Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context (review)

This collection of essays seeks to expand the possibilities of the term "Baroque" as a category, a concept, and a historical period. The volume brings together a host of useful approaches to the cultural manifestations of the Baroque period that are not limited to the literary alone. As the editors note in their introduction, the field of Early Modern Hispanic Studies seems to have overcome the purely negative perception of the Baroque as the decadent art of a dying empire. Rather, the explosion of recent studies, especially those related to Colonial Latin America, have led to a reconsideration of the ways in which the Baroque esthetic could be appropriated by all sorts of social agents. In this sense, many of the essays in the volume build on, revise, or respond to José Antonio Maravall's influential theory of the Baroque as a conservative, top-down and mass-oriented social and historical structure, as delineated in his 1975 study La cultura del barroco. Análisis de una estructura histórica.

The editors' introduction to the volume provides a helpful overview of recent developments in Baroque studies and traces the vicissitudes of the appellation. The remainder of the collection is divided into five sections that discuss specific problems related to the Baroque. Part I, "The Baroque and Its Dark Sides," deals with melancholy, desengaño and the monstrous aspects of the administration of the Habsburg Empire. The two essays in the section discuss the psychological strategies of domination utilized by the Habsburg Empire—the Baroque esthetic being one of them—as well as the deconstructive, delirious nature of the Baroque. Part II, "Baroque Anxieties and Strategies of Survival," illuminates many of the philosophical cruxes common to the Baroque such as the famous horror vacui, new forms of subjectivity, and violent antitheses such as self/other, nature/artifice, or seeming/being. It relates these cruxes to philosophical quandaries common to our own digital age and how we are still burdened by a fear of emptiness, the notion of which is so important to the Baroque. Parts III and IV, "Institutions and Subjectivities in Baroque Spain" and "Strategies of Identity in the Colonial Context," while seemingly divided by geographical locale, in fact similarly address problems common to both Iberian and American experiences: freedom and containment, social control, and emergent forms of subjectivity. The essays in these sections highlight problems of specific social classes, such as the urban bourgeoisie or American Creoles and how they utilized the Baroque to aid in constructing a collective identity. Part V, "The Baroque and Its Transgressive Recyclings," offers two excellent concluding essays by Mabel Moraña and Edward H. Friedman that both recap the collection and open spaces for further dialogue. They also note several problems with excessively liberating or inclusive (mis)readings of the Baroque in our own time of globalization.

There are several key essays that should be highlighted here for the value of their contributions. First, Egginton's essay, "Of Baroque Holes and Baroque Folds," builds on his impressive earlier work in How the World Became a Stage and disputes Deleuze's hypothesis of folds outlined in Le pli: Leibniz et le Baroque. Egginton magisterially integrates wider debates about representation, Baroque artifice, and subjectivity in his contribution, concluding with a discussion of our problematic relationship to truth, as described by Gracián in El criticón. Second, Nelson's essay "From Hieroglyphic Presence to Representational Sign: An Other Point of View in the Auto Sacramental," provides a healthy dose of visual studies for the collection. Given that the Baroque was overwhelmingly visual, even in its poetry, it is quite fitting that the volume includes essays that consider not only theater or painting, but also emblems, an oft-neglected genre. Nelson takes pains to point out the importance of the emblematic mode in the auto sacramental genre as it pertains to dramaturges such as Calderón and Sor Juana. As Nelson affirms, the emblem form plays...