A Menippean Defense of Spain’s American Conquest: Linguistic Imperialism in Juan Pablo Forner’s Exequias de la lengua castellana

Among eighteenth-century scholars, Juan Pablo Forner (1756-1797) is widely regarded as Spain’s most fervent apologist. Critical attention, however, has tended to focus almost exclusively on his Oración apologética por la España y su mérito literario (1786), which he wrote in direct response to Masson de Morvillier’s entry on Spain for the Encylopédie méthodique (1782), and has largely overlooked a key digression within his understudied Menippean satire, Exequias de la lengua española, which defends Spain’s colonial record against European criticism. This article attempts to shed light on the Menippean techniques Forner uses to counter the disparaging portrait of Spanish colonial practices, and argues that the menippea enables him to produce one of the eighteenth century’s most insultingly aggressive, rancorous, and ludic defenses of Spanish colonialism. It examines how Forner uses the freedom of invention typical of Menippean satire to rehearse and settle the Valladolid dispute of 1550–1551 between Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de Las Casas, and proposes that Forner’s vision of a benevolent linguistic imperialism, which functions primarily as a pretext for assuaging Spain’s colonial guilt, has its origins in Carlos III’s linguistic policy, which imposed Castilian as the sole language of empire in 1770.