The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492-1898)

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Santa Arias, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Santa Arias

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367609382
• eBook ISBN: 9781351606332
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492-1898) brings together an international team of scholars to explore new interdisciplinary and comparative approaches for the study of colonialism.

Using four overarching themes, the volume examines a wide array of critical issues, key texts, and figures that demonstrate the significance of Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean across national and regional traditions and historical periods.

This invaluable resource will be of interest to students and scholars of Spanish and Latin American studies examining colonial Caribbean and Latin America at the intersection of cultural and historical studies; transatlantic, postcolonial and decolonial studies; and critical approaches to archives and materiality. This timely volume assesses the impact and legacy of colonialism and coloniality.

Part I

Colonialism and coloniality

1
Race and domination in colonial Latin American studies

Daniel Nemser

In the last two decades, race has emerged as a major topic in the field of colonial Latin American studies. By my count, nearly twenty monographs and ten edited volumes addressing the question of race during the early modern/colonial period in part or in full have appeared since the publication of R. Douglas Cope’s The Limits of Racial Domination in 1994.¹ While the discipline of history accounts for most of these titles, anthropology, history of art, and literary/cultural studies are represented as well, and it is clear that these scholars see themselves as participating in a broad, interdisciplinary dialogue. Pushing back against earlier scholarship that took for granted the transparency, stability, and transhistorical character of racial classification in the Iberian empires, these studies have aimed to historicize the meaning of difference and the contours of identity prior to the emergence of the “scientific” approach to race in the nineteenth century. Using rich empirical analysis, they have demonstrated convincingly that colonial formations of difference drew not only on phenotype but also on other kinds of attributes, including ancestry, culture, language, occupation, religion, and social status. Furthermore, this new historiography has emphasized the capacity of subaltern subjects to contest, negotiate, evade, and resist the imposition of racial categories by colonial authorities.

The Iberian empires also show up in a very different set of scholarship on race. Contemporary race theorists often mention this case as a starting point for exploring the emergence of “modern” ideas of race, but this treatment commonly occurs in passing—a reference to limpieza de sangre here, a name check of Bartolomé de las Casas there. In their influential work on racial formation in the United States, for example, the sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant trace the emergence of modern notions of race back to the conquest of the Americas. “It was only when European explorers reached the Western Hemisphere ... that the distinctions and categorizations fundamental to a racialized social structure, and to a discourse of race, began to appear” (1994, 61). In a short section on the history of racial formation, they reference Las Casas in an endnote and label the conquest “the first ... racial formation project” (1994, 182–183, n19; 62). But here as in most of these studies, there is little sustained engagement and these Iberian and Latin American foundations quickly drop away.

In general, then, these lines of scholarly inquiry—the historiographical and the theoretical—have failed to intersect.² This is not to say that historical studies do not consider race at a conceptual level, or that they never cite critical scholarship on race, but that this engagement is limited. We might say that the role of race theory in the historiographical paradigm is analogous to that of Las Casas in the theoretical paradigm. This missed encounter may be related to disciplinary differences, or perhaps, as I discuss below, the temporal demarcation of colonial studies has made specialists reluctant to draw on contemporary theoretical work that they deem anachronistic. Whatever the explanation, it is worth taking a step back and thinking through the implications of the assumptions we make when we talk about race in colonial Latin America. Although today it is a commonplace to call race a social construction, the historian Thomas Holt observes that academics are quick to “fall back into the older habits of thought” without “prob[ing] beyond the mantra of social constructedness, to ask what it really might mean in shaping lived experience” (2000, 10). In this light, I suggest that the field of colonial studies would benefit from engaging more substantively with race theory. Specifically, such engagement might help to highlight, reframe, and address certain conceptual problems that arise from how the field has tended to understand race.

In this chapter, I sketch out three of these conceptual problems and identify their implications. The first has to do with the periodization of race and the problem of anachronism; the second with the privileging of agency over domination; and the third with the concept of mestizaje (racial/cultural mixture) and the demographic causality it often implies. Next, I attempt to model the sort of theoretically engaged analysis I am proposing by considering the racialization of the “Indian” in the Jesuit José de Acosta’s De procuranda indorum salute (1588), an influential missionary treatise that marks a significant turning point in the colonial project. Finally, I suggest that contemporary race theory would also benefit from grappling with the conceptual implications of recent scholarship on colonial Latin America.

Before moving on, I want to outline some of the key concepts that inform my analysis here. As a social construction, race is not a “natural” category rooted in bodies or populations, nor is it reducible to some prior or preexisting (and therefore more “authentic” or “objective”) identity. Race has a history, or many histories—it has come into existence at particular moments and in particular places, and has endured but also changed over time. Precisely because the “parasitic and ch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Between colonialism and coloniality: Colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies today
• Part I: Colonialism and coloniality
• Part II: Knowledge production and networks
• Part III: Materialities and archives
• Part IV: Language, translation and beyond
• Index