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Politics of Temporalization: Medievalism and Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century South America - Hardcover

Altschul, Nadia R.

 
9780812252279: Politics of Temporalization: Medievalism and Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century South America
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812252276 ISBN 13: 9780812252279
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

A postcolonial study of the conceptualization of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America as medieval and oriental
If Spain and Portugal were perceived as backward in the nineteenth century-still tainted, in the minds of European writers and thinkers, by more than a whiff of the medieval and Moorish-Ibero-America lagged even further behind. Originally colonized in the late fifteenth century, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil were characterized by European travelers and South American elites alike as both feudal and oriental, as if they retained an oriental-Moorish character due to the centuries-long presence of Islam in the Iberian Peninsula. So, Nadia R. Altschul observes, the Scottish metropolitan writer Maria Graham (1785-1842) depicted the Chile in which she found herself stranded after the death of her sea captain husband as a premodern, precapitalist, and orientalized place that could only benefit from the free trade imperialism of the British. Domingo F. Sarmiento (1811-1888), the most influential Latin American writer and statesman of his day, conceived of his own Euro-American creole class as medieval in such works as Civilization and Barbarism: The Life of Juan Facundo Quiroga (1845) and Recollections of a Provincial Past (1850), and wrote of the inherited Moorish character of Spanish America in his 1883 Conflict and Harmony of the Races in America. Moving forward into the first half of the twentieth century, Altschul explores the oriental character that Gilberto Freyre assigned to Portuguese colonization in his The Masters and the Slaves (1933), in which he postulated the "Mozarabic" essence of Brazil.
In Politics of Temporalization, Altschul examines the case of South America to ask more broadly what is at stake-what is harmed, what is excused-when the present is temporalized, when elements of "the now" are characterized as belonging to, and consequently imposed upon, a constructed and othered "past."

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nadia R. Altschul is Senior Lecturer of Hispanic Studies at the University of Glasgow. She is author of Geographies of Philological Knowledge and coeditor of Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World.

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Introduction
Iberian Premodern Conquests and Postcolonial Multiple Temporalities

Geopolitics has its ideological foundations in chronopolitics.
—Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other 144

What is lost in opposing a European . . . "modernity" to "alternative modernities" or a space of the nonmodern is the boundary-crossing struggle over the conceptual and moral bases of political and social organization. The asymmetry of conceptual power . . . is all the more reason to keep one's focus on how such concepts were used in historical situations.
—Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question 149

Ibero-America was colonized in the late fifteenth century by Iberian nations that had allegedly not progressed from the medieval to the modern age. According to this narrative, these lands colonized by still-medieval conquerors also continued the existence of a functional medieval or premodern past. As explained by the foremost Spanish medieval historian of his generation, Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, exiled in Argentina in the 1930s, the conquest of Spanish America was "a projection of the Hispanic middle ages in space and in time." As he states, only a medieval society with its unencumbered individualistic soldiers could have achieved the conquest of the new continent. Openly following suit and expanding this vision, the Mexican historian Luis Weckmann clarifies further in two extensive studies the out-of-sync temporality of Iberia in the medieval-modern divide: his portentous 1984 book on the medieval heritage of Mexico, which was followed in 1993 with a similar book on the medieval heritage of Brazil, in which he studies the continuation of the Middle Ages in both locations. Weckmann posited that medieval trends were, overall, stronger in Spain than elsewhere in Europe, because Spain had lagged behind European modernity and had seen no waning of the Middle Ages during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For Spain, the autumn of the Middle Ages happened only during the first two centuries of European modern history, as the country had striven against all odds to keep medieval ideals alive and dominant. According to Weckmann, Iberian medieval civilization had in fact flowered both later in time and elsewhere in space. Since medieval civilization in Spain achieved its highest point later than any other country in western Europe, Spain had transmitted its Middle Ages as a "living product" to the Americas, such that this living Spanish Middle Ages found its last expression in the colonies. Supplied with such background, Leslie Workman, the foundational figure of the study of medievalism, stated in his first editorials for the flagship journal of the discipline that "the society which Spain planted in the New World was medieval by almost any definition."

As Weckmann shows in his book on the medieval heritage of Brazil, the same applied to Portugal and its Portuguese American offspring. As a contemporary Brazilian historian observed, the modernizing reach of the Renaissance in Portugal was limited, such that Iberians' modern colonial experience had in a certain way prolonged their medieval colonial experience. Against an English colonization that was accomplished by "modern" segments of society, the Portuguese process of conquest and colonization had been accomplished by social sectors that were "still medieval." The medievality of Iberia and its Ibero-American colonies, in other words, is predicated on an invidious contrast with a core of Europe that had successfully progressed into modernity and left the Middle Ages behind. As Cooper's epigraph suggests, however, to merely reject this discourse of Ibero-American premodernity as spurious would obscure more than it would illuminate the moral and political boundary crossing lodged in the medieval/modern divide and the particular lineaments of an Iberian medievality that contrasts with European modernity. On a more explicit level, the asymmetry of conceptual power between Iberia and the so-called core of Europe meant that the post-Enlightenment empires had the ability to determine the backwardness of Spain and Portugal as a matter of fact instead of a matter of naming.

This book delves further into the politics of the medieval/modern divide and its attendant concepts of modernity, alternative modernities, and the premodern by investigating these historical boundary-crossing struggles in the Ibero-American context. The notion that Ibero-America was medieval or that the British Empire would bring modern ways of life to the Spanish American premodern backwaters was not the purview of twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars but was already evident in early ethnographic and autoethnographic texts from the nineteenth century. To start examination of deployments of the medieval and the oriental in Spanish South America and Brazil, as well as to understand the implications of a split temporality between Iberian/Ibero-American medievality and European modernity, this introduction first delves into the presence of the medieval in theoretical conceptualizations of contemporaneity. To examine what Cooper called the opposing fields of modernity, alternative modernities, and the premodern, we start by examining the thought of Dipesh Chakrabarty as the most influential understanding of modernity and temporality that addresses medieval contemporaneity.

Contemporaneous Middle Ages

The commonplace according to which Iberia was a throwback medieval land while its geographical peers had progressed into an early modern period is an example of what Johannes Fabian critiqued as the denial of coevalness or allochronicity, a view of temporality by which contemporary populations studied by anthropologists were considered as living at an earlier stage of the western civilizational timeline. According to this division, Iberia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not a Renaissance land but an out-of-sync location that didn't evince the beginning of modern futurity, a noncoeval medieval continuation vis-à-vis Europe's early modernity. In this book, I critique this denial of coevalness and out-of-sync presence of the medieval but also the derived and complementary proposition of the coexistence of multiple temporalities in postcolonial locations like the former colonial holdings of Portugal and Spain.

The notion of coexisting temporalities was proposed within postcolonial studies in opposition to the allochronous status projected onto colonized populations. The most influential opinion regarding the presence of the medieval in this temporal multiplicity is offered by the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty. Associated with his Provincializing Europe, the contemporaneity of the medieval was welcomed as a rejection of the alterity and radical separation of the medieval from the modern and as a critique of the construct of modernity as it sets itself against others, whom it constructs negatively. The contemporaneous presence of the medieval in the modern responds to the denial of coevalness by arguing that the past is active in the present because the present is always made up of elements reaching us from the past. Chakrabarty has argued for two facets of contemporaneity. On one hand, he pointed out that any practices, populations, or institutions existing at a particular present time are fully contemporaneous with each other. This means that there can be no real past time or place. But this is because to recognize the existence of something we call the past means that this past holds a presence within us. The past, then, lives in us, and as long as we recognize them to any extent, these past worlds are never completely lost. On the other hand, because of this inner presence, humans experience time not as linear but in "time knots" wherein past and present coincide, and even when we classify ourselves as modern, we...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812252276
ISBN 13 
9780812252279
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Mare Nostrum Group B.V.
gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk

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Breda
4831 GR
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