This paper argues that Jesuits promoted modernity in the Latin American colonies through a Baroque rhetoric and ethos. It analyzes De procuranda indorum salute, a text published in 1588 by Jos & eacute; de Acosta, one of the most influential organic intellectuals of the Society of Jesus. Acostas' text constitutes a fundamental guide for evangelization and embodies the Jesuit modernizing impulse. Based on this work and supported by the thinking of the philosopher Bolivar Echeverria, among various historiographic sources, this paper disputes the widespread thesis that establishes a relationship of exclusivity between modernity and Protestantism, a thesis that portrays Catholicism and the Latin American region as retrograde and feudal. Second, this paper proposes, this time in clear opposition to Echeverria, that the program represented by Acosta seeks to orient the colonies toward a modernity with capitalist characteristics instead of an "alternative modernity," as the Ecuadorian philosopher argues. Finally, it concludes that Acostas' strategy requires a solid subjective transformation that falls not only on the Amerindians but, above all, on those who dominate; that is, settlers and missionaries.
This article explores how Aurelio Arturo and Fernando Charry Lara appropriate the conventions of the Western pastoral tradition to tackle the histories ofunequal land ownership and violence in the Colombian countryside. The article demonstrates that Arturo infuses his monumental poem "Morada al Sur" with pastoral tropes to naturalize an order of relationships between rural laborers and wealthy landowners. This order is mirrored in the mental powers Arturo attributes to these social types during moments of idleness: the workers remain intellectually inactive, while the landowners are shown to be engaged in keen mental activity. In making this distinction, Arturos' poem casts meditation on the rural landscape as a privilege ofthe landowners, thus mobilizing aesthetic contemplation to reproduce deep social hierarchies. The article also claims that Charry Laras' poem "Llanura de Tulu & aacute;" turns upside down the pastoral trope of the locus amoenus by reworking several poetic models, particularly Rimbauds' poem "Le Dormeur du val." The article shows that Charry Lara rewrites pastoral to criticize urban misconceptions about the Colombian countryside and stage how trauma renders an experience inaccessible to consciousness. In doing so, Charry Lara reclaims landscape as a space of oblivion where human violence is inscribed and ultimately erased.
This article offers a reading of Contrabando (2008) by Victor Hugo as well as in theoretical and political debates in the field of Latin Amerinovel within the so-called narcoliterature debate in Mexico. It proposes that there is no debate, because there is no genre; or rather, that the genre itself exists in one single novel, Contrabando. This article also develops understanding of politics as an accumulation of social strategies that forms of politics, or rather infrapolitics. Finally, this article introduces and develops the notion of cumulation, which underlies (and subverts) capitalist accumulation. Contrabando illustrates how any attempt to transform cumulation into accumulation has vanished. That is, the novel invites us to (re)think the literary and political landscape, in an epoch of narco-accumulation, as a work of cumulation where history, politics, and economics cumulate in an entropic order.
Miguel de Silveiras'El Macabeo (Naples, 1638), a sacred epic in Gongorine style based on the biblical Books of Maccabees, has generally been read in terms of the New Christian authors' supposed crypto-Judaism or, conversely, his Catholic orthodoxy. Through a case study of a single lyrical episode, the lamentation of an allegorical Jerusalem as a grieving widow, the article goes beyond this binary to demonstrate how the poem appeals to a readership not defined by adherence to one faith or another. This passages' complex layering of allusions to the prophetic and poetic books of the Old Testament, the epics of Tasso and Lope, and the major poems of G & oacute;ngora from the 1610s, primarily his Soledades, are united by dense imagery of seafaring and drowning. They articulate a penitential vision of exile accompanied by an apologetic promise of redemption in dialogue with the sacred history of the period. Methodologically, the analysis also proposes an appraisal of literary biblical adaptation, which brings into consideration the affective resonance of the readers' experience of public performance of sacred texts-in this case, through the Tenebrae liturgy and music-in the reception and exegesis of an open-ended text.
This article revolves around statements by a variety ofpublishers on the role of independent presses in fomenting new reading practices, strategies, and tastes in contemporary Latin America. We asked thirteen publishers from throughout the continent (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, M & eacute;xico, Per & uacute;, and Puerto Rico) to respond to a series of questions about how they conceive of their publishing practices, the methods they use to create and maintain their reading publics, and the economic and political obstacles they face in pursuing their aims. A brief introduction by the compilers situates the publishers' responses in relation to the changing conditions of the Hispanophone publishing industry and the resurgence of independent presses in Latin America in the early twenty-first century.
