José de Acosta, Violence and Rhetoric: The Emergence of Colonial Baroque

SUMMARY:

This essay considers the relationship between the violence of the conquest and the Baroque as a rhetorical style and a historical will. Walter Benjamin ascertained that Baroque allegories attempted to overcome a religious-epistemological crisis that questioned the connection between events on the one hand, and a providential order on the other. José de Acosta’s De procuranda indorum salute (1588) represents the emergence of a colonial Baroque that aimed both at suturing the catastrophe of the Indies to transcendence, and at moving history forward by breaking the impasse reached by the debates on the justice of the conquest. Acosta’s Baroque becomes a third alternative confronting the figures of Machiavelli and Las Casas, permitting Spain to continue its imperial path while avoiding two unacceptable conclusions: acknowledging, as Machiavelli argued, that Spain’s supposed good intentions were no more than an appearance whose truth resided in a will to power with no moral or religious justification; or having to restore, as Las Casas demanded, everything misappropriated from the inhabitants of the new territories.