Abstract The novel Sab (1841) by the Cuban-Spanish writer Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda has been called both a radical anti-slavery novel (Sommer 1991, Davies 2013) and an anti-abolitionist novel that only pays lip service to the abolitionist cause (Williams 2008, Gomariz, 2009). In this article I approach this ambiguity by moving the focus from content to form and from story to reader. Building on insights by Peter Brooks (1976), Jacky Bowring (2017) and David Denby (1994), I argue that formally the novel is a melodramatic tragedy and that its melodramatic tableaux vivants foster moral reflection in the reader by creating a clash between the ideal and the real and between surface and depth. I develop this in critical dialogue with ideas about the (dis)connection between emotionality, empathy and human rights developed by Lynn Hunt (Hunt 2007) and Lynn Festa (2006).

This chapter presents an analysis of the only Spanish autobiography written by a slave, namely, Juan Francisco Manzano’s Autobiografía de un esclavo (Autobiography of a Slave) (1840, written 1835) and his tragic drama Zafira (1842). Much of the reception has focused on the weakness of the narrator and writer. The proposed reading argues that the alleged ‘weakness’ of the writer has a positive aspect connected with his poetic sensibility. Moreover, his acknowledged vulnerability may be seen as a civilizing force. Reading the autobiography in the light of the tragedy, the author demonstrates that, in both texts, Manzano uses the form of tragedy to dramatize not only the sufferings but also the strength of the weak.

This chapter analyzes how carnivalesque strategies can turn hierarchies upside down and create the basis for equality and collective rights. This is demonstrated in two works that view the conquest from the perspective of the Indians. Both are from the 1550s: Micael de Carvajal’s 1557 Cortes de la Muerte (Court of Death), which is formally a danse macabre that draws on the rituals from the festival of Corpus Christi and the undated, anonymous Tragedia del fin de Atawallpa (Tragedy of the End of Atawallpa), which uses a ritualistic, repetitive rhythm, to create chain reactions and mirror effects between the conquerors and the conquered. The chapter argues that the moment of death makes room for an equalizing, embodied form of solidarity.

This chapter presents the historical background for the texts studied in the book. It gives an introduction to the special traits of the Spanish history of slavery, and its lack of similarity and synchronicity with the history of other colonial empires. A brief overview of the simultaneous enslavement of Native Americans and Africans is provided. The chapter presents the human rights thinking in the Spanish Empire in the early period (late fifteenth century until mid-sixteenth century) with special attention paid to Bartolomé de las Casas. In the Cuban context, intellectuals who are partially inspired by Las Casas such as Félix Varela, José Antonio Saco, and Domingo del Monte are presented. The intro argues that there is an intellectual link between the formulations of the rights of the Native Americans in the sixteenth century and the rights of enslaved Africans in the nineteenth century.

This chapter presents an analysis of the novel Sab (1841) by the Cuban–Spanish writer Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. It is the only antislavery book written in Spanish by a woman. Its reception has primarily focused on the (lack of) heroism in the characters and their (in)ability to protest against slavery. The proposed reading shifts attention away from the main characters to the aesthetic form. It is argued that the book is a paradoxical, melodramatic tragedy that creates moral reflection through its numerous theatrical and highly emotional tableaux vivants. Through the figure of Sab, his Native American godmother, and the landscape and history of Camagüey, an interracial solidarity is created that supports the enslaved mulatto’s claim for equal rights.

This chapter presents an analysis of the Western world’s first atrocity story written by the Dominican monk and forerunner of human rights, Bartolomé de las Casas: Brevísima relación de la destruición de las Indias (1542, published 1552) (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies). The text will be compared with the engravings made for the 1598 edition by the Flemish artist Théodore de Bry. The author analyzes the book’s paradoxical combination of religious allegory and forensic denunciation of massacres. She argues that the atrocity story functioned as a moral telescope for the contemporary Spanish audience, that it had an activist political agenda, and that it was based on a modern form of human rights that included both individual and collective, political rights.

A study of the forensic theatricality of human rights claims in literary texts about slavery in the 16th and 19th century in the Spanish Empire.

This chapter presents a reading of Lope de Vega’s famous tragicomedy about the conquest of America, El nuevo mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón (1598–1603) (The New World Discovered by Christopher Columbus). The author argues that the drama makes use of forensic presentism to engage audiences in the moral aspects of the conquest, and that the tragicomic mode is especially adept at depicting conflictive encounters since it allows a dual vision of ‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims.’ The Indian king Dulcanquellín is shown to be both a tyrant and a modern, democratic ruler who can be persuaded by speech. The reading explores how humor is used to deconstruct Spanish power, which is emblematically and theatrically staged with a huge Christian cross on the beach of an American island. In the encounter, a ‘cross-cultural’ theatricality unfolds that can redefine emblems and rights.

In this case study it is argued that the Latin American magical realism is a ‘laboratory’ for exploring the relation between realism and the real. Furthermore, it is argued that magical realism should not be seen as an enchantment, but rather as an investigation of the real, especially of causality and temporality. The study begins with a discussion of the general understanding of magical realism and its position within world literature. It presents Asturias’s form of Magical Realism as transcultural. The main focus of the study is a comparative analysis of two texts by Miguel Ángel Asturias, the mythologically founded Leyendas de Guatemala (1930), and the novel El señor presidente (1946), which is often considered to be a portrait of the dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera and his authoritarian regime (1898–1920). Despite the differences between the texts, this study argues that the texts share the same realistic ambition and that their combination of styles, inspired by the Maya text Popol Vuh and surrealism, serves the function of exploring particularly strange experiences of reality. At the end, Asturias is briefly situated within the Latin American tradition.

Orbis LitterarumVolume 75, Issue 5 p. 279-280 BOOK REVIEW Héctor, Hoyos. Things with a History: Transcultural Materialism and the Literatures of Extraction in Contemporary Latin America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019, 576 pp. Karen-Margrethe Simonsen, Corresponding Author Karen-Margrethe Simonsen litkms@cc.au.dk orcid.org/0000-0002-6586-8527 Aarhus University, Aarhus C, DenmarkSearch for more papers by this author Karen-Margrethe Simonsen, Corresponding Author Karen-Margrethe Simonsen litkms@cc.au.dk orcid.org/0000-0002-6586-8527 Aarhus University, Aarhus C, DenmarkSearch for more papers by this author First published: 10 August 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/oli.12270Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume75, Issue5October 2020Pages 279-280 RelatedInformation

This article addresses a question crucial to contemporary cultural analysis: the question of how to compare and what to compare in a globalized world. Modern comparativism has effectively undermined the very foundation of historical comparativism, i.e. the idea of confined and segregated (national) cultures and Eurocentric perspectives and perceptions of what is historically significant, and what is not. The article opens with a discussion of some important critical revisions of comparative methodologies in the fields of comparative literature and art history, and then moves on to call for a relational comparativism that is attentive to three aspects: context, dynamics/agency and circulation. To indicate what the implications of a relational comparativism might be, we conclude with two case studies of the autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) and the commemorative sculpture I Am Queen Mary (2018) by artists Jeannette Ehlers and La Vaughn Belle. Both works are related to the history of slavery; a history that in significant ways points to the need for rethinking comparativism.

The focus of this article is the relation between time and transcultural space in literary history. The argument is that the concept of anachronism can help us understand the complexity of temporality and that the analysis of transcultural exchanges between European and Latin American art and literature may change literary history and further an understanding of the anachronism of Eurochronology. Two examples of a transcultural and anachronistic relation between Europe and America will be analyzed, both of them novels and writers of magical realism. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel Cien anos de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) is analyzed as a challenge to European historicity, while the transcultural aesthetics of Miguel Angel Asturias is analyzed as a challenge to the understanding of avant-gardistic modernity. The analyses are carried out in critical dialogue with historicism and theories about world literature.

This article presents an introduction to the field of law and literature in Denmark and a legal and literary reading of one of the Western world's first crime stories, The Pastor of Vejlbye, written by the Danish writer Steen Steensen Blicher in 1829. This is a story based on a true case of a possible miscarriage of justice from the seventeenth century. The reading focuses on Blicher's story, the role of the judge, the nature of false confessions, the issue of the death penalty, and the whole narrative and diaristic setting that establishes a strong tension between the epic self-explanation of the pastor and the weak and hesitant diaristic prose of the judge.