Retorica, historia y polemica: Bartolome de Las Casas y la tradicion intelectual renacentista (review)

Bartolomé de Las Casas (1485-1566), protector of the Indians and thorn in the side of Spain's colonial enterprise, continues to engage us all across the centuries. This latest study brings the newest forms of literary analysis to bear on the principal works of Las Casas, especially the magisterial Historia de las Indias. The author invokes themes of the subaltern, the "other," "subtexts," "agency," and other tools of the literary trade. If one is persistent enough to get beneath the sometimes painful forms of expression common in this genre—beneath the tropes and subalterns—the reader will find a little gem of a book. Arias places Las Casas into the cultural and intellectual world of the Renaissance, yet recognizes his role in initiating a new search for equality and a new definition of human rights growing out of the unprecedented events associated with the encounter between the Old and New Worlds.

A good example of an analysis worth considering is her exploration of the prologue to the Historia. In it Las Casas goes through the usual digressions, identifying the reasons for writing history, how a historian establishes his legitimacy and authority, and, in sum, touching on things familiar to most historians. While historians in general tend to establish legitimacy by basing their findings on primary sources, Las Casas invests his works with the authority of the eye witness: "I was there; where were you?"

Las Casas uses history as a tool to convict and convince. The author expands upon this and puts the prologue and Las Casas within the Renaissance intellectual milieu. Like so many literary scholars, she finds his rhetoric as convincing—perhaps more so—than the content or substance. Las Casas, the polemicist, fits into this framework well. As the author points out, Las Casas's favorite historian, Cicero, argued that telling the truth about the past—history—sometimes has a higher calling than mere veracity. We are called to condemn and to affirm, to convict and to teach, and in Las Casas's case, not simply convict the conquest but proselytize the Indians.

A chapter on Las Casas's biography of Columbus explains clearly his several aims in telling the "true" story of the great Discoverer. Part hagiography and part defense of the many claims of Columbus and his heirs based on the original contract of 1492, Arias places this biography into the context of Renaissance practices. What's missing, of course, is the magnificent, sometimes noble, and sometimes exceedingly base character of Columbus captured by modern biography (such as by Samuel Eliot Morison's definitive Admiral of the Ocean Sea, written in the mid-twentieth century before the postmodernists explained it all in exceedingly dull and convoluted language). Chapters on millenarianism, utopianism, and other "isms" add insight not only into Las Casas's world but also into his contribution in signally making the complex cosmos of the sixteenth century. That Las Casas did indeed forge much of the rhetoric of what may be called the "counter conquest" is clearly demonstrated. The Dominican friar comes off as a surprisingly modern man who not only defined and defended the "other" but also provided the texts that colonial postmodernists have thrived on.

This is neither a history book nor a biography, and anyone searching for a life of Las Casas will have to look elsewhere. There are traces of history and biography within, but the central goal was to explore how Las Casas helped pioneer the modern definitions of equality and human rights. For those willing to savor the analysis slowly, there is considerable food for thought in this short monograph.