Transnational Cervantes (review)

In Transnational Cervantes, William Childers reassesses the place of Cervantes’s work in literary history as part of a plan to break down the walls between European and non-European scholarly traditions and, more importantly, between Western and non-Western literatures. To achieve his ambitious objectives, Childers follows a “transnationalizing strategy” inspired by the work of postcolonial theorists from Aníbal Quijano and Walter Mignolo to Homi Bhabha and Edward Said. Postcolonial notions of cultural hybridity, transculturation, internal colonialism, and border thinking inform Childers’s historical perspective, allowing him “to show the relevance, not simply of [Cervantes’s] texts, but of the entire constellation of meanings they establish in relation to their historical circumstances” (xviii–xix). The postcolonial frame of the book draws meaningful connections between the cultural crossroads of early modern Spain and twenty-first-century America, especially when it comes to interpreting the conflictive nature of subaltern identities and contradictory subject positions. This study builds on the insights of another award-winning book, George Mariscal’s Contradictory Subjects: Quevedo, Cervantes, and Seventeenth-Century Spanish Culture (1991), while benefiting from the recent contributions of Carroll Johnson (Cervantes and the Material World [2000]), Barbara Fuchs (Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities [2001]), and Diana de Armas Wilson (Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World [2000]), among others.

While the unapologetic “presentism” of its postcolonial approach is likely to be perceived as the most salient methodological innovation of the book, I would like to call attention to another praiseworthy dimension of Childers’s research, namely, his painstaking and judicious use of archival documents, which adds credibility and historical urgency to the overall picture of his transnational Cervantes. Childers is in good company when it comes to incorporating archival material into his literary commentary, especially among those who follow the lead of Américo Castro or José Antonio Maravall. What I find most refreshing about Childers’s historicist approach, however, is his ability to critically weave archival information into his subtle readings of well-known passages of Don Quijote and El coloquio de los perros as well as several sections of Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda. It should be noted that Childers’s “transnational strategy” offers a much-needed corrective to the long-standing hierarchy of Cervantes’s narrative works by placing Persiles right alongside his most celebrated masterpiece. Whatever one might think of the relative value of Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda in relation to Don Quijote, Childers makes clear that literary scholars cannot afford to keep shoving Persiles under the rug or to continue to pass on the idea that Cervantes’s posthumous work reflects the orthodox views of its author. Childers’s rehabilitation of Persiles as a transnational work that contests imperial ideology builds on the findings of Diana de Armas Wilson, Amy Williamsen, Michael Nerlich, and David Castillo and Nicholas Spadaccini, yet he journeys farther on this revisionist road by effectively using Persiles as a lens through which to reinterpret other Cervantine writings. The result of this approach is a welcome defamiliarization of the Cervantine canon, most notably Don Quijote, which Childers reads not as the first European novel (as is often the case among European and North American scholars), but as the (by)product of the transcultural realities of a conflict-filled period of imperial expansion and internal colonization.

Transnational Cervantes is structured into three parts that correspond to a progressive opening of the interpretive lens: part one, “Decolonizing Cervantes”; part two, “Cervantes’s Transnational Romance”; and part three, “Cervantes Now.” The first section lays out the case for recontextualizing Cervantes’s work, especially Don Quijote, Persiles, and the exemplary novel El coloquio de los perros, within the cultural politics of Counter-Reformation and Imperial Spain. The Cervantes who emerges from these pages is simultaneously Mediterranean and Atlantic, a Cervantes who critically reflects on colonialism in the Americas, on the morisco question, as well as...