Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest (review)

Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest. By JOSÉ RABASA. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000 . Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiv, 359 pp. Cloth, $59 .95 . Paper, $19 .95 .

Since the appearance of his 1993 Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism, José Rabasa has emerged as a leading voice among scholars studying early modern/colonial historiography--principally that of the sixteenth century--from an interdisciplinary, subaltern studies perspective. This new volume consists of an introductory essay, six chapters, and an epilogue; four chapters revise journal articles published between 1993-97, and thus much of the material here will be familiar to scholars following Rabasa's work. Although some of the revised pieces--chapter 5 on Garcilaso's La Florida del Inca, for example--retain the feeling of self-contained essays, Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier does a very good job of bringing together earlier studies with new ones to form a cohesive and significant reflection "on the conjunction between writing and violence that grounded the Spanish conquest of the Americas in the sixteenth century and continues to haunt us all, even today" (p. 1 ). The resulting book represents an important contribution to ongoing debates focused on the intersection between colonial Latin American studies and postcolonial theory, and while parts of it will stir controversy, Rabasa offers much material for thinking through these categories of inquiry in fresh ways.

While familiarity with the numerous critical discourses set into motion by Rabasa in the introduction--historiographical, literary, anthropological, postcolonial--is more than helpful to grasp his complex argument, readers are not assumed to have deep knowledge of either sixteenth-century texts or contemporary cultural critique (the former, appropriately for the Duke Press audience, receives more explication than the latter). Thus specialists from many fields may profit from reading this book, which demonstrates both solid early modern textual research and a commitment to engaging the theoretical and political project of subaltern studies from a distinctly Latin American point of view. In particular, the section "After Postcolonialism" (pp. 16-20) presents a clear methodology, building on J. Jorge Klor de Alva's 1995 discussion of the meaning of colonialism in the Spanish New World context, taking it further to "identify the ways in which sixteenth-century colonial enterprises . . . constitute prototypes and inaugurate structures of power relations that remain in force during the so-called second wave of European expansionism" (p. 19 ).

To accomplish these goals, Writing Violence focuses on the northern frontier of Spanish colonization in New Mexico and Florida. Chapters 1 through 6 study, respectively, Cabeza de Vaca's writings; the New Mexico corpus written between 1539 and 1610 , including Fray Marcos de Niza, Pedro de Castañeda, Juan de Oñate and others (much of this existing as archival material); Gaspar de Villagrá's epic poem Historia de la Nueva México (1610 ); the story of Hernando de Soto's expedition, as described by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo in his Historia general; Garcilaso's La Florida del Inca; and lastly, anti-Spanish documents pertaining to Florida, including English and French Protestant verbal and visual texts. Running through all chapters is a critique of the concept of "peaceful conquest," which Rabasa considers oxymoronic and in need of thorough questioning through a consideration of the "force of law," that is, speech acts that push the definition of violence beyond acts of war and into the realm of "the culture of conquest, the mediation of the law, the aesthetics of colonial violence, the moralization of terror, the politics of authorship, and the symbolization of hatred" (p. 25 ).

Recognizing that colonial categories of domination continue into the present, Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier "not only seeks to explain what colonialist texts...