1. José Cárdenas Bunsen will address, on the basis of new documentary evidence, the problem of the authorship of the Quechua grammar and vocabulary that the Italian printer Antonio Ricardo published in 1586. It maintains that these linguistic treaties came out anonymously in order to endow them with the authority of the Third Council of Lima (1582-1583), the episcopal assembly under whose authority Antonio Ricardo established the first printing press in South America. Thanks to the surviving papers of the antiquarian Jesuit Juan de Soria (†1600), this paper will show that the authorities of the Third Council commissioned the composition of a Quechua grammar to the mestizo translator Blas Valera (1545-1597). His Arte de la lengua índica served as the main source behind the 1586 publications and circulated in manuscript form in Andalusia in 1595 with the authorship of the mestizo Jesuit clearly identified. Valera never claimed credit for the anonymous grammar following the corporate pattern of conciliar publications in which the synod is the source from which the authority of its texts emanates. This corporate authorship explains both the anonymous character of the 1586 publication and the acknowledgment of Valera’s personal work among his fellow Jesuits, shaping a peculiar case of colonial authorship that reveals the complex coexistence of the personal and corporate dimensions of the production, publication, and authority of the final, printed text.
2. Shaibal Dev Roy will discuss how recent scholars, such as Eric Gardner, Benjamin Fagan, and Jonathan Senchyne have considered the emergence of black print culture in the United States and suggest that we engage with the archive of black print culture differently by considering the intersections of black authorship, textual consumption, and racialization. In response to this turn, Dev Roy studies the material practices that function as the generative force in authoring, distributing, purchasing, and reading Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative in the US. Equiano’s Narrative was written with a transatlantic audience in mind and that narrative was advertised, printed, and sold by William Durrell in the US. Through this study of the reception of Equiano’s Narrative in the US, he examines black authorship in a period during which the system for producing texts—subscription, printing, selling, and reading—depended on the capital and literacy of white people. As he deals with traces in the material archive, he turns to a brief period between 1791 and 1792, a period prior to the full emergence of black print culture. This research has revealed not only that most of Equiano’s readers in the US were white, but that many of them were enslavers themselves and actively opposed efforts to end slavery.
3. Ana Hontanilla will study how between 1773 and 1775 José Maldonado, a pardo veteran militiaman involved in the defense of Havana during the British invasion of 1762, elevated a petition within the military jurisdiction, requesting ratification of a previous declaration of his fuero or military privileges. At two hundred pages in length, Maldonado’s autobiographical writing may be one of the first petitions filed by a Cuban pardo soldier seeking recognition of fuero and military rank. Between 1794-1795 José Castellanos, a retired first corporal of grenadiers of the free pardo battalion requested the military rank of Coronel Lieutenant, which led to his writing of his notarized biography. This paper explores the interplay between subjectivity and writing in these two pardo militiamen. Hontanilla pays particular attention to the relationship between the legal practices according to which each litigant organized their petitions, the creative employment of the resources available to them for self-representation, and the response of the apparatus of the colonial power. These pardo militiamen struggled to position themselves within the ranks of Cuban racial hierarchy. I contend that the symbolic and economic graces they sought were as important as the recording and archiving of their stories. That is, their autobiographical and biographical writing sought personal gain but mostly to place pardo militiamen contributions within the narrative of Cuba’s history.
4. Kevin Sedeño-Guillén will present how the production of manuscript for the purposes of circulation in Spanish America, existed contemporary with printing, which had a low production, during the three last decades of the eighteenth-century, and to the second decade of the nineteenth-century. One could mention many authors, such as Manuel del Socorro Rodríguez, Eugenio Espejo, José Agustín Caballero, etc.- who had access to print, because of responsibility as newspaper editors, but not in their condition as individual authors. The context to this situation could be traced to the control of access to print maintained by both the Spanish colonial authorities, and by the Church during almost the domination period over the Americas. In order to analyze the impact on the circulation of knowledge, and on the constitution of individual authorship, of the coexistence in the Americas of a print culture and a manuscript culture, this study proposes to analyze the manuscript entitled [Elemental Plan of the Good Taste in all Kinds of Subjects], by the mestizo Manuel del Socorro Rodríguez, editor of Papel Periódico de Santafé de Bogotá [Newspaper of Santafe de Bogota], and librarian at the Royal Public Library at Santafé de Bogotá.
This panel session expect to feature a presider and four formal presentations (up to 13 minutes each) with at least fifteen minutes of unstructured discussion.