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Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza Y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico - Hardcover

More, Anna

 
9780812244694: Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza Y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812244699 ISBN 13: 9780812244694
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

In the seventeenth century, even as the Spanish Habsburg monarchy entered its irreversible decline, the capital of its most important overseas territory was flourishing. Nexus of both Atlantic and Pacific trade routes and home to an ethnically diverse population, Mexico City produced a distinctive Baroque culture that combined local and European influences. In this context, the American-born descendants of European immigrants--or creoles, as they called themselves--began to envision a new society beyond the terms of Spanish imperialism, and the writings of the Mexican polymath Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (1645-1700) were instrumental in this process. Mathematician, antiquarian, poet, and secular priest, Sigüenza authored works on such topics as the 1680 comet, the defense of New Spain, pre-Columbian history, and the massive 1692 Mexico City riot. He wrote all of these, in his words, out of love for my patria. Through readings of Sigüenza y Góngora's diverse works, Baroque Sovereignty locates the colonial Baroque at the crossroads of a conflicted Spanish imperial rule and the political imaginary of an emergent local elite. Arguing that Spanish imperialism was founded on an ideal of Christian conversion no longer applicable at the end of the seventeenth century, More discovers in Sigüenza y Góngora's works an alternative basis for local governance. The creole archive, understood as both the collection of local artifacts and their interpretation, solved the intractable problem of Spanish imperial sovereignty by establishing a material genealogy and authority for New Spain's creole elite. In an analysis that contributes substantially to early modern colonial studies and theories of memory and knowledge, More posits the centrality of the creole archive for understanding how a local political imaginary emerged from the ruins of Spanish imperialism.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anna More is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Introduction: Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive

biombo: The Fissures of History

The Museo Franz Mayer in Mexico City houses a decorative standing screen (biombo) whose magnificent double-sided painting strikingly evokes the tension between the imaginary order of seventeenth-century New Spain and the region's violent origins (Figure 1). On one side, the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan unfolds as a series of battles erupting simultaneously throughout the pre-Columbian city. Although a legend in the lower left-hand corner labels key moments of the conquest depicted in the painting, the composition itself is geographical and spatial rather than chronological. A strong chiaroscuro marks the events represented: while light bathes the depiction of the Spanish approach to the mainland and Moctezuma's reception of Hernán Cortés in the upper left edges, the darkened lower corners reveal indigenous families fleeing into the surrounding forests as well as the infamous "sad night" (noche triste), when the Spanish were temporarily forced to retreat from the city. Rather than a chronological narrative, the painting presents the conquest as a palimpsest in which Moctezuma's initial reception of the Spanish gives way to bloody battles that force residents to flee into the wilderness. The depiction thus actively undermines sixteenth-century accounts such as Francisco López de Gómara's official history, which narrated the Mexican conquest as an act of providence. Although the biombo includes stock events from this providentialist historiography, such as the appearance of Santiago to the Spanish conquerors and Moctezuma's death at the hands of his own vassals, these scenes are not given priority over what one critic has called the "motley banquet of violence" (abigarrada festín de violencia).Indeed, the overall impression is one of violent disorder in which bodies, spears, and horses point outward from empty buildings. Perhaps the most spectacular of these constructions, labeled the "temple that was in the central plaza of Mexico where the palace stands today" (cue que estaba en la plaza de México donde oi esta el Palacio), is fantastically represented as a hollowed-out octagon rather than the towering pyramid depicted in other colonial sources. The biombo, in short, portrays the conquest as a disordering event rather than the conclusive translatio imperii found in official historical representations.

The contrast between this representation and that of the second side of the biombo could not be greater. On this, a serene map of seventeenth-century Mexico City spreads out as if before the eyes of a traveler who has paused on his journey through the hills outside the city. As opposed to the violent chiaroscuro of the previous side, the viceregal buildings are homogenous in color and shape, differing occasionally in size and form and distributed symmetrically around the central plaza. This time, the legend identifies an ordered urban geography, naming all the buildings whose repetitive geometry and red roofs would be indistinguishable from one another otherwise. The soft and graceful wooded landscape that rings the city sets a bucolic tone and complements the gardens inside. The geometrical symmetry, which extends even to the watery canals that cut through the city, is broken only by the sweeping curve of the aqueduct that points a path to the heart of the city: the central plaza (zócalo) and the cathedral. But what is perhaps most remarkable, after the chaos of the previous side, is the complete absence of human figures from the urban scene, as if the order of the city depended on their exile. What embodiment may be found is funneled through the perspective of the viewer atop Chapultepec, one of the symbolic centers of the colonial government, whose hill provides the best vantage point from which to survey the city. In fact, the painting follows a generic chorographic perspective often used in seventeenth-century cartographic representations, in this case lifted directly from a popular Dutch atlas of the seventeenth century. The original drawing was completed in 1628 by Juan Gómez de Trasmonte, the architect of Mexico City's cathedral. This he made at the request of Adrian Boot, a Dutch engineer who was helping with the desagüe project, the perennial attempt to solve the city's flooding problems. The map sought to represent the city as it should appear after further draining of the lake. As the late seventeenth-century biombo was likely a gift to the new viceroy, the Conde de Galve, the incorporation of the map's chorographic perspective surely sought to symbolize the relationship between colonial governance and an orderly city, cleansed of any visual impediments to the sweeping gaze.

Although it would be easy to read the biombo's antipodal sides as depicting the civilizing triumph of Spanish urbanity, the lack of providentialism in the representation of the conquest and the absence of bodies in the viceregal city force us to question such a clear moral conclusion. In fact, the pairing of urban order with violent conquest produces not so much a teleology as the uncomfortable meeting of two planes of history around sites in the city. The biombo's physical structure further suggests the fragility of a viceregal order built on conquest. Although modern reproductions customarily represent the screen in its full extension, the material object in the Museo Franz Mayer is not one solid plane but rather a series of panels, fissured to allow it to stand freely in space. In this way, the voids that interrupt the screen negatively register the presence of the opposite side. In fact, if we imagine walking around the freestanding object, its very structure denies a clear chronological order. Instead, past and present are locked in a dialectical embrace suggesting as much the desire as the impossibility of overcoming the Spanish conquest at the end of the seventeenth century. Although the legend on the first side orients the viewer by noting the viceregal transformation of several pre-Columbian buildings, the absence of bodies in the viceregal city abstracts its order from any human chronology, as if the human form would be the most palpable point of connection to the violence displayed on the other side. Rather than a document of historical transformation, then, the biombo appears to retreat from history into an idealized urban plane. If nothing else, the biombo presents the problem of relating an imagined seventeenth-century viceregal order to its historical foundations in violence nearly a century and a half before.

As a material object, the biombo is a salutary reminder of the specificity of historical artifacts, even those whose representational power transcends their immediate history of production and reception. A decorative art form initially imported from Asia, the colonial biombo is an excellent example of the hybridity of cultural production in seventeenth-century New Spain. In fact, it is possible that biombos became popular in the houses of the colonial elite precisely because their form condensed a history of cultural incorporation that was itself an essential characteristic of New Spain. The Franz Mayer biombo suggests this history by framing the battle scenes of the first side with a golden arabesque arch, a Moorish motif that gloriously remembers the Reconquest of Spain. On the reverse side, however, this frame has been replaced by a border of flowers, a common trope for America as an earthly paradise that avoids all reference to the violence of conquest. While framing the transformation of urban space after the conquest in moral terms, these juxtaposed motifs do little to provide a historical account of that transformation....

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2012
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812244699
ISBN 13 
9780812244694
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
362
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

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