The Darker Side of the Renaissance Colonization and the Discontinuity of the Classical Tradition

The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Colonization and the Discontinuity of the ClassicalTraditionAuthor(s): Walter D. MignoloSource: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Winter, 1992), pp. 808-828Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2862638 .Accessed: 24/04/2014 11:11

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The University of Chicago Press and Renaissance Society of America are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Renaissance Quarterly.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 202.41.10.30 on Thu, 24 Apr 2014 11:11:14 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Colonization and the Discontinuity

of the Classical Tradition

by WALTER D. MIGNOLO

A distinctive feature in the new directions I have selected for this presentation is what I call the "darker side" of the European

Renaissance, which could be condensed in "the discontinuity of the classical tradition." Such discontinuity becomes apparent in the fractured cultural products which do not conform to the aesthetic norms of the early modern period, and they are, consequently, marginalized from histories of ideas, art or literature. I have also used elsewhere the expression "colonial semiosis" to distinguish the fractured semiotic practices in the colonial periphery resulting from the clash between hegemonic norms and values guiding semiotic practices in metropolitan centers, their extension to the colonial periphery, and the resistance and adaptation to them from the perspective of the native population to whose historical legacy the Eu- ropean Renaissance was quite meaningless. I have selected, there- fore, those scholarly works which have in the past fifteen years introduced a new perspective by looking at the European Renais- sance from the New World colonial periphery. I have also selected a few examples upon which I will comment, and I will use foot- notes to honor names, articles, and books that were not included in the body of the paper, although without them this very overview would not have been written.I

'Recent trends in North American and European scholarships have been reviewed by Leah Marcus. My own notion of the "darker side of the Renaissance" goes along the lines, in my understanding, of Marcus's distinction between the Renaissance and early modern period and her own comments on the role of colonial studies in remapping Renaissance studies. I am indebted to her for letting me read the manuscript of her forthcoming article, which came to my hands when I was editing the final version of my own. I also hope that my own view on recent directions on colonial studies could be a complement to David Wallace. A previous critical summary in Hispano-American colonial studies is in Rolena Adorno, I988.

[ 808]


THE DARKER SIDE OF THE RENAISSANCE

At the last meeting of the Modern Language Association of America, two books about Latin America were honored as the books of the year. One is by Regina Harrison and the other by Ro- berto Gonzalez-Echevarria.2 The connections between these two books and the European Renaissance might not be self-evident judging by the titles, the institution extending the award, and the area of study to which the books belong. I see them, however, as paradigmatic examples useful to draw a general picture of "New Works on the New World" in the field of literary and cultural studies. Chronologically both books extend from the colonial New World to contemporary Latin America. The authors' selections regarding texts of the colonial period are quite paradigmatic: Gonzalez-Echevarria has devoted a chapter to the Inca Garcilaso de Vega. Son of al Inca mother and a Spanish man of arms, Garcilaso moved to Spainl in his early years (toward I560) and published his classical narrative Comentarios reales de los Incas in 1607. The book, which conformed quite well to Renaissance rhetorical norms for historiographical writings, was printed shortly after he finished it and became a canonical work not only of the colonial period but also of a widespread post-independence image of some kind of es- sential feature of Latin American culture. 3 Regina Harrison devoted a chapter in her book to the Relacidn of Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui, a pure-blood Indian from a powerful community that was an en- emy to the Incas but finally submitted to them. Pachacuti Yamki wrote his rclacionus toward I6I3.4 His work was not published during his lifetime and remained in the archives until the end of the nineteenth century when it was published as a historical document. I perceive in these two examples the model of recent as well as fu- ture research directions on the colonial New World. To those interested in remapping the canon of Latin American literature, Gar- cilaso de la Vega offers a paradigmatic example of a colonial as well as a Latin American writer. To those interested in charting the corpus for the exploration of semiotic practices in the colonies,

"Regina Harrison; Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria. 3Among recent studies emphasizing the Renaissance side of Garcilaso de la Vega,

see Enrique Pupo-Walker, and Margarita Zamora. For a reading of Garcilaso as an op- positional writer disguised as a Renaissance man, see Susana Jakfalvi-Leiva; Raysa Amador; and Jose Rabasa'.

4Previous studies in this important text have been written by Raquel Chang- Rodriguez, I980 and 1982.

809


RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

Pachacuti Yamki provides an exemplary case to ask new questions and scrutinize new problems.

I have introduced the dichotomy between canon and corpus in a more dogmatic way than I would normally think about and use. 5 Since I do not have time to elaborate and develop the nuances im- plied in such a distinction, I would like to say that canonical examples like Garcilaso could be read from the point of view of the problems identified by those working on the corpus and that examples such as Pachacuti Yamki could be used by those who might be interested in devising an alternative canon. The canon, in other words, is part of the corpus and not its opposite alternative. Canon- oriented research normally celebrates texts; corpus-oriented research normally explores cultural and semiotic processes. Be that as it may, both Harrison's and Gonzalez-Echevarria's books are useful examples to frame the topic we are discussing today, for they reveal-for those willing to see it-the other or darker side of the European Renaissance. Let me expand on this idea by quickly re- viewing some of the most significant work done in the past decade which, by looking behind the scene of the "literary" scholars, revealed the rich field of semiotic practices in colonial situations (or, of colonial semiosis).

Research and publications on neo-Latin, literacy, and education in colonial Mexico have received considerable attention in the past fifteen years.

Ignacio Osorio Romero, in Mexico, has been digging into archives and rare-book collections during the past three decades in order to chart the cultural significance of neo-Latin in colonial Mex- ico.6 His work has revealed at once both the continuity and the

5I have introduced and explored the distinction between canon and corpus elsewhere. See, for instance, Mignolo, 1991; forthcoming'; and forthcoming2.

6Professor Ignacio Osorio (1940-1991) passed away in July 1991, while Director of the National Library in Mexico. He had embarked on the ambitious task of centralizing all the information relative to rare book collections and manuscripts of the colonial period all over the country.

8io



discontinuity of the classical tradition, the brighter and the darker sides of the Renaissance. Regarding the brighter side, Osorio Romero has studied the curricula, libraries, and books on grammar, rhetoric, and poetics published in Mexico during the second half of the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries, and has shown that there was not much difference between the intel- lectual life in Spain and in New Spain during the same period.7 The curricula at Salamanca and the University of Mexico were very similar, as were the curricula in Spanish or MexicanJesuit colleges. Cervantes de Salazar, for instance, was already recognized as a Spanish man of letters when he became professor of grammar and rhetoric at the University of Mexico in I553.8 The foundation of the Jesuit Colleges closely followed the instructions and norms coming from Rome. When Ignacio Osorio looked at the Fran- ciscans and the teaching of Latin to the Indians, the discontinuity of the classical tradition and the darker side of the Renaissance began to emerge.9 Regarding the darker side, then, it is easy also to see what the spread of Renaissance cultural literacy means to the continuity of the classical as well as the Amerindian traditions. The model provided by Nebrija's Latin grammar and employed to write grammars of Amerindian languages soon revealed the cracks in the phonetic as well as in the semantic systems. Spanish gram- marians soon realized that Amerindian languages, alas, lacked sounds according to the universality of the sound system as codified for the Latin language. In the semantic system translation became a nightmare (though not always recognized by the translator) since concepts from one language and culture were translated into another which completely disregarded the meaning network of the word or concept. The semantic network associated with concepts inherited from the classical tradition and remapped in the European Renaissance (such as book or history of poetry, for instance) were inadequate to understand and translate semiotic practices from different cultural traditions. And orthographically it was another nightmare since Nebrija's effort to tame the voice by means of letters could not be successful in cultures where pictograms, ideo- grams (or logograms), and colored woven strings called quipus

7Ignacio Osorio Romero, I976; 1979; I980; I98I; I983I; I9832; I986. 8Archivo General de la Nacion (Mexico City). Ramo Universidad. Vol. 2. 9Ignacio Osorio Romero, 1990. On the same topic, see Juan Gil.



~~~27. ~I i , I

3. : ' 1 t .r


were their writing systems.1 A hard coup, indeed, for an evolu- tionary philosophy of writing which considered the alphabet its point of arrival. Some of these issues in Peru are directly and indirectly addressed by Regina Harrison in her chapter devoted to Pachacuti Yamki.

Education and literacy are then two topics which, especially in Mexico, have been largely explored in the past and that in recent years have seen a significant number of studies. Pilar Gonzalbo Aiz- puru devoted several studies to different aspects of education in colonial Mexico" and divided them according to gender and social class: the education of women, of Indians, and of Creoles, for instance. In the larger context of research conducted in the field of neo-Latin, Ignacio Osorio Romero studied the teaching of Latin to the Indians. 12 Needless to say, the more we know about education in colonial situations the better our understanding of the spread of western literacy in the colonial world. And the better our understanding of the spread of literacy in colonial situations, the better our ability to understand the complexity of what I have called elsewhere "colonial semiosis": a network of semiotic practices charac- terized by the encounter of writing systems from different cultural traditions through the spread of Western literacy. And, finally, it was in the New World where that colonial semiosis manifested it- self in the face-to-face encounter between the brighter and the darker sides of the European Renaissance.

The discontinuity of the classical tradition and the darker side of the European Renaissance emerged in a series of works in which semiotic practices were looked at more from the Amerindian perspective in the colonial world than from the norms and values of Western literacy.

A significant contribution has been by Martin Lienhard in a number of articles published in the last decade. An overview of his own previous work could be found in his recently published book on

'"On the uses of Nebrija's Castilian grammar (I492) to write grammars of Amer- indian languages, see Frances Kartunnen and Ascensi6n Le6n-Portilla. For a critical ex- amination of Nebrija's influence in the New World, see Walter D. Mignolo, I990 and 1992.

"Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, I9901; I9902; and 1987. Ignacio Osorio Romero, I990.

8 3



FIG. 2. The Codex Borbonicus was "painted" toward 1540 (twenty years after the conquest of Mexico) although it preserves the Mexica writing system. It has been painted in surfaces prepared from tree bark (amoxtli). By its content it is basically a tonalpohualli, a record of the days of the year and their cosmological configura- tion. The person trained to "read" them was the tonalpouhqui, generally translated as "soothsayer, sorcerer" although, in context, it would be equivalent to the Span- ish "letrado" (man of letters). Tonalpoa is a verb which could be properly translated as "reading the signs of the world" according to a code based on numeracy instead of on (alphabetic) literacy.

writing and ethno-social conflicts in Latin America. 3 Half of the book is devoted to semiotic practices in the colonial world, the Andes, Mesoamerica (Mexico and the Yucatan Peninsula), and the area called Guarani (including Paraguay, northeast of Argentina, southwest of Brazil). Lienhard has charted a widespread map of semiotic practices articulated around the conflict, first, between Re- naissance and Amerindian literacies and, second, in Amerindians' uses and adaptations of alphabetic writing to preserve their own traditions and resist colonization. His analysis of ethnic conflicts which centered on semiotic practices (escritura) reveals the violence

'3Martin Lienhard, 1990.

814



that Renaissance concepts of grammar, rhetoric, and poetry did to the reality and conceptualization of the colonial world.

The chapters that Lienhard devoted to the colonial world, before looking at its present legacies, bring to the foreground what has been always suppressed or silenced in the histories of Latin Amer- ican cultures and literatures of the early years. In such manuals an epic poem such as La Araucana, written in the second half of the sixteenth century by a Spanish soldier following and transforming Ariosto's model, was and is one of the paradigmatic examples of epic poetry, just as Garcilaso de la Vega is of historical writing with a literary (rhetorical) bent and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz is of ba- roque poetry. By the same token, every semiotic practice that de- fied well-written Spanish prose or well-established Renaissance systems of genres that was not written in one of the major vernac- ular languages or even alphabetically fell beyond the territory of the scholar interested in colonial literatures and cultures and in the Eu- ropean Renaissance. 4 Lienhard has devoted almost two hundred pages of his book to chart those forgotten and marginal-ized from the brighter perspective of the continuity of the classical tradition in the colonial world. His book shows indirectly how much the concept of literature in modern scholarship functioned as a wall that hid a rich and complex world emerging from the encounter between members of highly civilized cultures but was narrated and passed on to us by members of one of the cultures in question, those who belonged to and believed in the values that we attribute to or place today in the European Renaissance.

A second important aspect of this line of research has been manifested in the scholarly edition of a significant amount of texts marginal to the literate Renaissance tradition and to many literary scholars a province of ethnographic and anthropological research. There was a clear political agenda in such a distribution of labor which is being erased today by literary texts which are not yet part (or not clearly part) of the literature of the colonial world. Because of the restricted Renaissance legacy of the concept of poetry and its later transformation during and after the European Enlighten- ment, texts that caught the eye of philologists interested in textual editions were those texts which fell naturally within the domain of

'4For a critical study on the transformations of the Hispanic narrative model during the sixteen century, see Beatriz Pastor, 1988.

8 5



FIG. 3. The Codice Tudela shows already the process of Mexica into alphabetic writing. The Codice Tudela is basically a record of Mexica gods and scenes of social life "translated" (or described) in alphabetic writing. The folded, accordion form of pre-Columbian codices, has now taken on the form of a Western book.

literature. A turning point in the profession took place when an historian (ohn Murra), a literary scholar (Rolena Adorno), and a specialist in Amerindian philology (orge Urioste) edited the work of Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva Coronica y Buen Govierno,'s a text

'SGuaman Poma de Ayala, 1980. Rolena Adorno has devoted two fundamental studies to this work. See Adoro, 1986 and 1989.

816



which had been ignored in the history of Latin American literature and banished from the Spanish history of the historiography of the Indies. Certainly there was a French edition, but it was French and it was taken mainly as a document to study Andean culture rather than as a significant cultural production of the colonial New World. 6 This edition, which soon invaded the scene of literary and cultural studies, makes one wonder why Guaman Poma did not receive the attention that Garcilaso de la Vega did. And one can spec- ulate that Garcilaso managed to be critical at the same time he conformed to the mainstream of the European Renaissance while Guaman Poma was less concerned with or successful in behaving in a like manner. The result was that one remained in the brighter side of the Renaissance while the other was displaced to the darker one. In Mexico the counterpart and contemporary of Guaman Poma and Garcilaso de la Vega was Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl. His works, not published during his lifetime, have been edited recently by Edmundo O'Gorman, a Mexican historian with a philologico-literary and philosophical bent whose contributions to understanding the darker side of the Renaissance have been widely recognized in the international arena. I7 It is in this context that the ten volumes of the Relaciones Geogrdficas de Mexico, edited by Rene Acufia, a Guatemalan classical philologist who turned his attention to New World matters, found its extraordinary place. The Rela- ciones Geogrdficas are an outstanding example of the darker side of the Renaissance for they were a response to the European need at the time to gather information in order to control and administer new territories. I8 The Relaciones, as important as they are to understanding the European Renaissance, remained in the shadow of a more spectacular cartographic history related to travel, explora- tions, and map-making.

A significant contribution to changing the perceptions of the colonial world, which also had a significant impact on the field, is the Popol Vuh (the Book of Council), a series of narratives from the Maya-Quiche of Guatemala about the origin of the world and of

'6Poma de Ayala, Nueva Cordnica y buen gobierno (Codex peruvien illustre), Travaux et Mrmoires de l'Institut d'Ethnologie, vol. 23, rpt. (Paris, 1936).

'7John Elliott wrote in 1970 that O'Gorman 1961 was one of the three basic studies on the New World published up to that date. Elliott, 1970.

'8Acuna, 1982- 988. For the place of the Relaciones Geograficas in the context of colonial letters and in the Renaissance system of genres, see Walter D. Mignolo, 1982; 1987; and I990.

817



their own culture. 19 Dennis Tedlock, the editor, is an anthropologist and specialist in the language and culture of the Maya-Quiche of Guatemala, and currently a professor of English at the Univer- sity of New York at Albany. What distinguishes Tedlock's edition from the previous ones are, among other things, two aspects. First, it became clear in his edition, translation, and introduction that the Popol Vul, which until then had been considered a pre-Columbian narrative, was also a colonial text. Written in Maya-Quiche and in alphabetic characters toward the middle of the sixteenth century, it was discovered and translated into Spanish at the beginning of the eighteenth. Second, textual production of the colonial period was not written only by Spanish and European colonizers about the New World, but that it was also produced by a mixture of oral, hi- eroglyphic, and alphabetic performances. Furthermore, textual production in Amerindian languages included translations from Amerindian writing systems to alphabetic writing, the endurance of the oral tradition and to a certain extent, pictographic writing system, and, finally, the hybrid cultural production characteristic of colonial situations which discloses the darker side of the cultural metropolitan centers, in this case the European and Spanish Renais- sance.20

Next to the edition of hybrid and-from a certain point of view-marginal texts from the perspective of Renaissance norms and values, it should be mentioned that a significant number of recent works, particularly in the form of articles, have brought the intersection between Pre-Columbian semiotic practices, European Renaissance art and literature, and colonial Latin America to the foreground. Since all these works focus on Amerindian languages, picto- or logographic writing systems, and ways of conceiving and depicting space and fixing memories in graphic forms, they have been considered-from the perspective of the literati-as alien to

'9 Tedlock, 1985. Tedlock has also devoted some fundamental studies to the narrative in the larger context of interpretation and oral performances. See, for instance, Tedlock, 1982.

20Another important hybrid text recently edited and translated into English by an anthropologist, Frank Salomon, and Quechua philologist, Jorge Urioste is The Hua- rochiri Manuscript: A Testamenit of Ancient and Colonial Andean Religion (Austin, 1991). Frank Salomon also presented a paper at the 1992 Renaissance Society conference about the encounter of Amerindian and Renaissance traditions in the Huarochiri Manuscript.

8 8



their field when framed within the Renaissance legacy and its cor- responding periodization. Two important contributions in this direction have been made in Germany by a linguist and literary scholar Birgit Scharlau in collaboration with an anthropologist Mark Munzel2l and in France by an ethnohistorian with a literary bent, Serge Gruzinski.22 Both studies have shed new light on the complexity of the encounter and transformation during the sixteenth century of alphabetic writing and Amerindian oral and written traditions. Beyond these two books a profusion of articles and several recent workshops has been devoted to the colonization of languages, verbal and non-verbal,23 and to record keeping and tell- ing stories without words as well as on Amerindian forms of territorial representation. 24 The confrontation between the materiality of cultures as manifested in the diversity of writing systems reveals, once again, the darker side of a European Renaissance in which the letter and alphabetic writing became a cornerstone of civilization.

At this point, the study of maps and the conflicting rationalization of space should be brought to the forefront. The groundbreak- ing The Invention of America (1958, 1961),25 by the Mexican philos- opher and historian Edmundo O'Gorman, showed the relevance of cartography in the European construction of the other and definition of the self-same.26 More recently, the Amerindian conceptualization of space before and during the colonial period has com- manded the attention of ethnohistorians, semioticians, and literary

2'Scharlau and Munzel, 1986. 2Gruzinski, 1988. 2The first workshop on "The Colonization of Language: Verbal and Non-verbal,"

took place at the University of Philadelphia, in December 1989, organized by Nancy Farriss et al. in conjunction with the Latin American Program and the Ethnohistory Workshop. The second one took place in Paris, in June 1992, organized by Serge Gru- zinski and Nathan Wachtel, the Centre de Recherches sur le Mexique, l'Amerique Cen- trae et les Andes, the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

24Both workshops were organized by Elizabeth Boone, Director of Pre-Columbian studies and took place at Dumbarton Oaks in March 1991 and April 1992, respectively.

2SSee note 14. The Spanish version La invencion de America, was published by the Universidad Nacional de Mexico in 1958.

26I have not insisted on this issue because it has been largely discussed mainly by scholars and intellectuals interested on the European construction of the other rather than by scholars interested in the "otherness"' of Europe seen from the non-Western world or on the definition of Europe self-same in the process of constructing its "oth- ers." On this topic, see Mignolo, i9922 and 1988.

819



scholars with an interdisciplinary bent. Gruzinski in the book just mentioned paid special attention to Amerindian cartography and underlined the "fuzzy" frontiers between painting, mapping, and writing in Mexican society. The tlacuilo was a man of many func- tions, contrary to the increasing European specialization and distinction between the geographer, the historian, and the painter. Jose Rabasa has devoted a lengthy chapter of his forthcoming book to the atlas as a cartographic genre in the European Renaissance and has disentangled the complicity between power and rationalization of space in Mercator's world map (Inventing America, forthcoming).27 I will cross the modesty barrier here and mention some of my own contributions to the ethnic and geometric rationalization of space during the European Renaissance and its colonial expansion. I have been mainly concerned with two aspects, the overpow- ering force of European cartography in the colonization of space and the process of putting the Americas on the map, which was at the same time a process of concealing the Amerindian's representation of space. 28 Amerindian "maps" have begun to receive the attention of ethno- and art historians. A recent example of this exploration is the lengthy study of Amerindian "maps" from the area of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, published by Arthur Miller. 29 This recent direction in the field of literary studies and art history builds on a long tradition of ethnohistorical research on pre-Columbian America as well as on recent developments in the history of cartography to which Brian Harley has made fundamental contributions. 30

Another area in which the gaps left by previous scholarship are now being filled in is the domain of women's writing during the colonial period. Although this aspect is not specific to colonial situations and a wealth of recent publications regarding women's

27Rabasa, forthcoming2. 28Mignolo, I989' and I9922 29Miller, I99I. A classic study in the field is Smith, I973. Of particular interest in

this regard is Gruzinski, I987. 3Brian Harley, who was scheduled to cover the aspects related to research in the

history of cartography on this panel, passed away in December I 99 . Among his recent methodological contributions to the study of maps I would like to mention, Harley, 1988 and I989.

820



waLatk.

rIEj

FIG. 4. One of the many maps or "pinturas" attached to the Relaciones Geogrdficas de Indias (toward 580), a questionnaire prepared by the Council of the Indies in order to gather information from the New World. The map or "pintura" belongs to Relaci6n de Temazcaltepeque (I 579). Notice that East is on top, according to pre- Columbian cosmological orientation (Archivo de Indias, Ramo Indiferente Ge- neral).

82I

1

i. . -, i

"\ 7:

. i ... :4, : ...

:gi.. ..

*

:;Z



writing during the European Renaissance could be mentioned, there is perhaps a difference between living and writing in a society enjoying the benefits of an economic, cultural, and religious expansion and writing in a society in which such benefits are not always clear and equally distributed.

For nearly three centuries Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz held a very distinguished role in the cultural history of colonial Mexico and Hispanic American letters. Recently her work has been marketed in the English world though the translation of Octavio Paz's vo- luminous biography.31 Paz's book was followed by a collection of essays edited by Stephanie Merrim.32 In a valuable introductory essay Merrim reviews the basic bibliography about SorJuana and also pays special attention to Paz's book when she states that "Paz looks at Sor Juana, profoundly, in his way, as a woman, but not as a woman writer" (20). In the same volume edited by Merrim an article by Asunci6n Lavrin (a historian rather than a literary critic) looks into general education and literacy in colonial Mexico as it impinges on the formation of a religious vocation. An educated woman-observes Lavrin-who passed beyond mere literacy to the reading of literary or historical texts, or who knew Latin and had some notion of mathematics, was an unusual individual in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Knowledge beyond these nar- rowly defined parameters was not for women.33

Electa Arenal and Stacy Schlau made a major contribution to this particular area in their study of nuns' writing in sixteenth century Spain and New Spain (colonial Mexico).34 The main goal of their book is "an analysis of the act of writing, and especially linguistic usages, [that] can illuminate questions of power and domination, submission and subservience, and can reveal some less obvious aspects of the society's hierarchical structure. Sixteenth and seventeenth century Hispanic nuns circumvented an ideology that pro- moted women's silence and learned to couch their thoughts in language acceptable to authority" (i6). Four out of six extensive chapters are devoted to nuns in Spain, another to the Spanish Vice- royalty of Peru and another to New Spain. Two cases are examined in Peru and five in Mexico. One section of the chapter on Mexico

3'Paz, 1988. 32Merrim, 1991. 33Lavrin. In this context Jean Franco's valuable contribution to the topic should be

also mentioned. Franco, 1988. 34Arenal and Schlau, I989.

822



is devoted to Indian princesses and Catholic nuns. The corpus com- piled by Arenal and Schlau responded to a basic question: who were the nuns in Spain and in the New World who devoted part of their life to writing, beyond such cases as Santa Teresa de Avila in Spain and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz in colonial Mexico.

The book by Arenal and Schlau has been preceded by recent editions of texts written by nuns.35 In Mexico during the early '8os several investigations were devoted to nuns and conventual life from the perspective of the histoire des mentalites, in which issues related to writing and education are part of a larger picture of the history of sexuality in colonial New Mexico. Of particular interest in this context are studies on lay sisters (beatas) and lay brothers (beatos) who manage to use the religious institution, the confession, and writing to accomplish their personal goals. For instance, the recent edition of Beatas embaucadoras de la colonia, by Maria Rita Vargas and Maria Lucia Celis (1988), is supposedly a notebook collected by the Inquisition from a beato (lay brother) who devoted a great deal of his life to writing what was told to him by the beatas during confession. In this case it is the darker side of conventual life which began to emerge in a series of studies devoted to daily life in colonial Mexico.36 All these works, in sum, began to reveal a largely unknown aspect of the colonial life related to written practice by women but also to oral communication and domination, as those are cases in which verbal religious confession rather than writing is the locus where power, gender, and domination meet.

What I have been referring to metaphorically as the darker side of the Renaissance could be framed in terms of an emerging field of study whose proper name oscillates between colonial discourse and colonial semiosis. Both expressions are employed by those whose main interest is the study and understanding of the relation- ship between discourse and power during colonial expansion. The expression "colonial discourse" has been defined by Peter Hulme

3SFor instance, Myers, I992'. See also Myers, I9922. The Chilean nun Ursula Suarez (I666-I749) wrote a Relacion autobiografica edited by Ferreccio Podesta, 1984.

36Rita Vargas and Lucia Celis, 1988. Several studies dealing with the subject could be found in Ortega, 1986 and 1987. In this context I should also mention the chapter "Writers in Spite of Themselves: the Mystical Nuns of Seventeenth Century Mexico" in Franco.

823



in his study Colonial Encounters37 as all kinds of discursive production related to and produced in colonial situations, from-to use his own example-the Capitulations of I492 to The Tempest, from Royal Orders and edicts to the most carefully written prose. "Dis- course" used in this sense has an enormous advantage over the notion of "literature" when the corpus at stake is "colonial." While "colonial literature" has been construed within a framework of aesthetic dependency according to the rules and conventions applied in the Renaissance metropolitan centers, "colonial discourse" places colonial discursive production in a context of conflictive interactions, of appropriations and resistances, of power and domination. Significant texts such as the Popol Vuh, as well as many oth- ers of the same kind, now acquire a new meaning: instead of being considered pre-Columbian texts admired for their otherness, they now become part and parcel of colonial discursive production. It could not be otherwise, since the Popol Vuh was written alphabetically around 1550. How could a text alphabetically written be pre- Columbian if Amerindians did not have letters, as all missionaries and men of letters constantly remind us? How then could such a text not be related to the European Renaissance when the celebration of the letter became one of its foundations? The Popol Vuh was written in Maya-Quiche, certainly a language not very popular in the European Renaissance, but quite common in the colonies where major Amerindian languages (like Nahuatl, Maya Quiche and Maya Zapotec, Quechua) competed with Latin and Spanish, and challenged the continuity of the classical tradition and the spread of Western literacy.

However, when pushed to the limit, the notion of"colonial discourse," desirable and welcome as it is, is not the most comprehen- sive one we can concoct in order to apprehend the diversity of semiotic interactions in colonial situations and, thus, shed more light on the darker side of the Renaissance. The notion of "discourse," although embodying both oral and written interactions, might not be the best alternative to account also for semiotic interactions between different writing systems during the colonial expansion, such as the Latin alphabet introduced by the Spaniard, the picto- ideographic writing system of Mesoamerican cultures, and the quipus in colonial Peru. If we were to limit the use of the term discourse to refer to oral interactions and reserve the notion of text for written

37Hulme, 1986.

824



ones, we would need to expand the latter term beyond the range of alphabetic written documents in order to embrace all material sign inscriptions. By doing so we would honor the etymological meaning of text (weaving, textile), which began to lose its original meaning when alphabetic writing and the Renaissance celebration of the letter obscured the more generous medieval meaning, which, as Renaissance people, they were trying to conceal. The expression "colonial semiosis" indicates, on the one hand, a field of study par- allel to other already well-established ones such as "colonial history" or "colonial art." But, on the other hand, it intends also to indicate a change of perspective and a change of voice when it comes to understanding the construction of a New World during the sixteenth century, a perspective in which the darker side of the Renaissance is brought into light and a change of voice in which the European Renaissance is looked at from the colonial periphery.38

The picture emerging from works on the New World, revealing a network of semiotic practices and little celebrated works in the New World, is relevant for those interested in colonial expansion and in cultural interactions in colonial situations. The expansion of the Spanish Empire and the construction of a New World out of the encounter of two old ones showed both the bright side of the European Renaissance exported to the colonies and the darker side, the hybrid cultural products generated in the encounter between persons and institutions representing both the Amerindian traditions and the European Renaissance. In the past, literary scholarship tended to focus on the European sources of colonial culture and in the paradigmatic examples of successful Creoles within the Euro- pean exigencies, while specialists in pre-Columbian cultures fo- cused on the reconstruction of Amerindian cultures. What I have tried to suggest is that there is ample evidence that the darker side of the Renaissance is being explored by a new generation of scholars who have moved from literary scholarship to the human sciences and art history, as well as by social scientists and art historians who have engaged themselves in a productive dialogue with literary scholars. UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, ANN ARBOR

38On this issue, see Walter D. Mignolo, I9892.

825



Bibliography Acuna, Ren6. Relaciones Geogrdficas del Siglo.

io vols. Mexico City, 1982-1988. Adorno, Rolena, ed. From Oral to Written Ex-

pression: Native Andean Chronicles of the Early Colonial Peru. Syracuse, 1982.

. Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru. Austin, 1986.

. "Nueva perspectivas en los estudios literarios coloniales hispanoamericanos." Revista de critica literaria latinoanericana 28 (1988): 11-28.

Amador, Raysa. Aproximacion Historica a Los Comentarios Reales. Madrid, 1984.

Archivo General de la Nacion. Ramo Uni- versidad. Vol. 2. Mexico City.

Arenal, Electa and Stacy Schlau. Untold Sis- ters: Hispanic Nunts and their Works. Albu- querque, 1989.

Chang-Rodriguez, Raquel. "A Forgotten Indian Chronicle of Peru: Titu Cusi Yu- panki's Relacion de la conlquista del Peru." Latin American Indian Literatures 4 (1980): 87-95.

"Writing as Resistance: Peruvian History and the Relacion of Titu Cusi Yu- panqui." In Rolena Adorno, ed. From Oral to Written Expression: Native Andean Chronicles of the Early Colonial Peru. Syra- cuse, 1982.

Elliott, J. H. The Old World and the New, 1492-1650. London, 1970.

Ferreccio Podesta, Mario, ed. Ursula Suarez. Relacion autobiografica. Academia Chilena de la Historia, 1984.

Florentine Codex [1578]. Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson, trans. New Mexico, 1969.

Franco, Jean. Plotting Womene: Gender and Representation in Mexico. New York, 1988.

Gil, Juan. "El latin en America: lengua general y lengua de elite." I Simposio de filo- logfa iberoamericana. Universidad de Sevilla. Zaragoza, 1990.

Gonzalbo Aizpur6, Pilar. Las mujeres en la Nueva Espana: Educacion y vida cotidiana. Mexico City, 1987.

. Historia de la educacion la epoca colonial: El munudo indigena. Mexico City, 199o'.

. Historia de la educacion en la epoca colonial: La educacion de los criollos y la vida ur- bana. Mexico City, 19902.

Gonzalez Echevarria, Roberto. Myth and Ar- chive: Toward a Theory of Latin American Narrative. New York, 1990.

Greenblatt, Stephen S., ed. Redrawing the Boundaries of Literary Studies. New York, forthcoming.

Gruzinski, Serge. "Colonial Indian Maps in Sixteenth-Century Mexico: An Essay in Mixed Cartography." Res 13 (1987): 46- 59.

. La colonization de l'imtaginaire: Societe indigene et occidentalisation dans le Mexique espagnole XVImne-XVIIeme siecles. Paris, I988.

Harley, Brian. "Maps, Knowledge and Power." In D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels, eds. The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the symbolic representation, design and use of past environments. Cambridge, 1988.

"Deconstructing the Map." Carto- graphica 26 (1989): I-20.

Harrison, Regina. Signs, Songs and Memlory in the Andes: Translating Quechua Lalnguage and Culture. Austin, 1989.

Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797. New York, 1986.

Jakfalvi-Leiva, Susana. Traduccion, Escritura y Violencia Colonizadora: Un Estudio de la Obra del Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. Maxwell School, Latin American Series, 7. Syra- cuse, 1984.

Kartunnen, Frances. "Nahuatl Literacy." In G. A. Collier, R. Rosaldo, and J. D. With, eds. The Inca and Aztec States: 1400- 1800. New York, 1982.

Lavrin, Asunci6n. "Unlike Sor Juana? The Model Nun in the Religious Literature of Colonial Mexico." In S. Merrim, ed. Feim- inist Perspectives on Sor Juania. Detroit, 1991.

Le6n-Portilla, Ascension, Tepuztlahcuilolli. Impresos ein ndhuatl. Historia y bibliografia. Vol. i. Mexico City, 1988.

Lienhard, Martin. La voz y su huella: Escritura

826



y contflicto etnico-social en Am&erica Latina 1492-1988. Hannover, 199ggo.

Marcus, Leah. "Disestablishing the Renais- sance (?): New Directions in Early Mod- ern Studies. " In S. Greenblatt, ed. Redra,- ing the Boundaries of Literary Studies. New York, forthcoming.

Merrim, Stephanie, ed. Feminist Perspectives on Sorjuana Ines de la Cruz. Detroit, I99I.

Mignolo, Walter D. "Cartas, cronicas y relaciones del descubrimiento y la con- quista." In Historia de la literatura his- panoamericana: Epoca colonial. Madrid, Catedra, I982.

. "El mandato y la ofrenda: la Descrip- cion de la provinica y ciudad de Tlaxcala de Diego Munoz Camargo y las Relaciones de India. " Nueva Revista de Filologia Hispdaica 35 (I987): 451-84.

. "Anahuac y sus otros: la cuestion de la letra en el Nuevo Mundo." Revista de critica literaria latinoamericana 28 (1988): 29- 56.

. "Colonial Situations, Geographical Discourses and Territorial Representa- tions." Dispositio 36-38 (1989'): 93-140.

"Afterword: From Colonial Dis- course to Colonial Semiosis." Dispositio 36-38 (i9892): 333-37.

. "La grafia, la voz y el silencio: las Rel- aciones Geogtrdficas de Indias en el contexto de las letras virreinales." Insula 552 (1990): 11-12.

. "Teorias renacentistas de la escritura y la colonizaci6n de las lenguas nativas." Sitmposio de filologia iberoamtericana. Zara- goza, 1990.

. "Canon a(nd) Cross Cultural Boundaries (or whose canon are we talk- ing about?)." Poetics Today 12/1 (1991): 1-28.

"Nebrija in the New World: The Colonization of Anierindian Languages and the Discontinuity of the Classical Tra- dition." L'Homme: Revue Francaise d'An- thropologie 122-124 (April-December 19921): 187-209.

. "Putting the Americas on the Map: Cartography and the Colonization of Space." Latin Amierica;n Colonial Review 1-2 (19922): 25-65.

. "Canon and Corpus: Alternative Views of Comparative Literature in Colo- nial Situations." Dedalus: Revueportuguese de litterature comparee I (forthcoming').

. "Entre el canon y el corpus: nuevas direcciones en los estudios literarios y cul- turales latinoamericanos." Nuevo Texto Critico (forthcoming2).

Miller, Arthur. "Transformation of Time and Space: Oaxaca, Mexico, circa 1500- 1700." In Susanne Kuchler and Walter Melion, eds. On Rememnbering and Repre- sentation. Washington, DC, 1991.

Myers, Kathleen. The Spiritual Autobiogra- phy of Madre Maria de San Joseph (1656- 1719). Liverpool, I992'.

."The addressee determines the discourse: the role of the confessor in the spiritual autobiography of madre Maria de SanJoseph." Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 49 (19922): 39-47.

O'Gorman, Edmundo. The Invention of America. Bloomington, 1961.

Ortega, Sergio, ed. De la santidad a la perver- sion: 0 depor que no se cunplia la ley de Dios en la sociedad novohispana. Mexico City, 1986.

-

, ed. El placer depecary el afdn de normar. Mexico City, 1987.

Osorio Romero, Ignacio. Topicos sobre Ci- cerod en Mexico. Mexico City, 1976.

Colegios y profesores Jesuitas que ensedron latin en Nueva espana. Mexico City, 1979.

- . Floresta de grazmdtica, poetica y retdrica

en Nueva Espana: 1527-1767. Mexico City, I980.

. "Jano o la literatura neo-latina en Mexico." 1981.

. "La ret6rica en Nueva Espana." Dis- positio 22/23 (I983'): 65-86.

. "Doce poemas neolatinos del siglo XVI novohispano." Nova Tellus I (19832): 171-206.

-- . Las bibliotecas novohispanos. Mex-

ico City, 1986. . La ensenanza del latin a los Indios.

Mexico City, 1990. Pastor, Beatriz. Discursos narrativos de la con-

quista: Mitificacio y emergencia. Hannover, 1988.

827



Paz, Octavio. SorJuana or, the Traps of Faith. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Cam- bridge, 1988.

Poma de Ayala, Guaman. Nueva Coronica y buen gobierno (Codex peruvien illustre). Travaux et Memoires de l'Institut d'Eth- nologies. Vol. 23. Rpt. Paris, I936.

. El primer nueva coronica y buen gobi- er,no. Eds. John V. Murra and Rolena Adorno. Trans. Jorge L. Urioste. Mexico City, 1980.

Popul Vuh: The definitive edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings. Trans. and ed. Dennis Tedlock. New York, 1985.

Pupo-Walker, Enrique. Historia, creacion y profecia en los textos del Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. Madrid, 1982.

Rabasa, Jose. " '. .. porque soy indio': Sub- jectivity in La Florida del Inca. " Poetics To- day 14/2 (forthcoming').

Inventing America. Norman (forth- coming2).

Rita Vargas, Maria and Maria Lucia Celis. Beatas embaucadoras de la colonia. Mexico City, 1988.

Salomon, Frank and Jorge Urioste, ed. and trans. The Huarochirf Manuscript: A Testa-

mentt of Ancient and Colonial Andean Reli- gion. Austin, 1991.

Scharlau, Birgit and Mark Munzel. Quelquay: Mundliche Kultur and Schrifttra- dition bei Indianeren Lateinamerikas. Frank- furt, 1986.

Smith, Mary Elizabeth. Picture Writing from Ancient Southern Mexico: Mixtec Place Signs and Maps. Norman, 1973.

Suarez, Ursula. Relacion autobiografica. Ed. Mario Ferreccio Podesta. Academia Chil- ena de la Historia, I984.

Tedlock, Dennis. The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. Philadelphia, 1982.

--

, ed. and trans. Popul Vuh: The definitive edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings. New York, I985.

Wallace, David. "Carving Up Time and the World: Medieval-Renaissance Turf Wars; Historiography and Personal History." Center for Twentieth Century Studies, working paper I, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1990-199I.

Zamora, Margarita. Language, Authority and Indigenous History in the Comentarios reales de los Incas. Cambridge, 1988.

828


Article Contentsp. 808p. 809p. 810p. 811p. 812p. 813p. 814p. 815p. 816p. 817p. 818p. 819p. 820p. 821p. 822p. 823p. 824p. 825p. 826p. 827p. 828

Issue Table of ContentsRenaissance Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Winter, 1992), pp. 653-920Front MatterMachiavellian Foundlings: Castruccio Castracani and the Aphorism [pp. 653-676]Replicating Mysteries of the Passion: Rosso's Dead Christ with Angels [pp. 677-738]The Composition of Giorgio Vasari's Ricordanze: Evidence from an Unknown Draft [pp. 739-784]Marsilio Ficino: Lecturer at the Studio fiorentino [pp. 785-790]The End of the Old World [pp. 791-807]The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Colonization and the Discontinuity of the Classical Tradition [pp. 808-828]ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 829-830]Review: untitled [pp. 830-833]Review: untitled [pp. 833-836]Review: untitled [pp. 836-838]Review: untitled [pp. 838-839]Review: untitled [pp. 839-841]Review: untitled [pp. 841-843]Review: untitled [pp. 843-846]Review: untitled [pp. 846-848]Review: untitled [pp. 848-850]Review: untitled [pp. 850-852]Review: untitled [pp. 852-854]Review: untitled [pp. 854-857]Review: untitled [pp. 857-859]Review: untitled [pp. 859-862]Review: untitled [pp. 862-864]Review: untitled [pp. 864-865]Review: untitled [pp. 866-868]Review: untitled [pp. 868-871]Review: untitled [pp. 871-872]Review: untitled [pp. 872-874]Review: untitled [pp. 875-877]Review: untitled [pp. 877-879]Review: untitled [pp. 880-881]Review: untitled [pp. 881-884]Review: untitled [pp. 884-887]

Books Received [pp. 888-913]Volume Information [pp. 914-920]Back Matter

The Darker Side of the Renaissance Colonization and the Discontinuity of the Classical Tradition

Documents

Transcript of The Darker Side of the Renaissance Colonization and the Discontinuity of the Classical Tradition