking is somewhere else, always in a fourth gesture which
is, as such, much more difficult to identify, since it remains beyond identity, and
which would constitute, precisely, what one could call the disaster of the first
three, their dis/aster, that is, their dis-orientation, their de-teleologization, their
ruin. Thinking would be on the side of the Baroque pilgrim, of his (her) exposure
to the open. Thinking is on the side of the always ongoing epistemic deconsti-
tution that does not cease being active for being disavowed. It is the site of the
disaster of the three constitutive gestures of modern university discourse in its
regionalist dimension. But if disaster is an interval of being, and if crisis is What
208 ALBERTO MOREIRAS

transforms disaster into possibility, into the possibility of a passage, a passage

towards an alternative projection of historical time, towards a new temporality,
then disaster is the dawn of a fourth gesture. The constitutive fissure between
theoretical discourse and field of reflection already always keeps in reserve the
possibility of the fourth gesture, which allows for the turning of a certain aban-
donment, of a certain banishment, into the de-localizing paso towards joyful
passions. This is the always implicit paso in the constitution of the Baroque: not
just a form of power, but also the awareness of the finitude of power. A specific
tradition in contemporary Latin American literary thinking has called that paso
Neobaroque. The recuperation of the Neobaroque form of experience, itself al-
ready a recuperation of the Baroque, is a necessity for contemporary theoretical
practice, not in the name of a re-appropriation of tradition, but rather in the name
of de-appropriation, in the name of an affirmative exodus out of university dis-
course as a sad passion of self-enslavement. The Neobaroque is one of the forms
in which reflection asserts itself anti-ideologically, as a principle of de-regional-
ization. Thinking is, for the Neobaroque paso or passage, the interruption of the
principle of regionalization, a pilgrimage towards the outside.
But Beverley resists what he calls “literatura neobarroca,” and wonders
whether it is itself something other than the superstructural expression of a
declining and desperate Latin American petty bourgeoisie attempting to hold
on to some kind of residual symbolic power. No doubt Neobaroque literature
or criticism can be forms of more or less reactionary privilege and cultural ex-
clusivity, can effectively connive with contemporary forms of imperial control,
can serve the establishment of conditions of hegemonic domination in the direct
or indirect, intentional or counter-intentional repression of subaltern expres-
sive forms. No doubt this is the main ideological interest in so much of current
Latin Americanist pro-Baroque or pro-Neobaroque critique—there where Latin
Americanism is still understood, or lived, as a sad passion.
Polemizing against his antagonist Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, Beverley
states that Espinosa Medrano’s historical accomplishment, his inaugural con-
tribution to the foundation of the Latin American lettered city, was not just an
act of liberation. Chiasmus (retruécano), to which Gonzalez Echevarria assigns
in Celestina’s Brood an emblematic character as the essential trope of baroque
practice, will find in Beverley a complex, even dangerous and destructive con-
dition of possibility. For Gonzalez Echevarria, “the retruécano is an equivalency
in the process of displaying itself both in its inherent repetition and difference,
in its reiteration and desired simultaneity. The chiasmus can be read in either
direction, both ways meeting somewhere in a virtual center where appearances
are reversed . . . American history, American writing, and therefore the reading
 MULES AND SNAKES 209

of American writing, must allow for the manifestation of such inversions, must
practice such inversions; chiasmus is the system of American history” (181).
Espinosa Medrano’s work brings to its epochal accomplishment, for Gonzdlez
Echevarria, the Baroque chiasmus by placing Gongorism in America and thus
giving it its full paradoxical truth:

The Baroque has a heightened consciousness of the model’s prestige and power;
hence baroque poetic practice consists in an ambiguous homage to the model, since
its monumental presence is still nothing but the setting for the new. The baroque
text is a kind of filigree, a jewel in which the setting is highlighted instead of the
precious stone. The strange in the Baroque is not the unknown, but the known
displaced and blown out of proportion. ... The Baroque does not suffer from an
anxiety of influence so much as from an anxiety of confluence and affluence, an
excess in which the new is merely one more oddity. The Baroque consists of an ac-
cepted and assumed secondariness and belatedness, which are capable of absorbing
the geographic and temporal displacements of the Antartic poet and can even flaunt
it like an emblem. (164)

By uniting criollo self-awareness and a vindication of Gongorism, Espinosa

Medrano founds the Latin American lettered city in chiasmus itself: “the creole
lives in a world of art in which he is the artifact par excellence. That is his odd-
ity. He is a trope incarnate” (16). This is the beginning of Latin American poetic
language, which Gonzalez Echevarria presents as the paradoxical accomplish-
ment of a particularist universality, that is, as the first, hence inaugural, Ameri-
can coincidence of being and thinking, or writing, and thus as the establishment
of a tradition which will become the very tradition of American hemispheric
modernity. But this defense of Americanness as secondary originality and thus
properly baroque originality against metropolitan precedence carries within
a repressed or disavowed chiasmus—this is the chiasmus that Beverley turns
against Gonzalez Echevarria. If it is true that the becoming-official of Gongor-
ism in America succeeds in incorporating heterodoxy into American life as the
genuine mark of an inchoate our-Americanism against the imperial position, it
is also true that such an our-Americanism includes, and is even based upon, a
founding repression where what is excluded is the very possibility of an indige-
nous counter-hegemony, which is always already outside the game of models
and copies. In the creation of the American lettered city, “the opposition civi-
lization/barbarism has shifted from a racial differentiation (European/indige-
nous) to a cultural one (cultured/ignorant) which is essentially equivalent to the
one that sets Géngora against his opponents in Apologético” (Beverley 125).
As a consequence, however, “the idealization of literary practice . . . sets up a
210 ALBERTO MOREIRAS

(precarious) creole or mestizo-creole identity not just in the face of the anterior-
ity/authority of European or peninsular culture, a stratagem that will move to-
wards a refunctionalization of the literary canon . . . as a register of possibilities
for that identity. It also establishes that identity in a differential relationship .. .
with a subaltern social subject: subaltern precisely given its lack of access to
or presumed incapacity for cultured literature, which can, however, adequately
‘represent’ or ‘speak for’ that subject” (Beverley 126-27).
Sad passions appear in Gonzdlez Echevarria through that originary denega-
tion that enthrones the Baroque as the condition of possibility of Americanness
without noting that the notion of everything that is American is then constituted
through its very definition as a mechanism of contention and enslavement of
what remains beyond the definition (and not just indigenous discourse). Litera-
ture, the site of baroque practice, incorporates in Gonzalez Echevarria’s version
of it a dominant character as an ideological state apparatus, understanding state
in a wide sense as the set of discursive practices conforming the social. In other
words, the Baroque, in Gonzalez Echevarria’s version of it, cannot be but colo-
nial Baroque. It cannot go beyond its status as regional ideology at the service
of the constitution of the local as a differential/mimetic/identitarian apparatus
of social capture. This limit of conceptualization is both a limit and the very
condition of possibility of Gonzalez Echevarria’s general project of reflection,
which consists of positing the Baroque as a mark of continental identity from
its metonymic installation in the so-called Boom of the Latin American novel.
“Why the Baroque? From outside the cultures of the Spanish-speaking world
it is difficult to fathom why a movement that is so apparently European should
be of any concern to modern Spanish-American writers. ... And yet a host of
[them] have made of the Baroque a banner for their new art, calling it the Neo-
Baroque” (195-96). Gonzalez Echevarria is a critic of the Boom, which also
means: his critique is necessarily contained within the discursive parameters as-
signed to and by the Boom. The Boom explains him, as much as he explains the
Boom, because his critical practice would seem to seek the determination of the
Boom as a literary apparatus at the service of a differential/identitarian construc-
tion where what is truly at stake is the ancestral question of Latin American
belonging. For whom is or must Latin America be? For those who make Latin
American identity. Who makes it? Whoever has hegemony. The problem is not
the answer, in a strong sense tautological and thus unavoidable, but the ques-
tion itself. But the question is not simply Gonzélez Echevarria’s: the question of
Latin American belonging, of Latin American appropriation, is the very question
of Hispanist or Latin Americanist constitution as an apparatus of regional appro-
priation. One could only proceed, as Handke suggests, “against the law, against
 MULES AND SNAKES Zila

the way of the world” by turning Hispanism around and understanding how ap-
propriation is always simultaneously expropriation and theft, as it is always the
case and the general strategy for any epistemic apparatus. One could then seek
the critical constitution of an ex-surrected subject of non-knowledge, a subject
in withdrawal, in exodus, in crisis of faith and of fidelity, in epistemic decon-
stitution: a neobaroque subject, against the containment of the Neobaroque as
a practice of identitarian belonging. Nothing further, perhaps, from Gonzalez
Echevarria’s mind, voluntarily contained in a practice of belonging radicalized
into a practice of self-belonging, and thus devoted to a policing and disciplining
of borders whose excess coincides with one of the faces, but only one, of the
baroque subject itself: “I, the critic, am the border. Nothing outside myself has a
valid existence. Nothing I do not approve of is Latin Americanism.”
What about Beverley? How does he solve the problem he detects in
Gonzalez Echevarria? Their two positions have largely determined, within
North American Hispanism at least, the parameters of critical practice for over
a decade. It is not that they have invented their respective positions: rather, the
polemic between them sets the historical limit in our professional errancy for
the long decade of the 1990s, that is, during the period between the exhaustion
of the Boom of the novel and the end of the group project of the Latin American
Subaltern Studies group. This is also the moment prefigured by the publication
of Rigoberta Mencht’s testimonio. In order further to define Beverley’s posi-
tion, one would have to refer to the totality of Against Literature and later texts,
but I will limit myself to the last chapter of the book I have been quoting from,
Una modernidad obsoleta. Estudios sobre el barroco (1997). This book could
be understood in its totality as a response to Gonzalez Echevarria’s Celestina’s
Brood. Its last chapter reproduces, with significant changes, an essay that was
originally read in 1991 and published in 1993: “Post-literatura: Subjeto subal-
terno e impasse de las humanidades.”
In reference to texts on the tupamarista and katarista rebellions of the
late eighteenth century, Beverley points out a forceful critical disjunction: “if
the historian chooses literature as a representative instance of rebellion (in the
sense of both mimetic and political representativeness), he or she sees an essen-
tially creole-reformist movement, conceived within the very same legal and hu-
manist codes imposed by colonization; if the historian chooses the non-literary
practices of rebellion he or she sees a revolution from below, above all of the
indigenous popular masses, with conjunctural mestizo and creole allies, willing
to reestablish a millenarian and utopian Inca state, or even to reestablish pre-
Incaic forms” (145). The force of that disjuntion goes, of course, well beyond
suggesting an alternative between literary historiography and historiography
212 ALBERTO MOREIRAS

of social movements. Chiasmus acts here in another way, through the clear
view that all textualism, whether literary-critical or properly historiographic, is
always already situated within the total interpretation of history as the history
of the dominant classes. Prose, and especially colonial prose, is in this view
always already, as Ranajit Guha put it, prose of counterinsurgency. All literature
is then also seemingly prose of counterinsurgency, in a context in which the
implications are not merely political: if the critical apparatus is an apparatus
for the interpretation of the prose of counterinsurgency as prose tout court, then
the critical apparatus is not only counterinsurgent itself, but must abandon all
pretensions of aspiring to historical truth. Thus, a critical epistemology based
directly or indirectly on textualist or literary resources automatically becomes
a bogus epistemology: mere ideology. “From this perspective, to look at texts
written by leaders of the rebellion for a creole reader as representatives of the
rebellion not just darkens the fact of an indigenous national-popular, non-liter-
ary (or not entirely based on cultured literature) production; it is also an act of
appropriation that excludes the indigenous subject as a subject conscious of his
or her own history and incorporates it as a contingent element in another history
(a history of the nation, of emancipation, of Peruvian or Latin American litera-
ture) with another subject (creole, Spanish-speaking, lettered)” (147). A for-
tiori, if this is the case for texts written by indigenous leaders of an indigenous
rebellion, it is even more the case for non-rebel texts, that is, for the majority
of texts that make up the Latin American literary archive. The Latin American
historical archive appears then as the archive, not of a revelation, but of a con-
cealment of experience regarding which the ideological apparatus of university
discourse can only appear as collaborationist. What is there to do, then, in order
to restitute revelation, not concealment, to the archive? How can we imagine a
critical practice that may at least give us, to use words that Maurice Blanchot
thought for another context, “the revelation of what revelation destroys” (47)?
Beverley’s insistence on subaltern representation leads him to wonder
whether literature is hopelessly trapped in processes of social inequality that
constitute it as much as it helps constitutes them. His insistence on developing
anon-literary concept of the literary represents what is perhaps the fundamental
position of what one could consider the Latin Americanist humanities left in the
last few years. At the end of his book on the Baroque he asks: “Is it possible to
transgress the Kantian distinction between aesthetic and teleological judgment?
Does literature depend on the existence of social inequality? “ (154). One may
wonder if the questions themselves are also baroque or if they are thoroughly
exterior to their field of inquiry. Beverley presents us with an apparently apo-
retic situation that he calls “the impasse of the humanities.” where all possible
 MULES AND SNAKES 213

options are or would seem to be equally hopeless. On one side, the “literary”
option seems to be doomed to the ideological reproduction of a socio-political
blockage that carries all knowledge pretensions to failure. If literature is noth-
ing but a superstructural procedure for control and self-reproduction on the part
of the dominant classes as such, then no literary practice can ever become a
truth procedure—the more literature tries to avoid its own condition as a state
apparatus, the more it reinforces its condition as a state apparatus, and the more
it sinks into its own ideological illusions. The more literature attempts to open
itself to subaltern expressivity, the more it hides its absolute complicity with
whatever is hegemonic at any given moment, and the more efficient its partici-
pation becomes in the repression of its own constitutive outside.
On the other side, however, the “‘anti-literary” option is caught in a similar
paradox, since its own radicalization in the name of subaltern expression, that
is, in the name of that which literature, as an ideological state apparatus, must
repress in order to constitute itself as such, is an empty radicalization. In what
language could any such radicalization express itself? Perhaps in a “post-lit-
erary” language? Would this be a language absolutely capable of eliminating
tropes, of expressing itself without figuration, of annihilating all metaphor, of
literalizing its own content as well as its own form? A neutral language, where
language itself would have given itself up, would have abandoned itself in favor
of a direct expression, without representation or mediation? A language that
would accede being directly, in the total identification of being and thinking, in
the total mutual absorption of action and word? But no dream is more literary
than that. This is perhaps the reason why Beverley introduces in his own preface
to his book a meditation that places the question about the outside of literature
at the very center of the literary adventure itself: “the great lesson of Russian
formalism was that literature’s ‘aesthetic effect’... persists through a process
of self-denegation and defamiliarization that was called ostranenie. I believe
that literature, today, can only exist in its negation, in its ostranenie. And the
most radical site for that negation is [to be reached] from the perspective of
what could not be adequately represented by literature, from the non-literary,
even from the anti-literary. For me, the subaltern is the name of that site” (10).
“To subalterno” briefly appears in Beverley’s text as the most literary of
literary devices. It is then not so astounding that a meditation on the Baroque
ends in a reference to Me llamo Rigoberta Menchi. Menchit’s testimonio is
archi-literature, insofar as it brings the literary apparatus to defamiliarization:
“literature, today, can only exist through its denegation.” Then, if testimonio is
the denegation of literature, testimonio is thoroughly crossed by chiasmus—the
more testimonio, the more literature. Baroque retruécano finally comes to its
214 ALBERTO MOREIRAS

own. This is probably the reason why a similar—if not identical—reasoning

appears in Gonzalez Echevarria’s book, where the entire literary apparatus
comes to support itself in Celestina, a pre-Baroque text, hence by definition
not Baroque, a foundational text of Baroque literature through and from the
very premise that it can be foundational of nothing, of no literature: “Celestina
inaugurates modernity by taking at once to its very limits the radical critique of
values subtending modern works . . . a work that has not only opened the dark
abyss of modernity, but appears to have filled it all with its gloom, can have no
heritage” (11). Through their respective meditations on chiasmus, Beverley and
Gonzalez Echevarria come to be chiasmatically related. And their chiasmus is
also the very figure of their identification.
Is Beverley’s critique of Gonzalez Echevarria then justified? Is Gonzalez
Echevarria not basing his own imaginary construction of a literary apparatus
for criollo hegemony on the very impossibility that the literary apparatus can
support any hegemony? And is this procedure not exactly equivalent to Bever-
ley’s imaginary construction of an antiliterary subalternism on the impossibility
that the antiliterary apparatus can subtract itself from literature’s hegemony?
For Gonzalez Echevarria, “Celestina’s witchcraft is an antisystem of values and
practices that would claim to induce the real world, particularly people, to act
according to how they really are, not as they pretend to be” (14). No hegemonic
illusions here: Baroque literature, if truly based, as Gonzalez Echevarria affirms,
in the radical antihumanism of Celestina, can never become a stable apparatus of
domination. It would rather be given over to a constant dismantling of all power
pretension, to the revelation of power as such, to the baring of the fact that all
“received knowledge, even in the form of religion, is but an elaborate cover-up
that literature must constantly expose” (31). Literature and anti-literature thus
come to the same: to the destruction of the dream of literality, a dream which,
although disavowed, is in such large measure a part of the present configuration
of cultural studies and its insistence on what I earlier called the essence without
essence of the local in resistance, in the merely representational against other
representations, where representation does not represent anything but the repre-
sentational struggle, brings nothing new to presence, it only presents itself, re-
peatedly, tediously, without a ground, where history is nothing but the pretext for
an infinite leveling of the discursive field through depthless, mantric syllogisms.
Against that supremely literary myth, it is better to opt for a neobaroque theoreti-
cal practice, since the latter at least understands, as Gonzalez Echevarria assures
us that Celestina understands, that “while it may be difficult ... to live like a
knight-errant or courtly lover in the present world, it is equally difficult... not
to” (31). Literary power, in the neobaroque gaze, is the awareness of the finitude
 MULES AND SNAKES 215

of literary power. It becomes essential then to tell love stories, even if they will
have to be told from the dark side of the knight-errant and the courtly lover, from
that with which they establish no relation, from the anticommunitarian position,
from the excommunicated and decommunicated site that marks the space of the
adventurous pilgrim. If not, “it is better done by the jackasses in the meadow”
(Celestina, qtd. in Gonzalez Echevarria 32).
The limit of Gonzalez Echevarria’s project—and, I insist, it is not merely
his project—is the self-conversion of the critic into an ideological state appa-
ratus: it does not matter that “state” means here phantom state or counter-state,
a literary state whose most powerful interpellative injunction is “act accord-
ing to who you are,” beyond and against ideological prejudice, but within the
overall prejudice that places the critic in accord with the tradition, thus setting
and determining the truth of being. The limit of Beverley’s project—not just
his project—could be ciphered in the baring or radical abandonment of the
critical position, as it renounces language itself in the name of an otherness
that language would always already repress. Are Beverley and Gonzalez Eche-
varria then saying the same, like the theologians in Borges’s short story? At
some level they are through their very differences, and the other is in the way
in which they say it. But then of course the difference between propositional
content and propositional form, between the said and the saying—is that not the
fundamental problem of neobaroque expression?’ Their chiasmus is not just the
site of their identification—tt is also the site of their difference.

Outside University Discourse

Let me then move, in this second section, towards an alternative conceptualiza-

tion of Neobaroque practice. Celestina’s word about jackasses in the meadow
curiously suggests that pure enjoyment, at least when it is still human, falls
essentially short of pure enjoyment. It is, therefore, in the name of enjoyment
that one must resist the critical truism according to which the Neobaroque is “a
reckless investigation into the possibilities of enjoying with words” (Echava-
rren 7). We know that there was always more than language in Villamediana or
Quevedo, in Géngora or Gracian. We also know that of enjoyment in language
one could say what Henry Charles Lea said of the Spanish Inquisition: that it is
“a power within [language] superior to [language] itself.”° Language and state,
but: power within the state superior to the state itself, power within language
superior to language itself. Always, in it, that which is in you more lovable than
you yourself, without which there would not be a yourself or any kind of a love
216 ALBERTO MOREIRAS

relationship. But precisely: because there is that power there is neither a your-
self nor is there a love relationship. The relation to that power of non-relation
is the Baroque—or, rather, the Baroque is a relation to that power or force of
what exceeds and, upon exceeding, goes into delirium.’ And the Neobaroque is
the specific, contemporary kind of relation to that power. Insofar as that power
is the object itself of theory, of the theoretical gaze, the Neobaroque is a theo-
retical practice, as the Baroque was. I understand a theoretical practice as the
absolute resistance to every process of reification or commodification of forms,
whether aesthetic forms, value forms, or conceptual forms. Only theoretical
practice preserves the possibility of an irruption of thinking. Theoretical prac-
tice is irruption of thinking. Why do we name it neobaroque?
The Neobaroque is a regional specification of Latin American theoretical
practice. It is Latin American regional thought: thought, not ideology. If ide-
ology is a mechanism for subject formation as well as a social love relation,
thought is always subjective deconstitution and revelation of the end of relation,
the establishment of what is relationless in any relation. If ideology is narra-
tion, thought is de-narration, de-narrativization, un-work. In the name of what?
Thought theorizes the excess concerning what is legible in any ideological ar-
ticulation. In a strictly materialist definition, thought is nothing but ideology’s
excess—an exodus.* The Baroque is ideological exodus, and thus absolute re-
sistance to all relation, to all reification of place, of situation. It is a relation to
the power of non-relation, hence an interruption of ideological sovereignty, of
the sovereignty of ideology. We need to mobilize the intellectual force of the
Neobaroque as freedom of thought—against the ideological communionism of
academic practice. What is interesting today? What has never ceased being in-
teresting: to trace, to establish an irruptive theoretical practice, to seek freedom
at and from the institution, to push thought towards its limit, to let thought come
into self-determination beyond the pressures of ideology—to affirm, and to run
the risk, of transverberation, of the angel’s sword, that is, of the moment that
Lacan theorizes under the rubric of “encore!,” the moment of maximum enjoy-
ment, maximum pain, when philosophy is no longer a misunderstanding of the
body and the body threatens to become a misunderstanding of philosophy.’
The Neobaroque is a regional mark of the Latin Americanist intellectual.
It can be defined as the murga or procession, the theoria that irrupts desolately
in the first poem of the first book of poems published by Néstor Perlongher. We
know that murga is, baroquely, in an association that would have delighted the
Lacanian Severo Sarduy or José Lezama Lima, since he talked of the “juice of
the eyes of the mule,” “its dirty tears,” and said about them that “they are in re-
demption arrogant offering” (Lezama, Poesia 1.165), the delirium of the olive,
 MULES AND SNAKES 217

its fetid juice or “alpechin,”

REET)
what the olive cries or exudes. But murga is also
the procession or “company of bad musicians that, upon Christmas or Easter, on
birthdays, etc., knock on the door of wealthy households with the hope of receiv-
ing some presents” (Diccionario de la Real Academia). Let us imagine a murga
without hope, a murga that either arrives or fails to arrive, a murga in imminence,
a bad murga of improper festivities, invisible, inaudible, but one which, precisely
in view of its inadequacies, becomes the transferential horizon, the relationless
relation, the abyssal support of the Lezamian “insular night” or of Sarduy’s un-
nameable feast. That murga is the trace of the Baroque that Perlongher defines
in the following way in the poem titled “La murga, los polacos”’:

It is a procession, it marches in the Warsaw night, it makes miracles with the masks,
it confuses the Polish public. The Krakow students look at it stunned: They have
never seen anything similar in their books. It is not Carnival, it is not a Saturday,
it is not a procession, they are not marching, nobody sees. There is no fog, it is a
procession, it is streamers, it is confetti, the cold ether like snow in a street in a city
in a Poland that is not, that is not. Which is not to say it has not been, or even that it
no longer is, or even that it is not being in this instant, Warsaw with its processions,
its disguises, its harlequins, and its Caroline bears, its famous peace—we talk about
the same, the one that rules leaning on the Vistula, the troubled river where the
procession falls, with its whistles, its colors, its meaty cha-cha-chas, producing in
the roiling waters a noise like a splashing that nobody pays attention to, since there
is no procession, and even if there were one, it would not be in Warsaw, and that
every Pollack knows. (23)

If we imagine an intellectual practice based upon the relationless relation

with that murga that does not quite exist but that, through its not existing, exists
in its omission and its void, we will have to imagine that such an intellectual
practice would go beyond the enjoyment of words towards the site where words
break off their relation with enjoyment and open to a surplus of enjoyment, to
a plus de jouissance which is always other than enjoyment, in the same way
capital is more than money. Do we have ears for such a murga in our academic
practice? Or is our academic delight nothing but what is meant in the third
meaning of murga, as in dar la murga, that is, “to bother with words or actions
that produce tedium through their excess or impertinence”? Against the tedious
murga the neobaroque murga, the disquieting one of the unheard-of leap into
the waters of Perlongher’s river, of which Peter Robb says or could have said
that, in order to read it, “you need a feel for the unsaid, for the missing file, the
cancelled entry, the tacit conclusions, the gap, the silence, the business done
with a nod and a wink” (np). Robb is talking about the paradigmatic baroque
218 ALBERTO MOREIRAS

painter, Caravaggio, whose life can only be reconstructed through unworked

fragments—‘they’re lies to the police, reticence in court, extorted confessions,
forced denunciations, revengeful memoirs, self-justifying hindsight, unques-
tioned hearsay, diplomatic urbanities, theocratic diktat, reported gossip, threat
and propaganda, angry outbursts—hardly a work untainted by fear, ignorance,
malice or self-interest” (np). On seeking the most difficult, in the Lezamian
way, one could not hope for a better definition of the baroque archive.
The baroque archive is the non-localization of the theoretical murga, of the
unnameable, disconcerting and confusing procession of ambiguous ontological
status in Perlongher’s poem. It is the opposite of the ontopological localization
of thinking, its dirty atopics, its suspicion—hardly a word untainted by fear,
ignorance, malice, or self-interest. Hardly a word without a body, but where
body as well as word sustain their glory in the refusal of localization, of onto-
pologization, of entrapment and capture. Hardly an untainted word, but where
the taint is the name of the very possibility of thought. In “Rapsodia para el
mulo” Lezama will refer to that powerful stain in the eye of the mule as paso:
“Step is the step of the mule in the abyss” (1.165). Lezama writes: “Sitting on
the eye of the mule, vitreous, blind, the abyss slowly goes over its invisible. In
the sitting abyss, step by step, one can only hear the questions that the mule
lets fall over the stone in the fire” (1.165). The mule is the theoretical animal
in Lezama, the cipher of neobaroque practice. The mule goes through “the ob-
scure, progressive and fugitive” (I. 163) as it falls in the contemplative abyss,
in love with the “four signs,” earth and sky, mortals and gods, the signs visible
from the temple, from the roof of the temple, from the contemplatio or theoria
that gives us those four signs if only we are willing to fall without wings, like
Talos in the Greek myth, or the mule in the abyss, “the saved wings inexistent in
the mule” (I. 164).'? And Lezama warns against the tedious murga that projects
its own Sterility, its own nihilism, its own radical, desolate de-habitation into a
darkness that is no longer “the obscure with its four signs” (1.165) of abyssal
dwelling but rather the simple deprivation of light at the ontopological house of
private resentment:

This secure step of the mule in the abyss is usually confused with the painted
gloves of the sterile. It is usually confused with the beginnings of the obscure ne-
gating head. It is usually confused by you, vitreous outcast, by you, hip with patent-
leather-like ribbons. It seems to tell us I am not and I am not, but it also penetrates
in the mansions where the homely spider no longer gives off light, and the portable
lamp translates from one horror to another horror. It is usually confused by you,
vitreous outcast, that it is a step the step of the mule in the abyss. (167)
 MULES AND SNAKES PINES)

Whoever confuses the mule’s paso with nihilism and sterility, whoever fails
to understand the mule’s movement to an alternative region (“step is the step
of the mule in the abyss”) is, for Lezama, the one who suffers from deprivation
of light. This bad murga that thinks one must always think from somewhere
(hence, not from the abyss), that thought must always have a ground, must
always have an identifiable location, that writing can only be autographic—one
should not simply disagree with it. There is no disagreement with tedium. It
is rather more urgent to ask what happens when those two minor intuitions
against the mule’s paso find no resistance and reach their radicalization: brutal
stasis, locationalism, final ontopologization of thinking. Locationalism, from
its beginnings as a defense against colonial or imperial expropriation, fails to
the precise extent it succeeds. It turns expropriation into property, and turns
property into the ultimate horizon of thinking—ontopology is what Karl Marx
used to call the social form of money, the inverted projection of exchange value
into the ideal foundation of the social. Locationalism, ontopological radicaliza-
tion—which is the dominant form of ideological thinking today—marks the
moment of absolute subsumption of intellectual labor into capital and is there-
fore absolutely functional to the neoliberal model, even to the extent that it
presupposes itself against it.
In some splendid pages of the Grundrisse, Marx mentions greed as the
fundamental affective tonality of the mode of social production ruled by capital.
He discovers a religious element in what he terms greed or monetary mania, a
curious historically-produced “en-thou-siasmos,” since it is the result of a social
change: money, “from its servile role, in which it appears as mere medium of
circulation, it suddenly changes into the lord and god of the world of commodi-
ties. It represents the divine existence of commodities, while they represent
its earthly form” (221). When that happens, when that new god is born in the
mutation of the second into the third stage of money, Marx says, “monetary
greed, or mania for wealth, necessarily brings with it the decline and fall of the
ancient communities [Gemeinwesen]” (223). There is no option, Marx says,
money becomes the community, Gemeinwesen, in the absolute substitution of
the old community. As the translator adds in a footnote, Gemeinwesen means,
beyond community, “common essence,” “common system,” and “common be-
ing.” Money becomes being, ontological foundation, “and can tolerate none
other standing above it” (223). There is no option: “Where money is not itself
the community,” once it appears in its third role or third stage, ‘it must dissolve
the community” (224). And this presupposes, Marx says, “the full develop-
ment of exchange value, hence a corresponding organization of society,” that
is, capitalist society (223). “The decay of [the] community advances” (223) to
220 ALBERTO MOREIRAS

the same extent that exchange value becomes constitutive of the ontological
foundation of the social. When capital and wage labor come to full existence
“money thereby directly and simultaneously becomes the real community [Ge-
meinwesenl, since it is the general substance of survival for all, and at the same
time the social product of all” (225-26).
And greed is simply the affective correlate to the real community whose
ontotheology is now constituted by money. Are money and the intellectual pro-
duction of the regionalist intellectual, then, the same thing? Is money the same
thing as identity, mimetic appropriation, and difference? Probably so. In their
social function, money and cultural production have a Gemeinwesen, a com-
munity, a common essence, which is what Marx will call somewhere else in
the Grundrisse “a vanishing mediation” (269). That is, in their social function,
money and cultural production, cultural production and money, mediate a rela-
tion, and they do it in such a way that, in the mediation, their common essence
vanishes in order to assume the form of the relation itself. An ontotheological
equivalency between the regionalist intellectual’s modality of university dis-
course and the social form of money is thus established.
In the Grundrisse, concretely in the pages of Notebook II where Marx
analyzes the social system that corresponds to the mode of bourgeois social
production, Marx is furious at those “socialists” who want to present socialism
as “the realization of the ideals of bourgeois society articulated by the French
revolution” (248). Marx says: “the proper reply to them is: that exchange value
or, more precisely, the money system is in fact the system of equality and free-
dom, and that the disturbances which they encounter in the further develop-
ment of the system are disturbances inherent in it, are merely the realization of
equality and freedom, which prove to be inequality and unfreedom. It is just as
pious as it is stupid to wish that exchange value would not develop into capital,
nor labour which produces exchange value into wage labour” (249). The social
mode of production ruled by capital, that is, the bourgeois mode of production,
although ideally based on equality and freedom, is really based upon the exploi-
tation of wage labor by capital. Proudhonian socialists—and one could add, all
manners of social democrats, including their representatives in contemporary
university discourse—are characterized by their “utopian inability to grasp the
necessary difference between the real and the ideal form of bourgeois society,
which is the cause of their desire to undertake the superfluous business of real-
izing the ideal expression again, which is in fact only the inverted projection of
this reality” (249).
Marx is pointing out an impassable difference between intellectual posi-
tions. One of them departs from and absorbs the Marxian notion of crisis un-
 MULES AND SNAKES 221

derstood as “the general intimation... towards the presupposition [namely,

the system of production now established upon the ‘world market’] and the
urge . . . towards a new historic form” (228). The other one is represented by
the utopian desire to undertake “the superfluous business of realizing the ideal
expression again, which is in fact only the inverted projection of this reality [of
inequality and unfreedom],” of the mirage that makes us understand inequality
and unfreedom as true equality and true freedom. This is the greed, the rever-
ence, and sanctity of our habitual three gestures, ideologically mediated and
offered as the inverted projection of our thirst for money. The three fundamental
ideological gestures of our regional-intellectual field are maniacal gestures, al-
ways already the result of a possession by the ontotheological foundation medi-
ated by the monetary god, by the social form of money. So, what is common to
those three gestures, that is, the only gesture within those identitarian, mimetic,
and differential gestures? It is the reduction of the world to the subject of pro-
duction, and the enthroning of the subject, regional or not, as the only possible
exchange value of general interest. In other words, it is the capitalization of the
regional subject, be it a continental, a national, or a minoritarian subject. Yet
this means that the unique gesture that sustains us, and that, by sustaining us,
founds university discourse in our times, is the reduction of the social relation
to a relation between things, since the relation between regional subjects, un-
derstood on the basis of their “natural” or historical difference, is understood as
a relation between subjects of equivalence, who are therefore reified into their
equivalence and turned into commodities. The regional subject, turned into a
commodity, guarantees in the last instance the right of the region to partake
of the universal community, the world market, and to an equality and freedom
within it which is the ideal (and ideological) foundation of the social system
based on exchange value. Thus understood, the identitarian and anti-imperialist
horizon of differential representation in regionalist university discourse has a
generalized equivalence of subjects as its implicit goal and final horizon. Iden-
titarian liberation is thus another name for oppression and enchainment, for the
inverted projection of the real social relation, which transforms social relations
into relations between things. Regional liberation is the transformation into a
thing, a commodity, of the regional subject—a subject that is only a thing, an
instrument of exchange in the general operation of paying reverence to the god
of greed. This is the Marxian analysis—a stunning critique of identitarian poli-
tics whose active erasure of the discursive map today is not just casual. Through
our discourse as regionalist intellectuals, and through our tendencies, we could
say we do what Marx said we did in 1857:
222 ALBERTO MOREIRAS

With that, then, the complete freedom of the individual is posited: voluntary trans-
action; no force on either side; positing of the self as means, or as serving, only as
means, in order to posit the self as end in itself, as dominant and primary; finally,
the self-seeking interest which brings nothing of a higher order to realization; the
other is also recognized and acknowledged as one who likewise realizes his self-
seeking interest, so that both know that the common interest exists only in the
duality, many-sidedness, and autonomous development of the exchanges between
self-seeking interests. The general interest is precisely the generality of self-seek-
ing interests. Therefore, when the economic form, exchange, posits the all-sided
equality of its subjects, then the content, the individual as well as the objective
material that drives towards the exchange, is freedom. Equality and freedom are
thus not only respected in exchange based on exchange values but, also, the ex-
change of exchange values is the productive, real basis of all equality and freedom.
As pure ideas they are merely the idealized expressions of this basis; as developed
in juridical, political, social relations [and we could add: in relations ruled by uni-
versity discourse], they are merely this basis to a higher power. And so it has been
in history. (244-45)

Regional intellectuals, in the last two hundred years of history, have been
the purveyors of the general interest through their function in preserving the
generality of self-seeking, self-localizing interests. They have turned the pro-
jected inversion of the social form of money into their task. The identitarian
politics of area studies as we know them are not the interruption but the radical
reaffirmation and consolidation of the sovereignty of capital over the region, the
posited identity between capital and region. How then to think, on the basis of
the crisis, towards the interval of being, that is, towards the outside of ontothe-
ology, and towards the abandonment of greed as community, and as the basis
of community? How to think towards the fourth gesture, and towards the inven-
tion of a new temporality? Is it possible to conceive of a situation where, if the
fourth gesture were not itself the community, it would dissolve the community?
Is it possible to imagine a principle of dissolution of university discourse for the
regionalist intellectual? A way of thinking the outside of university discourse
from university discourse? That outside, if it marks the disaster of regionalist
dialectics, can it be something other than an obscure murmur, a clamor or a
noise of being, only undetermined, and as undetermined empty, and as empty
wild, threatening, and destructive?
 MULES AND SNAKES 223

Dirty Atopics

But it is not so difficult to imagine an affirmative response to the latter ques-

tions. Against the ontopological radicalization of cultural studies, the neoba-
roque practice of dirty atopics. Translation, transculturation, locationalism are
not the ultimate horizons of thinking. Dirty atopics dwells in a supplement to
locationalism, and traces a program of thought that refuses to find satisfaction
in expropriation as much as it refuses to rest on appropriative drives. It is dirty
because there is no disembodied thinking, and it is atopic because no genuine
thought can be exhausted by its conditions of enunciation. In the foundational
work of Lezama, Haroldo de Campos, Sarduy, or Perlongher, and in so many
of their inheritors today, whether in literature, the visual, or the theoretical, the
Neobaroque becomes an attempt, a murky or dirty attempt, to find the possibil-
ity of an interruption of the regional, and to establish that interruption as a cat-
egory of general thinking. The Neobaroque is a war machine against that other
paradigm, the dominant ideological paradigm in the history of Latin American
modernity: the identitarian or locationalist paradigm which is still affecting, if
in different ways, projects such as those of Beverley (a critic of transcultura-
tion in the name of subaltern identity) or Gonzalez Echevarria (a disavower of
subaltern identity for the sake of the self-constitution of the criollista critic as
the posited master of language). From the days of Angel Rama’s translation of
Fernando Ortiz’s concept of transculturation, there has developed a whole indus-
try of transculturation in academic writing—now merged with the hybridizing
industry. In its worst facticity, its most common one, the transculturators and the
hybridizers posit as the end of their task to show that there is transculturation in
the cultural process, and that transculturation, or hybridity, is, generally speak-
ing, a good thing: the way in which subaltern culture contaminates and subverts
dominant culture. We know that there is transculturation, and we know that, for
better or for worse, transculturation is not just the form in which subaltern cul-
ture subverts dominant culture: it is also the opposite. In any case, transcultura-
tion studies, which originated as the great Latin American(ist) response to the
threat of a cultural homogenization imposed by global imperialism, have come
to be little else than glorified tautologies. This is not to say that it is not abso-
lutely necessary to research and trace as exhaustively as possible the practical
and real processes of transculturation: we can call that the study of the historical
labor of transculturation, without which there can be no specificity of any kind
to understand cultural transformation.'! But it is to say that there is a huge dif-
ference between the study of the labor of transculturation, through piecemeal
monographs and case studies, and the endless repetition of the fact that there
224 ALBERTO MOREIRAS

is transculturation, as if we had somehow forgotten it or ever denied it. There

is transculturation, there is hybridity: nobody will deny it. But hybridity is not
liberatory per se, and transculturation is not simply the glorious response of the
weak to the theft of time by the powerful. The task of thinking starts in a critique
of transculturation. Where can we establish the possibility of a critique of trans-
culturation? In a double articulation that I have called subalternist in the past and
that I do not hesitate to call neobaroque as well: in its first register, it requires the
study of the labor of transculturation; in its second register, it critiques the labor
of transculturation. Both must proceed in mutual articulation: without it, the
second register cannot exist, and the first register does not matter. We must cre-
ate a horizon of possibility for a critical perspective that will remain irreducible
to the factical study of the processes of cultural transformation. The notion of a
double articulation enables us to keep the horizon open to the horizon itself, that
is, it permits the affirmation of a beyond of transformational facticity that does
not reify it into a specific prescription or a specific dogma. The second register
transculturates transculturation: that is the savage inscription that opens history
to endless questioning, in the absence of which everything gets refunctionalized
at the service of the dominant factical model.
Dirty atopics: the name for a theoretical practice that disrupts the region
of thinking for the regionalist intellectual, whose region is then uncannily dou-
bled. Region is quite a word, and it has a king at the center. The Latin rex, the
principle of personalized—we could say, regionalized—sovereignty, colonizes
the region. The region makes a claim to sovereignty, and it is indeed the claim
itself. Region is a claim to sovereignty, the claim to sovereignty in its formal
truth. So what is the regional intellectual to do? Is the regional intellectual noth-
ing but the ideologue of the (regional) sovereign? Yes, if the regional intel-
lectual remains within the regional confines of the region; but there is another
possibility, in fact, one in which the regional intellectual seeks the interruption
of the sovereign claim, and thinks out of the claim and outside the claim: within
and without the claim. A regional intellectual who, therefore, seeks a non-
regional region within the region: a non-sovereign sovereignty, a groundless
ground. I think this is about the only way in which the regional intellectual can
be something other than an ideologue of the sovereign; the only way in which
the regional intellectual can become something like a thinker, because thinking
only happens in the interval of sovereignty, and against it, or rather, outside it,
which sovereignty cannot accept as anything but against itself.
But this already says that the regionalist intellectual can only think in the
crisis, if crisis is the interval of being, if crisis is whatever turns disaster into the
possibility of a passage, a paso into an alternative projection of time, and into
 MULES AND SNAKES 225

a new temporality. “Crises are then the general intimation which points beyond
the presupposition, and the urge which drives towards the adoption of a new
historic form.” A general intimation, an urge: a particular kind of basic affec-
tive tonality or structure of feeling for the regionalist intellectual as thinker, the
mandate to think the interruption of the sovereignty of the region, that is, to go
“beyond the presupposition” and to go “towards the adoption of a new historic
form.” The university discourse of modernity in its regionalist dimension is or
wants to be localizing thought. The destruction of programmatic Latin Ameri-
canism, of the tedious murga, seeks the interruption of localist sovereignty and
thus an a-local, atopic, an-archic constituent principle.
This non-principled principle or dirty atopianism is neobaroque irruptive
force. Not coincidentally, historical Baroque refers to the moment previous to
the final dissolution of the old community at the hands of money in its third
stage. The Neobaroque refers to the crisis of the ontotheological community
constituted as the social form of money in the moment of postmodernity; that
is, when Latin America becomes firmly integrated into the world market under
the Keynesian regime of capitalist development, which is also the moment of its
failure, as dependency theory has demonstrated. That is the time when Lezama
posits the poetic possibility as a “being for resurrection” following the Pasca-
lian norm: “since true nature is lost everything can be supranature’”’!* Lezamian
sobrenaturaleza is the space of constitution of an alternative real, against the
regime of productionist accumulation of the real, against Heideggerian “machi-
nation,” which is the reverse of the ontotheological coin whose other side is
culture as the realm of life-experience under capital.'’ But neobaroque nature
is not the place of culture—it is the place of the withdrawal of culture, of the
renunciation to the cultural, of the exodus from the cultural, now experienced
as the biopolitical instance of domination and as a sad passion.
That is the neobaroque paso: paso of the mule in(to) the abyss beyond the
ontotheological foundation. But the baroque bestiary includes another animal
that is for Lezama equally emblematic: the snake. Perlongher speaks of the
“step of the snake” in his poem of that title as an explicit supplement to the
Lezamian “step of the mule”: “a streamer of cobras in the mohave ballet getting
wet in the shade of spiralling araucarias marking in the ivy the lightness of a
step which is in truth the step of the grass through the air damp with the circles
of empty eyes in salty glass ribbons of macramé scanning the pupilar cythar,
the cornea horns its humming bird in love simulating in the moss carpet in the
humid of the air that dew of the smoke in its dehiscence” (289).
The snake’s paso—“its hump in unreading brush erases almost forgetting
the legends of the soap.” What remains is only “the lucidity of the step” (289).
226 ALBERTO MOREIRAS

Only the lucidity of passage? We must think of the charcoal sequence in the
famous Chapter 9 of Paradiso in order to understand what is luminous in that
lucidity. There the “master incorporator of the snake,” in his full ecstasy of
incorporation, causes “the final hecatomb of the charcoal shop’(355). “Char-
coal dust flowed like a river at dawn, then the charcoals of regular size, those
which have not been made smaller by the shovel, would roll like in the cave of
Polyphemus. The noise of the cakes of vegetable charcoal, rough black hon-
eycombs, was louder and more frequent. Through the smallness of the place,
the full variety of charcoal bounced off, hit, and left irregular black lines in the
bodies of these two ridiculous gladiators, joined by the softened iron of the
alienation of the sexes” (355—56). “Through the smallness of the place, the full
variety of charcoal bounced off . . ”,-—as a consequence of the mobilizing and
de-localizing passage of the snake. Carbdén is of course an imperfect or dirty
anagram of barroco.

Notes

1. Severo Sarduy’s interpretation of the Baroque as “operativity of the efficacious sign”

(591) already points to the inversion of all sad passions based upon lack. Furthermore,
if the object “is also that which splits the unity of the subject and marks in it an invis-
ible lack, a lack to him/herself,’ Sarduy tells us that in José Lezama Lima’s Paradiso,
an emblematic work of Latin American Neobaroque, a “a particular hilariousness” is
its foundational characteristic. Hence “that little . . . laughter, violent but choked, with
the same virulence, the same energy ... as guffaw, but never reaching explosion.” I
will give the original, rather untranslatable Spanish: “esa risita cejijunta, violenta pero
ahogada, que tiene la misma virulencia, la misma energia de choteo y de impugnacién
que la carcajada, pero que nunca llega al estallido, a la explosi6n, al grafismo cari-
catural y sincopado” (595). In Lezama’s wake, Sarduy is the first to theorize the Latin
American Neobaroque as joyful passion.
i) See the Third Part of Spinoza’s Ethics, “Of the Origin and Nature of the Affects.” In
Postulates 54 and 55, for instance, “The mind strives to imagine only those things
which posit its power of acting” (182), and “When the mind imagines its own lack of
power, it is saddened by it” (182), it is already understood how sadness is the passage
to “a lesser perfection” from the joy of affect (188). Sadness is not deprivation, but an
act in itself, “a man’s passage from a greater to a lesser perfection” where the power
of mind is diminished or restrained (188). The sad passion is the mind’s act of self-
enslavement.
3. Cf. Bruno Bosteels’s essay, “Antagonism, Hybridy, and the Subaltern in Latin Amer-
ica,” where the terms “archi-politics” and “archi-aesthetics” are used to criticize the
Latin Americanist subalternism which is at the basis of my own essay.
 MULES AND SNAKES 227

“We have abolished the real world: what world is left? Perhaps the apparent? . . . But
no? With the real world we have also abolished the apparent” (Twilight 51). I must
also say that poststructuralist and postcolonialist critique are not at all the same. It
would be useful to establish the specific history of what I must leave as summary af-
firmation.
Far from wanting to be exhaustive, I must cite at least other analyses of the Baroque
that are related to the positions that interest me in this essay: Maravall, of course, and
also Morana, Naranjo, and Echeverria.
Lea says of the Inquisition, using a strictly aporetic tropology, that it is “a power
within the state superior to the state itself’ (357).
In “El heredero” Sarduy uses as his epigraphe the following passage from Jacques
Lacan: “IfI tell you all of this it is because I am returning from the museums, and
because, in sum, the Counter-Reformation meant a return to the sources, and because
the baroque is the exhibit of that return. The baroque is the regulation of the sould
through bodily scopy . . . lam only speaking, for the moment, of what one can see in
every church in Europe, what hangs from the walls, everything that leaks, everything
that... delirates. What I have called obscenity, but exalted” (Lacan 104-05; citado
por Sarduy 593).
My use of the notion of exodus is indebted to Paolo Virno, who says, for instance:
“Exodus is the foundation of a Republic. The very idea of ‘republic, however, re-
quires a taking leave of State judicature: if Republic, then no longer State. The politi-
cal action of the Exodus consists, therefore, in an engaged withdrawal. Only those
who open a way of exit for themselves can do the founding; but, by the opposite token,
only those who do the founding will succeed in finding the parting of the waters by
which they will be able to leave Egypt” (196). The disciplinary exodus I mention is
not shy about the possibility of an alternative foundation.
It is difficult not to quote Néstor Perlongher’s famous poem on Teresian transverbera-
tion, entitled “Luz oscura,” and which I will leave without translation: “Si atravesado
por la zarza el pecho/arder a lo que ya encendido ardfa/ hace, el dolor en goce trans-
figura,/fria la carne mas el alma ardida/en el blanco del ojo el ojo frio/cual nieve en
valle torrido: el deseo/divino se echa sobre lanzas igneas/ y muerde el ojo en blanco
el labio henchido” (304). Cf. also in Lacan, Encore, the references to St. Teresa’s
mystical experience as a baroque form of knowledge, and its metonymic relation to a
possible notion of feminine knowledge, or of knowledge as feminine.
10. On the relation of Talos’ myth and theoretical practice see Alberto Moreiras, Inter-
pretacion y diferencia (102-18), and an expansion of the same argument in “Phar-
maconomy.”
ile See for instance John Kraniauskas’ “Globalization is Ordinary” and “Hybridity in a
Transnational Frame,” where he argues the need for explicit attention to the labor of
transculturation.
En “Preludio a las eras imaginarias:” “poetry had found letters for the unknown, had
situated new gods, had acquired the potens, the infinite possibility, but its last great
228 ALBERTO MOREIRAS

dimension remained: the world of resurrection. In resurrection the potens culminates,

exhausting its posibilitéis” (Obras 819), and “Only the poet, master of the act operat-
ing upon the germ, which is nevertheless still creation, can be casual, can reduce the
totality, through metaphor, to comparative matter. In this dimension, perhaps the most
incommensurable and powerful that can be offered, the poet is the casual being for
resurrection” (Obras 819-20). On “supranature” Lezama says that in Pascal’s image
he found a “terrible affirmative force” that decided him to “place the image at the site
of lost nature. In that way, against nature’s determinism, man responds with the total
freedom of the image. And against the pessimism of lost nature, man’s invincible joy
in the reconstituted image” (Obras 1213). Note that “el total arbitrio de la imagen”
places the invention of the image beyond culture as an organic response to human
separation from nature.
13. See in Contributions, Heidegger’s comments on “machination” (88-100). For in-
stance, “Be-ing has so thoroughly abandoned beings and submitted them to machina-
tion and ‘lived-experience’ that those illusive attempts at rescuing Western culture and
all ‘culture-oriented politics’ must necessarily become the most insidious and thus the
highest form of nihilism” (97-98).

Works Cited

Beverley, John. Una modernidad obsoleta. Estudios sobre el barroco. Los Teques [Vene-
zuela]: Fondo editorial ALEM, 1997.
. Against Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Blanchot, Maurice. “Literature and the Right to Death.” The Gaze of Orpheus and Other
Literary Essays. Trans. Lydia David. New York: Station Hill, 1981.
Bosteels, Bruno. “Antagonism, Hybridity, and the Subaltern in Latin America.” Disposi-
tion.
Echavarren, Roberto. “Prdlogo.” In Néstor Perlongher, Poemas completos, 7-16.
Echeverria, Bolivar. La modernidad de lo barroco. México: Era, 2000.
. Modernidad, mestizaje cultural, ethos barroco. México: E] equilibrista, 1994.
Gonzalez Echevarria, Roberto. Celestina’s Brood. Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish
and Latin American Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
Handke, Peter. On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House. Trans. Krishna Winston. New
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Heidegger, Martin. Contributions to Philosophy. (From Enowning). Trans. Parvis Emad
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Kraniauskas, John. “Globalisation is Ordinary: The Transnationalisation of Cultural Stud-
ies.” Radical Philosophy 90 (1998); 9-19.
. “Hybridity in a Transnational Frame: Latin Americanist and Postcolonial Perspec-
tives on Cultural Studies.” Nepantla-Views
from South 1.1 (2000): 111-37.
Lacan, Jacques. Encore. Le Séminaire XX. Paris: Seuil, 1975.
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Lea, Henry Charles. The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies. New York: MacMillan,
1922.
Lezama Lima, José. Obras completas. II. Ensayos/cuentos. Madrid: Aguilar, 1977.
. Paradiso. Eloisa Lezama Lima ed. Madrid: Catedra, 1980.
. Poesia completa. 2 vols. Madrid: Aguilar, 1988.
Maravall, José Antonio. La cultura del barroco. Andlisis de una estructura histérica. Bar-
celona: Ariel, 1975.
Marx, Karl. Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. (Rough Draft).
Trans. Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin, 1993.
Morania, Mabel. Viaje al silencio: exploraciones del discurso barroco. México: Facultad de
Filosofia y Letras, UNAM, 1998.
Moreiras, Alberto. Interpretacion y diferencia. Madrid: Visor, 1991.
. “Pharmaconomy: Stephen and the Daedalids.” In Susan Stanford Friedman, ed.
Joyce: The Return of the Repressed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. 58-86.
Naranjo, Rodrigo. “La recaida al barroco. Imagen y clase a fines de la modernidad.” Un-
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Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Lon-
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Perlongher, Néstor. Poemas completos (1980-1992). Ed. Roberto Echavarren. Buenos Ai-
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Robb, Peter M. The Man Who Became Caravaggio. New York: Henry Holt, 1999.
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Spinoza, Benedict de. A Spinoza Reader. The Ethics and Other Works. Ed. and trans. Edwin
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Virno, Paolo. “Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus.” In Radical
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lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 189-209.
o® 9

Keeping Things Opaque:

On the Reluctant Personalism
of a Certain Mode of Critique

Brad Epps

For L.C.-H.
Of course, principally,
for A.M.

Disciplines, Institutions, Nations, and Selves

Posicionalidad, locaci6n y memoria . . . son los centros

del debate politico e intelectual de este fin de siglo

(Positionality, location, and memory are the centers

of political and intellectual debate at this century’s end)
—Hugo Achugar, Leones, cazadores e historiadores

When we speak of literature, or culture, or the queer, or the subaltern, or so

much else, do we not also speak of our disciplines, or institutions, or nations,
maybe all together?! Are we not spoken, at least in part, by our disciplines, in-
stitutions, or nations as well, even when we represent them as intermixed? For
that matter, when we speak of ourselves, when we deploy the “we,” are we not
also speaking, again in part, of a fragmented, yet insistent, “I”? And is this “I”
not also spoken by someone, or something, beyond it, too? The questions are
largely rhetorical, at least as I turn them. They may be less rhetorical for others,
which is to say that they may be answered, if they are answered, with a “no,”
resounding, nuanced, or otherwise. No, we are not spoken by our disciplines,

230
 KEEPING THINGS OPAQUE 223i

institutions, or nations, or not in any consequential manner, and certainly not—

and I would agree—exhaustively. No, we do not speak individually when we
speak in the plural, for representation does obtain. And so on. The debates that
mark much academic inquiry, the debates between, say, literary studies and
cultural studies—the former subsuming, and virtually erasing, philology and
literary history, and the latter involving, often quite tensely, postcolonial and
subaltern studies—turn on such questions. So, for that matter, do the debates
between Hispanism, however understood, and other disciplines, but also within
Hispanism, its trans-Atlantic vortices, its national factions, its essentialist and
anti-essentialist maneuvers, its hegemonic fantasies and para-hegemonic aspi-
rations, its turgid reconfigurations, and its struggles for visibility, fame, and
power. As my own language suggests, it often seems as if Hispanism—or any
“ism”—were an entity endowed with agency, something above and beyond the
individuals who variously contribute to it, participate in it, and are interpellated
by it. The appearance of something transcendent, or perhaps alienating, might
provide, however, the occasion for a return to the material grounds from which
thought—including so-called groundless thought—is at least partly produced.
The ideologies of Hispanism are, among other things, the institutionalities and
(inter)nationalities of Hispanism, the places where people work and from which
they speak and write.
As for me, working at Harvard University is not exactly unobtrusive—par-
ticularly when I call attention to it, something I have never before done in writ-
ing. Then again, publishing habits are such that an institutional affiliation, when
there is one, almost always accompanies the author’s name. The persistence of
the proper names of individuals and institutions in critical work bears reflection,
perhaps especially when said critical work presents itself as radical. For amid
all the ethico-political proclamations, it is as if intellectual recognition entailed
institutional recognition, as if thought could only circulate by presenting itself
as tethered to a relatively delimited, individualized site: a particular person, or
group of people, in a particular place, or in particular places. The independent,
free-lance critic is still a minor player in academic circuits, particularly in the
United States. And as for academic circuits, the flow is hardly free: whatever
elective affinities allow for the formation of study groups, associations, alli-
ances, or cliques, a principle of selection fractures them as well. Selection is
at the core of the U.S. academic system, where applications and admissions
vary from institution to institution. Harvard prides itself on its ability to admit
only the “best and brightest,” and many, if not most, of those admitted endorse
the principle of selection, assume it as their own. Admission is thus a multi-
faceted and ideologically charged process, one whose effects are potentially
232 BRAD EPPS

unending. A powerful multinational corporation that profits from its non-profit

status, Harvard continually seeks to increase an already enormous endowment
by capitalizing on a fetishized aura, the self-replicating illusion of select knowl-
edge, expertise, and truth, of the ever-so grand Veritas emblazoned on its gates,
stationery, caps, and tee-shirts. Harvard is jealous of its name and insignia, and
administrators and professors alike worry about dissemination, diffusion, and
depletion: both name and insignia are guarded, quite explicitly, as trademarks,
as signs of value, but also of wealth.? Wealthy, Harvard is not alone; like many
other universities and colleges, it capitalizes on the nostalgia and melancholy
attachment of its alumni and would-be alumni, binding them together in a se-
lect collection of donors and would-be donors. It benefits more materially by
making supposedly savvy investments and by acquiring, sometimes in less than
transparent manners, more and more of the surrounding communities often
only to disregard the standards of these communities, including, rather notori-
ously, the adjusted standard of living or “living wage.”
The preceding statements, if they are to be more than the sour grapes of a
disenchanted insider recently given a lesson in political and economic justice by
students and workers, are themselves attached to some idea of truth, verily.» My
knowledge, including the essay that you now have before you, is implicated in
its site of production—a partly movable site that inheres in funded sabbaticals,
summers, and travels elsewhere—and carries a stamp of privilege that at once
credits and discredits it. Something similar holds for those teaching at other rich,
private institutions, say, Yale or Stanford or Duke, the latter being a place where
students and teachers, fuzzily evoking a Civil War past, sometimes still refer to
Harvard as the Duke of the North. All sites, with all their rivalries, perforce con-
dition—not determine, but condition—what is there or, as both Mabel Morafia
and Hugo Achugar insist, from there produced.* Alberto Moreiras may be on
solid ground when he states that “[t]he university, in view of the shrinking of the
intellectual public sphere, has become one of the last institutional sites where
a critical practice is not just theoretically possible, but also practically exist-
ing” (“Global Fragments” 82). Yet it is important to recognize, without reifying
them, that there are differences not only between and within universities but
also between and within “intellectual public spheres.” One can certainly assume
that Moreiras has in mind what earlier in the essay just quoted he calls “western
universities,” but the university and the public sphere that are most densely ad-
umbrated are those of the United States of America, where both Moreiras and
I are employed. The critical practices that “the university” makes possible are
conditioned, that is, by the particularities of universities (in the plural) and of the
people (again in the plural) who work in them. If a critical practice is “practically
 KEEPING THINGS OPAQUE 233

existing” in “the university” it is in a way that is, as Moreiras must surely know,
far from even. Power is such that it produces powerful imbalances, and the U.S.
academic system, with its principle of selection, its leagues, tiers, hierarchies,
stars, awards, prizes, grants, investments, tenure concerns, contracts, and con-
tacts—what Pierre Bourdieu might call social capital—is perforce a question-
able site for critique, theoretically and practically. In some sense, it may be one
of the most questionable sites for critique imaginable.
The problems and paradoxes that attend radical or progressive critique
in privileged places are obviously not new, and Noam Chomsky and Fredric
Jameson are obviously not the only ones implicated. But a lack of novelty does
not make for a lack of significance, and old, onerous, and obvious as it may be,
it is again necessary, I believe, to consider what is at stake in the institutional site
of the discipline(s), particularly when it is a site of financial privilege. Hispan-
ism—which John Beverley has called an “ideological minifundio” (10)—is un-
doubtedly institutionalized, but it is so, as indicated, in uneven ways that recall,
without necessarily duplicating, the unevenness of international configurations.
Latin Americanism, as a now dominant, if contested, mode of Hispanism (itself
contested too), raises questions of economic unevenness that do not hold, at least
not with the same intensity, for Peninsularism. True, arguments about economic
contributions and political representation mark debates about the unevenly rec-
ognized languages and cultures of the Spanish state, but the differences between
Catalonia and Andalusia, economically speaking, are not of the same order as
the differences between Spain and any country in Latin America. Indeed Spain,
like the United States, is a powerful investor and creditor in Latin America, es-
pecially in banking, telecommunications, and utilities, and that fact makes no
mean difference in the debates by which Hispanism replicates itself. And yet,
Latin Americanism—an ideality arguably more operant, or at least operant dif-
ferently, in the United States than in Latin America proper—is profitable in the
United States in a way that now tends to outstrip the ideality known as Penin-
sularism. Some scholars, and even some departments, take great stock in the
decline of Peninsularism, as if the injustices of a colonial past were somehow,
in some tiny way, corrected. The reaction is understandable—and I speak as one
formed as a Peninsularist. After all, Peninsularism long dominated and often
denigrated Latin Americanism, as if the latter were to the former as a copy to
a model. Such a situation endures, albeit in a softer mien, in the representation
and promotion of the Spanish language as the felicitous legacy of an effectively
sanitized process of conquest and colonization.’ Linguistic “patrimonio” remits,
that is, to the “madre patria” [literally the mother fatherland], and the violence
of history is accordingly “redeemed” in the form of a universal or international
234 BRAD EPPS

“oift’of communication and commerce. The defense and celebration of Span-

ish is by no means unique to Spain (nor can it be reduced to a Spanish national
project), but the Spanish government, and more than one of its intellectual repre-
sentatives, would capitalize nonetheless on a genealogy which accords a place of
privilege to Spain. Triumphant as they may at times appear, the cultural politics
of the Real Academia de la Historia and the Instituto Cervantes, for example,
signal an anxiety about the place of Spain in the Spanish-speaking world, which
is also an anxiety about the place of Spain in the English-speaking world. Af-
ter all, in international Hispanism, particularly in the United States, Spain does
not enjoy the position of dominance that many once considered its due.° The
tables have turned but in a manner that bears consideration. Spain is increasingly
strong economically, but it is an increasingly hard “sell” in the U.S. academy,
even though economic and political difficulties in parts of Latin America (most
recently in Argentina) have entailed the closing of some U.S. programs and the
compensatory move of some U.S. students to Spain. Such moves do not mean
that interest wanes; quite the contrary, they may even stimulate interest. Demo-
graphics and immigration—positionality, location, and memory, in Achugar’s
formulation—doubtlessly play crucial roles in the construction of interest, but
Renato Rosaldo’s critique also seems germane: in the land of the rich, cultural
vibrancy, economic hardship, and academic interest often go hand in hand.’
The “success” of Latin Americanism in the United States has been de-
scribed, as Moreiras remarks, as a “sell-out” (‘Order” 126), an assessment that
is not, for all its harshness, without reason. I will return to the question of
a “sell-out,” but for the moment suffice it to say that the “success” of Latin
Americanism in the United States, only partly measured in positions, grants,
salaries, study abroad programs, and publishing opportunities, exists alongside
the “difficulties” of much of Latin America itself. The “difficulties” of Penin-
sularism in the United States exist alongside the relative “success” of Spain.
Clearly, however, things are not so simple; success and hardship are relative
and highly debatable, and the situation in one Latin American country is not
the same as in another. But within the trends, the status, in the United States, of
Latin Americanism and Peninsularism—let alone of what Moreiras calls “first”
and “second Latinamericanism” (“Global Fragments” 85) or “neohispanism”
(“Neohispanism”)—varies from institution to institution, even within a given
institution. Still and all, as a general rule, academics (like myself) who attempt
to wrench themselves from one formation into another or who attempt to recon-
figure longstanding disciplinary divisions contend with the shadow of oppor-
tunism, that is to say with the shadow of suspicion—as if a late arrival troubled
belonging. So-called Trans-Atlantic Studies are constituted in such a shadow,
 KEEPING THINGS OPAQUE D319

and so, for that matter, are both Latin Americanism and Peninsularism (indeed,
Hispanism in general) outside of Latin America and Spain. Suspicion also at-
tends Latin Americanism and Peninsularism inside Latin America and Spain
(which clearly does not saturate a peninsula), for their conceptual unity is con-
tested by an array of indigenous and peripheral endeavors, likewise subject to
suspicion. Suspicion, in short, may well be a mainstay of both the construction
of disciplines and their deconstruction, of both essentialist and anti-essentialist
postures, of work here, there, and at all points in between.
The critique of identity, which necessarily bears on difference, has been
successful in promoting suspicion, its own included. For the critique of iden-
tity, though pushing most forcefully at the established disciplines, at once con-
solidates and fractures less established disciplines such as subaltern studies,
post-colonial studies, queer studies, women’s studies, ethnic studies, cultural
studies, Latino studies, and (other) so-called area studies, varying, again, from
institution to institution. And varying from nation to nation: for the prolifera-
tion of disciplines, differences, divisions, and debates, bound up in the relative
success of the critique of identity, does not mean that certain reductive ges-
tures, evident in “North/South” or “U.S./Latin America,’ become impossible
or even unadvisable. Granted, “it would be wrong to reduce [the] debate [over
studies, knowledge, and power] to an issue of relatively disempowered profes-
sionals from the Latin American semiperiphery confronting their comfortably
settled brothers and sisters from the capitalist core” (Moreiras, “Order” 127,
emphasis mine).* But it would also be “wrong” to brush reduction, relativity,
or even a reductive relativity aside, to assume that the specific site of question-
ing is not in question, that it is not part, maybe even a big part, of the problem.
However reductive it may seem, relative (dis)empowerment obtains—no less
than relative (dis)comfort—and it does so in ways that no amount of theoriza-
tion can gainsay, at least if we accept the implications of “an accomplished
globalization” (Moreiras, “Order” 125)—no pun with “accomplished” neces-
sarily taken. As Walter Mignolo accurately notes, “globalization has neither
erased nor supplanted [the] distinction” between center and periphery (183).
Indeed, globalization, as thus far accomplished, means precisely that there are
relatively disempowered professionals (let alone non-professionals) in Latin
America and relatively comfortably settled professionals in the “developed”
nations, that there is a “reduction” of the world, fraught with complexities, into
a “semi-periphery” and a “core.”
Moreiras’s critique of reductive geopolitical maneuvers entails, logically
enough, their reiteration: “objections concerning unequal exchange bear heav-
ily upon metropolitan-based institutional intellectuals, who may very well have
236 BRAD EPPS

tried to incorporate a certain amount of self-reflexivity in their work but who

still see themselves constrained by their own institutional location into types of
discursive behaviour which they are unable to control” (126). Though it may in-
deed be the case, it is unclear if the burden and the constraints to which Moreiras
refers are also his own, and to what degree, if any, they shape his reflections.
One can certainly assume that they are, and that he knows that they are, but it is
just this lack of clarity, part and parcel of an elliptical evocation of self-reflexiv-
ity in which the personal, as soon as it is “thematized,” is recast, rather abjectly,
as the personalist, that I would like to consider in the pages that follow. I will
be doing so mainly by way of Moreiras, because he proffers a critique that is
notable for its theoretical density, its relative visibility, and, more specifically,
its claims to radical para-hegemonic legitimacy in a transnational frame. Fur-
thermore, I will be engaging the personal not as a solution but as a problem that
hounds what might be called the refusal to engage the personal in a “conven-
tionally” or “identifiably” personal way, a refusal whose history as a token of
seriousness (where seriousness is always opaque and obscure) is as lengthy as
it is complex. Inasmuch as I will be examining the problem of the (im)personal
by way of Moreiras, whom I personally know and respect, I inevitably risk
representing him as representative of a self-consciously unconventional criti-
cal practice which is arguably, even defiantly, still minor within Hispanism.
I also risk representing myself, by way of so many situated, quasi-anecdotal
references, as representative of another critical practice, largely essayistic and
also rather minor, that would lay claim to legitimacy by way of fragility, insuf-
ficiency, partiality, and so on. The divide, like any divide (including that of
North and South), is vexed, and arguably specious, but it insists, in its relative
inconsequentiality, all the same. It insists, as Moreiras himself indicates, as ob-
jections, burdens, constraints, and controls (or the lack thereof) that complicate
the flow of critique and of capital, symbolic and otherwise. More pointedly,
however, some sort of divide is the very condition of possibility for the debates
and competitions on which critique and symbolic capital depend.
According to Moreiras, “the ongoing debate [here specifically the debate
between literary and cultural studies] has been initiated by scholars whose asso-
ciation with the transnational academic sphere is longstanding, which automat-
ically turns their interpellation into a matter of intellectual not social position”
(“Order,” 126, emphasis mine). And yet, not only are automatic interpellative
turns and a transnational academic sphere likewise debatable (How transna-
tional is transnational? How is interpellation rendered automatic?), it seems
more than likely that the intellectual and social are inextricably intertwined.
Whether or not Moreiras means to suggest that they are not (his sentence struc-
 KEEPING THINGS OPAQUE 237

ture, at any rate, does), a non-social intellectual interpellation is untenable. The

intellectual is a social and, no less importantly, an economic position that may
vary according to any number of material and psycho-symbolic factors, also
intertwined, but that nonetheless obtains for all “intellectuals,” regardless of
how they “understand” contextualization, historicization, and identification. It
is also, as I have been insisting, a disciplinary, institutional, and national posi-
tion (even when it situates itself outside disciplines, institutions, and, more anx-
iously, nations). Self-proclaimed international, transnational, or postnational
intellectuals (the new cosmopolitans’), many of whom champion dislocations
and disjunctions, still contend with national laws and borders; they still stop be-
fore crossing (the repositioning of borders in the European Union, for instance,
only reinforces their power elsewhere). Moreiras, who has advocated a “second
Latinamericanism” purportedly “[n]o longer caught in the search and capture
of ‘positions, fixed points, identities’ [the terms are Michael Hardt’s]” (“Global
Fragments” 88) and who appears to have positioned himself in the “non-posi-
tion” of rifts, fissures, and disjunctions—when not ever so tendentiously beyond
position—is thus not without real motivation. After all, as someone who was
not born in the United States, Moreiras surely has dealt with some aspect of the
Immigration and Nationalization Service (recently subsumed within the Bureau
of Citizenship and Immigration Service, BCIS), some control, some demand to
assume a “fixed point” or “identity” and to “justify” his presence in the United
States. His colleague, Walter Mignolo, who has “no problem saying that I am
Argentinean and Latin American, although I live in the United States and am
a naturalized American [sic],” has also had to assume, if only performatively,
a fixed point and an identity that allow him to “balk at saying that I am Ameri-
can when the implication is ‘from the United States’” (182), while staying in
the United States. Different as they are, both men are interpellated by specific
governmental agencies that effectively make their intellectual positions social,
economic, and national positions as well.
Living on the hyphen, holding two passports, switching codes, deconstruct-
ing “identity politics,’ and so on, may complicate, but certainly do not obviate,
the force of geopolitical boundaries, brutally reinvigorated in the wake of Sep-
tember 11, 2001. Nationality may not be determinative in the last instance,
but national governments often function as if it were—which is why it is in-
cumbent for critical thinkers to engage “fixed points and identities” rather than
to dispense with them, almost telegraphically, as so many benighted populist
ruses. In the United States, the newly created Bureau of Citizenship and Im-
migration Services and the Directorate of Border and Transportation Security,
both of which are part of the newly created Department of Homeland Security,
238 BRAD EPPS

have concentrated their efforts on the enforcement of existing laws and the
creation of new ones. As a result, all sectors of society, including the Academy,
have been compelled, and constrained, to be more “vigilant” with respect to
the identity and ideology of its members. The machinations of the BCIS and
other governmental agencies not withstanding, the Academy is still not easily
reducible to national identity, as if all universities in the United States were
the same, indeed as if all nursery schools or dance academies were the same.
Clearly they are not, and the relative poverty of one may be the relative wealth
of another. This may allow us to say that the nation is not one, that the United
States is not quite so united and uniform as many of its supporters and detrac-
tors claim. Class continues to divide (and even to divide academics), even if it
does not do so with the clarity of days gone by; indeed, need-based scholarships
effectively blur class divisions even as they acknowledge them. But this nation
that is not one (the U.S.), and that has been constructed by way of the fractured
disavowal of class, nonetheless functions as if it were one, and often as not with
a vengeance. Nationality, and its reductive charge is not superseded, even when
the turning towards the one that is at the root of the “university” is wittily, or
cynically, recast as the turning towards the many, the “polyversity.” The mul-
tinationalism that implicates higher education in the United States does not, in
other words, translate seamlessly into transnationalism, let alone postnational-
ism, for it is still replete with highly delimited national implications and invest-
ments in sweatshops abroad, outsourcing at home, and the military-industrial
complex in strategic locations.
Part of being “comfortably settled” may in fact entail both a nagging sense
of discomfort at the intractability of uncomfortable, even deadly, differences
and divisions the world over and an obstinate attempt to complicate said differ-
ences and divisions as “always already” complicated—all the while sidestep-
ping or downplaying complicity. I do not mean to affirm a binary logic, but
at the same time I do not mean to deny it, as if it, or some trace of it, were no
longer operant. What is more, anti-binary logic becomes binary itself when
it consigns binary logic to the “wrong”—tread “reductive’—“side” of things,
when it winnows out binarism and reductionism from hybridity, heterogeneity,
and pluralism or, more cryptically, from excess, openness, exteriority, and in-
finitude. All of these signs—hybridity, pluralism, openness, and excess—have
been employed not only in radical anti- or para-hegemonic projects but also in
a relatively loose project, implicating citizens and non-citizens, of U.S. national
self-affirmation, what Frederick Buell calls “the reconstitution of U.S. cultural
nationalism in an interesting, new, ‘postnational’ form” (551). There is, still
and all, a more tenacious problem here, that of materiality. As Bourdieu notes,
 KEEPING THINGS OPAQUE BS)

a “dual economy” of both local and global proportions is far from obsolete, and
a “small privileged minority of stable workers endowed with a permanent sal-
ary” exists alongside, and yet largely separate from, “an enormous army of in-
dustrial reserve, comprised of a non-professional sub-proletariat” (Contre-feux,
48). Bourdieu, who was certainly not the most vulnerable of intellectuals, notes
that duality entails “an economic regime that is inseparable from a political
regime, a mode of production that entails a mode of domination founded on the
institution of insecurity, domination by way of precariousness” (Contre-feux,
46, emphasis original). Duality and division, reductive as they may be, mark the
entire “transnational” academic system.
Duality marks the academic system variously, to be sure: public and private
institutions with greater or lesser endowments (and some private institutions are
more financially embattled than some large public institutions), but also tenured
and non-tenured positions. As a tenured faculty member, I enjoy stability, and
I do so in a way that structurally separates me from many of my actual and po-
tential interlocutors as well as those who have few “pretenses” or little “desire”
about being engaged at all. The same, more or less, goes for all tenured faculty
members, for tenure, as a guarantor of stability, effectively puts the tenured in
a “safe” place (one might even say, more cryptically, that it encrypts them).
Little wonder that attacks on tenure at specific institutions, or by way of spe-
cific individuals, organizations, or state governments, generate anxiety among
many of the tenured for they indicate that the place is not that safe. Indeed, it
is not that tenured faculty members do not experience economic insecurity and
precariousness, but rather that they experience it as a fantasy, or nightmare, of
institutional disruption, not as business as usual. The dining workers, janitors,
security guards, and others who “share” our academic space—the “‘subalterns”
who guard the grounds, clean the offices, and serve the food—belong to a work
force whose major signs are insecurity and precariousness. In this, they are argu-
ably closer to non-tenured faculty, though some of the latter, presumably through
“hard work” and “dedication,” may still aspire to, and attain, security as tenure,
which is basically, for all the intellectual rationalizations, a “stable salary” that
underwrites the aforementioned “practically existing” critical practice.
I say this, belabor it even, to call into question my own intervention as well
as—at once more tentatively and more brazenly—those of many of my col-
leagues. This calling into question is not, as Moreiras seems to think, tantamount
to abstention or renunciation or to the notion that the subject is “exhausted”
by location and that “locationalism” is perforce reactionary, quite the contrary
(abstention, after all, can assume the guise of a highly involute theorization, a
fetishization of theory). Tenure in a wealthy U.S. university does not account for
240 BRAD EPPS

the subject in his or her entirety, as in some game of all or nothing, but it does
“count” for something. To claim that tenure does not alter the charge of the sub-
ject’s utterances, or to claim that tenure is a mere matter of luck (the right person
in the right place at the right time), is to underestimate, even misunderstand, the
structure of burdens and constraints as well as of rewards and privileges. The
irony—which is, of course, the “fact’”—is that even the present critique, duly
signed and published, will expand my curriculum vitae and fold (itself, me)
back into an academic system in which value is measured by way of publica-
tions. To borrow a phrase from Nelly Richard, mine is a “centrist signature,” but
one whose “power of auto-referentiality” does not reside in its invocation of the
self as much as in the self’s situation in a place of privilege (222). “Even when
their current hypothesis is that of de-centering,” Richard writes, “those who for-
mulate it continue to be surrounded by the reputation, academic or institutional,
that allows them to situate themselves in ‘the center’ of the debate at its densest
point of articulation” (222). Richard’s signature itself is hardly minor, but it is
not centrist or not as centrist as the signature of those, like me, who live and
teach, with tenure, in rich universities in the United States. Anonymity, writing
to have no name, or no face, remains a utopian gesture associated, in the puta-
tively more sophisticated circles, with the names of such famous writers as Blan-
chot, Barthes, and Foucault. The radicality of anonymity is such that it cannot
be “duly cited” or “named” without being compromised. In fact, true anonym-
ity in the academy is more typically reserved for the subjects whom academics
figure as “subaltern” and who give a sense of urgency and importance to our
work. Academic entities such as the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group
may challenge the power of the proper name, but do not, perhaps indeed cannot,
dispense with it entirely. The “Founding Statement” of the group is, after all,
reprinted in Dispositio/n “with the kind permission of Duke University Press,
who [sic] published it in boundary 2 20:3, 1993” (1, note). Others, including
many of those who have participated in the group, have publicized the names of
the participants; indeed, the names are listed later on in the original publication.
The point may be petty, but that is precisely why it matters; for it gives the lie
to some of the more grandiloquent gestures of professional academics. This is
not to say that those who participated in the aforementioned group—or indeed
any group—are the same or that their work is the same, for clearly it is not. In-
stead, it is simply to say that academics, regardless of our affiliations, continue
to be marked by any number of external signs of (in)validation. It is also to say
that the day that our exchanges take place without copyright, proper names, and
institutional affiliations will be the day that a certain radicality has finally taken
 KEEPING THINGS OPAQUE 241

root, that utopia has finally found its place. In the meantime, academic work will
proceed, more or less, as it has.
One of the ways that such work proceeds is by casting itself in a heroic,
risk-ridden, cutting-edge role. Risk, precariousness, and insecurity, often ab-
strusely figured, function as an ethical principle for many academic endeavors.
And abysses, fissures, breaches, and other such signs function as the abstrusely
figured spaces of said endeavors. Moreiras’s invocation of a “second Latinamer-
icanism’’—attesting both to the inadequacy and stiffness of Latin Americanism
per se—constitutes an assertive radicality that spins in just such a space:

[a second] Latinamericanism does not primarily work as a machine of epistemic

homogenization, but rather against it: a disruptive force, or a wrench, in the epis-
temological apparatus, an anti-disciplinary instance or Hegelian ‘savage beast’
whose desire does not go through an articulation of difference or identity, but rather
through their constant disarticulations, through a radical appeal to an epistemic
outside, to an exteriority that will not be turned into a mere fold of the imperial
interior. In this sense, Latinamericanism seeks an articulation with alternative lo-
calities of knowledge production to form an alliance against historically constituted
Latinamericanist representation and its attendant sociopolitical effects. (“Global
Fragments” 87)

An entity apparently endowed with its own agency, its own “desire,” this
“second Latinamericanism” not only sets straight the “first” by twisting it inside
out, it also maintains a principle of order and progress—first that, then this—that
trumps teleology, however twisted, by rendering it ghostly. What any of this has
to do with anything Latin American (rather than, say, Asian or European or Afri-
can) remains to be seen. Repeatedly, Moreiras cites Latin America, appeals to it
(or rather beyond it), but rarely offers anything “precise” or “specific” about it.
To do so, of course, would presumably be to fall prey to a benighted “articula-
tion of difference or identity”—or to a “sociological and literary conventional-
ism’”—that would keep the imperial machine working smoothly, wrench-free."
Of course, the idea that Moreiras’s own critique is not also smoothly at
work, and that its “beasts,” “wrenches,” and “radical appeals” are not also stan-
dard fare in a highly theorized U.S. academic setting rife with its own conven-
tions, is specious, to say the least. Moreiras’s work, which I obviously take
seriously, moves me, but also gives me pause. In many respects, it is work that
engages Latin America as a concept or idea within parameters that are, disci-
plinarily speaking, more philosophical than literary, historiographic, sociopo-
litical, or economic. As such, it is entirely “legitimate” and both addresses and
242 BRAD EPPS

raises important questions that push at the limits of materialist analysis. A lack
of material specificity is not, in itself, problematic, and I do not mean to sug-
gest that Moreiras’s work does not make a significant contribution to the field,
quite the contrary. Rather, I would resist the assertiveness that would erect a
particular approach or line of study into the approach or line of study for Latin
America, even as concept or idea. It is the tendency to emit something like a
prescriptive, assertive overview in which materiality is adduced in the most
general and “philosophical” of terms that concerns me. Bourdieu makes much
of the play of words over things, or realities, and criticizes “the propensity to a
revolutionariness with object and without effect” (Contre-feux, 35). His critique
rings in important ways, as does his advocacy, articulated at none other than
the 1999 MLA in Chicago, for a committed scholarship or, as he also puts it,
an engaged knowledge (Contre-feux, 33-41). His call for efficacy, clarity, and
self-critique is one that I take seriously, and impresses much of what I have
to say here. Antonio Cornejo-Polar makes a similar critique, but does so, im-
portantly, as part of a critique of the preponderance of a limited critical canon
that is not written in Spanish (343). More explicitly localized than Bourdieu,
Cornejo-Polar also grapples with the play of words and reality. His call for a
critical practice in Spanish is also one that I take seriously, though I do not
heed it here, largely because I want to intervene in the debate as practiced in
the United States, where the dominance of English remains undeniable (as the
present volume indicates). There is another reason, of course, and it hardly has
the same intellectual or professional veneer as the former: English is my native
language, and my sense of its limits and possibilities, my feeling of its rules,
regulations, and their abrogation, is especially acute.
I will return to affective linguistic investments later on, but for the mo-
ment I want to underscore what is so obvious as to go often noticed. Differ-
ences and divisions among and within universities and academics matter, but
they still, within a fractured generality, allow for contrasts between the United
States and Latin America. They matter in ways that outstrip the presence or ab-
sence of particular lines or programs of studies, of particular subjects presumed
to know, indeed of particular disagreements and debates. They matter not just
symbolically but also materially. And yet, the material value of academic in-
stitutions, including their physical plants, libraries, laboratories, investments,
endowments, portfolios, contracts, pay scales, salaries, financial benefits and
perks are elided or ignored in a number of essays that assert their radicality (and
the radicality of their authors). Different as cultural studies, subaltern studies,
postcolonial studies, queer studies, literary studies, Hispanic studies, and Latin
American studies (first, second, or whatever) may be, they all have something
 KEEPING THINGS OPAQUE 243

in common. To state the obvious, they are all studies. The debate over them,
for all its exilic, migratory, cosmopolitan, or radical gestures, for all the fervor
it stirs and all the ink it spills, is housed, especially in the United States, in par-
ticular institutional sites, primarily universities, many of which have outposts
and investments overseas. Achugar is on to something when he argues that the
debate itself is debatable, that the debate is not the same in the United States
as it is in Latin America in part because the relations between the academy
and civil society (or the intellectual public sphere) are different. That said, it is
not that the sites where, or from which, academics work can account for us in
our entirety (that would indeed be reductive in the “wrong” sense), but rather
that we cannot leave these sites entirely behind. In a so-called globalized era, a
system of symbolic and material profit necessarily implicates us all, differently,
unevenly, unequally, and at times, quite divisively.
However radical the appeals to exteriority, our nationality, and that of other
academic critics who participate in intellectual “debates” (Sarlo, Achugar,
Morana, Mignolo, etc.), is at stake in ways that the nationality of most im-
migrants is not. As I have previously intimated, the “non-native” or foreign
professionals that manage to secure academic or other “prestigious” forms of
employment in the United States typically need their employers, whose papers
are already in order, to vouch for their skills, their unique skills. The rhetoric of
skills recently made an appearance at my place of employment, when the then
president of Harvard University, Neil Rudenstine, confronted with a student
protest that included a three-week occupation of his office, used it to “justify”
outsourcing, downsizing, and low wages for non-unionized, largely immigrant
employees. He even went as far as to point out that Harvard was “humane”
enough to provide “free” English classes (note the importance of a de facto “na-
tional” language) so that the workers could find better employment, more than
likely elsewhere. The point is important, for it underscores the degree to which
the employed academic intellectual, whose skill is ratified as unique by the
institution, is separated from those with whom, but more commonly for whom,
he or she would speak and whose history he or she would “restitute.” A visa,
green card, or passport is a mighty thing, and it enables all sorts of legally sanc-
tioned speculations on legality and illegality, nationality and postnationality,
hegemony and anti-hegemony, locations and dislocations—all sorts of balking
and talking. It is a document that enables, despite its burdensome constraints,
a rather materially comfortable settling and critical practice in the brutally un-
equal core of capitalism.
To deconstruct nationality, however commendable a project, can be to dis-
avow it, to make as if it did not matter or, perhaps, as if it mattered too much.
244 BRAD EPPS

Whatever the case, such deconstruction tends to be yet another sign of privilege,
the surplus effect of a relatively unencumbered time and place in which thought,
reflection, and theory can come to be. For those who are beaten at the border, or
who drown or suffocate in the crossing, or who are interned in camps, or who
“dream” of leaving home for a “better life,’ the debate between cultural studies
and literary studies, or Peninsular studies and Latin American studies, or subal-
ternism and aesthetic value, is indeed academic. This is not to say that the differ-
ence does not signify and is ultimately indifferent (though it is to say, once again,
that it may be relatively inconsequential), but rather that it is institutionally and
nationally circumscribed, shot through, moreover, with questions of economic
class. And yet, literary and cultural critics, Peninsularists and Latin American-
ists, subalternists and aesthetic theorists, are arguably more alike than not. If they
can be said to constitute a transnational community, it is against the background
of others whose transnationality, less prone to skillful institutional validation, is
decidedly more vulnerable, when not downright inoperant. Whether or not “we”
academics call these others—usually without really calling them—“subaltern,”
we almost invariably call ourselves, in our fractured individuality, in the pro-
cess. Nationality works yet its divisive magic, roughly and ever so peacefully,
so much so that its overcoming, undoing, negation, or erasure is in some dogged
sense national, too. The critique of nationality is important and might take the
form, from time to time, of a self-critique, a critique of the location, positioning,
and memory—to use Achugar’s words—of the critic, his or her signs of identity
and his or her interrogation, or refusal, or such signs.

The Nameless Project

In order not to be authoritative, I’ve got to speak autobiographically.

—Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies

In what follows, I want to focus my attention on a more delimited disagreement

and debate, the previously invoked exchange between Alberto Moreiras and
Beatriz Sarlo which appeared, in English, in the Journal of Latin American Cul-
tural Studies in 1999. A first version, in English, of Sarlo’s piece was presented
in 1996 at Duke University; it was first published, in Spanish, in 1997 in Revista
de Critica Cultural; it was then translated by Lucy Phillips and published as
indicated. Moreiras’s much longer piece bears no marks of translation and was
evidently written in English: there is no note, as is the case with Sarlo’s piece,
which indicates that it has a cross-cultural, bilingual history. The distinction is
 KEEPING THINGS OPAQUE 245

not insignificant. As Moreiras declares: “Sarlo’s essay ... must be read in the
context of a developing discussion of what Mabel Moraiia calls ‘international
Latinamericanism’ or theory about Latin America at an international level” (“Or-
der” 125).'' Sarlo’s piece, which is a defense of literature, literary criticism, and
aesthetic value(s), antedates Moreiras’s piece, which thus functions as a response
or rebuttal—not just to Sarlo but also to Achugar, Morafia, and others who are
not primarily, or as resolutely, concerned with a defense of aesthetic value(s).
Both pieces engage literary studies and cultural studies or rather, as Moreiras
recasts it, literary studies and the modality (or anti-modality) of cultural studies
that he champions: subaltern studies. The twists and turns of studies, by which
“cultural,” “subaltern,” “postcolonial” and so on are now tied together, now torn
29 66.

apart, are as complex as they are common. Sarlo’s intervention is unquestionably

less demanding—in more than one way—than Moreiras’s and, interestingly, less
artfully wrought.'* What most strikes me about Sarlo’s piece is, however, what
strikes Moreiras: its instances of personal reflection, location, and interpreta-
tion, what Sarlo designates as “personal experience.” Moreiras, who here avoids
drawing on any personal experience of his own, or in his own name, maintains a
stance of critical distance, a semblance of objectivity, autonomy, and radicality
whose measure is an absence of grounds, fundamental, in turn, to his under-
standing of accomplished globalization (“Order” 125).'? Despite a few caveats
regarding the complexity of meaning and the lack of satisfactory answers to the
questions that cultural studies poses, Moreiras’s response to Sarlo is confident
and, moreover, rigorously anti-anecdotal. It rehearses no personal story, no little
incident, no subjective moment, and virtually no point of location, except by way
of others. Sarlo’s “personal experience” accordingly occludes what the reader
can only imagine as Moreiras’s “personal experience;” it functions under his pen
as a pettiness that inhabits, like some benighted negativity, Moreiras’s theoreti-
cal speculation, itself immersed in negativity of a more dazzling sort.
Such dazzling negativity reminds me—toutes proportions gardées—of
what Keats, referring to Shakespeare, called “negative capability” and what
Paul de Man, glossing Keats, celebrated as “a life so buried under the wealth of
its own inventions that it has ceased to exist as a particular experience” (xxv).
Moreiras might be similarly, if less sumptuously, buried, if only what he cel-
ebrated did not entail here something like the burial of poetry itself, its en-
cryption under a wealth of subalternist inventions. Rhetorically, it is by way of
Sarlo’s “personal experience” that Moreiras incorporates into the body of the
text that bears his name and that forms part of his curriculum vitae personality
and experience as other than his, as not his, as nameless. Said namelessness is
essential, it seems, to the subaltern, or rather to the subalternist studies, that
246 BRAD EPPS

Moreiras advances. Pursuing “the possibility of raising questions in the name

of nothing,” Moreiras asserts “the question about asking under no name, in the
name of nothing: a nameless thinking or a nameless asking” (“Order” 136). The
question, he assures us, has to do with the subaltern and, though he certainly
does not put it so, with its institutionalized maintenance in and as subaltern or
subalternist studies, especially in the United States. Sarlo had already noted the
conditioned profitability of cultural (and subalternist) studies, whose “growing
popularity ... has provided employment for countless retrained literary crit-
ics” (115)—and retrained philosophers, I am tempted to add. But Moreiras, in
responding to Sarlo, is not interested in addressing such questions as employ-
ment, and labors instead to make a more philosophically compelling argument
invoked by Sarlo herself. And here, in the shadow of labor and the market,
we return to the ever so constrained burden of selling, or selling-out. Moreiras
takes on those “Latin American intellectuals” who “have sharpened their critical
knives on what they regard as a major Latinamericanist sell-out of Latin Amer-
ica into the global market taking place primarily if not exclusively through the
U.S. academy, and in particular through Latinamericanist subaltern and post-
colonial studies” (“Order” 125-26). Compelling as it is, Moreiras’s argument
for namelessness, groundlessness, and subalternist critique finds itself shaped
by the very “knives” that would be sharpened against it. It also turns, at times
even decisively, on a number of slippery, universalizing premises of its own.
Adducing Bové’s claim that “‘history has been the principle within and
according to which modern state systems organize knowledge,” Moreiras goes
on to declare that “we must also realize that value thinking has been the prin-
ciple of that principle” (“Order’ 133). The dutiful tenor of the sentence—in
which the I disappears behind a collective “we must’”—and the penchant for
meta-theoretical repetitions—the “order of order, the value of value, the reason
of reason” with which he begins (“Order” 125)—are two of the more insistent
features of Moreiras’s prose. But imperatives and polyptoton—the employment
of the same word in various cases—are not what is most at stake. For what is
at stake is nothing less than the configuration of the world and the value of the
configuration of the world, and, of course, of value itself. For Sarlo, the value
at stake is aesthetic, a value in need of rescue and protection by the Left (which
needs to rescue and protect it from wholesale appropriation, or sell-out, by the
Right). But values, which Moreiras identifies as “‘consubstantial to state think-
ing” (“Order” 133), are supposedly “without a ground when at stake is, not the
need to rebuild a previous state form as a defense against transnational capital,
but rather the necessity [sic] to think through what Bové calls ‘the transnational
space between state and superstate (or no state) and the national and transna-
 KEEPING THINGS OPAQUE 247

tional forms of capital’” (“Order,” 133). What happens when, and if, there is a
“need to rebuild a previous state form” is unclear, though still more unclear is
what happens when there is a “need” to build a state that has no previously ex-
isting form or a form whose previous existence is long past. Moreiras does not
consider that value, if identified as consubstantial to state thinking, might vary
according to the state or would-be state in question. Whatever the transnational
space may be, there is little space in Moreiras’s conceptualization for any state
in abeyance, in protracted projection, in erasure, or even in danger: the “no
state” is not, then, just a possible end but also a seemingly impossible begin-
ning. Tellingly, Moreiras names no state or states and deploys instead the non-
state, or non-superstate, of Latin America even as he criticizes the presumably
more homey nuestro americanismo (literally, “our Americanism’ ) of others.
The lack of attention to specific states and non-states, to specific moments
and events, distinguishes Moreiras’s defense of subalternist studies from work
by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ranajit Guha, and other subalternist critics who relate
events in a manner that does not entail the deletion of history and historiogra-
phy as heretofore practiced. For that matter, it distinguishes it from the work of
other members of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group such as Ileana
Rodriguez as well as that of Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, Manuel Burga, and oth-
ers working in Latin America. Moreiras’s ethico-philosophical interests, perhaps
his ethico-philosophical formation, may partially account for both his apparent
unwillingness to name (he does not, quite rightly, aim to speak for the subaltern
or in its/his/her name) and his apparent disinterest in historical “details.” Such
“details” turn on him, as author, all the same. For the nameless thinking or name-
less asking, when asserted by one who has a name and whose name is known,
smacks of what Bourdieu calls the oracle effect, an assumption of ever greater
authority by abolishing the self and by speaking in the name of others or an ideal.
For Bourdieu, “it is when I become Nothing . . . that I become Everything. . . .
The oracle effect is a veritable splitting of personality: the individual personal-
ity, the ego, abolishes itself in favour of a transcendent moral person” (Language
211). Although Bourdieu himself is no stranger to the oracle effect (perhaps
“no one” who publishes is), his work puts the ground back, if only provision-
ally, under the groundlessness that has become so dear to much self-designated
radical critique. Bourdieu’s work does so, I might add, not by simply denying
groundlessness, but by indicating that groundlessness, not unlike globalization,
is easier said than done, let alone lived. Moreiras, however, presents groundless-
ness as an all but indisputable truth and, furthermore, as a value in its own right:
its truth entails the impossibility of securing truth and its value, the impossibil-
ity of securing value. The upshot, so thick with paradox (as Moreiras knows),
248 BRAD EPPS

includes not just idealist moves against idealism, but also a developmental logic
against developmental logic. Tracing a line of ascendant, developmental, hier-
archical truth-value (precisely what he claims not to trace), Moreiras impugns a
“retrenchment into past forms” (128) and an attempt to “resuscitate” nationalist
projects “from the ruins of state-centered desarrollismo (developmentalism)”
(129). More significantly, he holds that some critics hold on to “the dying (which
remains spectral)” while others embrace “the emergent” (134). It almost goes
without saying that Moreiras (implicitly) situates himself among, and maybe at
the forefront of, the emergent.
For someone as given to spectral thinking as Moreiras is elsewhere, it is
curious that he does not dally with the possibility that the specter of the dead
and dying might haunt the emergent or that the emergent might be a rehearsal,
with a difference, of the dead and dying. The closest he comes is when he writes
that “this is not to say that these forms [of value thinking] will not return: they
will, necessarily, but always under the guise of unavoidable farce, in the well-
known Marxian sense” (136). Moreiras does not gloss what is “well-known,”
and so the would-be Marxian designation of farce here functions as a dismissive
accusation in its name. Be that as it may, the complication of critical positions
appears less important than a reaffirmation of their division. For all its philo-
sophical and political trappings, the aforementioned division between the dying
and the emergent (which ironically, if not farcically, supports a desarrollismo of
its own) signals also, and perhaps primarily, a competitive ethos in which ideas,
projects, and persons, truths and values, vie for critical ground, or groundless-
ness. In this, it “necessarily” shares more than a little with capitalism and the
so-called market of ideas.'* Mabel Morafia’s sense of déja vu with respect to
much postmodern theorization (218) is borne out, I believe, in Moreiras’s for-
mulation of critical positions that recall previous divides—never exactly neat—
between decadents and regenerationists, traditionalists and avant-gardists, and
so on. Without naming names, Moraiia criticizes the penchant to “hacer de
América Latina un constructo que confirme la centralidad y el vanguardismo
téorico globalizante de quienes la interpretan y aspiran a representarla discur-
sivamente” (make of Latin America a construct that confirms the centrality and
globalizing theoretical avant-gardism of those who interpret it and aspire to
represent it discursively) (219). Morafia refers to the boom in subaltern studies,
by which she indicates the imbrication of theory in literature and of both in the
market. Just as the “boom” in Latin American literature was partially designed
in Barcelona, so might the “boom” in Latin American subaltern studies be un-
derstood as partially designed in Pittsburgh and Durham (in both cases, Latin
American production is downplayed in order to be “discovered” and promoted
 KEEPING THINGS OPAQUE 249

from a metropolitan site). Morafia is considerably more discreet in her allusions

than I am, but Moreiras seems to be engaged nonetheless. He counters, more
directly (by citing her), with a discourse of displacement that has little patience
for the ostensible pettiness of placement. Championing a nameless, ground-
less, radical thinking, Moreiras styles himself, but only implicitly, as among the
emergent but also as in the “interregnum,” another concept he borrows from
Paul Bové (135). The interregnum designates an in-between whose exaspera-
tion with “populist-historicist” projects apparently leaves its denizens little time
to recall, at least in Moreiras’s version, the regal, dynastic dimensions of what
was, once upon a time, a between kingdoms. At any rate, the name, the history
of names, is here out of the question, as if its recognition could only entail the
misrecognition or, worse still, the disrespectful evacuation of the subaltern.
The division, if nothing else, seems clear. Those who hold on to the dying
are, in Moreiras’s words, “tendential neo-Arielists ... by and large engaged in
a salvaging movement of what is past” (“Order” 134). So engaged, the “‘neo-
Arielists” (like the nuestroamericanistas) are eminently melancholy, mired in
a movement past and forever backward, mired, in fact, in non-movement. So
engaged, the “neo-Arielists” can hardly be viable challengers in the “patterned
disputes,” or debates, with the people “they critique,’ some of whom “place
themselves in the interregnum” (“Order” 134). The voluntarism of such a pro-
nouncement, tendentious in its own right, is indicative of a refusal to confront
the insufficiency of the will and, hence, the difficulty of self-placement and the
insistence of preexisting structures of placement (the burdens and constraints
already noted). In contrast to such willfully oblique self-placement, Sarlo’s “re-
course to ‘personal experience’” is openly conditioned by disciplinarity, institu-
tionality, and nationality. Her “adoption” of the position of art critic is in some
very significant sense out of her hands and takes the form of an exasperating, at
times exhausting, negotiating of terrain. If Sarlo’s position is one of delimited
negotiation and struggle, in which recourse to personal experience can be an
act of resistance, Moreiras’s place, despite his claims to openness, untimeli-
ness, and infinitude (indeed perhaps because of them), seems uncannily more
secure. True, Moreiras does not place himself by name among those who place
themselves in the interregnum (he refers to “some of the people”), but it seems
all but clear that the interregnum is his place and that he is one of the people that
the “tendential neo-Arielists” critique. It seems also all but clear that he need
not and indeed should not name himself.
The lack of the name is not always the same, however. Moreiras’s liter-
ary-theoretical study, Tercer espacio, is a deeply personal work that includes
a lengthy reflection on a photograph of a young child, held in the arms of a
250 BRAD EPPS

young woman, looking into a mirror. The photograph is duly reproduced, ap-
parently in order to give more credibility—dare I say “ground”—to the written
description. The woman and child are described in the third person, their names
withheld, in a manner that ostensibly strengthens the photograph’s allegorical
charge. The photograph might thus appear to be any old photograph, a found
object, a piece of a personal past that becomes impersonal or extrapersonal or,
as Moreiras prefers, “desprivatizado” (deprivatized) (Tercer 34) because it can
only partially be remembered and never, with any exactitude, named. The date
of the photograph, however, is given at the very outset: 1957. Only a bit later
does the reader “see” that the child in question is the author and that the woman
is the author’s mother. The index does not mention the mother and refers only to
the “foto del autor” (author’s photo), but the entire work is explicitly dedicated
to her, in memoriam, as well as to the author’s father, whose first name only is
given. It is a compelling strategy, this withholding of the name, for it casts the
photograph into the sphere of something like the universal, though the fash-
ion, faces, and frame of the mirror, let alone the date, impose a more localized
impression. The strategic withholding permits Moreiras to hold forth in some
powerfully reflective ways. “Mirar ese espejo (in the photograph) es un anticipo
de lo imposible” (to look at that mirror is to anticipate the impossible) and, for
the photographed child as author, “una leccién en todo lo que le desborda”’ (a
lesson in everything that exceeds him) (Tercer 33). Despite the annunciation
of what might pass as a universal impossibility, the lesson is arguably more
pointed, and more poignant, for the subject therein depicted. To make that per-
fectly clear, however, might risk wrecking a lesson for the reader. For “en este
texto la foto se desprivatiza y deviene no solo lugar de escritura, sino emblema
o alegoria fundacional” (in this text the photo is deprivatized and becomes not
only a place of writing but also a foundational emblem or allegory) (Tercer 34).
With just the right spin, the author’s personal, private baby picture becomes a
place for writing and an allegory, apparently for us all.
In Moreiras’s allegorical lesson, Roland Barthes—the dead author whose
writings about the death of the author are supplemented by autobiographi-
cally touched speculations on his love for his (dead) mother—is mentioned
by name, as is Ivan Zulueta, director of Arrebato. Interestingly, in La chambre
claire (Camera Lucida), Barthes does not show his best-loved photograph of
his mother, a photograph of her as a child, before he could ever be seen (by us
at least) in her arms. For Marianne Hirsch, “Barthes cannot show us the photo-
graph because we stand outside the familial networks of looks and thus cannot
see the picture in the way that Barthes must. To us it would be just another ge-
neric family photograph from a long time ago” (2, emphasis original). Moreiras
 KEEPING THINGS OPAQUE 251

proceeds differently, showing us a baby picture, his own, but refusing to deploy
a proper name or first person pronoun of his own. Then again, Moreiras’s name
graces the cover of the book, and perhaps any repetition would have seemed un-
-seemly; after all, books, with their editors, copyrights, and ISBN numbers, are
already such delimited, personally marked products. The “deprivatization” of
the photograph thus runs against the privatization of the book, but it also spins
the allegorical into something generic, just another family photograph from a
(fairly) long time ago. For Hirsch, the generic spells the end of poignancy, and
yet for me, there is something poignant in Moreiras’s open self-retention, such
showing without quite telling, such mournful determination to be taken away
without being taken away, or “arrebatado.” It is almost as if the author were
embarrassed by his authority, his name, and his publicly uttered I, embarrassed
or all too proud to give it up easily.
But this is mere speculation, pregnant with emotional markers, the writerly
afterlife of reading and seeing. What is less speculative is that even at his most
intimate, Moreiras remains (touchingly) distant. There is a lesson here—Tercer
espacio is not part of a debate, but of a monograph, of which more later—and
it whispers to us that we might show ourselves, but not speak of ourselves, at
least not by way of a proper name or a first person pronoun. The mother tongue
is, nevertheless, at play, and it comes through amid considerable confusion,
its dramatic quotient benefiting in the process. Moreiras recounts his “duda
entre redactar sus palabras en la lengua que le compete ptiblica y profesional-
mente, dada su afiliacion, o en la lengua que, a fuerza de distancia y desgaste,
ha acabado por no hacerse suya, a pesar de su filiacién, pero en cuya extraneza
cree entrever a veces todavia una genuina posibilidad de escritura” (doubt be-
tween composing his words in the language which, given his affiliation, is of
his public and professional competence or in the language which, despite his
filiation to it, has by dint of distance and wear turned out to not be his, but in
whose strangeness he believes that he at times still glimpses a genuine possibil-
ity of writing), (Tercer 36). Never abandoning the third person, which seems
to be the person best suited to the “third space,” Moreiras explains, in Spanish,
his doubt about explaining anything, including himself, in Spanish, or perhaps
in English, or perhaps in yet another language. Emotion rears its head again, if
only to cast down its eyes. What Moreiras writes in his response to Sarlo about
his Latin American Latin Americanist colleagues and their affective investment
in Spanish may go for him, at least in Tercer espacio, though only up to a point.
And what Moreiras writes, in a footnote, is that “emotion may be the very heart
of the matter under discussion” (““Order” 142, n. 14). He does so in acknowl-
edgment of what he calls the “affective investment” in the Spanish language by
252 BRAD EPPS

Cornejo-Polar, Achugar, Morafia, Sarlo, and other Latin Americans (“Order”

142, n. 14).
Recognizing the affective investments in Spanish and other languages, I
want to stay with Moreiras’s own affective, autobiographical gesture, fraught
with strangeness, extrafieza. The strangeness that Moreiras claims to glimpse
as offering a genuine possibility of writing—of writing, if of nothing else—also
carries a charge of estrangement. Moreiras is from Spain, at times still called
by some the mother country, though from a corner of the mother country where
Spanish is not always the mother tongue (the mother tongue of Moreiras’s
mother, though not of his father, seems to be Spanish; cf. Tercer espacio, 36).
Whatever place Galician may have in Moreiras’s account of public and pro-
fessional competence, affiliations and filiations, remains, however, opaque.’ I
have been drawing on personal knowledge, admittedly limited, and not on the
shaky provenance of a name—in which the “ei” of “Moreiras” might be taken
as a mark of identity, ie., Galician—or on the possible wordplays to which
the proper name may lend itself (in such play, mortality would necessarily be
shadowed forth). As a result, something no less suspicious—i.e., my limited
personal knowledge of, and fractured affection for, another person—wriggles
its way ever more flamboyantly into play and leaves me with no less clarity
than before. Galician might, in some way, here signify, and, in signifying, might
push at the either/or formulation of a linguistic dilemma, and decision, that runs
along more established international lines. The third space and the third person
might implicate a third language, one less inclined to hegemonic success than
either English or Spanish. And yet, “Galician,” as is well known, functions in
parts of Latin America as a virtual synonym, or perhaps metonym, for “Span-
ish.” The exilic history of the Galicians, itself stamped by Castilian hegemony,
wrinkles the transatlantic relations between languages, places, and identities,
including stereotypes. Moreiras’s own relation to such historically layered rela-
tions might matter, I suspect, but I simply do not know for certain.
The logical effect of such suspicious uncertainty might be silence, my
keeping quiet about what I do not know and, for that matter, what I know. Si-
lence certainly has its place in critical endeavors, but Moreiras is hardly a silent
critic. That said, the place where Moreiras places himself without quite naming
himself, the interregnum, is purportedly “‘a logical place, the obverse of hege-
mony, a place of silence without a permanent positivity of its own” (141). That
this “logical place” is “the subaltern position” might be one thing, I suppose,
but that it is also, and in the same stroke, the subalternist position, the position
of the practitioner of subaltern studies, is another. The two positions—subaltern
and subalternist—are not commensurate, and Moreiras’s involute prose, de-
 KEEPING THINGS OPAQUE 253

manding (if seductive) for even the most theoretically engaged of critics, brings
that incommensurability home. For my part, I do indeed “feel. . . a certain de-
historicizing [is] at stake” in such speculation. And yet, how I “feel” about de-
historicization, historicism, or history, seems to be beside the point, or rather
it seems to be a point beyond speculation. Moreiras adduces the charge of de-
historicization as a sort of reactive formation—“perhaps some of the critics of
subaltern studies react to what they feel is a certain de-historicizing” (141), but
he brings it up only to set it aside. “But with this,” he writes, “we have reached
a point that no amount of metacritical commentary and no lengthy theoreti-
cal statement could ever trespass. Monographs are needed, since there are not
enough of them, to show that the subalternist critical perspective in Latin Amer-
ican studies can restitute history as history” (141). At the close of his piece, as
its close, the theoretician of the emergent, placed in the interregnum, declares
theory to be at a dead end, a site that cannot be trespassed. We have traveled far,
up to a point where only a return or entrenchment is possible. Arriving at this
point, beyond which we cannot perform any more metacritical commentary or
theorization, we either stop dead or turn back to produce . . . monographs.
Monographs are needed, Moreiras tells us. And monographs, which the
dictionary defines as “learned treatises on a particular subject,’ seem to be on
this side of a theoretical limit. Whatever else monographs may accomplish,
they will at least show something powerful and productive about “the subal-
ternist critical perspective in Latin American studies” (141). Moreiras’s call
to monographic action implicitly recalls Gramsci’s, for whom “this kind of
history [subaltern history] can only be dealt with monographically, and each
monograph requires an immense quantity of material which is often hard to
collect” (55). Florencia Mallon cites the preceding passage from Gramsci in
her 1994 examination of Latin American Subaltern Studies, its “promise and
dilemma.” She does so in order to support her insistence on a “laborious and
methodologically complex task” that draws on “semiotics, literary criticism,
and many forms of textual analysis” (1497) without “dismissing earlier tradi-
tions and works as irrelevant and passé” (1501). For Mallon, the dismissal of
earlier traditions entails the dismissal, or at least avoidance, of “the archive and
the field” (1501), whose demands are difficult “in today’s academic world, with
it notorious overproduction” (1502). Waxing rapturous about the quasi-revela-
tory joys of “getting one’s hands dirty in the archival dust” and “one’s shoes
encrusted in the mud of field work” (1507), Mallon, nonetheless, reminds us
of the neatness of some of our more theoretically informed speculations and
programs. She also warns against a literary-philosophical habit by which his-
toriographic monographs are elided, forgotten, ignored, or declared to be non-
254 BRAD EPPS

existent. Criticizing Patricia Seed for failing to “demonstrate an awareness”

of previous work by Latin Americanists on subaltern subjects (1500), Mallon
implicitly submits that showing is knowing, a dubious proposition that, still and
all, has an effective, and affective, charge when placed alongside Moreiras’s
call for (more) monographs.
For Moreiras, apparently writing after Mallon, what the much-needed
monographs will show is the subalternist perspective as that by which history
is restituted as history, in “an absolute, that is, non-arbitrary way” (141). His-
tory restituted in an absolute, that is, non-arbitrary way: the assertion is strong,
and it comes without any qualifier such as Gramsci’s “this kind of history.” The
qualifier “absolute” remits to Moreiras’s presentation of Jameson’s “absolute
historicism” which “grounds the possibility of a comprehensive theory of past
societies and cultures in the structure of the present, of capitalism” (qtd. in
Moreiras, 131). Moreiras continues to quote Jameson, who refers to “honor-
ing” “existential historicism” as “an experience” (131), but he does not unpack
either “existence” or “experience” and moves immediately “to claim the status
of absolute historicism for that which subaltern studies attempts to do” (131).
Against absolute historicism, as its insufficient rival, he declares that he “will
retain the name of populist historicism to refer to an always insufficient kind
of historicism, thwarted by its confusion of the part and the whole, and intent
on hegemonic seizure” (131). Moreiras’s own possible confusion of parts and
wholes, his own possible intents on hegemonic seizure, do not quite figure, but
neither do the “repressive strategies” and “collusion” that Dipesh Chakrabarty
mentions in a passage that Moreiras quotes as supporting his presentation of
“absolute historicism” as a “motto for subalternism” (131). And what Moreiras
quotes from Chakrabarty is his request “for a history that deliberately makes
visible, within the very structure of its narrative forms, its own repressive strate-
gies and practices, the part it plays in collusion with the narratives of citizen-
ship in assimilating to the projects of the modern state all other possibilities
of human solidarity” (gtd. in Moreiras, 131). Even if it is admitted, by way of
an appeal to disciplinarity, that Moreiras is writing not history but a critique
of history, the critique of history is not yet beyond history (or historiography),
and, hence, not yet beyond its own repressive strategies and its own forms of
collusion. Within that, it remains unclear, and perhaps deliberately so, what
it would mean for Moreiras’s own subalternist, or meta-subalternist, practice
to ask—by way of a previous authority whose relation to subalternity is not
Moreiras’s—for a history that deliberately makes visible such things.
All told, if this is not how subalternist studies fall “prey to itself by, pre-
cisely, not being subalternist enough,” then I either have no idea what the acad-
 KEEPING THINGS OPAQUE B55

emy is or I have no idea what the subaltern is. Who the subaltern is, or might
be; and whether he or she can speak; and whether it depends on whether we
have been listening or not; and whether there is indeed a history here to be res-
tituted; and whether restitution will alleviate misery, injustice, exploitation, and
suffering, I do not know. At least I do not know any of this after so much meta-
critical commentary and so lengthy a theoretical statement, so much “unmaster-
able excess” that “constitutes [Moreiras’s] personal investment” (140) and that
sends me packing back to monographs, to another kind of study, more focused,
more delimited, more specific. Or perhaps it is more in touch with the archive
and/or the field. Whatever the case, Moreiras’s gesture is a strong one, a slap in
many a face already de-faced as hegemonic because it is not subalternist in the
manner that Moreiras puts forth. The gesture mimics, as in an inverted glass,
that of those, like myself, who would take Moreiras to task for being intent on
hegemonic seizure in his own right (as if hegemonic seizure were always al-
ready “wrong”’). Whatever the plays of Gramsci (whom Moreiras does not cite),
Jameson, and Chakrabarty, the idea that a /ine of study, duly practiced by “trans-
national” intellectuals employed in U.S. universities, could restitute history as
history in an absolute, non-arbitrary way, might indeed best be answered with
silence. And yet, second best to silence, it does lead me to raise the question as
to why restitution, so figured, should be the objective.'®
Sarlo, for whom “art is about... something extra” (123), helps me, how-
ever, to see Moreiras’s highly theoretical piece on subalternity as artful in its
excess. That it is also a mode of academic power and a perspective of study is,
I guess, just something extra. There is of course more. Moreiras writes with
unwavering seriousness, not stopping to deal with the messiness—or as Stuart
Hall might put it, the “nastiness”—of materiality, not stopping to unpack such
loaded terms as “‘absolute” and “non-arbitrary,” “experience” and “existence,”
“repression” and “collusion.” Such seriousness is, as Sarlo might say (and I
would certainly agree), Moreiras’s “right,” and it would be frivolous of me—or
all too serious—to bend, or want to bend, his writing into something else. yet,
I am struck by a certain excessive effect of seriousness. In an unwitting reitera-
tion of conventional gender divisions, Moreiras plays the man’s part (selfless,
general, forward thinking, philosophical) while Sarlo, at least in Moreiras’s re-
sponse, is made to play, ever so implicitly, the woman’s part (self-concerned,
specific, bound to the past, given to art). Interestingly, Sarlo’s own deployment
of gender leads her to present “white males” as given to art and art criticism
and women and (other?) subalterns as relegated, by the aforementioned men,
to the production of cultural objects. However philosophy, art, and culture are
sliced, gender and race are sliced in, too. But Moreiras does not really engage
256 BRAD EPPS

either category, and limits himself to saying “and so it is so” (133) to Sarlo’s
assessment. That said, he returns directly to debunking “value thinking as the
right medicine for cultural-studies-based racist orientalism” (133), taking up
Sarlo’s explicit reference to racism and ignoring her only implicit reference, or
non-reference, to sexism. Insofar as Moreiras insists on attending to the “great
debate of the end of the century,” and insofar as said debate “is not a debate on
values, but rather on that which values obscure” (136), it is interesting that he
does not attend to what is obscured in Sarlo’s summation.
Gender, race, class, and nationality, as categories of identity and difference,
are what Moreiras would push away, or behind, in the great debate on values; or
rather, they are what he, concerned about reductive maneuvers, would reduce
to populist articulations resolutely at odds with critical articulations (135)."’
Asserting a division between populism and criticism that effectively subsumes
and trumps all other divisions, Moreiras positions himself (ostensibly against
all positions) firmly on the side of the later. He is, after all, a critic, and that
designation, that position, that identity, obscured as it may be, is not without so-
cio-symbolic ramifications. Maintaining a consistently high level of discourse,
Moreiras would keep us centered on the crisis of the value of value, the ground-
lessness of grounds, radical openings, social infinitudes, “ruptural horizons,”
interruptions, and “unmasterable excesses.” The latter, as I have already inti-
mated, is the closest Moreiras comes to acknowledging his own critical person-
ality. “That the social only gives itself to us under the form of an unmasterable
excess,” he writes, “constitutes my own personal investment in subalternism”
(140). The confession, if such it may be called, is telling. Not the plight of the
poor, or the injustice of unequal economic distribution, or the destructive ef-
fects of globalization, or the denial of representation and self-representation, or
any of the other issues one might expect (all too humanistically?) from subal-
ternism, or from a personal investment in it, is sufficient. Rather, excess alone is
enough, more than enough, and it apparently exceeds all attempts, all expecta-
tions, to ground it, to situate it, to pin it down, if only for an arbitrary moment,
and take it to task. The rhetoric of radical openness that Moreiras deploys seems
to close his critique off from critique and to close him off as a situated social
subject. For to open him and his critique to critique would violate not only a
principle of delicacy, it would throw the one who makes such an overture (moi)
into what Moreiras scripts as a retrogressive position, prone to populist histori-
cist platitudes and identity politics presumably indistinguishable from “the old
metaphysical objection to post-metaphysics” (138).
Validating the valueless value of values, the groundlessness of grounds, as
the newest, latest, most historically adequate way of thinking (and of thinking
 KEEPING THINGS OPAQUE 257

inadequation), Moreiras presents himself as more in tune than Sarlo, Achugar,

and Morafia with what he calls, without any appreciable irony, “the spirit of our
times” (136). “Zeitgeist” haunts ‘the spirit of our times,” and does so in a way
that disturbs its “untimeliness” (140). For “Zeitgeist” drags “the spirit of our
times”—no doubt kicking and screaming—back into a line of high historicist
thinking and brings to the fore, by way of contrast, the presence of a collectivity
appreciable in “our times.” The spirit of the times, or the spirit of time, that is
one of the most internationally recognizable terms in German contains no men-
tion of the equivalent, in German, of “us” or “our,’ and Moreiras’s invocation
of it at least allows “us” to see “our” implication in it. In that respect, Moreiras
does “us” a service. The spirit of our times, however, is an effect of subjectiv-
ity amassed and monopolized, recast, forgotten, and remembered as more than
subjectivity—again I want to say estranged—and taken as if in excess of any
and all closure of personality. I would nonetheless open the “our” back up to
its petty, particular closures, especially to those closures that, oracle-like, claim
themselves to be so unidentifiably open. My point here is not, however, to criti-
cize Moreiras’s rhetoric as if something social could thereby be redeemed (the
very thought is absurd). For within my disagreement with Moreiras, I am in
agreement with many of the points he makes. I too am troubled—that ubiquitous
word—by the invocation of value as aesthetic value and of aesthetic value as
the reason, or ground, for preserving literature as a redemptive social practice,
redemptive of the social precisely because it would remove itself, in Sarlo’s for-
mulation, from the social.
The culture of redemption, as Leo Bersani argues, relies on “apparently
acceptable views of art’s beneficently reconstructive function” that rely, in turn,
“on a devaluation of historical experience and of art. The catastrophes of his-
tory matter much less if they are somehow compensated for in art, and art itself
gets reduced to a kind of superior patching function, is enslaved to those very
materials to which it presumably imparts value” (Culture 1). Bersani does not
pit art against society, or make one the horizon of the other, and in that respect
his suspicion of redemption dovetails Moreiras’s (and mine). The difference
is that Bersani does not concern himself with art in Latin America, or Latin
American art, but with art per se, which is here, as so often is the case, Western
art or, more precisely, a Western conceptualization of “art.” Sarlo’s “recourse to
‘personal experience’” (Moreiras, 132) hinges on this difference, one that she
finds repeated in institutional settings and professional practices worldwide.
“We have had trouble,” she writes, “in establishing common ground on which
to make decisions” (122). Generalizing from personal experience in an exem-
plary manner, Sarlo claims that non-Latin Americans look at things produced in
258 BRAD EPPS

Latin America, by Latin Americans, with “sociological eyes” (122) while she,
a Latin American, assumes the “perspective of an art critic” (123). Moreiras,
a non-Latin American, does not grapple with the way such a claim implicates
him, and proceeds to deride personal experience—or at least to be suspicious,
unflinchingly suspicious, of the recourse to it—as indicative of an inability to
be in sync with the spirit of our times. Among the things that “trouble” me,
personally as well as professionally, is the refusal, on the part of Moreiras, here
to acknowledge, even if to deconstruct it, his elliptical, “extimate” relation to
the reiterated site of his interest, competence, expertise, and investment: Latin
America.
As a non-native Peninsularist, I am struck by the conceptual vagueness
with which Moreiras insistently adduces Latin America. Disciplinarity will yet
have its way, and Moreiras, despite his professed interest in “raising questions
in the name of nothing” (136), raises them in the name of Latin America and the
subaltern, a Latin American subaltern. His authority, however, is neither separa-
ble from, nor reducible to, his recognized disciplinary and institutional status as
a Latin Americanist, the insistence with which he, like it or not, identifies him-
self and is identified by others as such. My authority, for whatever it is worth, is
neither separable from, nor reducible to my disciplinary and institutional status
as a Peninsularist, one whose discontent with said recognition has increasingly
lead him down a different path, Catalanist and Latin Americanist—curious as
the conjunction may seem to some. The conventions of disciplinarity require,
for a valid assumption of the position of the subject assumed to know, both
the erasure and the expansion of particular traits, qualities, or signs of identity,
both their remembrance and their forgetting. Manuel Burga, in an interesting
article on “lo andino” (the Andean), makes a similar—but of course quite dif-
ferent—observation: “negar lo andino y sentirlo propio, . . . sentirlo muy pre-
sente y darlo por ausente, son las paradojas y contradicciones de nuestra alma
nacional” (to deny the Andean and to feel it as one’s own, to feel it to be very
present and to give it as absent, is one of the paradoxes and contradictions of
our national soul) (68). My uneasiness with such a phrase as “nuestra alma na-
cional” (our national soul) might be, among other things, a symptom of my own
national, institutional, and disciplinary formation, but what I find compelling
is the paradox of the negation, or erasure, and the affirmation, or (re)writing,
indeed the expansion, of identity. Burga signals a sort of intellectual inhibi-
tion—though it is also possible to speak of intimidation—whose markers are
something like “theoretical sophistication” and “globalization.” And theoretical
sophisticated in an age of “accomplished globalization” tends to cast feeling
into a reactive, regressive, benighted regime of essences, spirits, and identities.
 KEEPING THINGS OPAQUE 259

In order to “estar a tono con los tiempos de un nosotros diverso y de la global-

izaciOn” (be in tune with the times of a diverse ‘we’ and of globalization), feel-
ing must assume a mask—Burga speaks of “disimulo” (dissimulation)—that
closes more than it opens dialogue.
IfI find it difficult to forget my past, it is in part because family, friends,
and colleagues, as well as unknown people in the street, in a bar, or in a store,
remind me of who I am or, rather, who they think I am. I am told, often by
people I have never before met, and almost always after I have answered their
question as to the place of my birth, that they could indeed “tell” that I was, and
apparently still am, a Southerner because they could “hear” it in my voice. They
are generally pleased with such a state of affairs, not only because it reaffirms
their discerning linguistic competence but also because, I venture to say, it reaf-
firms a longstanding sense of place, language, identity, and, yes, destiny. I am
what I sound like, and no amount of vigilance seems sufficient to suppress the
shibboleths that give me away, that offer me up to them as a quasi-familiar, or
unfamiliar, identity. Lest I be mistaken for misspeaking, I will add that I often
engage in the same activity, pricking up my ears to see if I can teli something
about the place, and “identity,” of a person from the opening of a vowel or the
duration of an onset consonant.'* I will not be brash enough to say that “we”
all “hear” identity, but I will say that many of us still try, still listen. And the
listening obtains even for those whose “hybridity” or native or near-native bi-
lingualism makes their tongue slippery in the extreme. What my name is, and
what language or languages I speak, and what I sound like when I speak them
(maybe even what I sound like when I write), are so many variables that are far
from inoperant in the academy or, for that matter, in society at large. The re-
course to personal experience is indeed not as easy as it sometimes seems, but it
is not as difficult, benighted, or moribund as Moreiras maintains in his response
to Sarlo. As has often been noted (an impersonal way of putting it, of course),
personal experience is an experience not just of personality, but of a persona,
a mask, an act or performance. Sarlo’s recourse to personal experience 1s also
recourse to a mask, a performative gesture, one that, in its explicit reference to
students, acknowledges other spaces, less hypothetical than the transnational
spaces between state and superstate (or no state), and perhaps, from a limited
institutional and disciplinary perspective, just as pressing.
Here, as I come to an inadequate close, I cannot but admit to a certain
exasperation that may resemble resentment—at least as Moreiras formulates
it. Moreiras, after all, marshals forth a series of resentful practices, specifically
citing three:
260 BRAD EPPS

first, national and/or regional particularisms resenting reductive representational

practices coming from the metropolitan location standing in as a signifier of uni-
versality; second, local interests resenting what they perceive as an overwhelming
colonization of their discursive space by intellectual and political agendas ema-
nating from other locations that cannot be made their own without a varying but
always present degree of violence; and third, personal histories resenting powerful
interpretative frameworks which are felt as a threat to the moral right of self-inter-
pretation. (126)

Moreiras’s is a powerful interpretative framework that does its best to give

a full account by emptying itself of any mention of particularisms, local inter-
ests, or personal histories except in general, that is to say, as categories without
content. Lest my own personally styled intervention be consigned forthwith to
the dust heap of resentment, I will venture the following: it is not that I “resent”
but rather that I “feel again” what Moreiras and others, in accord with the “spirit
of our times,” have declared dead or dying. All this I feel again because, in a
distressingly self-implicating sense, I have incorporated it within me as one of
the conditions of possibility of an I that I might, more or less improperly, call
my own through, for, and against what Sarlo calls “cultural inheritance” (121).
Far from constituting an essentialist position, I would submit that said “inheri-
tance” can be constructivist and progressive, even in some of its “conservative”
gestures, such as the gesture of love. The love of literature, something that even
Sarlo does not dare to name, “conserves” it as a cumulative and disperse ef-
fect of the lives of others. It is, moreover, an effect of lives often lovingly, and
hatefully, recounted in “little” languages that most of us, even in a politically
oriented Hispanism, do not know or take the time to learn. Said effect, which is
also an affect, does not rely perforce on either aesthetic value or social efficacy,
but on both and neither, sometimes at once.
In his rebuttal of Sarlo, Moreiras does not really tarry with the possibility
of what Sarlo suggests: literary and cultural studies or even literary cultural
studies; much less does he mention his own highly theorized work on litera-
ture. Instead, he reiterates their division in now classical fashion, in order to
make the debate more of a debate, one in which differences are strong and clear
even when arguments may be weak and muddled, and which might give way,
as here, to a debate on a debate. All of which brings me looping back to that
from which Moreiras, by way of Sarlo, started: the order of order, the value of
value, and so on. It is no doubt revealing that I have quoted no literary texts,
whether from Latin America, Spain, the United States, or anywhere else. Just
as Moreiras, in his response to Sarlo, says nothing specific about the subaltern,
or Latin America, I have said nothing specific about literature or, I admit, Latin
 KEEPING THINGS OPAQUE 261

America. There is a paradoxical agreement here. It is time, I think, to get back

to work, each in his or her own way, the so-called dying and the emergent at the
same impossible time. But that is what J think. I would be done—even though I
know that I will not be done—with such highly theorized proclamations, such
abstract debates, such metacritical turns, such confidently rendered time lines,
such self-concerned negations of the self. Monographs are needed, indeed.

Notes

1. I wish to thank José Antonio Mazzotti, Luis Cércamo-Huechante, and Nelly Richard
for their comments and suggestions. But I also wish to thank, in the most profound way
possible, Alberto Moreiras himself, whose dialogic openness, amid all the ostensible
opacity and obscurity (perhaps indeed thanks to all the ostensible opacity and obscu-
rity), is exemplary in its complication, if not rejection, of exemplarity. My desire, if of
desire I may speak, is to engage, even at the risk of disengaging, a densely theoretical
critique that has been caricaturized and dismissed, when not met with silence, on the
part of many, not all, of those with whom I am in agreement: the so-called locationists.
In so doing, I also desire—and no doubt this may seem more jarring than anything I
write about Moreiras—to open, or reopen, location to reflection and critique, to take
it as other than a given, to rehearse, “essayistically” and even anecdotally, its fragility
and strength. I do not know if I accomplish this, but in this question of accomplish-
ment I come close, I want to believe, to Moreiras, even as I come close, I also want
to believe, to those who may be less ambivalent about some of their proximities, and
distances, than I am. Such closeness, needless to say, cannot (but) hope to be recipro-
cal, and may indeed be at its most intense when it is denied, pushed away, set at naught
by way of so many locations, whether “strategically” essentialized or not, that I can
never have or hold.
2. Harvard University’s “Policy on the Use of Harvard Names and Insignia” states that “the
University and its members have a responsibility to protect its assets by seeking a fair
share of the economic value that the use of the Harvard name produces.” It goes on to
state: “‘Harvard University’ is one of the most widely known and respected trademarks
of any kind. The commercial fruits of this fortunate reputation are largely attributable to
the contributions of many generations of faculty, students and staff, and therefore should
be allocated for the benefit of the University as a whole. Any use of the Harvard name
that may depreciate its long-term value should be avoided.” It remains to be seen if a
critique of such rhetoric—in which the University is explicitly likened to a commercial
enterprise and its name to a trademark—qualifies as “depreciation.”
3. Inthe spring of 2001, a group of students, many of them affiliated with a group called
The Progressive Student Labor Movement, occupied the president’s and provost’s of-
fices in one of the venerable old brick buildings in Harvard Yard to demand a “living
wage” for out-sourced, non-Unionized, largely immigrant workers. Both Cambridge
262 BRAD EPPS

and Boston city councils had enacted a living wage, significantly higher than the na-
tional standard, for all city government employees.
Morafia asks: “;C6mo redefinir las relaciones Norte/Sur y el lugar ideol6gico desde
donde se piensa y se construye América Latina como el espacio irrenunciable de una
otredad sin la cual el ‘yo’ que habla (que puede hablar, como indicaba Spivak) se
des-centra, se des-estabiliza epistemoldgica y politicamente?” (how to redefine North/
South relations and the ideological place from which Latin America is thought and
constructed as the unremitting space of an otherness without which the ‘T’ that speaks
[and that can speak, as Spivak indicated] is decentered and destabilized epistemo-
logically and politically?) (218). Achugar stresses the importance of “un lugar desde
donde se habla y desde donde se lee” (a place from which one speaks and from which
one reads) (383). One might just as well add “desde donde se escribe y desde donde
se escucha” (from which one writes and one listens) to the range of locations.
Responding to a welter of recent Spanish works on the legacy of colonialism, Sil-
via Bermtidez confronts the symbolism of “debt” in Hispanic trans-Atlantic culture.
“Frente a la nocién de que es Espafia, como agente colonizador, quien esta “en deuda’
con los pafses que hoy constituyen lo que denominamos Latinoamérica, la nueva ar-
ticulacién establece que es en realidad América Latina la que supuestamente esta en
deuda con Espafia. Espafia, en realidad, no debe nada a Latinoamérica por el pillaje,
las matanzas, y la destruccion de la colonizacién. De hecho, perspectivas hist6ricas
negacionistas como las que se formulan en La mentira historica desvelada. ;Geno-
cidio en América? de Juan Luis Beceiro se utilizan para re-escribir los devastadores
efectos del proceso colonial de la conquista de América” (Against the notion that it
is Spain, as colonizing agent, which is ‘in debt’ to the countries that today constitute
what we call Latin America, a new articulation maintains that it is Latin America
which is supposedly in debt to Spain. Spain, in reality, does not owe anything to Latin
America for the pillage, massacres, and destruction of colonization. In fact, revision-
ist—or ‘negationist’—historical perspectives such as those formulated in Juan Luis
Beceiros’s The Historical Lie Unveiled: Genocide in America? are used to rewrite
the devastating effects of the colonial process in the conquest of America) (349). This
“nueva articulacion” (new articulation) is, as Bermtidez knows, scarcely “new” and
has a lengthy history. In a similar vein, L. Elena Delgado responds to the 2002 Premio
Principe de Asturias de la Concordia, whose recipient was Edward Said, by noting
that “la figura de Said es apreciada por su papel de critico del colonialismo ajeno
(sobre todo anglosaj6n e israelf) pero, aunque su obra esté traducida al espafiol, sus
conclusiones no se aplican para analizar también el colonialismo propio” (Said is ap-
preciated in Spain for his role as critic of foreign colonialism [especially Anglo-Saxon
and Israeli] but, even though his work is translated to Spanish, his conclusions are not
applied to analyze Spain’s own colonialism) (329, emphasis original).
As James Fernandez indicates, U.S. Hispanism has been interested, since its very
inception, in Latin America.
According to Rosaldo: “as the ‘other’ becomes more culturally visible, the ‘self’
 KEEPING THINGS OPAQUE 263

becomes correspondingly less so” (202). In much of Moreiras’s work neither the self
nor the other becomes “visible.” Such double invisibility may hold a promise, but the
promise is shadowed forth in a highly wrought manner that renders it also other than
promising.
In The Exhaustion of Difference, Moreiras writes: “Look now at stereotypical Latin
American Latin Americanists and you will realize that they are by no means off the
hook: if the problem of their alien friend was an excessively comfortable installation
in the privileges of Northern knowledge, and if such sinister installation in knowledge
(sinister because ‘excessively comfortable,’ and thus not comfortable at all) was in-
verted as a mark of unredeemable ignorance, Latin American Latin Americanists may
find a dubious legitimation in the positioning of location as final redemption” (6).
Whether Moreiras finds a dubious legitimation of his own remains unclear. What is
less unclear is, however, the gainsaying of material comfort by way of epistemologi-
cal and ethical discomfort.
Moreiras’s professed aim in his response to Sarlo is “to show that there is a certain
‘essentialism of anti-essentialism’ at work in her essay, which limits the cosmopolitan
scope of her words and might even reintroduce, through the back door, and possibly
counterintentionally, just as in the case of Morafia or Achugar, a sort of anti-populist
populism as the ultimate horizon of critical thinking” (129, emphasis mine). That
cosmoplitanism is, or should be, unlimited, indeed that it should be a value, is itself
not beyond questioning. As Bruce Robbins notes, “any cosmopolitanism’s normative
or idealizing power must acknowledge the actual historical and geographic contexts
from which it emerges” (2).
10. The latter phrase is from Richard’s blurb on Moreiras’s The Exhaustion of Differ-
ence.
Re The reference is to Morafia’s “El boom del subalterno” (50).
12: Sarlo also writes of demands: “Literary criticism not only asks questions but makes,
in a strong sense, demands of texts” (122).
133 Later on, however, Moreiras seems to question the accomplishment of globalization:
“In globalization (provided it could ever be accomplished) . . .’(133). Later still, he
states, glossing Paul Bové’s concept of the “interregnum,” that “temporally, it [the
interregnum] occupies rather something like a time gap—the time gap of unaccom-
plished globalization, which will remain our host for a long time to come” (140). The
question then arises: if one of the paradoxes of an accomplished globalization is that
it leaves us without a ground to question its very ground, does something /ess than an
accomplished globalization leave us with less groundlessness? Leave us, that is, with
just a bit of ground?
14. As Hall says with respect to the Gramscian-inspired problem of the organic intel-
lectual, “the problem is that it appears to align intellectuals with an emerging historic
movement and we couldn’t tell then, and could hardly tell now, where that emerging
historical moment was to be found” (281). Wherever or whatever the emergent may
be, Moreiras seems to know that he is “with it.”
264 BRAD EPPS

II). Moreiras does not make things easy for his reader. If “la lengua que le compete
ptiblica y profesionalmente, dada su afiliacién” (the language which, given his affili-
ation, is of his public and professional competence) is English, then the act of writing
in Spanish is indeed more “daring.” Or, if not daring, it is consonant with some of
Cornejo-Polar’s observations about language and scholarship: “los textos criticos en
inglés suelen utilizar bibliografia en el mismo idioma y prescindir, o no citar, lo que
trabajosamente se hizo en América Latina durante largos afios” (343).
16. That Moreiras invokes the restitution of history as history right after he tells us that we
have reached a point that no theory can trespass reminds me of his criticism of Gordon
Brotherston’s criticism of Brett Levinson’s reading of Rigoberta Mencht and testimo-
nio. Defending Levinson’s “intellectualization” of Menchiti’s text, which supposedly
“managed to operate a concrete historical restitution that may have no precedent or
continuation,” Moreiras offers an impressive reproof of empathy. For Moreiras, em-
pathy forestalls or forecloses “interlocution” and maintains a divide as profound as
that wrought by intellectualization (Exhaustion 218). Moreiras sides with Levinson,
his former student, and upbraids Brotherston for suggesting, as Moreiras styles it, that
“third world or resistant texts should only be treated abjectly, with ‘affect, empathy,
or commiseration’ (Exhaustion 218-219). It is interesting that Moreiras renders em-
pathy—not sympathy, but empathy—as a mode of abjection and that he advocates,
however implicitly, a mode of non-empathetic, intellectual solidarity. But no less in-
teresting is Moreiras’s claim that “restitutional excess can . . . choose to negate itself
as such; [that] it can look for its own point of closure in an attempt to come to the end
of itself, as in Brotherston’s response to Levinson” (Exhaustion 221, emphasis mine).
Moreiras is not alone in linking restitution to excess, which he calls “restitutional
excess,” but what strikes me is how his rendition of Brotherston’s essay (i.e., a resti-
tutional excess that leads to negation and to closure) resembles his own “final words”
on Sarlo. Whatever his intentions, Moreiras’s language encrypts the subaltern as that
which only the subject who assumes the subalternist perspective can “know.” The sub-
altern is, from this perspective, a disciplinary construct, a thing of the academy, and it
is the discipline that seems to come out on top. If “the discipline cannot be abolished
by its object” (Exhaustion 222), it may just be that the object can be abolished by the
discipline.
ve Moreiras’s expressed desire “to help move the debate beyond merely situational pa-
rameters” (131, emphasis mine) is one I share, but only if it does not entail the abso-
lute erasure of said parameters.
18. I have in mind Sean Crist’s article on so-called gay speech in American English.
 KEEPING THINGS OPAQUE 265

Works Cited

Achugar, Hugo. “Leones, cazadores e historiadores, a proposito de las politicas de la me-

moria y del conocimiento.” Revista Iberoamericana 63.180 (1997): 379-87.
Barthes, Roland. La chambre claire: Note sur la photographie. Paris: Etoile, Gallimard,
Seuil, 1980.
Bermudez, Silvia. “De patriotas constitucionales, neoconservadores y periférficos: ;Qué
hace una Espafia como tti en un entre siglos como éste? Revista de Estudios His-
panicos 37 (2003): 341-55.
Bersani, Leo. The Culture of Redemption. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Beverley, John. “Can Hispanism Be a Radical Practice?” Ideologies and Literature 16.4
(1983): 9-22.
Blanchot, Maurice. “La Littérature et le droit 4 la mort.” In De Kafka @ Kafka. Paris, Gal-
limard, 1982. 11-61.
Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo, introd. Utopia y revolucién: el pensamiento politico contempord-
neo de los indios en América Latina. México DF: Editorial Nueva Imagen, 1981.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Contre-feux 2: Pour un mouvement social européen. Paris: Raisons
d’ Agir, 2001.
. Language and Symbolic Power. Trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson.
Ed. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Bramen, Carrie Tirado. The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for Na-
tional Distinctiveness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Brotherston, Gordon. “Regarding the Evidence in Me llamo Rigoberta Menchi.” Journal
of Latin American Cultural Studies 6 (1997): 41-58.
Buell, Frederick. “Nationalist Postnationalism: Globalist Discourse in Contemporary
American Culture.” American Quarterly 50.3 (1998): 548-91.
Burga, Manuel. “Lo andino hoy en el Pert.” Quehacer 128 (2001): 65-68.
Cornejo-Polar, Antonio. “Mestizaje e hibridez: Los riesgos de las metaforas. Apuntes.”
Revista Iberoamericana 63.180 (1997): 341-44.
Crist, Sean. “Duration of Onset Consonants in Gay Male Stereotyped Speech.” U. Penn
Working Papers in Linguistics 4.3 (1997): 53-70.
Delgado, L. Elena. “La naci6n (in)vertebrada: razones para un debate.” Revista de Estudios
Hispdnicos 37 (2003): 319-40.
De Man, Paul, ed. John Keats: Selected Poetry. New York: Signet, 1966.
Fernandez, James. “Longfellow’s Law: The Place of Latin America and Spain in US His-
panism, circa 1915.” In Spain in America: The Origins of Hispanism in the United
States. Ed. Richard L. Kagan. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
122-41.
Foucault, Michel. The Archeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York:
Pantheon, 1972.
Gramsci, Antonio. “Notes on Italian History.” In The Prison Notebooks: Selections. Eds.
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and Trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Pub-
lishers, 1971. 44-120.
Guha, Ranajit and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Selected Subaltern Studies. New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1998.
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies.” In Cultural Studies. Eds.
Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992.
277-94.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.
Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1997.
Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. “Founding Statement.” Disposition 19.46 (1994):
1-11.
Levinson, Brett. “Neopatriarchy and After: J, Rigoberta Menchii as Allegory of Death.”
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 5 (1996): 33-50.
Mallon, Florencia E. “The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from
Latin American History.” American Historical Review 99.5 (1994): 1491-1515.
Mignolo, Walter. “Human Understanding and (Latin) American Interests-The Politics and
Sensibilities of Geohistorical Locations.” In A Companion to Post Colonial Studies.
Eds. Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2000.
180-202.
Morana, Mabel. “El boom del subalterno.” Cuadernos Americanos 67.1 (1998): 214—22.
Moreiras, Alberto. The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural
Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.
———.. “Global Fragments: A Second Latinamericanism.” In The Cultures of Globaliza-
tion. Eds. Frederic Jameson and Musao Miyoshi. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. 81-102.
. “Neohispanism: A Program for Tongue Dispossession.” In Jntellectuals and
Global Culture. Eds. Charlie Blake and Linnie Blake. Oxford, U.K.: Angelaki, 1997.
29-A0.
. “The Order of Order: On the Reluctant Culturalism of Anti-Subalternist Critiques.”
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 8.1 (1999): 125-45.
. Tercer espacio: Literatura y duelo en América Latina. Santiago: LOM Ediciones/
Universidad Arcis, 1999.
Richard, Nelly. “Cultural Peripheries: Latin America and Postmodernist De-centering.” In
The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America. Eds. John Beverley, José Oviedo, and
Michael Aronna. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. 217-22.
Robbins, Bruce. “Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism.” In Cosmopoli-
tics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1998. 1-19.
Rosaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1989,
Sarlo, Beatriz. “Cultural Studies and Literary Criticism at the Crossroads of Values.” Jour-
nal ofLatin American Cultural Studies, 8.1 (1999): 115-24.
Part IV
Hispanism/Latin Americanism:
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Xenophobia and Diasporic Latin Americanism:

Mapping Antagonisms around the “Foreign”

Idelber Avelar

(translated by Ignacio Sdnchez-Prado)

The “Foreign” among Us

The set of problems to be framed in this essay—discursive battles taking place

within and around the category of the “foreign” as well as the status of Latin
Americanism in them—does not start on September 11, 2001 but is the result
of a contradictory historical process. These questions have been, however, for-
mulated differently in the wake of the attacks and the ensuing war, the limitless
war that lacks a concrete, identifiable, visible enemy but not countless victims.
In this context, literary and cultural studies in Spanish cannot be absent from
the conversations and negotiations on what gets defined as “foreign” within and
outside the university. Spanish here again deserves specificity as the language,
amongst the ones studied as “foreign” in the United States, most obviously in
contradiction with that pedagogical status. In a previous piece, I argued that the
demographic importance of the Spanish language in this country is of a cen-
trality impossible to explain if one holds on to the ideology (dominant both in
Hispanism and in Anglophone studies) that affirms, or at least silently assumes,
a belated arrival of Spanish to an already constituted American identity and,
270 IDELBER AVELAR

parallel to that assumption, that of an organic and essential relationship between

Spanish and the territory geopolitically designated as “Latin America” (“Clan-
destine”). That text was an attempt to think the current state of literary/cultural
studies in Spanish through this double determination: a domestic language that
gets studied as a foreign language, while its literary and cultural components
inhabit an indeterminate zone in programs of comparative literature and theory,
between the post-romantic Western canon and postcolonial literatures. Latin
Americanism in the United States operates in this “in-between” space, one that
cannot, however, be satisfactorily thought out within Latin American Studies,
due to this interdisciplinary field’s endemic, proverbial lack of self-reflexive
theorization.!
But in-between academic spaces do not remain unaffected by wars, es-
pecially by a war like this, with invisible, virtual, presumed or yet-to-become
actual enemies, accompanied by an unprecedented mobilization of state, media,
and intelligence apparatuses as well as orchestrated restrictions to immigration
and civil liberties of non-American citizens, with repressive measures directed
specifically to the student body. If anybody still conducted debates within the
university recurring to the derogatory label “ivory tower” (which supposedly
protected the academic subject, and according to a commonly heard argument,
disqualified entire discourses by the alleged security enjoyed by those within
the university against the harassment of the “real world”), the events of the
past few months in the U.S. have made visible the anachronism and naiveté
of such binarism. As the market value of trustworthy translators from Arabic
rises, so does the demand for classes that could introduce the young elite to the
understanding of a world globalized not only by capital but also by terrorism.
Vis-a-vis the in-between space occupied by Latin America and Latin American
studies, situated in the interval that separates the West from its other, the suspi-
cion remains: Are they with us or with them?
The various stories of Mexicans recently being objects of hostile attacks in
the U.S.—by being or not confused with Middle Easterners—are emblematic:
not white enough, the Latin American mestizo is subject to the xenophobic at-
tack by evoking the image of the feared other, the dark, the impenetrable, the
Eastern. The darker other today takes the place of the necessarily excluded,
that outside without which the subject—the Subject of American bellicose pa-
triotism—could not constitute itself. This is a particularly eloquent instance
both of what Ernesto Laclau has called “constitutive outside” and what Judith
Butler has theorized as the unspeakable, the nonhuman, never to be confused
with a hidden substance, but rather understood as the abjected whose exclu-
 XENOPHOBIA AND DIASPORIC LATIN AMERICANISM 2M

sion sustains the field of the possible (the readable, the speakable)—a field that
ceaselessly remakes itself by abjecting other bodies and reappropriating bod-
ies previously abjected.* The politics of social abjection today revolves around
skin color, hair texture, facial traits, garments, all of them signs that must be
read beforehand, as a foundation for the action to be taken. The foreigner has
to be identified in order to be catalogued in the continuum of dangerousness, in
an operation that effectively denies him/her access into the political, while the
ongoing war redefines the very notion of politics, now equated with a crusade
of Good against Evil over and above any international law and any identifiable
goal. Danger is thereby decreed to be outside politics, and becomes itself that
which dominant politics—through its war machine—must seek to destroy. But
an implacable dialectical law continues to organize that movement: a mighty
and powerful military operation to eliminate danger cannot be deployed without
making proliferate more and more of the very danger it presumably attempts
to erase. The operation we witness today attempts, of course, to circumscribe
that danger outside “our” borders, by ceaselessly producing corpses, widows,
orphans, and disabled throughout the “Third World,” as the abject, unrepresent-
able, unspeakable bodies.
In the continuum of intolerance installed in the wake of September 11th,
some are clearly more “foreign” than others. In a discussion on racial profiling
as anecessary or desirable security measure in airports—the U.S. media already
discusses the need or desirability of torture as a questioning tool, as attested by
the odious article published in Time by Charles Krauthammer and many other
written and televised pieces—a CNN commentator explicitly defended the
practice by indicating that a Mrs. Smith, with two kids, will never be as likely
to be a terrorist as a Middle Eastern man, traveling in Arab garments and with a
Syrian passport. By being confronted with the question of how to differentiate,
only by sight, the universe of possible terrorists from the “good Arab-American
citizens” (in the end, a community numbering in the millions), the same com-
mentator recurs to the lapidary comment: “but those are not American citizens
and are not seeking citizenship.” The commentary assumes that an American
passport automatically exempts anyone of any possibility of ties with terrorism.
It is to be expected, of a CNN commentator, the forgetting of examples such
as Oklahoma City. Most logically contradictory, however, is the move from the
sphere of the visible (features, garments) to the sphere of the initially invisible
(citizen of what country? What passport does he carry in his pocket?). It is in
this zone where xenophobia operates and disseminates: How to identify and
catalogue the other? How to establish beforehand the border between the citi-
272 IDELBER AVELAR

zen and the non-citizen without recurring to racism?? What if racism is founded
in this very distinction?*
In the wake of September 11th, then, the distinction between citizen and
non-citizen manifests, more than ever, its instability, its reliance on racist prem-
ises, necessary for sustaining the binarism’s imaginary solidity. In other words,
not only are we amidst a wave of racist and xenophobic violence in the U.S.
but also alongside such repressive offensive there are the many everyday opera-
tions, the various micro-interventions of power through which bodies, habits,
voices, and accents are identified, marked, imprinted, and called by the law.
This law is not (it has never been) a consensual system of democratically de-
fined regulations, in some sort of utopian, Habermasian exercise of communi-
cative competence. Neither is a written-in-stone law with transcendental origins
and authority, unchangeable by political intervention. It is a law that evolves,
transforms, and becomes another, and whose trajectory is the object of a po-
litical struggle with implications for university life, from the negotiations of
disciplinary boundaries to admission and hiring policies.
Ethnic, cultural, and area studies programs, as well as those of foreign lan-
guages and literatures, are probably the institutional sites more directly vulner-
able to this rearticulation of the limits of legality in the U.S. Regarding the
national composition of its scholarly body, these programs share with some of
the natural sciences the status of being demographically more suspicious for the
bellicose and xenophobic Right. In the sciences, at least, the institution already
has at its disposal a solid technical apparatus that constrains the uses of the
knowledge produced there. Such control is never equivalent to an absolute and
uncontested monopoly, as proven by the technological knowledge displayed
by the terrorists of September 11th. As the sciences witness a significant offen-
sive to instrumentalize new forms of scientific knowledge for the war machine
deployed in the country, in the humanities, things happen on a much smaller
scale. But a renewed demand for translators, historians, and anthropologists of
the Arab world followed September 11th, as did promises to reconfigure both
student choices and research priorities. As Andrew Ross pointed out in the early
1990s, “as humanists and social scientists, we have also begun to recognize that
the often esoteric knowledge we impart is a form of symbolic capital that is
readily converted into social capital in the new technocratic power structures”
(104). Most certainly this remains true, but it is the nature of this convertibility
that must be investigated: what kinds of laws are governing the interpellation to
a historian, for example, to explain on television the nature of “Islamic belief’?
What operations can we carry out to short-circuit this fake invitation to dialogue
 XENOPHOBIA AND DIASPORIC LATIN AMERICANISM 273

and put the real problem on the agenda, i.e., the terms in which the question is
posed?
Refraining, then, from any illusions about the stability of a binary between a
science controlled by monopolies versus the presumably “counter-hegemonic”
humanities, it seems that humanities programs more immediately identifiable
as “foreign” will become objects of a differentiated scrutiny, based on a strat-
egy not yet agreed upon within the political, military, and financial elites, much
less in the universities’ administrative sub-elite (which remains, as always,
deeply derivative, fearful, and uncreative in its response to ruptures, breaks,
and crises in the texture of the social, such as the one experienced today). The
demand for a self-justification, for an explicit declaration of objectives, meth-
ods, and principles has always weighed heavily on those humanities programs.
The history of the appropriation of this demand by a morally traditionalist and
geopolitically bellicose Right is an important chapter in this country’s cultural
wars of the last twenty years.° The fact that such programs lack a unified, con-
sensual declaration about their missions has often put them in a defensive po-
sition against attacks by self-appointed spokesmen for the “Western canon,”
“traditional and family values,” and “Judeo-Christian civilization.” Everything
indicates that such offensive returns, framed by other tactics and rhetoric: the
call to understand “fundamentalism,” “Islamic mentality,” “anti-Americanism,”
and a series of other notions that are scholarly fragile, but no less important or
operative because of that.
“Fundamentalism” rhetoric masks a polarization between an “us” and a
“them” in which the latter are assigned a series of mutually contradictory attri-
butes, that of being cowardly kamikazes, primitive barbarians and tech wizards.
As far as the discursive articulation of that “them” takes place entirely around
the category of the foreign, our context begs the question: what intervention
opens for cultural, ethnic, and area studies programs, beyond the mere struggle
for self-preservation and autonomy in which we will doubtlessly have to en-
gage? Will we be limited, as was the case in the cultural wars of the 1980s, to
a defensive position that stops on the mere affirmation of the obvious, that 1s,
that September 11th has nothing to do with the admission policies for foreign
students in our universities? What will be the form taken by the ideologeme
“foreign” within and outside the university campus? In the debate about the cul-
tural dimension of the latest events, have the terms of the conversation already
been determined by the racist right-wing? Or can one hope to displace, however
minimally, the axis of this debate through a pedagogical and scholarly practice
carried out in the university?
274 IDELBER AVELAR

Border of Excellence

Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, in a piece on the relation between diasporic

and area studies, quotes Robert Redfield, an advocate of the latter in the 1950s
in an influential book, The Primitive World and its Transformations. Redfield
concluded his book, Chakrabarty reminds us, with a quote from J.C. Furnas,
who “proved” that the accusation that “Western man does not understand the
savage,” can only take place because “the two sets of cultures work unmistak-
ably in two levels.” Furnas’s reasoning was that “the Western man” possesses
something that the rest does not, something that “imposes the privilege and
complicating obligations of intellectual integrity, self-criticism and generalized
selflessness.” J.C. Furnas concluded his “comparative anthropology” with the
statement: “if there is something we may call the white man’s burden, this is
it.’ We know that within the academic apparatus to which Redfield and Furnas
belonged, these statements were never seen as scandalous or aberrant, but on
the contrary, represented the hegemonic view in centers of area studies.
Chakrabarty comments, insightfully, that it was the fact that they referred
to cultures defined as foreign that made the Eurocentrism of their premises
invisible. If the term already was fully loaded with ideology in the 1950s, if it
masked a series of internal contradictions to what was defined as the “West,”
the migratory fluxes of the last decades have made it even more inadequate.
The CNN commentator’s difficulty, when trying to identify who should be the
targets of the racial profiling she defended for airports, functions here as a re-
vealing allegory. The form taken by such confusion in the media has been, as
we have seen, the insistent reminder that “the enemy can be among us, within
our borders.” The foreigner, even within the dominant ideology, turns out to be
less foreign than one expected.
Debates on borders within area studies have recently acquired a consider-
able protagonism.° The last few years have witnessed the publications of vari-
ous writings, such as Chakrabarty’s, devoted to the mapping of the many and
contradictory filiations of the subjects involved in area studies as a result of
migratory fluxes.’ As usual, cultural/literary studies in Spanish arrives belat-
edly to the discussion, despite the fact that it is impossible to understand the
discipline’s trajectory in the U.S. without a history of the migrations caused
first by the Spanish Civil War and later by Latin American dictatorships. In
recent years, the constitution of a “diasporic Latin Americanism”—a growing
community of Latin Americans that operates professionally outside of their
countries of origin—has produced visible effects in the discipline and redefined
 XENOPHOBIA AND DIASPORIC LATIN AMERICANISM POTS)

what is understood as foreign, both in the United States and in the Latin Ameri-
can academies.®
Regarding the consciousness on how disciplinary problems are affected
by the international division of labor, cultural, and literary studies in the U.S.
are still poorly equipped.’ Nothing in our discipline better illustrates the abso-
lutization of an exclusively national paradigm than the processes of tenure in
Departments of Spanish and the discourses on standards that accompany them.
Whatever one position on the desirability of tenure, and in what forms, it is
indisputable that Spanish language publications, in Latin American or Spanish
presses, do not regularly receive the same treatment as publications in Ameri-
can university presses. Since we know that the latter do not publish in any
language other than English—even though everything seems to indicate that an
academic market in Spanish will soon be constituted in this country, following
what is already going on in other publishing areas—many U.S.-based Latin
Americans confront the election of either writing in a language, English, that
they use on an everyday basis but in which, for whatever reasons, they may not
feel comfortable writing, or risk being professionally punished for choosing to
publish in Spanish.
This takes place, we must not forget, while these young faculty are evalu-
ated as members of a Spanish department (or a Department of Romance Stud-
ies, or Foreign or Modern Languages, as the case may be). The devaluation of
Latin American publications, of course, is never accompanied by any explicitly
xenophobic or racist statement, but by a very “reasonable” question about the
standards of the press in question, allegedly unknown due to the fact that the
process of evaluation of manuscripts does not include proof of peer review. This
question is, invariably, asked in bad faith, since those putting it forth within
Spanish departments know, or should know, that the peer-review system as
standardized in this country is not, nor has ever been, a universal practice, and
that the discipline in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and most of Europe has opted
for other methods of evaluation—other methods, not the absence of methods.
They also know that one should expect a junior faculty in a Spanish department
to be allowed, vis-a-vis the mechanisms of professional reward, to establish
his/her scholarly reputation in that language. In a context in which publishing in
Spanish still means to publish exclusively in Latin America or Spain, it would
be expected that the mechanisms of professional reward—for those who work
in that language—had already included a consideration of this geopolitical dif-
ference and an appreciation of the evaluation methods used by other publishing
traditions. If those methods are regarded as insufficient by the standards of any
American institution, the minimum obligation of these institutions would be
276 IDELBER AVELAR

to inform the interested parties at the beginning of their probationary period,

instead of waiting seven years to destroy a tenure case with the ill-intentioned
question: “Where are the readers’ reports?”
The work carried out over the past three years by the MLA Committee
on the Future of Scholarly Publishing has shown the complexity of the prob-
lem. The profession’s mechanisms of reward are in blatant contradiction with
the economic possibilities of scholarly publishing today, as measured by the
(growing) number of manuscripts produced, the (declining) number of pub-
lication slots in university presses, and the (declining) average of copies sold
of every scholarly book that does see print—the latter decline accentuated by
a budget crisis in libraries as well as the systemic flux of funding away from
humanities purchases to science journals.'° For those publishing in “foreign”
languages such as Spanish, the absence of explicit peer-review mechanisms in
Latin American presses becomes an issue all-too-easily manipulated against
junior faculty, even though it is well known that in any reputable press publish-
ing scholarly work in Latin America manuscripts are also evaluated, generally
by specialists employed by the publisher.
The undemocratic (imposed) universalization of this particular paradigm
has served as a justification for disqualifying countless academics from Latin
America and elsewhere, many of them with a curriculum superior to those dis-
qualifying them. As I write this text, another excellent assistant professor of
Latin American literature has received an unfavorable notification on her tenure
case, despite being recommended enthusiastically by her department and by all
of the external reviewers contacted by the university. The case in question is
typical: its protagonist is the author of two well-reviewed books and a finished
manuscript under contract, not to mention a respectable corpus of articles in
some of the most recognized journals in the profession. The external review-
ers recommended her unanimously. To her surprise and indignation, and to the
surprise and indignation of all of us who evaluated her within the discipline, her
university’s promotion and tenure committee rejected her. One of the recurrent
arguments was the lack of “evidence” of the “scholarly standards” of the press
where this young scholar had published her two books. The press in question
was the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México (UNAM).
If it is tacitly accepted that an American biologist or mathematician sitting
on a tenure committee does not have to know the UNAM, it is also tacitly ac-
cepted that the final word, in those cases, will belong to the specialists in the
field (Spanish)—a field within which few people ignore that the Autonomous
National University of Mexico maintains standards superior or equivalent to
the American university presses held as norms of excellency. Within the disci-
 XENOPHOBIA AND DIASPORIC LATIN AMERICANISM PAE

pline, this young professor—punished for publishing in Spanish—was evalu-

ated enthusiastically, but the discipline does not seem to have enough political
strength to impose its decision on university administrations. The framework is
complicated by the fact that the discipline is inhabited by a group of scholars
who more and more resent the loss of cultural capital of their subfields and what
they perceive as an “invasion” of methods, discourses, subjects, and accents
with which, until recently, they did not have to deal. These are the ones who
invariably pose the question “where are the readers’ reports?” with the bad faith
proper to those who ask rhetorical questions in order to corner their interlocu-
tors into silence.
Another conflict takes place around the writing styles brought by Latin
American students coming to graduate programs in American universities in
increasingly large numbers. In Anglo-America, both the humanistic disciplines
and the social sciences have followed, for decades, the protocols of one particular
genre, the paper. The introduction of diasporic Latin American students—some
of them already mature and with considerable academic experience in their
countries of origin—to this genre has not taken place without controversy, one
in which the terms of the debate are plagued by “misunderstandings” (or in fact
untranslatability) on all sides. The criticism leveled against the essay—the priv-
ileged genre within humanistic disciplines in Latin America—is well known:
from the point of view of the paper, the essay is a vague, impressionistic genre
that lacks consideration for evidence, and where statements are made without
reference to the relevant bibliography, thus generating unconscious repetitions
of studies already published by others, redundancies within the same text, and
logical leaps without the pertinent links. I do not deny that such accusations
are often true. To defend the essayistic tradition en bloc and propose the essay
as an alternative model of writing is not something I am ready or willing to
do, at least not until a significant displacement is imposed on some protocols
of that tradition. It is a matter, instead, of critiquing and remaining on guard
against formulations of the problem that implicitly endow the Anglo-American
genre of the paper—a genre based on paraphrase and Aristotelian syllogism—a
monopoly on “rigor.” This tendency is particularly harmful in the context of a
discipline that has lacked consensual mechanisms whereby “rigor” could be de-
fined and where the very vague, accident-plagued trajectory of this notion—one
devoid of any rescuable “rigor”—could be unveiled, studied, interrogated.
If the criticism flung at the essay from the point of view of the paper is well
known, the reverse is not any less true: looked at from the standpoint of an es-
sayistic tradition, the paper is a boring accumulation of reading notes, hiding
the author’s lack of creativity or originality and her/his choice of taking refuge
278 IDELBER AVELAR

in the shelter of quotes of authority. It is a model of writing that has found a safe
haven in the social sciences of the Anglo-American world, and against which
countless Latin American students manifest a resistance that is understandable,
even when it is not well articulated. To those who later experience migration
to the American academy, the conflict, however implicit and silent, is unavoid-
able. They will be evaluated within a discursive genre with which they have
had an antagonistic relationship. This would not be necessarily a problem if
the discipline had built a more generalized understanding of the historicity and
geographic specificity of the genre, but such understanding is the exception and
not the rule. The most common reasoning, amongst those in charge of guiding
students coming from other traditions, is that the syllogistic-paraphrastic model
of the paper should simply be assumed as a given, eternal, ahistorical ideal of
academic writing, as if the profession’s standards could never be questioned by
their members and changed by their political and intellectual practice.
The worst one can do, then, with the essay vs. paper controversy is to en-
trench oneself in one of the two positions, thereby maintaining intact the imagi-
nary purity of the two genres and giving up the true task, that of inhabiting these
two traditions without blinding oneself to a genealogical understanding of both,
to a critique of both, to a practice of writing that could unsettle the borders of
both. This task—that we might call deconstructive—consists in not taking bor-
ders for granted but as contingent operations of enclosure that can be rethought,
redrawn, remade, even if one concedes (or precisely because one concedes) that
one’s discourse is never simply external to those limits but is, in fact, contained
by them. For those of us working in an English-speaking university, it may be
valid to point out to Latin American students that access to the mechanisms of
professional reward here depend, to a great extent, on one’s mastery of the writ-
ing codes proper to the paper (the genre’s particular understanding of what “ev-
idence” is, its conception of empirical grounding of argument, its teleological
structure). This guidance, however, ought to be accompanied by an intellectual
practice that includes a critique of the genre itself, and of the history through
which these codes established themselves. This is nothing other than the indis-
pensable metadisciplinary interrogation: how democratic have the election and
consecration of the discipline’s mechanisms of professional reward been? How
open to the scrutiny by its members have their standards and patterns of excel-
lence been? Which voices have been silenced by those conceptions of excel-
lence? To what extent can the unearthing of these voices unsettle the very rules
of the game, the very field of the visible and the speakable?
 XENOPHOBIA AND DIASPORIC LATIN AMERICANISM 279

Conclusions

These are questions that have recently gained a renewed urgency. The task today
is to combine attention to the politics of exclusion (recent repressive measures
directed against the university and against specific programs or voices within
the university) and attention to the epistemological debates on paradigms that
are, in many cases, complicit with the racism and xenophobia implicit in those
measures being taken in society at large. In the case of Spanish, an open and
well-informed debate on the globalization of the process of publication and
its relations with the standards of tenure in the U.S. is a particularly important
item on the agenda. The tradition that diasporic academic subjects bring with
them, instead of being disqualified (or at best taken as a tabula rasa on which
to imprint a new model) should instead be addressed as a tradition with which
to engage in mutual knowledge and critical dialogue, no more and no less, in
order that the specific labor on the deficiencies of each particular student can
take place without resort to ethnic, national, or religious stereotypes.
If cultural wars in this country have left a legacy of special interest to cul-
tural and literary studies in Spanish, it is the conclusion that the democratiza-
tion of cultural capital in the discipline not only lies on the canon and its expan-
sion. If it was once possible to believe that canon renewal was the great political
intervention one could make from within the discipline, and if at that same
point it was possible for others, like John Guillory, to believe that the expan-
sion of the canon did not alter at all the mechanism of distribution of cultural
capital in the discipline, it seems clear that both positions are now insufficient.
The former need to be reminded that the belief in the necessarily democratic
potential of curricular revision ignores the ways in which power absorbs and
appropriates those inclusions without necessarily altering the Real antagonisms
that structure the field. Guillory and followers have to be reminded that canons
are never altered without setting in motion other social and institutional forces,
and that an alteration of the canon never is simply a replacement of content.
Thus, we must keep pursuing initiatives of curricular renewal, but without the
illusion that the horizon of possible intervention is exhausted there: “values”
and “the canon” are both concepts that name—imperfectly, as it is proper to the
concept—zones of struggle for access to the production and distribution of cul-
tural capital in the discipline. In times like these, to consider values and canons
as the “fundamental crossroads of our time” is at worst, a mistake, and at best,
a metonymy. And to the young, epistemologically and institutionally fragile
disciplines, mistaking the part for the whole can be particularly harmful.
280 IDELBER AVELAR

Notes

The notion of “in-between” (“entre-lugar”) was coined by Silviano Santiago in a ca-

nonical essay in 1971. It does not designate, as some paraphrases have led to believe,
a celebration of the “middle of the road,” but an argument on how postcolonial bina-
risms are constituted and how aporetic choices are confronted by intellectuals inhabit-
ing these interstitial spaces. The paradigmatic binarism against which Santiago raised
his voice was the false opposition between imitation and autochthony that plagued
Latin American criticism in the 1960s. For an excellent translation of Santiago’s writ-
ings with a very useful introduction, see The Space In-between, a recent volume ed-
ited by Ana Lucia Gazolla.
By ceaselessly remodeling its borders, the field of power thereby opens itself up to
politics. In other words, the open-ended and mobile conception of power proposed
by Foucault and sharpened, critiqued, and developed by Judith Butler has nothing to
do with the political quietism that would argue that “power will always reappropri-
ate everything,” “there is no room for real oppositional/transformative action,” etc.
For Butler on the dialectic of gender performativity and power, see Gender Trouble,
the original book (1990) and the indispensable preface to the 1999 edition. For a
refined, careful reworking of what may have remained complicit with a certain vol-
untarism in Gender Trouble, see her tour de force Bodies that Matter, especially the
introduction (1—23) and the critique of Lacan (57-119). For Ernesto Laclau’s notion
of the constitutive outside, see especially the classic study coauthored with Chantal
Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, as well his reassessment in New Reflections
on the Revolution of Our Time. On the theory of the subject, the role of hegemony,
and the continuing relevance of a certain concept of universality, see Judith Butler’s
contributions in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, a remarkable compilation of
written debates among Butler, Slavoj Zizek, and Ernesto Laclau in which alliances
are slowly, patiently, and carefully theorized: a Butler-Zizek alliance against Laclau,
attempting to show the centrality of the Hegelian dialectic for a theory of the social; a
Butler-Laclau alliance in the defense of the irreducibility of the deconstructive prac-
tice, identified by Zizek with a relativistic and ultimately quietist multiculturalism;
and, finally, a Zizek-Laclau alliance against Butler’s critique of the transcendental or
quasitranscendental status ascribed by Lacanian theory to the Phallus and to the Real
of the trauma. As Zizek points out in the book, the “gap that separates the three of us
is impossible to define in neutral way,” i.e. the very formulation of each disagreement
necessarily will involve “taking sides” (213-14).
For an insightful argument about the Greek distinction between citizen and non-citi-
zen, see Page DuBois’ Torture and Truth, a study of the origins of the practice of
torture in Greek courts, sanctioned as long as the tortured was not a citizen but a slave.
DuBois’ argument is that the juridical sanctioning of this practice is of a piece with
the understanding of truth that comes to be hegemonic in Western philosophy. I have
briefly discussed DuBois’ revolutionary book in “Five Theses on Torture.”
 XENOPHOBIA AND DIASPORIC LATIN AMERICANISM 281

This is the point that well-meaning but imperialistic First-World liberals continually
miss when they speak of “ethics” and “cosmopolitanism.” For the most obvious ex-
ample, see Martha Nussbaum’s profoundly North American, upper-class liberal defi-
nitions of “humanity” in her For the Love of Country, a book that also features critical
responses by over a dozen scholars and a reply by Nussbaum, in which she chooses
to ignore the only response, that of Judith Butler, that critiques the heart of her project
(her dependence on a mythical notion of the “universal”). As Butler points out, “What
constitutes the community that might qualify as a legitimate community that might
debate and agree upon this universality? If that very community is constituted through
racist exclusions, how shall we trust it to deliberate on the question of racist speech?”
(49). For my critique of Nussbaum, see “The Ethics of Criticism.”
Amongst the wide bibliography I singularize, for the clarity and forcefulness of its
arguments, Michael Bérubé’s Public Access and the compilation of articles by Bérubé
and Cary Nelson, Higher Education under Fire. As Peggy Kamuf has pointed out in
The Division of Literature, the characterization of academic work as “too specialized,
technical or obscure” operated doubly in the cultural wars as a mark of respect and
distinction for the sciences and as a mark of disdain for humanities. For a theoretically
and historically indispensable argument on the restructuring of the university around
the interests of monopolist capital, see Bill Readings, The University in Ruins. All
anglophone and francophone bibliography of the past seven years has been written,
as expected, in ignorance of the most complete and radical analysis of the modern
university recently published, Chilean philosopher Willy Thayer’s genealogical tour
de force, La crisis no moderna de la universidad moderna.
The border studies endeavor has played a key role in establishing this as a central
question. Yet it is also necessary to make a clarification on what is understood by “bor-
der.” As Robert Irwin shows in a recent article, an Anglocentric map of the border has
systematically been privileged, a fact that “often seems to paradoxically perpetuate
or even reinforce barriers that prevent both dialogue with Mexican scholars based in
Mexico and the study of Mexican texts that speak to issues of U.S.-Mexico relations
and border culture” (511). For Irwin, José David Saldivar’s focus on the border as a
land extending all the way to Seattle (as if it could only extend towards the North), is
symptomatic. See Irwin’s argument in “Toward a Border Gnosis.”
A capital text on the diasporic as locus of enuntiation for contemporary cultural
practices is Homi Bhabha’s introduction to The Location of Culture. On the recent
transformations in the field of English-language postcolonial studies, see the excellent
article by Gaurav Desai “Rethinking English.”
I will leave for another opportunity the debate with all the Latin American critics that
have hypostatized an enemy in the “foreign” paradigm of Cultural Studies, thereby
reproducing the mythification we critique here. The most nuanced critique remains
that of Beatriz Sarlo, who insists on recuperating “values” presumably essential to
political practice and ignored by the “relativism” of Cultural Studies. For a particu-
larly unfortunate example of a resentful classicist lamenting the passing of the times
282 IDELBER AVELAR

when canons were stable and universal, see the foremost Brazilian Barthesian, Leyla
Perrone-Moisés. For an identitarian recourse to an “us” vs. “them” rhetoric that at-
tempts to put forth a critique of US multiculturalism while refusing to engage the
aporias of the Latin American tradition, see Hugo Achugar.
9. The phenomenon is not, again, exclusive of our discipline: in a previous piece (“Eth-
ics”) I tried to observe how the Anglo-American bibliography on the topic of the
Ethics of criticism—produced by both literary critics and philosophers—is written
without attending to their position in the international division of intellectual labor, an
ignorance that profoundly affects, of course, whatever they have to say about “cosmo-
politanism,” “humanity,” and the like.
10. The MLA Committee on the Future of Scholarly Publishing was composed of Judith
Ryan, Idelber Avelar, Jennifer Fleissner, David E. Lashmet, J. Hillis Miller, Karen H.
Pike, John Sitter, and Lynne Tatiock. The report that it has produced includes a de-
tailed analysis of the economics of scholarly publishing today and a set of recommen-
dations to all parties involved, from departments to libraries, from university presses
to administrations. The report is published in the 2002 issue of Profession.

Works Cited

Achugar, Hugo. “Repensando la heterogeneidad latinoamericana (a proposito de lugares,

paisajes y territorios).” Revista Iberoamericana 62 (1996): 845-61.
Avelar, Idelber. “The Clandestine Ménage a Trois of Cultural Studies, Spanish, and Critical
Theory.” Profession (1999): 49-58.
. “The Ethics of Criticism and the International Division of Intellectual Labor.”
SubStance 91 (2000): 80-103.
. “Five Theses on Torture.” Trans. Philip Derbyshire. Journal of Latin American
Cultural Studies 10.3 (2001): 253-71.
. “Tres signos vacios y el 11 de septiembre.” Revista de Critica Cultural 23 (2001):
66-67.
Bérubé, Michael. Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics. London
and New York: Verso, 1994.
Bérubé, Michael and Cary Nelson, ed. Higher Education under Fire: Politics, Economics,
and the Crisis of the Humanities. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” London and New
York: Routledge, 1993.
. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Second ed. London and
New York, 1999 [1990].
. “Universality in Culture.” Nussbaum et al. 45-52.
. Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contem-
porary Dialogues on the Left. London and New York: Verso, 2000.
 XENOPHOBIA AND DIASPORIC LATIN AMERICANISM 283

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Reconstructing Liberalism: Notes Toward a Conversation between

Area Studies and Diasporic Studies.” Public Culture 10.3 (1998): 457-81.
Desai, Gaurav. “Rethinking English: Postcolonial English Studies.” A Companion to Post-
colonial Studies. Ed. Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray. Malden, Mass. and Oxford:
Blackwell, 2000. 523-39.
DuBois, Page. Torture and Truth. New York and London: Routledge, 1991.
Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Irwin, Robert. “Toward a Border Gnosis of the Borderlands: Joaquin Murrieta and Nine-
teenth-Century U.S.-Mexico Border Culture.” Nepantla: Views from the South 2.3
(2001): 509-37.
Kamuf, Peggy. The Division of Literature, or the University in Deconstruction. Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Krauthammer, Charles. “In Defense of Secret Tribunals.” Time Magazine 158.23. Novem-
ber 26, 2001.
Laclau, Ernesto. New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. London and New York:
Verso, 1990.
Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical
Democratic Politics. London: Verso, 1985.
Nussbaum, Martha et al. For Love of Country: Debating the Limits ofPatriotism. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1996.
Perrone-Moisés, Leyla. “Que Fim Levou a Critica Literaria?” Folha de Sao Paulo. Suple-
mento Cultural “Mais!” 25 de Agosto de 1996.
“Report of the MLA Committee on the Future of Scholarly Publishing.” Profession 2002.
New York: MLA, 2002.
Ross, Andrew. “Defenders of the Faith and the New Class.” Intelectuals: Aesthetics, Poli-
tics, Academics. Ed. Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1990. 101-32.
Santiago, Silviano. “O Entre-Lugar da Literatura Latino-Americana.” Uma Literatura nos
Trépicos. Sao Paulo: Perspectiva, 1978. 11-28.
. The Space In-Between: Essays on Latin American Culture. Ed. Ana Licia Gazzo-
la. Intro. Ana Lucia Gazzola and Wander Melo Miranda. Trans. Gazzola, Tom Burns,
and Gareth Williams. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.
Sarlo, Beatriz. “Los estudios culturales y la critica literaria en la encrucijada valorativa.”
Revista de Critica Cultural 15 (1997): 32-38.
Thayer, Willy. La crisis no moderna de la universidad moderna: Epilogo del conflicto de
las facultades. Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 1996.
® 11

Hispanism in an Imperfect Past

and an Uncertain Present

Nicolas Shumway

The notion of “Hispanism” will never be an easy sell in the United States
academy. Nor should it be. It is a term fraught with intellectual weaknesses and
marked historically by ideological agendas that do it little credit. In the Anglo-
American world, no broad movement exists in support of an analogous term for
the culture of England and its former colonies. Anglicanism has been claimed
by religion; Englishism, Commonwealthism, or Britishism sound as weird as
the concept they invoke; and “Americanism” calls to mind a kind of right-wing
zealotry that few of us would support.
Yet, despite such reservations regarding Hispanism, I consider myself a
Hispanist and remain extremely enthusiastic about Hispanic Studies, i.e., the
study of all things pertinent to Spain, Spanish American nations and peoples,
and Spanish-Latino populations in the United States. Indeed, studying and
teaching about the Spanish-speaking world have occupied most of my profes-
sional life. I came to this world in my late teens when I first studied Span-
ish in earnest. This was the beginning of a life-long fascination that continues
to shape my research, teaching, and travel. My career as a Hispanist has also
blessed me with numerous Hispanic friends who enrich my life in countless
ways. I therefore rejoice at skyrocketing enrollments in courses dedicated to
Spain and Spanish America, and am delighted to participate in the opportunity
 HISPANISM IN AN IMPERFECT PAST AND AN UNCERTAIN PRESENT 285

the present moment affords for Hispanists to renegotiate for ourselves and for
our students a more prominent place in the U.S. academy.
So why does the term “Hispanism” make me so nervous? For starters, His-
panism is not a field. Like most terms ending in -ism, Hispanism suggests an
ideological, political, or even religious agenda. My initial contact with this sense
of the term put me on guard very early in my career. It occurred in one of my
first teaching positions where a senior faculty member specializing in Spanish
Medieval literature insisted on reviewing all readings used in first- and second
year-Spanish language classes to assure that junior-faculty course supervisors
like myself included sufficient material from Spain. As I grew more familiar
with the workings of the department, it became apparent that his worries in this
regard extended all the way through masters and doctoral reading lists. In his
view, titles on such lists should be approximately 60 percent from Spain and 40
percent from Spanish America. Sensing my disagreement, he explained that we
should never lose sight of Hispanism, which in his view meant the spiritual cen-
trality and dominance of Spain. Of course, a curriculum designed around this
notion of Hispanism also meant a majority of faculty appointments in Peninsu-
lar literature and guaranteed enrollments in this particular individual’s courses.
It also meant a subservient departmental role for anything involving Spanish
America.
This article looks at Hispanism from six vantage points. First, I consider
how Hispanism developed in the nineteenth century as a strategy for replacing
a political empire with a spiritual one. Second, I look at how the newly inde-
pendent Spanish-American nations throughout most of the nineteenth century
wanted nothing to do with any kind of Spanish empire, spiritual or otherwise.
Third, I give brief overview of the pronounced anti-Hispanic bias one finds in
Anglo-American thinking and historiography, from Elizabethan times to well
into the twentieth century. Fourth, I analyze how in the early twentieth century
the idea of Hispanism became more respectable throughout the Spanish-speak-
ing world as a counterweight to U.S. hegemony. Fifth, I consider some of rea-
sons why Hispanism is now an important agenda item for U.S. universities. And
finally, I conclude where I began: explaining why Hispanism continues to strike
me as a bad idea.

Consolation Imperialism

As it turns out, I had good reason to be wary of my senior colleague’s view

of Hispanism, for Hispanism—as an ideology and not an area of study—was
286 NICOLAS SHUMWAY

in some sense a strategy created to save a dying empire, to affirm a spiritual

empire in place of the political empire that had just collapsed. Consider for
example the critical note on José Joaquin de Olmedo’s famous poem, “Ode to
Bolivar” (Canto a Bolivar) that appeared in 1826 in the London-based Ocios de
Espafioles Emigrados, a cultural review published by Spanish liberals exiled by
the reactionary Ferdinand VII. Olmedo’s poem praises two of the most decisive
defeats dealt Spain by the Spanish American insurgents: the Battle of Junin and
the Battle of Ayacucho, both fought in 1824. In discussing Olmedo’s poem, the
Spanish critic (either Joaquin Lorenzo Villanueva or Pablo Mendibil accord-
ing to Luis Monguié from whose article I quote) had a problem. On the one
hand, he laments the “unpleasant memories” of a defeated Spain “that wound
our national pride.”' He further mourns that those same events “have forever
separated from the lap of the mother we hold in common those . . . brothers
of our own people...” On the other hand, however, he claims that this poem
that celebrates Spain’s defeats paradoxically sings of Spanish triumph, for the
poem brings glory to “Castillian poetry” by being “one of the compositions that
most pays it honor” (cited in Monguid, 230-31).? The critic’s gambit, then, is
basically identical to that of my senior colleague. Whatever their political dif-
ferences with the mother country, Spain’s former colonies in the critic’s view
will always be spiritual children of Spain and members of that grand Hispanic
family evoked by the term “Hispanism.”
No one waxed more eloquently in creating and defending this notion of
spiritual Hispanism than the Spanish romantic scholar and nationalist, Mar-
celino Menéndez y Pelayo (1856-1912). Menéndez y Pelayo was such a pro-
lific researcher that few elements of Hispanic culture, from the Spanish Middle
Ages to Spanish philology to Spanish American literature, escaped his attention.
Yet, despite the breadth of his erudition, his studies of Castilian literature and
history always arrive at a similar conclusion: that only Spain gives cultural and
spiritual unity to all things Spanish and Spanish American. And not just Spain,
mind you, but don Marcelino’s particular vision of Spain which is firmly rooted
in the Spanish Middle Ages. In weighty tome after weighty tome, Menéndez
y Pelayo argues against political liberalism and shows no qualms in defending
the Spanish monarchy and ultramontane Catholicism. In sum, his is not just a
defense of Hispanism; it is also an attack on a modern world whose material
and scientific success would seem an affront to Spanish glory.
Menéndez y Pelayo is clearly arguing against the Spanish liberals of his
own time, men like Benito Pérez Galdés and Pio Baroja who wrote withering
critiques of Spanish backwardness and cultural provincialism. But the founda-
tion of his argument is Hispanism. He maintains that all true Hispanists must re-
 HISPANISM IN AN IMPERFECT PAST AND AN UNCERTAIN PRESENT 287

sist foreign imports like liberalism and return spiritually if not literally to those
things that made Spain great and unique in the first place, to wit, the crown, the
church, and the cultural empire of Hispanism. Along with Free Masonry and
Protestantism, much of the modern world is, in his view, inimical to the His-
panic essence. The Spanish sixteenth century in his view “withstands compari-
son with most glorious ages of the world. . . . Not since the times of Judas Mac-
cabeus was there a people that could so justly believe itself the chosen people
to be the sword and arm of God; and everything, even their dreams of greatness
and universal monarchy were referenced and subordinated to one supreme goal:
one faithful flock and one pastor” (Menéndez y Pelayo, 264-65).
Currents in Menéndez y Pelayo’s thinking found new proponents in the
Spanish Generation of ’98 when the loss of Spain’s last American colony in
the Spanish-American War forced an entire generation to ponder Spain’s de-
cline from a world power to one of the least developed countries in Europe.
Even more sobering for the Generation of ’98 was the fear that Spain had ac-
tually contributed little to the modern world, that in a society dominated by
science and commerce, Spain, Spanish culture, and Spain’s colonial offspring
had become marginal and even irrelevant to the mainstream of Western culture.
Although no single attitude towards these questions emerges in the Genera-
tion of °98, some of its members—notably Ramiro de Maeztu in his Defensa
de la Hispanidad—continued Menéndez y Pelayo’s attacks on liberalism. Not
surprisingly, such ideas became key features of Spanish fascism. Franco’s dic-
tum that “Spain is different’ masked many disagreeable ideas, chief of which
was the notion that the Spanish spirit demanded strong, Catholic leaders who
must resist liberalizing tendencies that would betray true Hispanism. In a word,
Franco himself. Not surprisingly, the strapped Franco government found ample
funds to republish much of don Marcelino’s work.

Spanish America as Non-Spain

Meanwhile, back on the American continent in Spain’s former colonies, a much

different story was unfolding. No one should be surprised that Spanish Ameri-
can independence leaders had little good to say about Spain. After all, who
speaks well of an enemy in times of revolution? In his widely read “Letter to
a Jamaican Gentleman,” for example, the Liberator Simon Bolivar denounced
Spain as “an old serpent that only seeks to satisfy its poisoned fury” by trying to
reclaim its lost American colonies (71—72).‘ Bolivar fully supports Bartolomé
de las Casas’ highly jaundiced version of the Spanish conquest (63). But, more
288 NICOLAS SHUMWAY

importantly, he claims that Spain had kept its colonies in a state of “permanent
infancy” which made the new Spanish American nations incapable of mod-
ern self-government and in some sense predestined to failure (63). In short,
he considers the Spanish legacy an impediment to be overcome rather than
embraced.
Much more surprising is how this anti-Spanish animus informs the thought
of liberal leaders and reformers in Spanish America for virtually all of the
nineteenth century, long after independence was won. Indeed, one could argue
that, in great measure, modern Spanish America actually defined itself against
Spain rather than descended from Spain. For example, in his Facundo of 1845,
the Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento claims that Spain’s only legacy to
the Americas was “the Inquisition and Hispanic absolutism.” Spain for him is
“the backward daughter of Europe” (2).° Later, when he visited Spain in 1847,
Sarmiento found a retrograde and paradoxical country where all democratic
tendencies had been crushed by popular despots and Counter-Reformation fa-
naticism. While aware of the former glories of the Spanish empire, Sarmiento
saw them as old and worn, symbolized by El Escorial, which in his words is “a
still fresh cadaver, that stinks and inspires disgust” (Viajes, II, 49).° Similarly,
the Chilean essayist and novelist, Vitorino Lastarria, succinctly noted in 1844
that progress for Spanish America was synonymous with de-Spanishization
(19-20). In sum, with great difficulty does one find among nineteenth-century
Spanish American liberals anything akin to “Hispanism.” Rather, their attitude
towards Spain seems frankly Oedipal. They could hardly wait to cast off their
embarrassing Spanish parent and adopt new cultural models in Northern Eu-
rope and North America. Even well into the twentieth century, the obligatory
youthful journey of all Spanish American elites was to France, not Spain. In
fairness to some Spanish intellectuals, let it be said that a chief influence in this
denunciation of Spain and Spanish culture were Spanish liberals like Mariano
José de Larra who were just as damning in their indictments of Spanish provin-
cialism and absolutism.
Which is not to say that reverence for Spain did not survive among some
Spanish Americans, but hardly among liberals, positivists, and believers in
progress. Among religious and political conservatives—the kind who brought
Maximillian to Mexico, for example—reverence for Church and Monarchy did
indeed endure. But who looks to them for cultural models today? For the fact
is that what we call modernity and enlightened thinking had only timid echoes
in Spain. Of course, Spain experienced an enlightenment of sorts, but it was a
movement so respectful of the Church and the Monarchy that it hardly com-
pares with the radical reforms being proposed in Northern Europe and North
 HISPANISM IN AN IMPERFECT PAST AND AN UNCERTAIN PRESENT 289

America. Moreover, up until the fall of Franco, liberal ideas in Spain were regu-
larly denounced as imported French perversions, out of sync with the Spanish
soul.

Hispanism and the Anglo-American Tradition

In the meantime, how was Hispanism faring in England and the United States?
Not at all well it turns out. The Anglo-American tradition is marked by a pro-
found and abiding anti-Hispanic bias whose roots go back at least as far as Ref-
ormation England. When Henry VIII, hoping for a male heir, defied the Pope
and discarded his Spanish wife Catherine of Aragon to marry Anne Boleyn,
he set England against Rome and earned the undying enmity of the Spanish
Hapsburgs, beginning with Catherine’s nephew, Charles I (also Charles V of
the Holy Roman Empire). Without Spanish interference, the Pope would have
surely granted Henry the annulment he requested; after all, previous popes had
granted annulments on grounds even more specious. But Spanish-led intrigue
in the Vatican made such accommodation impossible.
Things got worse when Henry died without a male heir. Mary, daughter
of Henry and of the spurned Catherine, assumed the English throne. A devout
Catholic, she tried to return England to Rome, murdering as many real and
imagined heretics as she could get her hands on, including the revered Thomas
Cramner, primary author of the first Book of Common Prayer, which in modi-
fied form is still used in Anglican worship throughout the world and remains a
monument of English prosody. She thus earned the sobriquet “Bloody Mary”
by which she is still remembered in history, legend, and song. For English re-
formers and their descendants, she typified the best one could expect of a Span-
ish Catholic ruler: authoritarian, fanatical, and ruthless.
English enmity for Spain reached new intensity under Mary’s eventual suc-
cessor and half sister, Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen for her loyal subjects, the
Bastard Queen for Roman Catholics who never recognized Henry’s marriage to
her mother Anne Boleyn. Her irregular birth did not, however, prevent Phillip
II from courting her, knowing that things with the Vatican could be straight-
ened out with well-placed favors and proper politicking. Elizabeth apparently
realized that marital union with any man would diminish her powers and was
quite happy to flirt with many powerful suitors but bind herself to none. She
was just as fickle in religious matters and skillfully sought a middle ground be-
tween Rome and Geneva. Frustrated at her elusiveness and England’s continued
disuse for the papacy, Phillip launched the Invincible Armada in 1588 which
proved anything but. Humiliated in battle by the smaller but more mobile Eng-
290 NICOLAS SHUMWAY

lish fleet, the Armada eventually succumbed to a storm hailed by the English
as God-sent. Ten years later, in response to rumors that Phillip was planning a
second assault, Elizabeth’s navy launched a surprise attack on the Spanish fleet
anchored at Cédiz. Clearly, the stage had been set. For the next two centuries,
Spain and England would contend mightily as Europe’s leading colonial powers
—and the English empire would eventually eclipse its Spanish rival.
Their enmity was ideological as well as political and economic. Demon-
izing Spain became one of England’s favorite parlor games. An unwitting ally
in England’s vilification of all things Spanish was no one less than the Catholic
reformer, Bartolomé de las Casas. His Brevisima historia de la destruccién de
las Indias was promptly translated into English. The London edition of 1689
carried the following description on the title page:

Popery truly Display’d in its Bloody Colours: Or a Faithful Narrative of the Horrid
and Enexampled Massacres, Butcheries, and all manner of Cruelties, that Hell and
Malice could invent, committed by the Popish Spanish Party on the Inhabitants of
West India . . Composed first in Spanish by Bartholomew de las Casas, a Bishop
there, and an Eye-Witness of most of these Barbarous Cruelties . . . (cited in Her-
ring, 176-77)

To be sure, the English colonizers treated the Indians just as badly, if not
worse, than the Spanish. But that was no reason for the anti-Spanish, anti-Cath-
olic English to not use de las Casas’ history as a useful instrument for discredit-
ing their country’s chief colonial rival.
This anti-Spanish animus in Anglo-American historiography gained strength
in the nineteenth century and, to some degree, has never quite disappeared. Al-
though he died in 1859, the histories of the conquest of Mexico and Peru by Bos-
ton-born William H. Prescott still stand as monuments of U.S. historiography
and figure among the very few nineteenth-century histories to continue in print.
His low opinion of Spanish culture, however, pulsates on virtually every page
he wrote. Consider how in his History ofthe Reign of Philip II, King of Spain he
tells us that “The Inquisition succeeded in Spain, for it was suited to the charac-
ter of the Spaniard” (1:379), or that “Spain was shut out from the light which in
the sixteenth century broke over the rest of Europe. . . . The genius of the people
was rebuked, and their spirit quenched. ... Every way the mind of the Spaniard
was in fetters. His moral sense was miserably perverted” (1:446). He later ar-
gues that “The same dark spirit of fanaticism seems to brood over the national
literature. ... The greatest geniuses of the nation, the masters of the drama and
of the ode, while they astonish us by their miracles of invention, show that they
 HISPANISM IN AN IMPERFECT PAST AND AN UNCERTAIN PRESENT PES) I

have too often kindled their inspiration at the altars of the Inquisition” (1:447).
Or consider this concluding paragraph from Henry Charles Lea’s 1922 study of
the Inquisition and his depiction of Spain as a national failure:

Thus the conclusion that may be drawn from our review of the causes underlying
the misfortunes of Spain is that what may fairly be attributable to the Inquisition is
its service as the official instrument of the intolerance that led to such grave results,
and its influence on the Spanish character in intensifying that intolerance into a
national characteristic, while benumbing the Spanish intellect until it may be said
for a time to have almost ceased to think. (4:508)

Not until the somewhat revisionist histories of Lewis Hanke and Lesley
Byrd Simpson do the Spaniards in U.S. history books start getting more sympa-
thetic treatment. But in the popular mind, Hispanism, fanaticism, authoritarian-
ism, and the Inquisition seemed to go hand in hand. The one area where Spain
got slightly better press among Anglo-American writers was in folklore and
literature. Washington Irving’s popular “Tales From the Alhambra” presented a
human side of Spain while English romantics like Shelley and Coleridge found
much to admire in Calderon de la Barca. And, of course, folkloric Spain found
enduring representation in Carmenesque operas and music. Dancing gypsies,
romantic guitars, bullfights—these became the only images of Spanish cul-
ture that could rival those of tyrannical rulers and grand inquisitors—which
of course was not much of a victory for Hispanism since being admired for
folkloric value hardly earns one a better place in academe.
Anti-Spanish bias in the United States also influenced politics. Manifest
Destiny was in the air the day the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Like
the Spanish to the south, the early English settlers claimed American lands
by divine right. The United States’ early and main territorial expansion came
through legitimate political means (if we disregard Indigenous peoples). The
Treaty of Paris of 1781 gave the fledgling country all territory claimed by Great
Britain up to the Mississippi River, and the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 allowed
claim to territories through the Pacific Northwest to the Pacific Ocean. How-
ever, when it came time to claim Mexican territories that now comprise the U.S.
Southwest—the United States’ first real imperialistic enterprise—anti-Spanish
sentiment proved crucial. Consider, for example, how Senator William Preston
in 1847 sought to justify the U.S. War against Mexico:

This invader [Santa Anna] had come at the head of his forces, urged by no ordinary
impulse—by an infuriate fanaticism—by a superstitious Catholicism, goaded on
by a miserable priesthood, against that invincible Anglo-Saxon race, the van of
292 NICOLAS SHUMWAY

which now approaches the del Norte. It was at once a war of religion and of liberty.
And when the noble race engaged in a war, victory was sure to perch upon their
standard. (Cited in Tureson, 151)

Clearly, Senator Preston felt that the war against Mexico was justified since
Hispanism represented darkness while Anglo-Saxon Protestantism represented
light. Things Hispanic imbued by a “superstitious Catholicism” and led by “a
miserable priesthood” deserved to be replaced. The Mexican War was, there-
fore, not imperialist but liberating—and from what the southwestern territories
needed liberation was precisely the ideologies of Hispanism.
Roughly a half century later, similar attitudes nurtured United States ex-
pansion into Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Panama. Theodore Roosevelt and his co-
religionists had little trouble persuading most U.S. citizens that such expansion
was done in the name of civilization, since things Hispanic just were not that
civilized. Consider the following lines from 1899 in which Roosevelt urges
Congress to sign the treaty with Spain and continue the war in the Philippines:

To refuse to ratify the treaty would be a crime not only against America but against
civilization. To leave the task half done whether in the East or the West Indies would
be to make the matter worse than if we had never entered upon it. We have driven
out a corrupt medieval tyranny. In Cuba and Porto Rico we are already striving to
introduce orderly liberty. We shall be branded with the steel of clinging shame if we
leave the Philippines to fall into a welter of bloody anarchy, instead of taking hold
of them and governing them with righteousness and justice . . . (16:471—72)

For the soon-to-be president, Spain in 1899 was still a “corrupt medieval
tyranny” that the United States routed in the name of civilization, not to men-
tion, that time-worn trinity of Anglo-American Puritanism: liberty, righteous-
ness, and justice. Not all North Americans agreed with “Teddy.” Mark Twain,
among others, famously dissented from Rooseveltian imperialism, but theirs
was a voice crying in the wilderness.

Making Hispanism Respectable

In odd ways, however, United States imperialism became a rallying point for
Hispanism and helped make it more respectable over a broad cross-section of
Spanish and Spanish-American intellectuals. Menéndez y Pelayo’s paeans to
the spiritual riches of Hispanism seemed less quaint against the backdrop of
the Spanish-American War, the War in the Philippines, and the proxy war by
 HISPANISM IN AN IMPERFECT PAST AND AN UNCERTAIN PRESENT 293

which the United States seized the Panama Canal Zone. While virtually no
one in Spanish America felt sad about Spain losing its last American colonies,
increasing numbers saw the United States and U.S. culture as an enemy against
whom Hispanics from both sides of the ocean and of varying political stripes
could rally.
One of the most peculiar texts in this regard was also the most popular: the
book-length essay Ariel, published in 1900 by the Uruguayan writer José En-
rique Rod6. Rod6 argues that the descendants of Greece and Rome, whom Rod6
calls the Latin race, already possess a spiritual and aesthetic superiority over the
yanquis. He incongruously chooses the native-born, earthbound, and ultimately
treacherous Caliban from Shakespeare’s The Tempest as the symbol of U.S.
vulgarity, materialism, and “utilitarianism.” Likewise, he sees the winged Ariel
from the same play as the marker of the aesthetically sensitive Latin peoples.
Rod6 is particularly critical of his Spanish American forebears who blindly
idolized the United States while failing to appreciate the wealth of their own
cultural heritage. Rod6 also waxes eloquent in defending leisurely contempla-
tion and talent-based aristocracies while expressing a lofty disdain for demo-
cratic systems that confer undue authority on the untutored masses, producing
not democracy but mediocracia (from mediocre). He thus echoes arguments
being presented concurrently in Spain that not only defended Hispanism and
Latinidad but also identified U.S. cultural hegemony as Hispanism’s chief en-
emy. Oddly, Rod6 denounces U.S. cultural hegemony without mentioning the
more immediate dangers of U.S. military and commercial expansionism. Two
years earlier, the U.S. had occupied Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, yet
the best Rod6 can come up with is an assertion of Spanish America’s spiritual
and aesthetic supremacy.
While Rod6 says little about Spain, his defense of “latinidad” and his at-
tacks on liberal society as seen in the United States are at one with emerging
currents in early twentieth-century Hispanism on both sides of the ocean. In
1913, the Argentine writer Manuel Galvez published an essay entitled E/ solar
de la raza in which he argued that Argentina had sacrificed its Hispanic and
Catholic birthright for a mess of liberal potage. In Spain, José Ortega y Gasset
worried about the rebellion of the masses and the wealthy untutored who tram-
pled good taste. Back in Argentina, Manuel Ugarte saw the United States as the
New Rome. And in Mexico, José Vasconcelos echoed now familiar currents in
Hispanism in his unabashed admiration of Spanish culture and Catholicism and
his disdain for the United States as a disgusting, vulgar, materialistic society. Be
not surprised that Vasconcelos found much to admire in Spanish fascism.
294 NICOLAS SHUMWAY

Hispanism and Hispanic Studies in the United States

These discussions, however, had little effect on United States universities until
the 1930s. There had, of course, always been courses in Hispanic studies in
literature and history departments, but largely as also-rans. The history of Spain
and Spanish America was not considered central to the U.S. experience, and
literature in Spanish acquired at best a tenuous secondary status in Romance
Language departments where French was clearly the favored partner. In short,
while U.S. scholars included in their ranks people who might be called Hispan-
ists, they were a minority presence.
After World War I, several forces combined to make Hispanic Studies more
visible in the United States. European scholars and artists began immigrating
to the United States, drawn first by the muscular young country’s prosperity
but later by the deteriorating political conditions of Europe. Among these were
exiled Spanish intellectuals fleeing fascism, many of whom found homes in
United States universities. While unsympathetic to fascism, these scholars were
nonetheless quite nationalistic in their desire to place the literature of Spain at
the center of Hispanic studies in the U.S. academy. And in fairness to them, it
was the literature they knew best. It was largely under their tutelage that the first
generation of North American Hispanists studied and wrote dissertations, often
reflecting similar preferences for the literature of Spain.
Scarcely ten years later a new influx of Spanish-speaking intellectuals came
to U.S. universities, but this time they were Argentines fleeing Perén. While of-
ten politically sympathetic to their colleagues from Spain, Spanish departments
soon became the locus of an unending tug-a-war between Spanish American-
ists and Peninsularists that to this day has not ended. The Argentines brought
with them a new awareness of Spanish American literature as seen in the work
of critics like Pedro Henriquez Urefia, who although a Dominican realized his
pivotal histories of Spanish American literature in Argentina. Later Argentine
scholars of this generation, men like Enrique Anderson-Imbert, Anibal Sanchez
Reulet, and Raimundo Lida, came to powerful academic positions in leading
U.S. universities from which they insisted on a greater place for Hispanic lit-
erature generally and equal representation for Spanish American literature in
the Hispanic canon. Then, beginning in the late 1950s, another social upheaval
brought to the U.S. academy significant numbers of Cubans, who quite natu-
rally insisted on equal treatment for excellent writers like Alejo Carpentier and
José Lezama Lima while objecting strenuously to the often pro-Fidel sympa-
thies of their older Spanish colleagues.
 HISPANISM IN AN IMPERFECT PAST AND AN UNCERTAIN PRESENT 295

Concurrent with these developments, from the end of World War II through
the 1970s, red scares and sputnik envy caused state and federal governments
in the United States to invest heavily in higher education. Through the Title VI
programs of the National Defense Education Act (now the Health and Educa-
tion Act), support for graduate students interested in Latin America became
increasingly available. Title VI National Resource Centers and wealthy founda-
tions, such as the Ford and the Rockefeller Foundations, also brought financial
backing for research, conferences, and lecture series on topics related to Latin
America. Hispanists clearly benefited from these programs, particularly those
of a Latin American persuasion.
Student enrollments also climbed steeply, so much so that since 1985 more
U.S. students study Spanish than all other foreign languages combined. Stu-
dent interest was partly driven by a growing sense that Spanish was becoming
the second language of the United States, given the growing numbers, influ-
ence, and visibility in the U.S. academy and the society at large of so-called
“heritage” speakers of Spanish. These groups influenced the U.S. curriculum
in two significant ways. First, they helped fill classrooms of traditional Spanish
language and literature programs, giving Hispanic studies political clout in the
U.S. academy that it has never had before. Second, they claimed a place for the
study of United States Latino literature and were primary movers in expanding
literary studies to include cultural studies, a shift from the study of texts to the
study of cultural contexts. Through this second endeavor, they brought new
pressure on a curriculum designed primarily with a focus on Spain, yet in their
political stance they could be just as damning of Anglo-centric academe as the
Menéndez y Pelayos or Vasconcelos of yesteryear.
Because of these numbers, the study of Hispanic cultures has never been
better situated in the U.S. academy. We have numbers, we have political clout,
we have students, and we have faculty. The question now is How much can this
new situation borrow from the Hispanism of yesteryear? Or said differently,
is there anything in the ideology of Hispanism that those of us dedicated to
promoting Hispanic Studies might find useful? I conclude with some tentative
answers to these questions.

Hispanism or Hispanic Studies?

Obviously, Hispanism must occupy us as an object of study. The study of the

debates on collective, national, and cultural identities that underlie notions
of Hispanism must concern us, whether they be Larra’s critique of Spain or
296 NICOLAS SHUMWAY

Maeztu’s and Gilvez’s proto-fascist defense of hispanidad. No overview of

Hispanic cultural history and production can ignore such ideas. | would also
hope that the study of Spanish cultural nationalism might lead to deliberation
on nationalism in general including that of the United States. Indeed, the coun-
terpoint Hispanism offers in its critique of U.S. cultural hegemony and middle-
class self-satisfaction can lead to very fruitful discussions. I have also found
that North American students are frequently drawn to Rod6’s fulminations
against U.S. culture, perhaps because Rod6, surely without knowing it, wrote
in the tradition of the Jeremiad, a Puritan preaching tradition in which listeners
perversely enjoyed being upbraided for their manifold imperfections.
But to teach an idea is not to defend it much less be persuaded by it. Indeed,
questioning central currents of Hispanism and examining where its essentialism
and anti-liberal sentiment led in some instances (e.g., fascism) must not avoid
scrutiny. We must also be bold in recognizing the ways Spanish-centric Hispan-
ism continues to distort the curricula of Hispanic studies. Consider for example
how in Spanish language literature programs only Spain seems to have the right
to teach its literature as a national literature. Spanish American literature more
often than not is framed as well Spanish American literature. Our literature pro-
grams seldom teach national literatures of Mexico, Argentina, Cuba, or Chile,
although all these countries have highly developed traditions of writers, publica-
tions, and criticism that lend themselves to being studied in a national frame-
work. Moreover, writers from those countries, including even the cosmopolitan
Borges, can often be understood only in dialogue with their national traditions.
Lumping all Spanish American literature together also hides vital differences in
those literatures. For example, Andean and Mesoamerican literature will surely
say more about indigenous peoples than the literature of the River Plate, just as
Caribbean literature will necessarily speak to issues of negritude to a greater
degree than that of the Southern Cone. Despite such differences, nonetheless, we
continue to teach courses with titles like “Introduction to the Spanish American
Novel” or “Spanish American Vanguardism.” Such course titles suggest that lit-
erature programs are still organized with Spain at the center and everyone else in
a marginalized amalgamation that recalls terms like las colonias or las Indias.
Now before anyone gets too annoyed, let me quickly say that I love much of
the literature of Spain and that any student of Spanish language literature needs
a firm grounding in the Spanish classics from the Middle Ages through the
Golden Age. But I must also note that after Independence, Spanish American
literature becomes increasingly disconnected from Spain. There are, of course,
moments of rapprochement, for example, during Modernismo or among some
 HISPANISM IN AN IMPERFECT PAST AND AN UNCERTAIN PRESENT 297

of the vanguardist poets. But students of twentieth-century Spanish American

fiction would do better reading Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Faulkner, and
Proust than Gald6s, Mir6, Cela, or Goytisolo.
Traditional notions of Hispanism also seem ill-equipped to accommodate
recent developments in Spanish language literature resulting from globalization.
Two of the most significant anthologies published in recent years are McOndo
and Se habla espanol, both of which give visibility to expatriate writers who,
although from various Spanish-speaking countries, have been partly educated
in the United States. What greatly distinguishes these young writers is the de-
gree to which they are in dialogue with the United States, not as aficionados a la
Sarmiento or anti-hegemonists a la Rod6, but as bright, creative young people
who recognize that some element of U.S. culture now forms part of their in-
dividual and collective identities. In short, quite unlike the anti-imperialist left
that people of my generation supported, these new writers see globalization as
an identity to be embraced rather than a hegemony to be resisted.
Nor is it at all clear how traditional Hispanism might accommodate the
literature of U.S. Latinos. Spanish departments in the United States have often
been notoriously inhospitable to U.S. Latino literature, partly because much of
it is written in English and partly, I suspect, because U.S. Latinos raise hackles
among people educated in Ortega’s fear of the masses. Yet, there it is, a rich,
diverse and burgeoning literature that can claim Hispanic roots as much as any
literature of Spanish America.
So how do I conclude? Hispanic studies is an exciting field, or better said,
an exciting current within many fields. Moreover, there has never been a better
time to be a Hispanist in the United States precisely because of the opportunities
this moment affords. Hispanism on the other hand strikes me as an outmoded
idea based on essentialist, ideologically driven, and Spain-centric notions that
will ultimately do more to divide than to promote. I began this essay saying that
Hispanism would never be an easy sell in the United States. I haven’t changed
my mind.

Notes

1. “ingratos recuerdos que hieren el amor nacional.”

2. Respectively, los sucesos que han separado para siempre del regazo de la madre
comtn a unos pueblos, hermanos del neustro, a quines no podemos menos de desar
tanta ventura como a nostros mismos,” and “defraudar . . . a la poesia castellana de un
homenaje debido por una de las composiciones que mas la honran.”
298 NICOLAS SHUMWAY

3. “|... resiste la comparaci6n con las edades més gloriosas del mundo! .. . Nunca, des-
de el tiempo de Judas Macabeo, hubo un pueblo que con tanta razon pudiera creerse
el pueblo escogido para ser la espada y el brazo de Dios; y todo, hasta sus suenos de
engrandecimiento y de monarqufa universal, lo referfan y subordinaban a este objeto
supreme: Fiet unum ovile et unus pastor.”
4. “una vieja serpiente, por solo satisfacer su safia envenenada.”
5. “la hija rezagada de Europa.”
6. “un cadaver fresco aun, que hiede e inspira disgusto.”

Works Cited

Bolivar, Simon. Escritos politicos. Ed. Graciela Soriano. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1969.
GAlvez, Manuel. El solar de la raza. Buenos Aires: Sociedad Cooperativa Nosotros, 1913.
Hanke, Lewis. Las Casas and the Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America.
New York: Columbia University, 1966.
Herring, Hubert. A History of Latin America from the Beginnings to the Present. Second
edition. New York: Knopf, 1965.
Lastarria, José Victorino. Misceldnea historica y literaria. Valparaiso: Mercurio, 1855.
Lea, Henry Charles. A History of the Inquisition of Spain. 4 volumes. New York: Macmil-
lan, 1906-1907.
McOndo. Ed. Alberto Fuguet y Sergio Gomez. Barcelona: Mondadori, 1996.
Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino. La conciencia espanola. Ed. Antonio Tovar. Madrid: EPE-
SA, 1948.
Mongiu6, Luis. “Las Tres Primeras Resenas Londinenses de 1826 de La Victoria de Junin.”
Revista Iberoamericana 30 (1964): 225-37.
Paz Soldan, Edmundo y Alberto Fuguet. Se habla espaol: voces latinas en USA. Miami:
Alfaguara, 2000.
Ortega y Gasset, José. La rebelion de las masas. 1929; Madrid: Ediciones de la Revista de
Occidente, 1970.
Prescott, William H. History ofthe Reign ofPhilip the Second, King of Spain. Philadelphia:
Lippincott, 1855; Rpt. 1869.
Rod, José Enrique. Ariel. Montevideo: Impr. De Dornaleche y Reyes, 1900.
Roosevelt, Theodore. The Works of Theodore Roosevelt. 21 volumes. New York: Charles
Scribners and Sons, 1925.
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. Civilizacién y barbarie: Vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga.
Ed. Raimundo Lazo. [1845] Mexico City: Editorial Porrtia, 1977.
- Viajes por Europa, Africa y Estados Unidos. 3 volumes. Ed. Julio Noé. [1845—
1851] Buenos Aires: La Cultura Argentina, 1922.
Simpson, Lesley Byrd. The Encomienda in New Spain: the Beginning of Spanish México.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950.
 HISPANISM IN AN IMPERFECT PAST AND AN UNCERTAIN PRESENT 299

. Many Mexicos. 4th ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

Tuveson, Ernest Lee. Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role. [1968]
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Ugarte, Manuel. El destino de un continente. Madrid: Editorial Mundo Latino, 1923.
Vasconcelos, José. La raza césmica: misién de la raza iberoamericana. Paris, Agencia
mundial de libreria [19207].
® 12
Hispanism and Its Lines of Flight

Roman de la Campa

The era in which Hispanism stood as an organic principle governing the study
of Spanish and Spanish American letters seems like a dim and distant memory.
Whether we like it or not, humanistic fields of study such as Hispanism have
been supplanted by a disciplinary practice in a constant state of flux, less a com-
munity of established texts and methods than an aggregate of wholly disparate
elements in which innovation, transgression (or even a reluctant tweaking of
tradition), must somehow concur in the pursuit of new packaging for disciplines
and scholars. The same could also be said for newer articulations of related
fields such as Latin Americanism, or even Latino studies, a more distant cousin.
Some would argue that such a state of disciplinary affairs only pertains to the
American (U.S.) academy, but one can’t help but notice the degree to which
other historically influential sites of Hispanism—Britain, for example, or even
Spain itself—must now respond to the same logic of knowledge production.
The pull of the American research apparatus currently engaged with what
was once the province of Hispanism has evolved into an expansive institutional
nexus that trains and supports a growing body of transnational, middle-class,
professional academics with potentially lifelong positions, in numbers that
are simply unthinkable anywhere else. This new class of intellectual began to
emerge in the United States during the cold war, with its emphasis on area and

300
 HISPANISM AND ITS LINES OF FLIGHT 301

international studies as a form of national defense, but it grew into much larger
and more influential sphere through the 1980s, as postmodernism, cultural
studies and globalization steadily voiced a North American view of humanistic
endeavors that supplanted the European paradigm of modern aesthetics. !
It, therefore, seems particularly important to note that projects engendered
in the American academy betray certain propensities, as they do everywhere
else. Generally speaking, they reveal a tendency toward a historical sweep, of-
ten with proposals that seek to redefine the past, present, and future in one fell
Swoop, a symptom not only of the reach and ambition of work possible under
the auspices of an extraordinary research university system, but also of the
mounting pressures for inventive productivity faced by humanist intellectuals
in this era of privatization. In the case of Spanish-related topics, this new field
of force vastly intensified during the last four decades. It reached that magni-
tude not necessarily as a primary site of theoretical or artistic origination—no
one would deny the import of high European theory and Latin American litera-
ture during this time—but as part of an impulse given to remapping disciplinary
paradigms, an energy comparable to software design that constantly alters the
domain of fields, areas, and objects of study. Equally important, this timing also
coincided with the advent of deconstructive modes of reading and writing, ar-
guably the most productive common denominator behind the myriad sequence
of theoretical frameworks evidenced during this period, a fertile register for
an epistemology of turns, breaks, and interstices that gathers strength through
poststructural praxis and postmodern experience.
It is possible to intuit that most, if not all, of these methods and approaches
share a common challenge of considerable proportions: How to incorporate
the legacy of Western culture into a new world order being presently promoted
by neoliberal capitalism, particularly after 1989? Not only was the aesthetic
utopia of Western postmodernity advanced during the 1980s deeply challenged
by the subsequent crudity of global economies, but the teleological project in-
spired by Third World modern narratives lost even more prestige, as evident in
Latin America and other areas demarcated as peripheral or compromised mo-
dernities. This led either to deep disenchantment or muted resistance amongst
scholars and artists who continued to have a stake in imagining the world as a
safer, fairer place, particularly those for whom migration to the United States
or Western Europe was not an option or a wish.
Therefore, it seems paramount to constantly scrutinize the radical changing
nature of knowledge and value production prevalent today. Does it augur a la-
mentable sliding slope of dispersion, or a moment of theoretical dissemination
302 ROMAN DE LA CAMPA

worthy of celebration? Are those two opposite viewpoints implicitly linked? Do

they promise more than a new strand of inchoate pluralism where value resides
largely or solely in the will to produce, inspired by the pull of sub-specialties or
even smaller groups of scholars capable of continuously launching and estab-
lishing their own new paradigms in the globalized American (U.S.) academy?
Has the emphasis on conceptual design claimed a new terrain no longer depen-
dent on high-low divide and national traditions? Could it have led to certain
aversion toward literary studies and the aesthetic realm?
One thing seems clear: It has become much more difficult to sustain areas
of study through single meta-signifiers such as Hispanism, or, for that matter,
Latin Americanism, given the plethora of conflictive elements contained by the
latter term. In his most recent book Néstor Garcia Canclini asks, with a con-
siderable degree of consternation, just how we might continue to think about
Latin America today.” Similar questions apply to the field of study known as
English, a thoroughly globalized sphere best conceived as a transnational or di-
asporic entity whose disciplinary object can only be grasped as lines of flight in
constant movement amidst linguistic, cultural, and national traditions.* For the
cluster of Spanish/Latin American/Latino discourses, the question is not just
what each of its fields can add to the archive at this point—say, new or forgotten
authors, regions, epochs, conceptual frameworks, or even traditions—though
these are important pursuits. The larger question, it seems to me, would be
whether this opportunity can be seized to recast the fleeting lines of Humanism
itself, with a more central role for the new constellation of disciplines associ-
ated with Hispanism. After all, Spanish language and literature always held
a secondary rank in the Humanist hierarchy of value fashioned by European
national literatures; and Latin Americanism came into its own rather late in the
game. Moreover, even though post-Hispanist discourses may no longer rely on
the pillars of philological foundation, their heterogeneity may help unfold new
interdisciplinary endeavors that bridge humanistic disciplines and the lettered
social sciences (history, sociology, cultural anthropology), or at least help erase
the way in which those two cultures of research have been so drastically severed
in the last half century.*
Equally important, and perhaps more dramatic, are the momentous changes
undergone by departments otherwise known as Spanish (often with Portuguese
barely clinging to the title) in the United States. These are units whose growing
importance deserves special attention in a nation reluctantly assuming a condi-
tion of de-facto bilingualism throughout its major metropolitan areas. English
may have turned into the lingua franca of globalization, but the links between
language, literature and nation have been undermined like never before. Eng-
 HISPANISM AND ITS LINES OF FLIGHT 303

lish departments, for example, must now account for an increasing body of
literature by authors who write in English, but whose cultural and national
bearings reside elsewhere, (India, South Africa, Asian American, U.S. Latino,
among others). In that contradictory terrain, Spanish now awakens to the des-
tiny of a second national language in the United States, in spite of that nation’s
deep-seated disinterest in foreign languages, a symptom that has only grown in
the past few decades. Spanish departments must, therefore, not only brave the
fragmentation of their traditional disciplines, but also come to grips with their
own set of rising entanglements.
These administrative units of academic capital, once the guardians of His-
panism as a foreign language and literature, must now ask what it means—cul-
turally, linguistically and theoretically—to live and work in the midst of 40 mil-
lion citizens of Hispanic and Latin American background in the United States,
with a buying power projected to approach one trillion dollars by the end of
this decade?° No longer the cultural embassies of Hispanism in American (US)
academia, Spanish departments now rehearse the possibilities of an unexpected
global realm with uncertain yet profound implications for the potential links
between Spain, Latin America, and the growing U.S. Latino community. The
latter’s demographic, cultural, and political profile has not only seen tremen-
dous gains in coastal cities like New York, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, but
also in Minneapolis, Atlanta, Denver, and many other southern and mid-west-
ern areas, both urban and suburban.°
Mapping such a global terrain would comprise an equivocal but extraor-
dinary economy of Hispanic and Latino cultures: texts, services, products and
styles, as well as languages. Indeed, Spanish now claims the attention of all
English speakers in the United States (and some parts of Canada), at least as a
means to gain employment, but the path of post-Hispanism is not far removed
from a bilingual condition. Migrant multitudes from Latin American countries
are bound to learn English in the United States, but they nonetheless continue
to retain a relationship with Spanish and their nations of origin (which includes
small, but significant, numbers of Spaniards or their descendants as well). It
may seem farfetched for Hispanism to rethink itself through this growing bilin-
gual register in the Americas, indeed, there may even be a certain irony implicit
in that destiny if one realizes it came about in the site where the two most ambi-
tious colonial histories crisscrossed with their respective languages. Be that as
it may, it also seems clear that this bilingual condition contributes to a global
sense of Spanish in which Spain has found a unexpected re-entry of sorts, one
that is not defined by a sense of national or linguistic colonial empowerment,
but rather by the opportunities of investment in cultural and linguistic dissemi-
304 ROMAN DE LA CAMPA

nation, a sort of postnational Spanish marketing that is intrinsically transna-

tional, with its main theater of consumption in the Americas.’
Most critics concede that globalization and postmodern constructs impact
various nations differently, but it seems fair to say that few critical paradigms
take such complications to heart. Sifting through these events and their impact
on theory has been a difficult and challenging task, as one can plainly see in
two of the most highly cited contemporary attempts to address the crisis in the
field of humanistic endeavors: Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx and the more
recent Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.* The question one draws
from both, after thirty years of deconstructive work, is whether deconstruction
can critically address the post-1989 global scene, or at least draw a clear line of
resistance from postcapitalism, the other force of designification.
It seems crucial, therefore, to examine the contradictory ways in which
deconstruction figures as a nondifferentiated common denominator in many of
today’s critical discourses. Regardless of the diverse and often opposing ways
in which it is deployed, deconstruction imbues modalities of reading, writing,
and even speaking that inevitably turn toward de-signification of presence, and
logocentrism, in short, an incessant commitment to problematize how cultures
and histories establish notions such as reality, identity, and worldviews. Due
to its apparent negativity, it is often said that deconstruction only aims to tear
down critical paradigms once sacred to the humanities, yet one could argue it is
equally capable of rebuilding or reconceptualizing them. After all, humanistic
endeavors gained considerable prominence as an uncertain interplay between
aesthetics and epistemology, particularly through the postmodern aesthetics of
the early and middle 1980s.
It is therefore important to note that as a body of theory that looks upon
writing as a self-referential domain, deconstruction remains closer to artistic
practice, often distant from engaging how its critiques apply to the social, a dis-
ciplinary perspective that, in spite of its unquestionable possibilities as radical
epistemology, basically retains the pattern of the humanist researcher engaging
texts in isolation, banking on its pertinence in the postmodern lettered order
or awaiting a call to action through distant connections to the social. For those
involved in what was or may still be humanistic work after 1989, such an ap-
proach has increasingly become insufficient. The plane of concrete differences
has increased beyond the reach of models that define difference as particular-
ism, as well as those that critique modernities in the abstract, usually on the way
to claiming a new postmodern, subaltern or colonial overarching logic.
To move past this cul-de-sac, new comparative work may well be neces-
sary, the type of approach that will conjure new links between the production
 HISPANISM AND ITS LINES OF FLIGHT 305

of empirical and discursive knowledge, indeed, a reconfi guration of disciplines

capable of articulating the richness of the living social text in its constructive,
as well as deconstructive, realms. Examples of this kind of work can already
be found in texts such as The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital,
edited by Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, or the recent work of cultural critic An-
tonio Méndez Rubio, or that of Andreas Huyssen, a leading figure in the area of
comparative literature.’ They chart new paths beyond the openings propounded
by deconstruction, either with a very attentive ear to the exigencies of the so-
cial text—concrete nationalisms, emancipation movements, different types of
feminist struggles—or invoking a renewed aesthetic realm decoupled from any
nostalgia for the old order, one perhaps not envisioned by the cultural studies
hegemony.
Without these engagements, we attend to a postmodern order that values
only economic data or epistemic speculation, a new order of knowledge an-
chored exclusively in the digital revolution and the stock market on one hand,
and epistemological indeterminism on the other. Then again, perhaps these two
forces mirror each other in ways totally unforeseen up to this point, ways that
perhaps slip from writing as a self-enclosed deconstructive domain. The cri-
tique of the nation may well provide a case in point, since it has thus far shown
much more socioeconomic pertinence than critical acumen. There may be no
doubt that global capital finds collective identities such as the nation somewhat
anachronistic to its ever-widening drive toward new and unobstructed markets,
but the work of differentiating how this applies across the plane of varying
types of nation-states remains largely unexplored, particularly among literary
and cultural critics.
To say that identity critique, multi-temporality, and multiculturalism have
been made tangible in nearly all parts of the world only confirms the common-
place, celebratory side of postmodernism and cultural studies. Indeterminacy,
on the other hand, is now a global condition that requires elucidation through
conceptual proximity to entanglements such as split-states, permanent diaspo-
ras, postnational imaginaries, and the intensive realm of consumer subjectivity.
New insights will obviously be needed for differential approaches to cultures
and nations, particularly those with divergent or discomforting modernities, but
these pressures continue to startle academic structures, at times leading to sur-
prising but revealing proposals that must somehow redraw the boundaries of
the universal within national frameworks, be they linguistic, philosophical, or
literary. Among these efforts, Harold Bloom’s call for a literary canon may be
the most notable example. Western, North Atlantic, American, European, Latin
American, ethnic, universal, each imaginary must now field unprecedented
306 ROMAN DE LA CAMPA

strains, not only from migration waves that disturb the national identity like
never before, but, what is more important, from the techno-mediatic perfor-
mance industry, which has proven capable of designing a rich array of multicul-
tural products on its own.
A postnational understanding of Hispanism could perhaps begin by tracing
the following contours: a) the awakening national multiplicity of Spain that has
been steadily unveiling itself since the death of Franco; b) the large scale migra-
tion from half of the Latin American nations to the United States and Europe;
and c) the onset of Hispanic enclaves—a majority in some instances—in the
major urban centers of the United States. Each case reveals a splitting of the
nation-state equation, albeit in widely different forms that correspond to circum-
stances encountered by Spain, Latin America and the United States in the last
few decades. It is not, therefore, an end of the nation in a rigorous sense, as many
have augured, but rather a symptom of its dispersal that deserves special atten-
tion by those who study culture and literature, since it also implies opportunities
for shaping the links between transatlantic and new American Studies, without
abandoning discourses pertaining to Peninsular and Latin American traditions.
Indeed, one might even suggest that new comparativism within the postnational
sphere could renew our understanding of the Humanist past, as evidenced in
Derrida’s suggestive re-reading of Shakespeare, as well as Negri’s and Hardt’s
poignant re-articulation of Renaissance thought. Neverthless, such a disciplin-
ary reorientation will also entail a more detailed look at culture industries whose
main products today engage the manufacture of desire through television pro-
duction and computer technologies. This impulse has succeeded in fusing the
culture of marketing with the realm of performativity, creating a new epistemic
niche in direct competition with universities and other institutions for the best
creative talents. Commercial products must go to the market endowed with art-
istry and self-conscious performativity at the same time that artistic and cultural
products must assume market logic in order to survive. Even the academy and
its practitioners must now respond to this logic. As such, it constitutes a deeply
contradictory element, since it bridges the culture of globalization and academic
production precisely at the time that schools are becoming secondary agents of
education—indeed, at a moment in which mass media service industries have
managed to bring the acquisition of practical knowledge and training closer to
the interests of corporations.
It all points to an intricate nexus that links citizenship with consumption,
thereby comprising new forms of distributing and packaging the symbolic capi-
tal necessary to enter middle class status. It remains unclear, however, whether
or how critical discourses will respond to this challenge. The aesthetics of im-
 HISPANISM AND ITS LINES OF FLIGHT 307

aging—television, videos, advertisements, the Internet, performative arts, and

other media constructions of consumer citizenship—clearly exact a totally new
relationship with academic intellectuals. The space once known as “the street”
now breaks into the fold with a new force and legitimacy, no longer just an in-
truder that overturns the high-low cultural divide. The place of the researcher,
or intermediary, becomes irremediably more public and ultimately more anx-
ious, because capitalism itself demands it.
How, then, does one bridge the growing gaps between academic disciplines,
their object of study, and the new phenomena I have attempted to summarize
in this essay? Some might allege that it cannot be done, given that objects of
knowledge are necessarily by-products of disciplinary thinking, and that the lat-
ter have been dissolved by the twin forces of deconstruction and global reorder-
ing. Others prefer to look upon universities as places of resistance from which
to reclaim disciplinary order. A third position might insist on a new approach in
which critical theory explores a new role within, not outside, the growing nexus
of cultural markets and the arts. A comprehensive and suggestive example of this
position has been articulated by Andreas Huyssen. I offer, by way of conclusion,
a summary of its most salient points, each followed by a brief commentary of
my own:'?

a) Abandon the traditional split between high and low culture that opposes
serious art and literature to mass culture.
This challenge, one suspects, may well prove equally difficult for critics
who opt to remain exclusively within literature as well as those who seem to have
abandoned it altogether. The same could be said for critics quite at home with
the idea of a theoretical discourse that takes everything on board but remains far
removed from the specific analysis of both, literature, and mass cultural forms.

b) Substitute that vertical relationship (highNow divide) with a lateral or

horizontal one that would recognize that scholars are also subject to market
pressures.
At stake here would be the role of the academic intellectual in the research
university, particularly in the United States, an institutional space that has obvi-
ously changed, some would say drastically, during the past decade or so. If we
ourselves are prone to market pressures, can we still address our object of study
in terms of a tradition immune from such exigencies? If not, the question would
not be how to dispense with that tradition, but rather to learn new ways of read-
ing it, fully aware of the fact that our own subjectivity is being rehearsed in the
process.
308 ROMAN DE LA CAMPA

c) Approach the topic of media in all its historical, technical and theoreti-
cal complexity.
Much of the scholarship dealing with cultural studies continues to emanate
from scholars with literary training who embark upon the brave new world of
global or mass culture somewhat lightheartedly. We seem to bank on the weight
of our symbolic capital, particularly our command of theory, to talk about film,
television, architecture, music, and many other forms of contemporary culture.
Often we remain closer to textual analysis than to actual exploration of new
forms. Needless to say, such an approach, its limitations notwithstanding, often
yields new and refreshing work, but even if one concludes that it is a necessary
extension of the literary enterprise in today’s academy, one must wonder if it is
sufficient to meet its own claims and aspirations.

d) Reintroduce issues of aesthetic quality in the analysis of cultural forms

and products.
Much has been said about the category of “the aesthetic,” particularly as
regards to the authoritarian hermeneutic tradition it has left behind, laden with
universal value claims that often went unquestioned. But how will distinctions
based on quality be articulated or accounted for henceforth? Can literature retain
any particular value as a distinct practice of verbal exploration and polysemy
in the contemporary critical domain? Even market-driven cultural production
often involves a complex process of discernment among artistic performances.
One cannot help but wonder if the critique of universal aesthetic claims has
been displaced by a universal disclaimer of aesthetic discernment whose ideo-
logical pretenses remain unchallenged.

e) Abandon the notion that the well-deserved critiques of elite cultures will
play the role in political and social transformations that was reserved for the
avant-garde. Look instead for the ways in which cultural products and prac-
tices link to political discourses in specific instances.
All contexts have their internal shapes, needs and economies of value, even
if the institutional expansiveness and wealth of the North American academy
makes it possible to envision and theorize humanistic discourses as if they were
devoid of localized propensities. Indeed, those of us working in the United
States may be more prone to conceive our object of study as a transnational
community of discourses able to absorb all difference through theoretical para-
digms. But such a literary order, no doubt an interesting and timely symptom,
deserves particular scrutiny. A pivotal example would be the work of Argen-
tine master Jorge Luis Borges, for many, a model of the twenty-first century
 HISPANISM AND ITS LINES OF FLIGHT 309

post-symbolic imaginary. There is no doubt that his short stories advanced the
deepest challenge to literary conventions held in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, many of which favored surrendering the uniqueness of in-
dividual texts to the tedium of literary history. It is also true, however, that by
the end of the twentieth century his oeuvre took on a new symbolic meaning.
Indeed, it became a primary point of reference for postmodern official aesthet-
ics, a restoration of sorts within literary values that goes beyond the Western to
perhaps a global appreciation. Borges’s mastery may well lie precisely in hav-
ing taken literature to an aesthetic plane that knows, or values, only the probing
of its own making, a state of immanence eminently capable of turning what was
once an aporia into its own metaphysics.

f) Map a new comparative approach to cultural studies able to link dis-

ciplines such as cultural history and anthropology with literary and artistic
histories.
Literary and cultural studies would be well served by conceiving more
comparative frameworks able to approach the differential application of literary
studies, postmodernity, feminism, postcolonialism and queer theory—among
others—as well as the growing disconnect between the humanities and social
sciences. The question of difference seems paramount here. Today we are wit-
nessing new ways of mapping multiple contradictory textual and cultural prac-
tices difficult to encompass from national or regional paradigms. But old habits
are hard to break, even when driven by the spirit of innovation and radical ambi-
tion. New mapping may well require a deeper understanding of the relationship
between literary studies and the lettered social sciences, particularly if we are
to move beyond reductionist tendencies to cast these approaches as necessarily
driven by either relativism or factualism.

Notes

1. Andreas Huyssen makes a significant attempt to distinguish the date of the first stage
of postmodernism and distinguish it from the contemporary moment. “Literatura e
cultura no contexto global.”
Nestor Garcia Canclini, Latinoamericanos buscando lugar en este siglo.
3. The extent of this phenomenon has become quite evident in England, where there is
now a new national emphasis on studying the future of English studies. See Elaine
Showalter’s “What Teaching Literature Should Really Mean.”
4. Foran englightening discussion of disciplinary history, see Immanuel Wallerstein, et
310 ROMAN DE LA CAMPA

al., 1996. Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the
Restructuring of the Social Sciences.
5. This figure comes from television industry calculations, as reported in the New York
Times by Mireya Navarro.
6. For data and cultural commentary of the Latino urban pressence in the United States,
see Mike Davis’s Magical Urbanism.
7. Néstor Garcfa Canclini details how Spain has strategically positioned itself in the new
cultural economy of globalization while Latin American governments have failed to
do so. Op. Cit. pp. 20-48.
8. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire.
9. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, Politics of Culture in the Shadows of Capital, Antonio
Méndez Rubio, Encrucijadas: Elementos de critica de la cultura, and unpublished
manuscript: “Cultura y Desaparicion.” Andreas Huyssen, op. cit.
10. Huyssen, Andreas, op. cit. This is a summary of his five main points outlined in pages
29-31.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994.
Canclini, Nestor Garcia. Latinomamericanos buscando lugar en este siglo. Buenos Aires:
Paidos, 2002.
Davis, Mike. Magical Urbanism. London: Verso, 2000.
Derrida, Jaques. Specters of Marx. London: Routledge, 1994.
Huyssen, Andreas. “Cultura y Desaaparicion.” Unpublished manuscript.
. “Literatura e cultura no contexto global” in Valores: Arte, Mercado Politica. Eds.
Reinaldo Marques and Lucia Helena Vilela. Belo Horizonte, Brazil: UFMG, 2002.
Lowe, Lisa and David Lloyd. Politics of Culture in the Shadows of Capital. Durham: Duke
University Press, 1997.
Méndez Rubio, Antonio. Encrucijadas: Elementos de la critica de la cultura. Madrid:
Catedra, 1997.
Navarro, Mireya. “Promoting Hispanic TV, Language and Culture,” New York Times. De-
cember 30, 2002. C7.
Negri, Antoni and Michael Hardt. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Showalter, Elaine. “What Teaching Literature Should Really Mean,” The Chronicle Review
of Higher Education. January 17, 2003.
Wallerstein, Immanuel et al. Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commis-
sion on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1996.
 @ Afterword

Nicholas Spadaccini

In her introduction to this volume, Mabel Morafia argues that the concept and
practice of Hispanism ought to be reexamined from a multidisciplinary and
transnational perspective, keeping in mind the academic loci from which the
dissemination of knowledge related to this field emanate. This very point is
also emphasized by several contributors, all of whom are either Peninsularists
or Latin-Americanists who practice their craft in the United States. It is the
U.S. university system of private and public institutions with their extraordinary
resources (some of which, however insufficient, do seem to trickle down to
Humanities departments, including Spanish) and the visibility of Spanish as the
second most widely-spoken language of the United States, and with the highest
language enrollments other than English at our universities, which serve as a
backdrop for some of the exchanges that take place in these pages.
Morafa underscores the importance of taking into account the role of
scholars and writers “in the production of critical discourse related to catego-
ries of colonialism, national formation, modernity and identity politics” and
stresses the need to reflect on “the project and practices of hispanization. . .
both in Spain and Spanish America, throughout the process of formation and
consolidation of national states, and, nowdays, in the context of globalization”
(x). And these issues are indeed dealt with by many of the contributors, some of
whom focus on the traditional use of the Spanish as both a practical and sym-
312 NICHOLAS SPADACCINI

bolic device of subjugation within the Latin American and Spanish contexts.
Such of course is not the case within the U.S. where Spanish is the language of
a large and diverse minority population and the favorite “second” language at
the university level.
The question of language colonization is dealt with explicitly in several
essays, beginning with Lydia Fossa’s “Spanish in the Sixteenth Century: The
Colonial Hispanization of Indigenous Languages and Cultures,” in which it is
argued that the hispanization of Andean indigenous languages and cultures in
the Sixteenth century went well beyond purely linguistic change as indigenous
peoples were required to assume the language, habits, and religion of the colo-
nizer. Fossa points to the pragmatic appropriation by missionaries of indige-
nous languages such as Aymara, Puquina, and especially Quechua through the
importation of Spanish words and concepts, all to the detriment of other indige-
nous dialects and languages, in order to carry out evangelization (21—22). Her
focus on the colonizer’s strategies of domination through the colonization of
language leads her to conclusions which are substantiated by meticulous analy-
sis of well-known texts and legal documents. Yet, something equally important
is left unsaid, namely, that while the indigenous peoples were often required
by colonizer to “cease being themselves” (29), they were by no means passive
subjects void of resistivity.
The discussion in these pages on language colonization demonstrates the
extent to which Spanish is viewed both as a common language between people
of various ethnic and cultural background in both Spain and Latin America
and as an obstruction to greater autonomy and presence for “other” indige-
nous languages and cultures. This very point is made by several contributors,
among them Ignacio Sanchez-Prado who in his essay, ““ The Pre-Columbian
Past as a Project: Miguel Leon Portilla and Hispanism,” analyzes the “Hispan-
ist and nationalist foundations of nahuatl literary studies” in the work of the
well-known Mexican historian which focused on the recovery of Bernardino
de Sahagutin’s methodology, on the appropriation of Las Casas’ advocacy of in-
digenous causes, and on the role of Spanish as lingua franca, as a unifying force
among different ethnic groups (53). Sanchez-Prado is careful to point out that in
a later defense of the Spanish language in Pueblos originarios y globalizacién
(México: El Colegio nacional, 1997, 57) Leén Portilla distances himself from
“the exaltation of the linguistic and cultural mestizaje he endorsed in 1962”
(53) while continuing to argue that the use of Spanish as a common language
between cultures does not negate their cultural specificity (53). Sanchez Prado’s
point seems to be that, despite Leén Portilla’s reassessment, there remains a
basic problem: since Spanish is the only language of political interaction in
 AFTERWORD 313

present-day Mexico, bilingualism can be viewed as an obstruction to cultural

independence. From the postcolonial perspective which SAnchez-Prado seems
to favor (in line with well-known debates on national identity among intellec-
tuals such as Bonfill Batalla, Florescano, and Villoro) this sort of nationalist
appropriation of pre-Columbian history and cultures in the Mexican national
narration is seen as being tantamount to epistemological violence, while others
(Leon Portilla among them) could well find this assessment somewhat reduc-
tionistic.
The privileging of Spanish at the expense of other indigenous languages
and cultures is also criticized by Joan Ramon Resina (“Whose Hispanism?
Cultural Trauma, Disciplined Memory, and Symbolic dominance”) for whom
Hispanism implies nothing less than the voiding of various traces of cultural
and historical memory. Cognizant of the differences between the market-driven
Hispanism of the United States and the so-called state Hispanism of Spain,
Resina questions the privileged place accorded to Spanish on both sides of the
Atlantic at the expense of a recognition of difference in the multicultural and
multilingual realities of Spain and Latin America (183). His diagnosis of the
problem is both cogent and difficult to refute on the theoretical level. Yet, a
solution to the conundrum is elusive, especially within the U.S. context. How
does one generate demand for those “other” living languages of Spain and Latin
America within the undergraduate curriculum of a U.S. university? It is well
known that Spanish has become the second language of the United States with
extraordinary appeal for a large majority of students who fulfill second lan-
guage requirements and see it as a vehicle for enhancing future employment. It
is also irrefutable that Spanish is the most popular “foreign” language in U.S.
high schools and that demand for Spanish is continuing to grow at a vertigi-
nous pace. For these very reasons, it seems clear that university administrators
respond to the marketplace and little can be done in practice about this real-
ity. This, of course, does not negate Resina’s arguments but does point to the
difficulties of translating a democratic debate—one that might have resonance
within the specific historical and current political contexts of Spain and certain
Latin American countries—into practice within the more complex and largely
market-driven environment of the U.S. university in which Spanish is viewed
by administrators as “cash cow.”
Resina and others also remind us, correctly, that Hispanism is bound up
with cultural nationalism, with all of its negative implications. Thus, Sebastiaan
Faber (“‘La hora ha llegado’: Hispanism, Pan-Americanism, and the Hope of
Spanish/American Glory [1938—1948]) questions the usefulness of the concept
and argues that despite its transnational ambitions, Hispanism does not reflect
314. NICHOLAS SPADACCINI

the concerns and struggles of different social classes, ethnic groups, and com-
munities across Spain and Spanish America (89). His conclusions are based
on the use of unitary concepts as well as ideological slips in three key journals
published in Mexico City between 1938 and 1940: the Revista Iberoamericana,
Romance, and Espafia Peregrina. Faber finds it ironic that the Revista should
embrace a “pan-nationalist connection to the United States, with... invocation
of cultural uniqueness, shared destiny, and future glory” (74), even while assert-
ing Latin-American literature’s independence from Spain’s “universal mission”
and, therefore, distinct from Peninsular literature (73); or that Espafia peregrina
should postulate that America was the redeemer of mankind and repository of
Western civilization while proclaiming that such a phase was inaugurated by
“the sacrifice of the Spanish people” (81); finally, a similar slippage is detected
in the journal Romance and its proposal of “a unitary concept of Hispanic cul-
ture... covering the whole of the Spanish-speaking world, with Pan-Hispanic
folk tradition as its strongest bond” (83). Farber’s conclusion seems to be that,
even with the best of intentions, the concept called Hispanism is likely to be
misused and is, therefore, unredeemable.
Another essay that touches on the problem of using unitary concepts within
multicultural and multigual contexts, is Thomas Harrington’s “Rapping on the
Cast(i)le Gates: Nationalism and Culture Planning in Contemporary Spain,”
which argues that the castilianist model of culture planning articulated by Ne-
brija toward the end of the Fifteenth century was virtually unchallenged for
nearly four hundred years—until the Sexenio Revolucionario (1868-1874) and
the establishment of the First Republic when the castilianist discourse was tem-
porarily disrupted (117) only to regain momentum with Canovas (Discurso so-
bre la nacion, 1882) and the philological work of Menéndez y Pelayo “whose
cultural project and that of his political correlate, Canovas, might be compared
with those of the Sixteenth-century Jesuits and the twentieth-century members
of Opus Dei” (119). Harrington traces the efforts at culture planning by various
nationalist movements since the end of the Nineteenth century, pointing as well
to the inevitable counterattacks by castilianist politicians and intellectuals. His
essay ends with a rhetorical statement that has the flavor of exortation: “Would
it not be easier for everyone involved if the Neo-Castilianists of today would
simply admit, and base any and all negotiations over the future of Spain’s civil
society, on the unassailable fact that today’s Spain contains not just three, but
four major, historically-defined movements of national identity?” (134)—Cas-
tilian, Basque, Catalan and Galician. Harrington, a Hispanist writing from the
United States, presumably with no identity ties with any of movements in ques-
tion, ventures such a statement after having outlined the practice of castilianist
 AFTERWORD 35

culture planning from Nebrija to Aznar. At the same time the essay recognizes,
implicitly, that in today’s Spain culture planning is not the exclusive province of
castilianists and that the various nationalities have varying degrees of autonomy
in the cultural and political spheres.
Several other essays in this volume address questions related to specific
discussions within the field of Hispanism and, in some cases, propose certain
correctives. Thus, referring specifically to the so-called Siglos de Oro or Re-
naissance and Baroque periods, Anthony Cascardi (“Beyond Castro and Mara-
vall: Interpellation, Mimesis, and the Hegemony of Spanish Culture”) calls for
a Hispanism that goes beyond the existential historicism of Américo Castro and
José Antonio Maravall’s emphasis on ideas and institutions to focus on sub-
jectivity on the concrete level. Cascardi seeks to remedy this situation through
the use of Althusser’s notion of ideology and interpellation to see how subjects
were “fashioned through their interactions with various cultural institutions and
‘Ideological State Apparatuses’” (149). Yet, Cascardi also recognizes the co-
nundrum posed by the culture that emerges under Spanish Absolutism which
is “less than a perfect mirror of state ideologies” (149) and argues that subject
formation was rooted in a “process of cultural (re)production that involved in
the fracturing of mirrored images’” (150), using concepts from Lacan, Brau-
drillard, and Fuentes.
In the particular case of Maravall, it is important to recall that he is a his-
torian of social mentalities and political institutions and that he speaks of a
“transpersonal subjectivity” linked to a kind of “protonational political evolu-
tion” (Estado moderno 33; 490). The modern state with its centralized, abso-
lutist political system is dependent upon interpersonal bonds—what William
Egginton has recently called “theatrical identification,” an active ingredient “of
the modes of subjectification analyzed by critics from Althusser to Foucault to
Butler” (141). Eggington also makes the case that the notion of a transpersonal
collectivity can exist only in a “world” “whose spatiality is theatrical” and finds
a sociological correlate: Jurgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere (144).
The point is that if—as Maravall argues—in the urban society of the Seven-
teenth century, the “mass-oriented” nature of society led to a pervasive ano-
nymity, in which “bonds of neighborhood, friendship and kinship” are seriously
diminished (Culture of the Baroque 14), these bonds are gradually superseded
by an arena in which the “transpersonal collectivity” is played out in practical,
everyday ways. In Maravall’s case, it must be said that despite his basic em-
phasis on ideas and institutions and, therefore, on the excercise of power from
above rather than a focus on subjectivity on a more concrete level, his writings
also make clear that one cannot understand the complexities of Baroque cul-
316 NICHOLAS SPADACCINI

ture without taking into account the discrepant voices that are raised against
its conservative programs. This position is made clear in several of his major
books—La oposicién politica bajo los Austrias, La literatura picaresca desde
la historia social and even La cultura del Barroco, in which he explicitly says
that there are “instances, even frequent ones, of repulsion against what is pro-
posed. The background of conflict and of opposition in the Seventeenth century
is there for all to see, and without taking it into account—one must also insist
on this point—nothing can be understood” (198, my translation).
This does not negate the importance of Cascardi’s suggestion but merely
points out that Maravall’s interpretation of the baroque as a “guided,” “conser-
vative,” “urban,” and “‘mass-oriented” culture which saw the dominant segments
of society and their surrogates use persuasion and socio-political propaganda
in their drive to preserve their privileges, seems to be especially compelling
when one examines certain mass-oriented cultural artifacts (the comedia, the
auto sacramental, etc.) within the more immediate context of their production/
reception in the 1600s (see Spadaccini and Martin-Estudillo; and Castillo and
Spadaccini).
Another essay which focuses on a somewhat specific issue is Sylvia Mol-
loy’s “Latin America in the U.S. Imaginary: Postcolonialism, Translation, and
Magic Realist Imperative,” which calls into question how Latin America is con-
structed in the U.S. academy, especially within the postcolonial framework.
Molloy’s main contention is that Spanish is dismissed in the U.S. academy as a
language of intellectual exchange, claiming that well- known critics from Latin
America are generally not brought into the larger debate on postcolonialism
while other Latin-Americanists working at U.S. universities are, with some ex-
ceptions, usually absent from the larger debates (195). To underscore her point
Molloy discusses the reception of magic realism as a univocal representational
strategy and questions the lack of recognition of multiple aesthetic practices
and strategies as well as theoretical and critical agency within Latin-American
cultural production (198).The major point of this essay is compelling. Yet, as
one reflects on how Latin America is constructed in the U.S. academy, one also
senses the tensions and differences that exist between some U.S. based Latin-
Americanists and those writing from Latin America as Emil Volek has recently
pointed out in his introduction to his edited volume Latin America Writes Back.
Postmodernity in the Periphery (xvii-xx) where he speaks of academies “on
different tracks”: “There may be a lot of apparent interaction, even mimicry,
between the two, and, as always, a good number of Latin American intellectuals
of the first order work full- or part-time in the U.S. But this only covers up the
fact that the two academies are on different tracks. Those Latin Americans who
 AFTERWORD Si

are not mimicking current fashion in the North seem oddly out of place here,
are ostracized or find themselves in the category of provincial ‘subalterns’ who
really don’t and cannot speak for themselves, and need the right interpreters”
(xvii). While this particular take may well be controversial, some of the specific
issues raised by Volek cannot be easily dismissed such as, for example, his ob-
servation regarding cultural studies in the U.S. and Latin America respectively;
the former tied to the Humanities and much of it focused on identity politics;
the latter oriented toward the Social Sciences and influenced by the Birming-
ham School (xviii; see also Larrain). These examples show the complexity of
discussing concepts such as Latin Americanism or Hispanism even if one takes
into account the particular Joci of enunciation.
The status of Latin Americanism within the U.S. is also dealt with in Idel-
ber Avelar’s “Xenophobia and Diasporic Latin Americanism: Mapping An-
tagonisms around ‘the Foreign’” in which he specifically addresses problems
encountered by colleagues who write in Spanish rather than English and goes
on to review the general status of Latin Americanism within the category of the
“foreign” both within and outside the American (U.S.) academy. For this critic,
Latin Americanism occupies an “in-between” space (using Silvano Santiago’s
concept) which in post-September 11 is said to be affected by the war on ter-
rorism and the erosion of civil liberties. Avelar goes on to caution us to beware
of a politics of exclusion at U.S. universities and to keep an eye on academic
practices which might be complicit with racism and xenophobia. Such practices
are often masked by the language and rhetoric of “standards” and by the lack of
interest in other methods of evaluation (280).One could argue, of course, that
the American (U.S.) academy is not a monolith and that the kinds of difficul-
ties encountered by people writing in a language other than English in tenure
decisions vary considerably from one university to another. One might also cite
the cases of the many exiliados or expatriates from Spain and more recently
Latin America who have had—and continue to have—extraordinary careers at
U.S. universities. Yet, Avelar’s cautionary notes cannot be easily dismissed. The
examples he cites are compelling and are often replicated in subtle ways. In a
recent search at a major research institution (“de cuyo nombre no quiero acor-
darme”) a truly splendid candidate, a non-U.S. citizen from a Spanish-speaking
country, was eliminated from the competition after a campus visit because his
English was not deemed to be not sufficiently “native,” despite the fact that the
language of instruction in that particular department is Spanish and that the
person in question is conversant in four languages, has published five books,
and came highly recommended from specialists both from within and outside
of the U.S. university system. By those standards, few, if any, of the outstand-
318 NICHOLAS SPADACCINI

ing intellectuals from Spain and Latin America who have shaped generations of
graduate students in the U.S. would have survived this particular competition.
Avelar seems to have a point: in post-September 11 (and within the realities of
identity politics), beware of the “foreign” among us.
Roman de la Campa’s essay, “Hispanism and the American academy in the
Postnational Era” offers a broad reflection on the disciplinary changes that have
taken place within Hispanism, Latin Americanism and Latino Studies during
the last several decades and argues one can no longer think in terms of organic
principles. He points to large-scale immigration from Latin America to the U.S.
and Europe, as well as to the large Hispanic enclaves in urban U.S. cities, and
the affirmation of multiple nationalities in Spain in order to call for a postna-
tional understanding of Hispanism/Latin Americanism. De la Campa also calls
for new theoretical approaches to the production/consumption of knowledge
toward an exploration of “the growing nexus of cultural markets and the arts”
(311). While it is difficult to argue with De la Campa’s call for renewal, one
wonders to what extent Hispanism and Latin Americanism are thought about
today in terms of the organic principles that defined them in the past, prior
to poststructuralism and postcolonial studies and prior to the extraordinary
changes alluded to by De la Campa in terms of large scale migrations, global-
ization, and the “post national” condition.
Alberto Moreiras’s essay (“Mules and Snakes: On the Neo-Baroque Prin-
ciple of De-localization’”), also speaks indirectly to some of these issues, as it
points to the shifts in university discourse and the challenge to the notion of a
general epistemology by poststructuralism and postcolonial studies. His essay
reflects upon the understanding of the Baroque as a “field of identitarian ex-
pression concerning the peculiar Hispanic experience of modernity” (207) and
engages in dialogue with the respective interpretations of Roberto Gonzalez
Echevarria and John Beverley. He takes issue with the former for positing the
Baroque “as a mark of continental identity” and locating it “metonymically in
the so-called Boom of the Latin-American novel” (212), while, in fact, not going
beyond the Colonial Baroque or “its status as regional ideology at the service of
the constitution of the local as a differential/mimetic/identitarian apparatus of
social capture” (212). Moreiras also questions Beverley’s view of literature as
superstructure and as a mechanism of control by the dominant classes (215) and
defines him “a critic of transculturation in the name of subaltern identity.” In
the end, Moreiras distances himself from the so-called regionalist, identitarian
paradigms, to embrace the concept of the Neobaroque, which implies an “inter-
ruption of the principle of regionalization” and a kind of passage or “pilgrim-
age toward the outside” (210). The Neobaroque is mobilized in the name of a
 AFTERWORD 319

“freedom of thought” (218): thought marked by interruption in the line with the
foundational work of Severo Sarduy, Lezama Lima, and others (pry
Moreiras’s own critical practice as exemplified in one of his books (The Ex-
haustion of Difference. The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies, Duke,
1991) is scrutinized by Brad Epps in his essay “Keeping Things Opaque: On the
Reluctant Personalism of a Certain Mode of Critique” in which he explores the
question of locality—the institutional, political, and rhetorical site of enuncia-
tion of critical discourse. Of particular interest in this discussion is the American
(U.S.) university as a privileged place for academic exchange. Epps’s critique
of de-localization seems to aim precisely at what Moreiras in this volume calls
Neobaroque thinking—a “pilgrimage toward the outside” which, in line with
Epps’ arguments, could also be circumscribed by institutional considerations.
Finally, in an largely upbeat essay (despite its title) “Hispanism in an Im-
perfect past and an Uncertain Present,’ Nicolas Shumway reflects on the state
of Hispanic Studies in the United States and sees Hispanism as an arcane idea
which fails to accommodate new trends in Spanish-language literature within
the context of globalization. Among the examples he cites in this respect are
those of a young generation of expatriate writers, partly educated in the United
States, who are represented in recently-published anthologies (McOndo and
Se habla espanol) and who, to a great extent, are in dialogue with their ad-
opted country without shedding the identity of the countries and continent of
provenance. Shumway also asks what one does with Latino literature, much of
which is written in English, if old assumptions and paradigms about our field
are retained.
If Shumway and others are correct that Hispanism is an arcane idea, the
same problem surfaces in conjunction with the appellation Hispanic which, in
the U.S., is widely used and politically charged. On the one hand, it is rejected
in certain quarters because of its ethnocentric European connotation; on the
other hand, it continues to be used by the federal government for administrative/
demographic purposes (Giménez Mico). This appellation encompasses people
who in the recent census identified themselves as either “White,” “Black,” or
“some other race,” with the former having the highest income, followed by
those in the category of “some other race” and “Black” respectively, despite the
fact that the latter indicated the highest level of education (“How Race Counts
for Hispanic Americans,’ Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and
Regional Research at SUNY, Albany; cited by Fears). What does it mean to be
a Hispanist or a Latin Americanist in the U.S. academy which, despite the ad-
vances of interdisciplinary studies, is still largely organized around traditional
disciplines, both in the Humanities and the Social Sciences? What does it mean
320 NICHOLAS SPADACCINI

to be called Hispanic given the complexity of the phenomenon of migration

from so many different places, with their own multicultural and multilingual
realities? What is it that we do as academics, in our teaching and research, to
address these complexities?
The debates undertaken in this volume point to a profession in flux and to
an extraordinary range of reflection about concepts (Hispanism/Latin-Ameri-
canism ) which may no longer be as relevant as they once were. In the world
of the “Post-” what do we do with Hispanism and Latin-Americanism? Most
of the essays in this volume engage these questions and provide suggestions on
how rethink our disciplines.

Works Cited

Castillo, David and Nicholas Spadaccini. “Cervantes y la comedia nueva: lectura y espec-
taculo.” Theatralia 5 (2003). 153-63.
Egginton, William. How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and the Ques-
tion of Modernity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003.
Fears, Darryl. “Race Divides Hispanics, Report Says.” Washington Post, July 14, 2003,
Page AO3.
Giménez Mico, José Antonio. “Caliban in Aztlan: from the Emergence of Chicano Dis-
course to the Plural Constitution of New Solidarities.” In National Identities and So-
ciopolitical Changes in Latin America. Ed. Mercedes F. Duran-Cogan and Antonio
Gomez Moriana. New York and London: Routledge, 2001. 320-51. (Hispanic Issues,
vol. 23).
Larrain, Jorge. Identity and Modernity in Latin America. London: Blackwell Publishers,
2000.
Maravall, José Antonio. Estado moderno y mentalidad social. 2 vols. Madrid: Revista de
Occidente, 1972.
. La cultura del barroco. Andlisis de una estructura histérica. Barcelona: Ariel,
1975. English ed., Culture of the Baroque, trans. Terry Cochran. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1986.
. La literatura picaresca desde la historia social. Madrid: Taurus: 1986.
. La oposicion politica bajo los austrias. Barcelona: Ediciones Ariel, 1974.
Santiago, Silvano. Latin American Literature: The Space in Between. Trans. Stephen
Moscov. Buffalo, N.Y.: Council on International Studies, State University of New
York at Buffalo, 1973.
Spadaccini, Nicholas and Luis Martin-Estudillo. Libertad y limites: el barroco hispanico.
Madrid: Ediciones del Orto, 2004.
Volek, Emil. “Introduction.” Latin America Writes Back. Postmodernity in the Periphery.
New York: Routledge, 2002. xi-xxviii. (Hispanic Issues, vol. 28).
 e Contributors

Idelber Avelar is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature at Tulane

University. He is the author of The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin
American Fiction and the Task of Mourning, which was revised and extended
for a Spanish version entitled Alegorias de la derrota: la ficci6n postdictatorial
y el trabajo del duelo. He has published articles on topics such as dictatorship,
transculturation, and torture. He is currently working on a book on the geneal-
ogy of Latin Americanism.

Roman de la Campa is Professor of Latin American Literature and Compara-

tive Literature at Stony Brook University, of the State of New York, where he
also holds the position of Chair of the Hispanic Languages and Literature De-
partment. He has published numerous books and essays in the United States,
Latin America, and Europe. His most recent books are América Latina y sus
comunidades discursivas: cultura y literatura en la era global (1999), Latin
Americanism (1999), and Cuba On My Mind: Journeys to a Severed Nation
(2000). His next book, Latin, Latino, American: Split States and Global Imagi-
naries, will be published by Verso. He was born in Havana and now resides in
New York.
322 CONTRIBUTORS

Anthony J. Cascardi is the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Pro-

fessor in the Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature, Spanish, and
Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of, amongst
others, Consequences of Enlightenment: Aesthetics as Critique, Ideologies of
History in the Spanish Golden Age and The Subject of Modernity, as well as of
over fifty articles on Spanish literature. He has also been recipient of numer-
ous awards, such as the Andrew Mellon Foundation Publication Award for The
Bounds of Reason.

Brad Epps is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Women’s

Studies at Harvard University. He has published over fifty articles on modern
literature, film, and art from Spain, Latin America, Catalonia, and France and is
the author of Significant Violence: Oppression and Resistance in the Narratives
of Juan Goytisolo. He is currently editing two collections of essays, one with
Luis Fernandez Cifuentes, titled Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary His-
tory, and National Identity and another with Keja Valens, titled Passing Lines:
Immigration and (Homo)sexuality. He is also working on two books-length
projects: Daring to Write, on gay and lesbian issues in Latin America, Spain,
and Latino cultures in the United States, and Barcelona and Beyond, on the
modernization of Barcelona from the Renaixenga to the present.

Sebastiaan Faber is Assistant professor of Hispanic Studies at Oberlin Col-

lege. His interests are Nineteenth and Twentieth-century Spanish and Latin
American literature, Pan-Hispanism, Pan-Americanism, and Spanish Civil War
exile. He is the author of Exile and Cultural Hegemony: Spanish Intellectuals
in Mexico, 1939-1975 (2002) and has published in Hispania, Journal of Latin
American Cultural Studies, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Bulletin of
Spanish Studies, and Revista de Estudios Hispdnicos, among other journals. He
is currently writing two books; one on the impact of the Spanish Civil War on
Hispanism in the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands; and one on the
representation of Hispanic/Latino identity since 1810.

Lydia Fossa is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University

of Arizona. Recently, she has finished the manuscript entitled Narrativas pro-
blematicas: los Inkas bajo la pluma espafola to be published by the Instituto
de Estudios Peruanos in Lima, Pert. She is also preparing the electronic ver-
sion of the third part of “Glosas Croniquenses: Glosarios tempranos Quechua-
Castellano.” She has recently published the following articles: “Autorestem-
 CONTRIBUTORS 323

pranos, interpretes e informantes: primeras interacciones para describir a los

andinos,” and “L’interlocution dans la culture andine.”

Thomas Harrington is Associate Professor of contemporary Iberian Culture

at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. The prime focus of his research in
recent years has been on the dynamics of “cultural commerce” (the strategically
inspired transfer of cultural goods from one national cultural system to another)
in early twentieth century Spain and Portugal. He has also published studies
on the history and function of Hispanism in North America, Galician thought,
Catalan cinema and ideas, the development of Spanish Cultural Studies, the
journalistic enterprises of José Ortega y Gasset, and the Spanish emigrant/exile
communities of Cuba.

Sylvia Molloy is Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities, Spanish and

Portuguese Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at New York
University. Amongst her books are Signs of Borges and At Face Value: Auto-
biographical writing in Latin America. She has also written extensively on
Modernismo, feminist, gender and queer theory and questions of Comparative
Literature and Cultural Studies.

Mabel Morana is Professor at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of

Publications of the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. She
is the author of Literatura y cultura nacional en Hispanoamérica, 1910-1940
(1982), Memorias de la generaci6n fantasma (1988), Politicas de la escritura
en América Latina. De la Colonia a la Modernidad (1997) and Viaje al silen-
cio. Exploraciones del discurso barroco (1998). She has edited Relecturas del
Barroco de Indias (1994) and co-edited La imaginaciéon historica en el siglo
XIX (1994). She has coordinated special volumes on colonial literature for the
Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana and the Revista Iberoamericana.
In recent years, she has coordinated multiple volumes on indigenism, Latin
American cultural criticism, modernity, and postcolonialism.

Alberto Moreiras is Anne and Robert Bass Professor of Romance Studies and
Literature and Director of the Center for European Studies at Duke University.
He has published Interpretacion y diferencia, Tercer espacio: Duelo y litera-
tura en America Latina, The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin
American Cultural Studies, and has coedited with Nelly Richard Pensar en/la
postdictadura. He is a coeditor of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies.
324 CONTRIBUTORS

Joan Ramon Resina is Professor of Romance Studies and Comparative Litera-

ture at Cornell University. He is the author of La btisqueda del Grial (1988); Un
suefo de piedra: Ensayos sobre la literatura del modernismo europeo (1990);
Los usos del cldsico (1991); El cadaver en la cocina. La novela policiaca en la
cultura del desencanto (1997). He has edited five volumes: Myhtopoesis: Li-
teratura, totalidad, ideologia (1992), El aeroplano y la estrella: el movimiento
vanguardista en los Paises Catalanes (1904-1936) (1997), Disremembering
the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory since the Spanish Transition to De-
mocracy (2000), Iberian Cities (2001), and After-Images of the City (2003). He
has published nearly one hundred essays in professional journals and in collec-
tive volumes.

Ignacio M. Sanchez-Prado is currently a doctoral candidate in Hispanic Lan-

guages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of El
canon y sus formas: la reinvencion de Harold Bloom y sus lecturas hispano-
americanas (2002) and editor of América Latina: Nuevas perspectivas desde
los estudios literarios y culturales and, with Adela Pineda Franco, Alfonso
Reyes y los estudios latinoamericanos.

Nicolas Shumway is Tomas Rivera Regents Professor of Spanish American Lit-

erature at the University of Texas at Austin, where, since 1995, he has also been
the director of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. He
has published widely on Latin American literature and intellectual history, with
particular emphasis on Argentina. His book, The Invention of Argentina, won
international recognition and was selected by The New York Times as one of the
notable books of the year. In 1994, Emecé Editores published a Spanish transla-
tion of the book in Argentina and a revised edition in 2002. He is currently com-
pleting a book on thought and literature of the early national period in several
American countries, including Argentina, Mexico, and the United States.

Nicholas Spadaccini is Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the

University of Minnesota. He has published numerous books, editions, and col-
lective volumes, with an emphasis on early modern Spain and Latin America.
His most recent study (co-authored) is Libertad y limites. El barroco hispdnico
(2004) and he is currently completing a book on Cervantes and the culture of
crisis of Baroque Spain. He is editor in chief of the Hispanic Issues series.
@ Index

Compiled by Gerardo Garza

Abreu Gomez, Ermilo, 49; Canek, 49 Basque Country, 109

Academias de la Lengua, 131 Baudrillard, Jean, 147; Le Miroir de
Accion Espanola, 166 la production, 147
Achugar, Hugo, 231, 234, 243, 244, BeckeraGarlmeen lis
BSD, 257 Berceo, Gonzalo de, 130
Ahmad, Aijaz, 192, 193 Berenguer, Damaso, 124
Allende, Isabel, 195 Bergamin, José, 79
Almirall, Valenti, 116-18 Berger, Mark T., 78, 79
Altamira, Rafael, 121 Berlanga, Tomas de, 15, 16
Althusser, Louis, 144, 147-53, 203 Bersani, Leo, 257
Alvar, Manuel, 167 Beverly, John, xv, 193, 203, 204,
americanismo, 67 206, 208, 209, 211, 212-15, 223,
Anderson, Perry, 192 233, 318; Against Literature, 211
Anderson-Imbert, Enrique, 294 Biblioteca de Catalunya (La), 120
Arana, Sabino, 118, 119, 122 Bierhorst, John, 44—46, 52
Aranzadi, Engracio, 122, 124 bilingualism, 197
Arguedas, José Maria, 66 Bioy Casares, Adolfo, 195, 196
Asturias, Miguel A., 196 Blanchot, Maurice, 212
“Ateneo de la Juventud,” 41 Bloom, Harold, 305
Avelar, Idelber, xvii, xviii, 317, 318 Boas, Franz, 25
Azania government, 125 Bolivar, Sim6n, xii, 287, 288; “Letter
Azcarate, Gumersindo de, 121 to a Jamaican Gentleman,” 287,
Aznar, José M., 109, 110, 129-31, 288
BS Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo, 53, 247
Aztecs, 147 Boom, 210, 211, 248
Azurmendi, Mikel, 131 Borges, Jorge Luis, 190, 194-96,
296, 308-309
Badiou, Alain, 203 Bourdieu, Pierre, 171, 176, 178, 180,
Baroja, Pio, 286 233, 238, 239, 242, 247
Barthes, Roland, 250 Bové, Paul, 246, 249
326 INDEX

Brafias, Alfredo, 119, 123; El Celestina, 214

Regionalismo, 119 Centro de Estudios Histéricos, 121
Brenes Mesén, Roberto, 72, 76 Cerr6n-Palomino, Rodolfo, 27
Brennan, Timothy, 196 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 141,
Burga, Manuel, 247, 258, 259 151, 152,155; 1645-=E) iceloso
Burke, Peter, 175 Extremefio,” 155; “Knight of the
Burkhart, Louise M., 45, 46, 52; The Mirrors,” 147; Novelas ejemplares,
Slippery Earth, 45 152
Butler, Judith, 270 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 247, 254, 255,
Byrd Simpson, Lesley, 291 274
Chomsky, Noam, 233
caciques, 6 CIAA. See Office of the Coordinator
Camb6, Francesc, 120, 127, 129 of Inter-American Affairs
Campos, Haroldo do, 223 CIAP. See Compania Ibero-
CAénovas del Castillo, 116, 117, 126, Americana de Publicaciones
129) 1801325314 Discurso Cid (El), 122
sobre la nacion, 116 Cieza, Pedro de, 14; Primera Parte,
Cantares mexicanos, 44 23
Capitulacion, 15 Civil War, 127
Carballo Calero, 128 Clasicos Castellanos, 122
Cardenas, Lazaro, 79 Cédice Florentino, 42
Carpentier, Alejo, 190, 194-96, 294; Cédices, 48
The Kingdom of this World, 190 Colegio de México (El), 79
Carr, Raymond (Sir), 64, 87, 89 Col6n, Diego, 4, 8
cartillas, 21, 22 Colonial Quechua, 23
Casa de Espafia (La), 79, 80 Columbus, Christopher, 4
Cascardi, Anthony, xiv, 315, 316 Compania Ibero-Americana de
Cassou, Jean, 190 Publicaciones (CIAP), 86
Castaneda, Paulino, 6 Conde, Alfredo, 131
Castaneda-Delgado, 25 Congrés Internacional de la Llengua
caste, 140, 141 Catalana, 120
Castelao, Alfonso, 127 Constitution of, 1978, 107-09
Castro, Américo, xiv, 77, 139, 141, Constitution of Cadiz, 114, 115
142, 144, 146-48, 150, 151, 153, Convergéncia i Unié (CiU), 109, 129
ISO, TAM, WSIS WAS, Shik Cornejo Polar, Antonio, xx, 242, 252
Catalonia, 109, 118 Cosié Villegas, Daniel, 79
Caudet, Francisco, 86 Cramner, Thomas, 289; Book of
CEDA (Confederacion Espafiola de Common Prayer, 289
Derechas Auténomas), 126 creole archive, xi
Cela, Camilo J., 297 criollo, 49, 154-56, 191, 206, 209,
214
 INDEX 327

Crist Catalunya, 128 encomenderos, 5, 15, 17, 18

Crowe JohneAe, 72 Englekirk, John E., 72, 73
Cuadernos Americanos, 80 Epic of Latin America (The), 72
culture industries, 306, 307 Epps, Brad, xv, xvi, 319
Espana, 121
> Ors, Eugent, 120) 122/129 Espana invertebrada, 123
Dalton, Roque, 48 Espanya Gran (I), 122
Dario, Rubén, 190 Espana Peregrina, xiii, 64, 68, 69,
De Certeau, Michel, 26 79-84, 86-88, 314
De la Campa, Roman, xviii, 318 Espinosa Medrano, Juan de, 206,
De la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés, 154 208, 209; Apologético, 206, 209
De las Casas, Bartolomé, 12, 41, 46, Estat Catala, 124
47, 49, 54, 287, 288, 290; Estudis Universitaris Catalans, 120
Brevisima historia de la BIA t25si5
destruccion de las Indias, 290 Euzkadi, 127
Del Valle, José, 163 Even-Zohar, Itamar, 110, 111
deconstruction, 304-307
denial IGy i 7 Faber, Sebastiaan, xi1i, 313, 314
Derrida, Jacques, 304; Specters of Fabian, Johannes, 196
Marx, 304 Fabra, Pompeu, 120
Dia de la Hispanidad, 166 Fanon, Franz, 140
Dia de la Raza, 164, 165, 168 fascism, 62
diari catala (El), 116 First Republic, 115, 116
Diez-Canedo, Enrique, 77 Fossa, Lydia, x1, 312
diezmos, 11, 29 Fouchet, Max-Pol, 190
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 144 Fox, E. Inman, 121
discursive genre (essay, paper), 277, Franco, Francisco, 127, 138, 139
278 Francoism, 67, 82, 126, 163, 168-70,
doctrineros, 17, 21, 25; doctrinero ST
priest, 20 Fuentes, Carlos, 147, 197
Dominicans, 19-21 funcionarios, 178, 179
Don Quixote, xiv, 139, 141, 151, 153, Fundacion San Millan de la Cogolla,
156 IIPALl
Duverger, Christian, 19 Fundamentalism, 273
Furmas, J. C., 274
Ebacher, 45 Future of Scholarly Publishing, MLA
“Edicién y Distribucion Ibero- Committee on, 276
Americana de Publicaciones”
(EDIAPSA), 85, 86 Gabriel-Stheeman, Luis, 163
Egginton, William, 315 Gaceta Literaria (La), 83, 86
328 INDEX

Galeguismo, 119, 131 Guardia Civil, 115

Galeuzca, 125 Guevara, Antonio de, 151;
Galicia, 109 Menosprecio de corte y alabanza
Galvez, Manuel, 293, 296; El solar de aldea, 151
de la raza, 293 Guha, Ranajit, 212, 247
Garcia Canclini, Néstor, 192, 193, Guillory, John, 279
302 Giiney, Yilmiz, 192; Yol, 192
Garcia Lorca, Federico, 73
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, 192, 196, Habermas, Jiirgen, 107, 109, 110
197; One Hundred Years of Hall? Stuart, 255
Solitude, 192 Handke, Peter, 201, 202, 210, 211;
Garcia Oropeza, Guillermo, 51 On a Dark Night I Left My Silent
Garcia-Prada, Carlos, 72 House, 201
Garcilaso, 139 Hanke, Lewis, 291
Garibay, Angel Maria, 41, 44, 50, 51 Hardt, Michael, 304; Empire, 304
Gaylord, Mary, 153 Harrington, Thomas, xiv, 314
Generalitat, 125 Health and Education Act, 295
Generation of ’27, 139 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 173
Generation of, 1898, 73, 167, 287 Henriquez Urefia, Pedro, 40, 42, 71,
genocide, 176 294; Literary Currents in Hispanic
German Ideology, The, 171 America, 40
Gil, Rafael, 126 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 114
Gil Robles, José M., 126 hidalguia, 151
Giménez Siles, Rafael, 86 Hirsh, Marianne, 250, 251
Glosas emilianenses, 130 Hispanism, 55, 67-69, 89, 90, 138,
Golden Age, 138-40, 147, 151, 153 139, 141, 143, 144, 146, 147, 153,
Gondar Portasany, Marcial, 131 156, 205, 231, 233-36
Goéngora y Argote, Luis de, 140, 154, hispanismo, 65-68, 70
202, 204; Soledades, 204 hispanista, 65—67
Gongorism, 206, 207, 209 honor plays, 140
Gonzalez, Manuel Pedro, 72, 77, 78 Hora de Espana, 83
Gonzalez Echevarria, Roberto, xv, Human Rights, 46, 47
PASI, DAS, PN, OMS) SHUR Huyssen, Andreas, 305, 307, 308
Celestina’s Brood, 211
Good Neighbor Policy, 63, 68, 78, 79 iberoamericanismo, 70
Goytisolo, Juan, 194, 297 IILI. See “Instituto de Literatura
Gramsci, Antonio, 253—55 Iberoamericana”
Grup Torras i Bages, 128 identity, 206, 210, 235
Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe, 21, HemPaulela a
24
 INDEX 329

Ilustracion Espanola y Americana Klor de Alva, Jorge, 48-50, 191

(La), 163 Kuhn, Thomas, 175
fmaz, Eugenio, 82
Imperial Spain, 147 Lacan, Jacques, 147
indigenas, 41, 47, 49, 53-55 Laclau, Ernesto, 270
indigenismo, 41, 50, 53, 54, 66 Larra, Mariano José de, 288, 295
ING. See Irmandade Nazionalista Larrea, Juan, 79, 81, 83, 84
Galega Lastarria, Vitorino, 288
Instituci6n Libre de Ensenanza, 121 Latin America Writes Back.
Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 120 Postmodernity in the Periphery,
Instituto Cervantes, 163, 234 316
Instituto de Cultura Hispanica, 163, latinidad, 67
168 Lazarillo de Tormes (El), xiv, 148-50
“Instituto Internacional de Literatura Lea, Henry Charles, 291
Iberoamericana” (IILI), 62, 63, Leavitt, Sturgis E., 72
70-75, 77-79, 82, 87, 88 lenguas, 17, 21
Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Fisico- Leén Portilla, Miguel, xi, xii, 40-55,
Naturales, 121 312; Bernardino de Sahagun:
interpreters, 14, 15, 17, 18 Pionero de la antropologia, 44; El
Invincible Armada, 289, 290 destino de la palabra, 44; La
Irmandade Nazionalista Galega filosofia nahuatl, 47; La flecha en
(ING), 124 blanco, 47; Pueblos originarios y
Irmandades de Fala, 124 globalizacion, 47, 53; El reverso
Irving, Washington, 291; “Tales From de la conquista, 47; Vision de los
the Alhambra,” 291 vencidos, 47, 49
Itier, Cesar, 23, 26 Ley de Moyano, 115
Leyes de Burgos, 9
Jameson, Fredric, 233, 254, 255 Lezama Lima, José, 216, 218, 219,
Jiménez, Juan Ramon, 77 223, 225, 294; “Rapsodia para el
Jiménez Rueda, Julio, 72 mulo,” 218
Johansson, Patrick, 50 Lida, Raimundo, 294
Journal of Latin American Cultural Liga, 122
Studies, 244 Liga de Educacion Politica Espanola,
Juaristi, Jon, 131, 162, 174; El bucle 121
melancélico, 131 Literatura del México Antiguo, 42
Julia, Santos, 65 Lloyd, David (ed.), 305; The Politics
Junta de Cultura Espafiola, 79, 80 of Culture in the Shadow of
Junta de Museus de Barcelona, 120 Capital, 305
Junta para Ampliacion de Estudios Loayza, Jerénimo de, 11, 20, 21
(JAE), 121
330 INDEX

Lodares, Juan Ramon, 174; El Mencht, Rigoberta, 211; Me llamo

paraiso poliglota, 174 Rigoberta Menchi, 213
Lousiana Purchase of, 1803, 291 Mendibil, Pablo, 286
Lowe, Lisa (ed.), 305; The Politics of Menéndez Pidal, Ramon, 121-23,
Culture in the Shadow of Capital, 139 p16LAi62) 975
305 Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino, 117,
Lugones, 76 122, £73y 286P28 792925293
Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 175 mestizaje, 41, 50, 52, 53
mestizo, 49, 191, 270
MLA Committee, 276 Mexican War, 292
McOndo, 297 Middle Ages, 139
Macia, Prancesc, 1245 125 5127528 Mignolo, Walter, 45, 46, 193, 235,
Madariaga, Salvador de, 173 Za
Maeztu, Ramiro de, 166, 287, 296; Milhou, Alain, 20
Defensa de la Hispanidad,287 Miro, Joan, 297
magic realism, xv, 190-92, 194-97, mirror stage, 147
316 Modernity, 203
Mallon, Florencia, 253, 254 modernism, 192, 296
Mancomunitat, 122 Molloy, Sylvia, xv, 316
Manifest Destiny, 291 Monguio, Luis, 286
Mapes, Edwin K., 72 Monterde, Francisco, 72
Maravall, José Antonio, xiv, 142—44, Morajfia, Mabel, 221, 245, 248, 249,
146-49, 151, 156, 315, 316; La 252, 2574)
cultura del barroco, 142, 143, Moreiras, Alberto, xv, xvi, 231-37,
316; La literatura picaresca desde 239, 241, 242, 244-51, 254, 255,
la historia social,143, 145, 316; 257-60, 318, 319; The Exhaustion
La oposicion politica bajo los of Difference. The Politics of Latin
Austrias, 316 America, 319; Tercer espacio,
Mare de Déu de Montserrat (La), 128 249-51
Mariscal, George, 74, 153, 161 multiculturalism, 181, 182
Marti, José, 75, 205 multilinguism, 181, 182
Martin Artajo, Alberto, 168 Murguia, Manuel, 119, 123
Martin Barbero, Jesus, 193 Muria, José Mari, 51
Martinez, José Luis, 52 Museu de Belles Arts, 120
Nezahualcoyotl: Vida y obra, 52
Martinez, Gregorio, 23 nacion vasca (La), 122
Marx, Karl, 219-21; Grundrisse, 219, Nacional (El), 86
220 Nacionalitat Catalana (La), 120
Marxism, 147 “Nahuatl Literature,’ 41, 42, 44, 54
Meléndez, Juan, 14 National Defense Education Act, 295
 INDEX sigall

national identity, 110, 114-19-, 122- Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol

2IF129,50132°1389;°306,313 (PSC-PSOE, PSUG)) 129
national literature, 296 Pascoaes, Teixeira de, 122
nationality, 243, 244 Patronatoy AS
Nebrija, Antonio de, 25, 45, 111-15, Peninsulares, 191
117s. 121; 1619144315: Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, 195
Gramatica castellana, 25; Prélogo Pérez Gald6s, Benito, 286, 297
a la Gramatica de la lengua Perlongher, Néstor, 216-18, 223,
castellana, \\1 225; “La murga, los polacos,” 217
Negri, Antonio, 304; Empire, 304 Pi i Margall, Francisco, 116, 119
Neo-Baroque xv, 203, 208, 210, 211, picaresque, 145, 146, 148, 149
PNA Oe 2 23 922 Lee S319 Pike, Fredrick, 67
Nezahualcoyotl, 52 Pineiro, Ramon, 128
Nican mopohua, 54 Piqué, Josep, 107, 109, 131
Ninyoles, Rafael L., 178, 179 Pizarro, Francisco, 11, 15
North Whitehead, Alfred, 178 Popular Front, 63, 82, 126
Noucentisme, 122 Prat de la Riba, Enric, 120, 122, 128,
Nuevas Leyes, 12 129; La Veu de Catalunya, 120;
La Lliga Regionalista, 120
Ocios de Espanoles Emigrados, 286 Prats de Moll6, 124
Office of the Coordinator of Inter- Pratt, Mary Louise, 193
American Affairs (CIAA), 78 Prescott, William H., 290; History of
Olmedo, José Joaquin de, 286; “Ode the Reign of Philip II, King of
to Bolivar” (Canto a Bolivar), 286 Spain, 290
Onis, Federico de, 72, 77 Preston, William, 291, 292
Opus Dei, 117, 127, 314 Primo de Rivera, 123-27, 132
Ordufia, Juan de, 126 Protestant Reformation, 113
Ortega y Gasset, José, 120, 121, 123, Pujol, Jordi, 128, 129
[2a OMeAZ aGyew li Onmlis2935%
El espectador, 123 Quechua, vocabulary, 23; grammar,
Ortiz, Fernando, 195, 223 23
Quevedo y Villegas, Francisco, 138,
Padgen, Anthony, 154 139, 154
pacto de olvido (el), 109 Quijano, Anibal, x
Pais (El), 65
Palau de la Musica Catalana, 120 PACIRMM Biee lel Ole
Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV), Rafael, Vicente, 24
109, 1275128 Rajoy, Mariano, 130
Partido Popular (PP), 107, 109, 110 Rama, Angel, 197, 223
Ramon y Cajal, Santiago, 121
332 INDEX

Ramoneda, Josep, 131 Romance: Revista Popular

Ramos, Samuel, 49; Hispanoamericana, xiii, 64, 68,
Perfil del hombre y la cultura en 69, 82-88, 314
México, 49 Romancero, 122
Raza espafiola, 164, 165 Roosevelt, Theodore, 292
Read, Malcom, 153 Rosaldo, Renato, 234
Real Academia, 66 Ross, Andrew, 272
Real Academia de la Historia, 234 Rudenstine, Neil, 243
Reconquest, 113 Rushdie, Salman, 192; Midnight’s
Redfield, Robert, 274; The Primitive Children, 192
World and its Transformations,
274 Saavedra Fajardo, 147, 155;
Rejano, Juan, 86 Emblemas morales, 147, 155
Renan, Ernest, 51, 117 Sahagtin, Bernardino de (Fray), 41—
Requerimiento, 7, 15 47; Historia general de las cosas
Residencia de Estudiantes, 121 de la Nueva Espana, 42; Quince
Resina, Joan Ramon, xii, xiv, 89, 313 poetas del mundo ndhuatl, 51
Revista de Critica Cultural, 244 Saenz de Heredia, 126
Revista de Filologia Espanola, 121 Salinas, Pedro, 77
Revista Espanola de Ambos Mundos San Gil, Maria, 107, 109, 131
(La), 163 Sanchez-Albornoz, Claudio, 142,
Revista Iberoamericana, xiii, xx, 63, 173; Espana, un enigma histérico,
64, 68, 70, 72-77, 81, 82, 84, 86— 142
88, 314 Sanchez Barbudo, 85
Reyes Catdlicos, 139 Sanchez Bella, Alfredo, 163
Reyes, Alfonso, 40, 42, 71, 79; Sanchez-Prado, Ignacio M., xi, xii,
“Vision de Andhuac,”’ 40 s127813
Rexurdimento, 119 Sanchez Reulet, Anibal, 294
Ribera i Rovira, Ignasi, 122 Santo Tomas, Domingo de, 23-25,
Richard, Nelly, 193, 240 27; Lexicén o vocabulario de la
Rincon, Carlos, xv lengua general del Pert, 23, 25 :
Risco, Vicentem 22123 26; Arte y Gramdatica, 23; El
Robb, Peter, 217, 218 Nebrija indiano, 23
Rockerfeller, Nelson, 78 Santoyo, Martel de, 18
Rod6, José Enrique, 67, 75, 297, 296; Sarduy, Severo, 216, 217, 223
Ariel, 293 Sarlo, Beatriz, 244-46, 249, 251,
Rodriguez, Hleana, 247 252, 255-60
Rojas Mix, Miguel, 70 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 288;
Roggiano, Alfredo, 71, 76 Facundo, 288
Se habla espanol, 297
 INDEX SIRI)

Second Republic, 107, 115, 170, 177 Toledo, Francisco de, 29

Seed, Patricia, 254 Torres-Rioseco, Arturo, 72, 73, 74
Segala, Amos, 44, 52 transculturation, 223, 224
Seminario de Cultura Ndhuatl, 46 Anes, WS SS. I
Seminario de Estudos Galegos, 124 translatability, 193
Séneca, Benjamin, 69 Treaty of Paris of, 1781, 291
Serrano, Carlos, 166 Twain, Mark, 292
Sexenio Revolucionario, 115, 314
Shumway, Nicolas, xii, 319 Ugarte, Manuel, 293
Sigtienza y Gongora, Carlos de, 154— Unamuno, Miguel de, 120, 125, 139,
56; “Theatro de virtudes LO OO MELOdee le OleS
politicas,” 154, 155 UNESCO, 51
sol (El), 123 Unio Catalanista, Les Bases de
Solidaritat Catalana, 120, 124 Manresa (La), 118
Spaniards, The, 141
Spanish Absolutism, 147 Valverde, Vicente de (Fray), 6, 13-18
Spanish American Life, 72 Van Aken, Mark J., 67
Spanish Civil War, 63, 68, 69, 71, 76, Vargas Llosa, Mario, 167, 196
t7, po; £39 Vasconcelos, José, 49, 293
Spanish Falange, 67 Velazquez, Diego Rodriguez de Silva,
Spanish Inquisition, 140 147, 151; Las meninas, 147
Spengler, Oswald, 81 Vélez de Guevara, Luis, 202
Spinoza, Baruch, 203 Vidal-Quadras, Alejo, 131
Spivak, Gayatri, 196 Villanueva, Joaquin, 286
subaltern, 240, 242, 246, 247, 253- Villoro, Luis, 43, 50, 54; Los grandes
56, 258 momentos del indigenismo en
Supervielle, Jules, 196, 197; “Le México, 50
Goyavier authentique,” 197 Vitoria, Francisco de, 12, 18, 19
Vocabulario, 24, 26
Tarradellas, Josep, 128 Volek, Emil, 316, 317
Tenamaztle, Francisco, 47
tenure, 239, 275, 276, 277, 279 Xeneracion Nos, 128
Teoria do nacionalismo galego, 122,
123 Yuidice, George, 193
testimonio, 213
theatrical identification, 315 Zapatistas, 47, 53
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VOLUMES IN THE HISPANIC ISSUES SERIES

Ideologies of Hispanism, edited by Mabel Morafia

The State of Latino Theater in the United States: Hybridity,
Transculturation, and Identity, edited by Luis A. Ramos-Garcia
Latin America Writes Back. Postmodernity in the Periphery (An
Interdisciplinary Perspective), edited by Emil Volek
Women's Narrative and Film in Twentieth-Century Spain: A World of
Difference(s), edited by Ofelia Ferran and Kathleen M. Glenn
Marriage and Sexuality in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, edited
by Eukene Lacarra Lanz
Pablo Neruda and the U.S. Culture Industry, edited by Teresa Longo
Iberian Cities, edited by Joan Ramon Resina
National Identities and Sociopolitical Changes in Latin America,
edited by Mercedes F. Duran-Cogan and Antonio Gémez-Moriana
Latin American Literature and Mass Media, edited by Edmundo Paz-
Soldan and Debra A. Castillo
Charting Memory: Recalling Medieval Spain, edited by Stacy N.
Beckwith
Culture and the State in Spain: 1550-1850, edited by Tom Lewis and
Francisco J. Sanchez
Modernism and its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity
from Spain and Latin America, edited by Anthony L. Geist and José
B. Monleon
A Revisionary History of Portuguese Literature, edited by Miguel
Tamen and Helena C. Buescu
Cervantes and his Postmodern Constituencies, edited by Anne Cruz
and Carroll B. Johnson
Modes of Representation in Spanish Cinema, edited by Jenaro Talens
and Santos Zunzunegui
Framing Latin American Cinema: Contemporary Critical
Perspectives, edited by Ann Marie Stock
Rhetoric and Politics: Baltasar Gracidn and the New World Order,
edited by Nicholas Spadaccini and Jenaro Talens
Bodies and Biases: Sexualities in Hispanic Cultures and Literatures,
edited by David W. Foster and Roberto Reis

358)
 The Picaresque: Tradition and Displacement, edited by Giancarlo
Maiorino
Critical Practices in Post-Franco Spain, edited by Silvia L. Lopez,
Jenaro Talens, and Dario Villanueva
Latin American Identity and Constructions of Difference, edited by
Amaryll Chanady
Amerindian Images and the Legacy of Columbus, edited by René Jara
and Nicholas Spadaccini
The Politics of Editing, edited by Nicholas Spadaccini and Jenaro
Talens
Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain, edited by Anne J.
Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry
Cervantes’s Exemplary Novels and the Adventure of Writing, edited
by Michael Nerlich and Nicholas Spadaccini
Ortega y Gasset and the Question of Modernity, edited by Patrick H.
Dust
1492-1992: Re/Discovering Colonial Writing, edited by René Jara
and Nicholas Spadaccini
The Crisis of Institutionalized Literature in Spain, edited by Wlad
Godzich and Nicholas Spadaccini
Autobiography in Early Modern Spain, edited by Nicholas Spadaccini
and Jenaro Talens
The Institutionalization of Literature in Spain, edited by Wlad
Godzich and Nicholas Spadaccini

336
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HISPANIC STUDIES / LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Contributors
Idelber Avelar Sylvia Molloy
Anthony J. Cascardi Mabel Morana
Roman de la Campa Alberto Moreiras
Brad Epps : Joan Ramon Resina
Sebastiaan Faber Nicholas Shumway
Lydia Fossa Nicholas Spadaccini
Thomas Harrington Ignacio M. Sanchez-Prado

Ideologies of Hispanism
Edited by Mabel Morana

Bringing together contributions from top specialists in Hispanic stud-

ies—both Peninsular and Latin American—this volume explores a variety
of critical issues related to the historical, political, and ideological configu-
ration of the field. Dealing with Hispanism in both Latin America and
the United States, the book’s multidisciplinary essays range from histori-
cal studies of the hegemonic status of Castillian language in Spain and
America to the analysis of otherness and the uses of memory and oblivion
in various nationalist discourses on both sides of the Atlantic.

Mabel Morafia is a professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages

and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh and the director of publi-
cations for Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana.

Vanderbilt University Press

Nashville, Tennessee 37235
www.vanderbilt.edu/vupress

COVER DESIGN BY GARY GORE