Bodies, Texts, and Ghosts. Writing on Literature and Law in Colonial Latin America (review)

With Bodies, Texts, and Ghosts. Writing on Literature and Law in Colonial Latin America, Raúl Marrero-Fente—author of Epic, Empire, and Community in the Atlantic World (2008) in addition to several other books, edited volumes, and numerous essays—continues to build on his important contributions to the field of Spanish American colonial studies and Hispanic Transatlantic studies.

Marrero-Fente explains in his preface that the various essays included in this volume use an interdisciplinary approach to address three interrelated research topics—epic poetry, spectral agency, and the law in the Hispanic Trans-Atlantic colonial period. Each of the essays represents a close reading of a particular text (or, in some instances, several texts), informed by a mastery of the broader context, whether it is classical and medieval literary history, colonial history or the details of a given work’s publication trajectory. Marrero-Fente emphasizes the need to read colonial writings as hybrid texts that encompass a wide range of discourses—literary, legal, historical, geographical, ethnographical, and rhetorical. He argues that epic poetry is an overlooked genre that is key to understanding the transfer of poetic, political, and ideological models from Spain to the Americas, and that legal narratives should be read as “a kind of discursive practice of cultural dominance” (ix).

Many of Marrero-Fente’s arguments will be familiar to scholars of the colonial period. They are grounded in Roberto González Echevarría’s work on forensic rhetoric as one of the master narratives of the Spanish American archive and Walter Mignolo’s work on the epistemic colonial difference as manifested in what he first called colonial semiosis and later developed as border thinking. José Rabasa’s reading of the violence inscribed in all colonial discourse informs these essays, and the powerful call to arms made by Alvaro Félix Bolaños and Gustavo Verdesio in Colonialism Past and Present for an ethically-oriented approach to Spanish American colonial studies finds an equally powerful response in Marrero-Fente’s linking in the closing essay the Las Casas-Sepúlveda debate and the war in Iraq. One might say that these are the familiar ghosts that haunt this collection of essays and with whom Marrero-Fente engages in rich and productive dialogue.

The first five chapters of the book focus on various aspects of epic poetry, an area where Marrero-Fente has done important work, most notably on Silvestre de Balboa’s Espejo de Paciencia. Chapter one, “Spectral Agency: Epic, Loss and the Work of Mourning in Colonial Latin American Literature,” posits that epic poetry represents a spectral presence in colonial Latin American letters both because of its exclusion from the canon and its themes of violence, crime, and abuse. Marrero-Fente examines six of the nine poems that in his view form the corpus of the sixteenth-century colonial epic, offering brief readings that highlight the ghostly figures, elegiac passages, and oneiric sequences marking each poem. Each reading helps to build an overarching argument that the colonial epic recounts not triumphant conquest but rather an act of destruction that cannot be contained. In the second chapter, “Phantom Texts, Scientific Knowledge and Cultural Geography in La Conquista del Perú (1538),” Marrero-Fente uses his reading of this anonymous epic to challenge conventional thinking about literary tradition, insisting that American-themed epic poetry has strong (albeit unacknowledged) links to classical, medieval, and Renaissance models. He notes that the period of conquest and discovery of the Americas coincided with a transition in the development of Spanish poetry, and he traces this connection aesthetically and morally in La Conquista del Perú through his analysis of the figure of Fortune and the temporally successive portraits of Pizarro that emerge in the poem. Marrero-Fente’s discussion of the fundamental differences between how poems and chronicles treat colonial history is most insightful, as are his reflections on how navigation is presented in the epic as both...