Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (review)

Recently I did a brief Google search for the terms "Baroque" and "literature" and found an interesting database website that listed links to articles on Baroque accomplishments in Western Civilization within the realms of cultural production such as art, literature, music, philosophy, science and "miscellaneous." Eager to see what the cataloguers of the site found of interest in the Spanish-speaking world, I was amused to find they had clumped Spain and Portugal together, but had completely eliminated Luso-Hispanic America from their definition of "Western Civilization." Russian historical and scientific notables were included under "Other," and the US was grouped with England. However, there were no links whatsoever to articles on cultural production anywhere in the Spanish or Portuguese colonies.

I'm not surprised.

I've seen the glazed eyes of colleagues who study European and American cultures when I mention the Hispanic Baroque. Our systems of education in the English-speaking world rarely expose us to Lope de Vega, Velázquez or Victoria, much less to Sor Juana, Villalpando or Sumaya. The culture of the United States came of age in the Enlightenment, with its accompanying disdain for the previous age's aesthetic of centrality and absolutism, summarily dismissing the cultural production of all of the Seventeenth Century and much of the early Eighteenth Century under the rubric of "Bad Taste."

What Zamora and Kaup have done is make available to the English-reading public a series of critical essays that contextualize the Baroque of the New World–both the centripetal impulses of the Seventeenth Century, and the centrifugal fragmentation of the Neobaroque of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries. As William Egginton has noted, Zamora's and Kaup's repositioning of the Baroque and the Neobaroque as "bookends to the modern period" conceptualizes the Baroque of the New World as an aesthetic of immense cultural value.

The editors' introduction is a marvelous summary of the historical approaches to examining the culture of the Baroque, beginning with a reference to Cuban poet and cultural critic José Lezama Lima's parodic encapsulation of aesthetic movements: "The earth is Classical, the sea is Baroque." From here they guide the reader through the labyrinth of critical approaches, focusing on understanding the contemporary incarnations of the Baroque as being rooted and flowering in the cultural expression of Latin America: "excess, exaltation, exuberance."

The book's subtitle, "Representations, Transculturation, Counterconquest," serve as the three divisions into which the editors organize the essays. Essays in the "Representation" section cover the European Baroque, the New World Baroque and Neobaroque in foundational essays by Nietzche, Wöfflin, Benjamin and Wellek as well as newly translated works by Latin American authors such as Alfonso Reyes, Severo Sarduy and Pedro Henríquez Ureña. "Transculturation" includes commentary on colonial practices by José Pascual Buxó and Jorge Ruedas de la Serna that have not previously been accessible to the English-reading audience. Especially useful and groundbreaking are the essays in "Counterconquest" by Roberto González Echevarría and Irleman Chiampi. The translation of a chapter from Gonzalo Celorio's Ensayo de contraconquista opens new dialogue in the area of transculturation as a strategy for counterconquest.

Zamora and Kaup's book represents a new refashioning of the term Baroque, as well as usefully engaging the term "Neo-Baroque" that reinvigorates and resituates discussions in the field of aesthetics and cultural criticism.