The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative (review)

The publication of The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative is to be celebrated by all readers who have admired Rolena Adorno's trajectory of distinguished scholarship. "The culmination of three decades of research and reflection about colonial texts and their legacies" (vii), this book spans boundaries of geography and time, equally at home in colonial Mexico, Peru, North America, and imperial Spain. As in her prior work, Adorno explicates the presence of the colonial past in the post-Independence Americas, here bringing that past into the twentieth century as well.

The Polemics of Possession represents the highest level of meticulous research as it addresses the question of what remains the same and what is altered as change inevitably takes its course through New World history. The book is constructed as a journey through Adorno's own thinking process, as she connects readings of texts around the centralizing thesis that early colonial disputes regarding possession of lands and peoples established a matrix within which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonial texts are inscribed. Chapter 1 lays out this thesis, followed by Chapter 2 dedicated to Guaman Poma and his reading of Las Casas. Chapters 3 and 4 take up Las Casas himself, first alone, then in the company of Sepúlveda and Francisco de Vitoria. Chapter 5 continues a reading of Sepúlveda as historian alongside López de Gómara and Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, while Chapters 6 and 7 explore Bernal Díaz's eyewitness retelling of history. Ranging widely over the entire region, Chapter 8 examines the written and visual representation of the Amerindian in a variety of texts, leading into the myths arising from the figures of Gonzalo Guerrero and Cabeza de Vaca, subjects of Chapters 9 and 10 respectively. El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's reading of Cabeza de Vaca in Chapter 11 guides us to the twentieth-century creation of fictional towns in the works of Rulfo and García Márquez. Finally, Chapter 12 looks at the way historical figures of the colonial era are re-created by Reinaldo Arenas and Alejo Carpentier.

Rolena Adorno is not only a scrupulously thorough scholar, but also a principled one. Her sense of place as a North American scholar of colonial Spanish America, as a translator between cultures and worlds, has always been informed by a profound sense of justice and humanity. It is no accident that The Polemics of Possession concentrates on those same issues as they are brought to the fore in the debates around territorial possession. What, in the midst of the unwelcome change that befell what was called the New World after Spanish conquest, could survive and even resist the destruction? Adorno's insistence that we recognize the Amerindian presence in all colonial writing has been a beacon of principled practice for the field.

Alongside the insistence that scholars not abet an erasure or suppression of the native presence, two other principles of practice for writing on colonial narrative, which Adorno draws from her long experience as a reader, are set out here. Together they constitute the essence of this volume and ensure its place as a major reference in the field for decades to come. The first is that of "colonial writing as a social practice" (4), of these narratives as events themselves rather than mere descriptions of events. Such a perspective leads us to an understanding of colonial writing, from the early period and then on into the baroque era, as an exercise in rewriting, of a developing "web of connections" (6) between works treating the Spanish conquest and colonization of America. Each work bears echoes of those preceding it and resounds in others to follow, not simply as one author citing another, but as persuasive narrations intended to affect policy and social practice on both sides of the Atlantic. As Adorno emphasizes, it is not objective, historical truth that these works pursue, but rather a polemical incursion into the central debate of possession of territory and...