Antiquities and Classical Traditions in Latin America ed. by Andrew Laird and Nicola Miller (review)

Recent trends in classical reception studies have begun to shift beyond Europe and the culture of its elites, with Latin America as one area of especially energetic scholarly interest. This volume, the result of a 2016 colloquium hosted at the Warburg Institute in London titled "Classical Traditions in Latin American History," advances this burgeoning discourse by presenting discrete studies in the classical traditions present throughout Latin America. The ideological approach that is the organizing principle of the volume is especially progressive for its concerted interest in decolonizing the legacies of classical antiquity and its reception. Where classical reception studies have established robust lines of inquiry concerning the "different ways in which early modern views of antiquity shaped European responses to the New World," as summarized in the preface, this volume focuses on the traditions that emerged from within Latin America itself, shaped by or adapting classical antiquity.

The scope of the contributions, taken altogether, is admirably ambitious and exceptionally rich, especially for how slim a volume it is at 240 pages: the studies included in the volume, arranged chronologically, variously examine material beginning in the 1500s and culminating in the 20th century, with a wide-ranging geographic span that includes Argentina, Puerto Rico, Paraguay, Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico, and Chile, to name just a few countries. This sprawling overview of time period and geographic area provides convincing testimony of the "many vibrant classical traditions all over Spanish America" and its relevance for classicists (Cañizares-Esguerra, "Envoi," 198), thus firmly establishing the premises required for further research and, consequently, accomplishing one of the tasks set out by the editors in the preface to the volume, namely the integration of Latin American cultural production into global intellectual and cultural history. Such breadth of scope runs the risk of flattening the rich distinctions between Latin American cultures and time periods, but because the majority of the contributions are focused in subject and concise in argument, a sense for various distinct classical traditions and for subtle differences between regions and cultures emerges from the case studies. The volume simultaneously generates a view for some of the general characteristics common to a pan-Latin American engagement with the classics that can be set in contrast to other global regions and a trajectory of a diachronic evolution between earlier and later stages of engagement.

There is a clear prioritization throughout the volume of bringing attention to historically marginalized presences while acknowledging that encoded behind the scholarly inquiry central to the project are historical processes predicated upon suppression, conquest, and colonization. Nicola Miller's contribution, eschewing elite cultural production exemplified by epic poetry, historical writing, and political thought, analyzes the classical references of popular poetry, sayings, and song, with examples from Argentina, Cuba, and Chile, to demonstrate how "marginalised groups deployed classical references both to debate and dispute creole visions of the future of their nations" (146) in a learned double-speak that appropriated classical references for distinct aims. Miller's analysis concludes with a nuanced reading that places this cultural production "in between the conventional poles of opposition and acceptance" (154). Andrew Laird's analysis of the local histories of three indigenous Mexican chroniclers who used classical references as a means of "affirming a global value for their histories" (100) elevates the writings of indigenous thinkers as working within but also rivaling traditions of European antiquarian learning. Where elite or European cultural production is the focus of study, the approach is one that thoughtfully complicates familiar reception narratives. Desiree Arbo demonstrates that the 18th-century treatise of the Catalan José Manuel Peramás comparing the Jesuit mission in Paraguay to the ideal society projected in Plato's Republic functioned to "[present] the indigenous communities in the missions as ordered societies . . . composed of active and intelligent citizens" (121) within broader debates concerning identity, nation, and the condition of the indigenous. Similarly, Stuart McManus documents the transmission of Greco-Roman theories and...