Geographies of Philological Knowledge: Postcoloniality and the Transatlantic National Epic by Nadia R. Altschul (review)

This excellent volume sets out to chart an interesting, multilingual, and ambitious territory. How can we productively reread the national philological traditions of Europe, and more specifically their nineteenth-century national epics, from the viewpoint of the postcolonial periphery, in this case the work of Venezuelan polymath Andrés Bello (1781–1865)? Given its scope, Geographies of Philological Knowledge exhibits, not always by design, a tension between doing justice to its coverage of those national traditions in a European context and doing the same for the complex, abundant, and crucial work of Bello in the Latin American one. An additional complication is the claim to intervene in postcolonial studies. In this study, Altschul skillfully engages in original transnational and transfield work, while facing the risks of any study willing to cross these boundaries.

The book is divided into an introduction, six chapters, and a coda. The introduction (“Creole Medievalism and Settler Postcolonial Studies”) clearly states the study’s focus: “this book is concerned with a critique of the national philologies and the national epic through the medievalist work of Andrés Bello” (7). This will require: first, mapping the nineteenth-century evolution of the main European (mostly French and German) national philologies as distinct from the subordinated and belated Spanish ones; and second, understanding the work of Bello as an instance of criollo nationalism with repercussions for both the scholarly and nationalistic traditions of the colonial motherland and Spanish America. Using the work of Walter Mignolo on the coloniality of power and on interactions between local histories and global designs, Altschul asserts that Spain in the nineteenth century was considered by the other European imperial nations to be “an exotic and backward ‘colonial’ space” incapable of producing knowledge (10). According to the imperial narrative Altschul identifies, Spain could only produce culture, not knowledge: a culture moreover heavily influenced by the impact of the Arab presence in the Peninsula. This double colonial-Orientalizing effect was the challenge to be overcome by any Latin American criollo nationalist, like Bello, who was then forced to come to terms with the claim of belonging to the West by virtue of a form of European colonization the rest of the West considered backward.

Altschul defines the relevance of Mignolo’s concepts to her study by modifying them with the help of postcolonial theory. Following Mignolo, she defines Occidentalism as “the cultural self-understanding of the Americas as an extension of Europe,” resulting in “an intellectual internalization of coloniality” (13). Unlike Mignolo’s view of postoccidentalism as the epistemic going beyond the boundaries of the weltanschauung of Occidentalism, for Altschul the term, as manifested in the nineteenth-century practice of criollos like Andrés Bello, refers to “Occidentalist resistances” or “a form of struggle with coloniality that is carried out from within the Occidentalist frame of mind” and involves “resistance to the metropolis coupled with the internal colonialism of subjugated populations [Amerindians and Afro-Americans]” (13). This latter understanding comes, for Altschul, from postcolonial theory’s idea of the white settler, as if the psychic and cultural contradictions between internal and external colonialism were not a crucial part of Mignolo’s view or an integral aspect of Latin American discussions on the concept of criollos: “Settler postcolonial theory thus describes their position with the axiom that settler-colonists are both colonized and colonizing” (14). Armed with this otherwise well known premise about Latin American criollos, Altschul proceeds to develop the six chapters of her study.

The first chapter, “The Global Standards of Intellectual and Disciplinary Historiography,” follows the trajectories of two famous German twentieth-century husband-and-wife Hispanists (Yakov Malkiel and Maria Rosa Lida), on the one hand, and of nineteenth-century Spanish philologist Luis Galván, on the other, in a discussion of Bello’s scholarship on El Cid. Chapter 2, “Taken for Indians: ‘Native’ Philology and Creole Culture Wars,” ambitiously sets out to bring neocolonialism as a...