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Current Issue Article Abstracts Winter 2010 Vol. 78.1 • • • • • • • • Governor Sancho and the Politics of Insularity Daniel Nemser Governor Sancho's rule on the ínsula Barataria in Part II of Don Quijote has been read as evidence of Cervantes's endorsement of a more or less concrete political vision in response to the perception of Spanish decline. By focusing on Sancho's actions on the ínsula, however, scholars have overlooked the politics of the ínsula itself. This essay takes the Barataria episode as a point of departure for an analysis of the transatlantic politics of insularity in early modern Spain. In this context, insularity is necessarily a colonial matter. Filled with references to the practices of colonialism and specifically to the Americas, Barataria speaks to the legitimacy of possession and the spatial dimensions of governance. By reading Cervantes next to political theorists like Francisco de Vitoria, this essay suggests that the modernity of Barataria's politics lies in its insular ambiguity, a reimagining of the spatiality of colonial relations. Criminality and Subjectivity in Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez Patricio Boyer This essay explores the ways that Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora's Los infortunios de Alonso Ramírez adapts the picaresque's classical and Golden Age generic conventions for a Baroque and New World idiom. By examining the nature of criminality in the work, I argue that the traditional Spanish picaro's ambivalent relationship to the law is, in Sigüenza's text, replaced by an ambivalent relationship to the notion of criminality itself. Building on recent work exploring criollo identity in Sigüenza's writing, I show how he complicates our understanding of identity by offering readers a version of transgression that is more existential than juridical, and how he uses Alonso's story to examine the role early modern capitalism and maritime culture played in the development of New World identities. Graffiti and the Poetics of Politics in Rosas's Argentina (18291852) Brendan Lanctot This article considers the function of writing in Argentina during the mid-nineteenth century by examining graffiti, a scriptural practice that occupies the margins of what Ángel Rama termed the "lettered city." Against the grain of the durable myth that dissident letrados of the Rosas regime wrote in a cultural void, an interrogation of this corpus demonstrates how an array of social actors struggled to establish and define the operative terms of shared political and aesthetic discourses. The inscriptions of political adversaries, despite claims to the contrary, similarly appealed to the emotions of their audiences in order to imagine the nation as an organic, pre-existing social field sharply divided between a "we" and an internal other: civilization versus barbarism, or federalists versus unitarians. In other words, graffiti demonstrates how competing models for hegemony were debated through a common aesthetics and a mutually intelligible, modern political language. Maravillosas supercherías: género sexual y nacionalismo en los "Apuntes autobiográficos" de Pardo Bazán y Trafalgar de Galdós Carmen Pereira-Muro This article contrasts the construction and gendering of national subjects in two apparently unrelated 19th-century texts: Benito Pérez Galdós's historic novel Trafalgar (1873), the first of the Episodios nacionales, and Emilia Pardo Bazán's "Apuntes autobiográficos" (1886). It claims that the Episodios (specifically Trafalgar) can be traced as a master narrative adopted and subverted by Pardo Bazán in her efforts to find a place for the woman writer in a national culture conceived as exclusively masculine by the literary project (Realism) to which she affiliated herself. In her "Apuntes autobiográficos," the illusory character of gender and nation allow her to create a space for herself as a national subject and active builder of the national culture. The bending and renegotiation of the gender structures of the nation as formulated in Trafalgar caused her bitter fights and alienation in her time, but ultimately granted her a prominent place in what would be known as "Spanish literature." La Inquisición portuguesa en sesión: arte, poder y resistencia en O Judeu, de Jom Tob Azulay Gonzalo Aguiar Malosetti and Joseph Schraibman This article studies the political and ideological transactions between the monarchy and The Portuguese Inquisition in the XVIIIth century, dealing with the judicial process against the Brazilian dramatist, Antonio José da Silva (1705-1739), accused of judaizing by the Holy Office. We examine closely O Judeu (1996) by Jom Tob Azulay, a film which portrays this tragic affair by employing some of the aesthetic devices of "cinéma qualité." The dual analysis of the playwright as both subject of history and of fiction is at the center of our study. On the one hand, Antonio José is the focal point of a series of institutional arbitrariness seeking to legitimize the Inquistion as a political and repressive entity. And on the other, the ideological underpinnings behind the film highlight once again the complex relation between art and power in an authoritarian society. |
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