De Guancane a Macondo

De Guancane a Macondo is comprised of 16 essays written in Spanish by Rolena Adorno between 1992 and 2005. Several of them derive from talks the author gave at Spanish and Latin American universities. Of the essays, 14 were previously published in journals and edited volumes; only “Don Quijote en la América de los Austrias” and “La historia de los Incas narrada desde el norte” are original to this volume. The essays are grouped into four sections. Section 1 deals with sixteenth-century texts, addressing topics as diverse as Cervantes’s influence in America, the debate on the nature of Indians and Spain’s conquest rights, and Mala Cosa and inquisitional censorship. Section 2 focuses on contemporary recreations of sixteenth-century texts, giving particular attention to allegedly recently discovered colonial originals that Adorno argues are forgeries. Section 3 traces connections between sixteenth-century texts and contemporary fiction writing, while the fourth and final section centers on Hispanic and Latino studies in the U.S. academy, with an emphasis on historical writing in the nineteenth century and the emergence and contradictions of area studies. The appendix is a short obituary of Irving A. Leonard, who passed away in 1996, and whose intellectual legacy the author examines at length in chapter 4.Like most books that put together a 13-year span of intellectual production, De Guancane a Macondo follows the author’s many interests. However, a cluster of names and themes surface once and again. If the book had an analytical index (which would be a great addition in a future reprint) it is clear that names like Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and Bartolomé de Las Casas and questions of censorship, genre, intertextual relations, and literary and historical validity would stand out. The tone of the book is conversational rather than argumentative, with the exception of three essays in which Adorno disputes the reliability of a previously unknown textual corpus dealing with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Peru that was first presented to the academic public in Lima in 1996 (the corpus known to scholars of Andean colonial culture and society as the Miccinelli documents). Most often, the essays are built around details that previous scholarship had missed and which point, for example, to heretofore unknown and revealing connections between texts, or to problems in the way in which certain texts had been understood or to the way in which they have been classified in terms of literary genre.While the new elements that Adorno highlights, and their interpretations, are always grounded with extensive quotes, detailed footnotes, and an abundant bibliography, their larger relevance is not always fully addressed, at least not in an explicit manner. The essays are, at times, examples of hidden polemics. This notion, coined by Russian literary critique Mikhail Bakhtin, describes a text that, while studying its referential object (e.g., a given text), actually dialogues with other authors, but the dialogue is hidden, therefore intelligible only to knowledgeable readers. An interesting example of this kind of narrative in De Guancane a Macondo is “Don Quijote en la América de los Austrias.” The essay offers a brilliant rereading of Juan Rodríguez Freyle’s El carnero. Adorno argues in a convincing manner that Rodríguez Freyle (1566 – ca. 1639) was one of the first readers of Miguel de Cervantes’s masterwork on either side of the Atlantic, and that he not only found inspiration in El ingenioso hidalgo but also crafted his text’s enigmas so that only an expert reader of Cervantes could solve them. While seemingly focusing mainly on matters of literary canon — Adorno disputes the most common characterizations of El carnero — the essay in fact makes an unstated claim; scholars have previously discussed whether Rodríguez Freyle’s writing was or was not informed by Cervantes and have tended to refute the hypothesis.“Don Quijote en la América de los Austrias,” with its tracking of book shipments from Spain to America and its simultaneous, very close rereading of El carnero and El ingenioso hidalgo, is also an example of the range of materials and traditions of inquiry that Adorno weaves together. The author’s erudition and nuanced, extensive knowledge of the texts grounds the present collection of essays. At the same time, the book is not pretentious or obscure at any point. The possibility of reading the essays at two levels will certainly make the book appealing to both lay readers who want to gain a sense of the complexities of the canon of Spanish colonial literature and some of its contemporary repercussions, and expert readers with a keen eye for detail, intertextuality, and documentation

Ancient history · Art · Art history · Censorship · CONQUEST · Humanities · Literature · Section (typography) · Theology · Classics · Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America · History · Latin American history and culture · Philosophy