Subterranean Modernities and Phantasmal Nations: Some Questions and Observations

Overview

Duke University Press certainly has been busy. All six titles discussed here spin out of a commitment to enlarge and complicate the cultural, political, economic, and social scope of Latin American scholarly studies. In the texts that I explore here we see many analytical twists and turns in and out of a variety of cultural phenomena (maps, pictographs, literature, testimonios, and heretical diaries, among others) that aim to enliven discussion (modernity, coloniality/postcoloniality, nation) and expand conceptions of the past and present Americas (North and South).

The works, some more directly than others, seek to position the Spanish conquest and colonization of the Americas within the historical script to revise concepts of coloniality, modernity, and nation-state formation (a stronghold of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-European postcolonial studies). In Modern Inquisitions Irene Silverblatt explores how the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century inquisitions (traditionally considered premodern) in Lima, Peru, act as a violent undercurrent in the nascent formation of a unified Spanish nation-state. Inquisitional authorities like the Archbishopric of Lima played a significant role in scripting race narratives of the indigenous as Other. Silverblatt untangles the inquisition's role as an arbiter of "race thinking" (7) in the shaping of the modern world. Archived sermons, catechisms, diaries, autos-da-fé, and Catholic church correspondence between Madrid and Lima are the trace markers that make up a "theater of power" (7) that performs cultural and political unity of church and proto-state (at home and abroad) in opposition to Others: practitioners of witchcraft, Jews, Muslims, New Christians (colonialists like the Portuguese and Dutch), and all manner of indigenous heretics. It is upon the illusion of unity and "godlike" (80) autonomy, naturalized by the inquisitor's appeal to reason, moral inhibition, and regulation (in the name of a res publica) that the modern nation-state is built. For example, Silverblatt analyzes the "texts" of Doña Mencia de Luna, Manuel Henríquez, and Manuel Bautista Pérez, all of whom become the enemy (threatening Judaizers) necessary for a nascent Spanish nationalist discourse to form. Thus, to reveal the fragmentary nature of what amounts to "state terror" is to not only place Latin American coloniality centrally on the historical grid, but is also to reveal how the inquisition helped give violent birth to a Spanish nation-state and thus set the direction for, as Silverblatt writes, "modern race thinking" (219).

Silverblatt is not the only scholar interested in teasing out formative cultural, political, and economic subtexts within a Latin American coloniality that informs the birth of the modern nation-state. The eleven scholars brought together in Mark Thurner and Andrés Guerrero's edited After Spanish Rule focus less on the Iberian Peninsula and more on the discursive formation of the modern nation-state in Latin America. Collectively, they paint a thick and multilayered historiography of significant colonial and postcolonial moments in a wide sweep of Latin America (from the Andes to the Caribbean). For instance, Mauricio Tenorio turns his sights on Mexican creole/mestizo elites' construction of nationhood, inclusive of indigenous peoples only as symbolic objects; so, in the building of a postindependence Mexican nation-state...