Counter-Reformation Visuality and the Animated Icons of Hernando Domínguez Camargo’s Poema Heroico

COUNTER-REFORMATION VISUALITYAND THE ANIMATED ICONS OF HERNANDO DOMÍNGUEZ CAMARGO’S POEMA HEROICO Kathryn Mayers Wake Forest University A mong the most pressing questions in Spanish American scholarship today is the region’s unique coloniality and the need for more adequate theories to explain it. With the postcolonial studies of the 1980s, Latin Americanists turned largely to theoretical paradigms created in First World schools of thought by scholars focused primarily on British colonialism. Recent scholarship, however, has pointed not just to the lack of attention to Spain’s earlier and more long-lasting colonization of large parts of America, but also to the philosophical Eurocentrism of the conceptual models provided for understanding imperial domination.1 The search for theoretical and testimonial voices more revealing of colonized epistemologies has prompted re-examination of many Creole and European texts once regarded as the origins of the region’s literary canon—texts such as Hernando Domínguez Camargo’s Poema heroico a San Ignacio de Loyola, a Creole eulogy to the founder of the Jesuit order.2 Though celebrated at one time for asserting a uniquely American aesthetics of “counter conquest” (Lezama Lima 303), texts such as the Poema have been cited more recently for exoticizing the Amerindian and for reinforcing the same myths of civilization and modernity that nurtured the ideology of Occidentalism.3 The present essay reconsiders this particular poem’s relevance to the “colonial question” by focusing on its ekphrastic icons—its verbal images of visual objects of art.4 The Poema’s icons of religious artworks and of nature scenes “picture” certain commonplaces of European literature. Yet they simultaneously incite the reader to “see” in ways contrary to two of the principal myths that sustained Occidental imperialism: the myths of Cartesian CALÍOPE Vol.16, No. 1, 2010: pages 119-140 120 Kathryn Mayers objectivity and of Christian providentialism. In the pages that follow, I suggest that the Poema heroico’s icons fill a gap in notions of Spanish American coloniality by revealing a sort of border epistemology among Creole elites different from that of Amerindians and different, as well, from the perspective of early modern European colonizers. Furthermore, I argue, these poetic icons alert us to potential contradictions in twenty-first-century approaches to the colonial question, insofar as they prefigure the subject position assumed by a number of the very critics who today emphasize the inadequacy of Anglophone postcolonial theory for a Latin America with a far different pattern of colonization. Positional Hybridity and Ekphrastic Pictures In contrast to areas of the world colonized in later centuries and by other European powers, Latin America saw the rise of a demographically self-reproducing, interstitial colonial elite that existed at the borders between metropolis and periphery (Osterhammel 9).5 Spanish by law but American by birth, European in cultural origin but American in homeland, white in class but frequently mestizo in blood, Creoles fully fit neither of the categories of “alien rulers” nor “exploited local inhabitants” that typically distinguished colonizers from subalterns in other colonial areas. Hernando Domínguez Camargo, an American-born, Jesuit-ordained Creole who, for reasons unknown, was expelled from the Order shortly after entering it, exemplifies the positional hybridity of this Spanish American elite. As a Western-educated white, Domínguez Camargo shared the cultural memory and sensibility of those who developed the Western myths of civilization and modernity that legitimized European conquest and colonization of Amerindian peoples. However, as an institutional outcast who elected to reside in a series of embattled Muisca-Chibcha towns for the duration of his expulsion,6 Domínguez Camargo also knew the consequences of these myths for Amerindians: their decimation by forced labor and their loss of land and livelihood under forced relocation. This interstitiality notwithstanding, interpretations of the Poema heroico have oscillated between one of two ideological extremes. Upon the poem’s rediscovery HERNANDO DOMÍNGUEZ CAMARGO’S POEMA HEROICO 121 in the early twentieth century, scholars placed the work firmly within the Peninsular tradition, noting its culteranismo and seeing in it the culmination of Luis de Góngora’s style in the Indies. Beginning in the 1960s, intellectuals reinterpreted the work as the origins of an...