Contact, Mediation, and Myth in Early Latin American Literatures

Michel de Certeau wrote: "By an art of being in-between, he draws unexpected results from his situation"—an intriguing expression that opens Yanna Yannakakis's book. In her work, the citation applies to Native intermediaries, but it seems just as pertinent to scholars and teachers who (seek to) work comparatively. They, too, must distance themselves from their monolingual training and expertise in order to tackle new fields in the hope of "unexpected," or even enlightening, "results." This is true not only for those who work across languages but also for anyone who cultivates a transatlantic, transcultural, or transhistorical perspective on early America—and so, suddenly, nearly everyone can be called a comparativist, in some sense of the word. I make this point in order to argue for the importance of Latin American scholarship to North American studies. The flourishing field of Latin American literature and history should be taken into account not just out of a sense of duty but because it offers real methodological and theoretical advantages. For those who still wonder why they should care, this review begins by pointing out specific genres and themes that are shared across the colonial Americas, and that would benefit from comparative consideration in criticism as well as in the classroom.

Teaching, to be honest, is still complicated: there are few, good, affordable editions and translations of Latin American sources that can be assigned to undergraduate classes and professors harbor an understandable reluctance to assign many texts in translation or are simply hesitant to change time-tested syllabi. Rather than add another voice to the extensive debate about whether early American culture is best taught transatlantically, hemispherically, or both—let alone try to convince or castigate anyone about the need to assign more diverse texts—this overview begins by delineating productive pairings of Spanish writings with more canonical (and therefore usually English) texts. The idea behind this arrangement, which is followed by brief summaries and reviews of the four listed books, is to spark interest instead of inducing guilt, stressing the relevance of Latin American texts to current perspectives on North American literature and history.

Fictional dialogues are a popular genre across the American colonies. John Eliot's Indian Dialogues (1671) comes most immediately to mind, as well as its scholarly readings by Kristina Bross, David Murray, and Thomas Scanlan. Although this tract was purportedly written to aid future missionaries, Eliot uses the opportunity to stage wishful exchanges that speedily convert Native leaders while also assuaging the fears of "a colonial audience concerned about the outbreaks of violence with coastal Algonquians" (Bross 119). (For the sake of realism, this piece is perhaps best read alongside another less fictional Eliot tract, though its obvious fakery also, arguably, constitutes its charm.) Christoph Saur's A Dialogue between a Newcomer and a Settler in Pennsylvania (1751), translated from the German by Patrick Erben for Carla Mulford's Oxford anthology (735-44), is a promotional piece for the Middle Colonies, which contains a wealth of information on colonial Pennsylvania as well as on eighteenth-century Europe. It includes a spirited defense of Pietism, alongside such endearingly honest questions as: "If it would happen to me as it has happened to many people in this country [Germany], and I could not pay everything in cash and had to go into debt, would that be a big issue?" (Mulford 739). Helpful additions to this pair might be Manuel da Nóbrega's Dialogue for the Conversion of the Indians (Castillo and Schweitzer 1556-57) and the dialogue written by Fray Bernardino de...