“The Colonial Sensorium in Early Spanish America” will explore how texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries portray colonial bodies in relationship to their capacity to smell, taste, and hear. An important line of research has examined the use of sight in colonial Latin American societies, with particular emphasis on how racialized bodies were depicted in colonial visual culture (Carrera 2003; Katzew 2004; Lugo-Ortiz and Rosenthal 2013; Córdova 2014; Patton 2015). This panel moves beyond the emphasis on sight in colonial texts to consider the representation of colonial bodies through other senses. The papers on this panel will demonstrate that such an approach allows for an examination of forms of conceiving the body that have been overlooked because of a contemporary tendency to privilege the visual. The panelists will foreground three different ways colonial subjects navigated an unequal world—through smells, tastes, and sounds.

A recent edited collection by Ryan Giles and Steven Wagschal, Beyond Sight: Engaging the Senses in Iberian Literatures and Cultures (2018), has begun this work within the context of early modern Iberia. As part of this conversation, Lisa Voigt presents an account of what she calls the “Festive soundscapes in Colonial Potosí and Minas Gerais,” opening the conversation onto Latin America. In turn, historian Nancy van Deusen recently published Embodying the Sacred: Women Mystics in Seventeenth-Century Lima (2018), a monograph that privileges the sensorial, especially touch, as a means of examining the social reality of religious women in colonial Lima. Our panel, “The Colonial Sensorium in Early Spanish America,” enters into dialogue with these approaches by paying special attention to the use of the senses in producing and preserving Christian subjects. In pursuing this emphasis, the panel will address how colonial texts portray the humanness of racialized subjects in relation to their senses, often invoking them as proof of colonial subjects’ capacity for salvation. With such a focus, the panel will respond to the MLA’s presidential theme of “Being Human” by foregrounding the ways colonial Spanish American texts use the non-visual senses to inscribe colonial subjects into narratives of evangelical and spiritual progress.

In the first paper, “The Scents of Salvation in the Transatlantic Slave Trade to Spanish America,” Larissa Brewer-García examines textual descriptions of the smells preferred by black men and women in colonial Peru and New Granada. By examining a group of Jesuit writings from seventeenth-century Spanish America, the paper explores the ways in which the destitution and deprivation of black bodies in the middle passage was sometimes redressed upon arrival by a team of black African-born evangelical assistants who would bring fragrant herbs, oils, and incense to greet newly arrived captives in their ports of arrival. While the texts were composed to underscore the exceptional saintliness of the Jesuit priests evangelizing under those conditions, the same evidence can also be used to consider how black men and women were perceived and portrayed as humans with preferences for particular scents. The paper will dialogue with arguments made about the constitutive relationship between the abject and the ideal in the context of the Anglophone Atlantic slave trade by Simon Gikandi’s Slavery and the Culture of Taste (2011), bringing the discussion to an earlier period in the Hispanophone Atlantic.

Daniela Gutiérrez Flores in the second paper, “Tastes and Sounds of the Kitchen in Female Convents of Colonial Lima,” focuses on writings about the spiritual economy of the convent where cooking was simultaneously an everyday activity of religious life, an important source of income for the congregations, and a practice of spirituality that signaled obedience and humility for those that occupied the lowest rungs of the convent hierarchy. The paper explores how taste and sound appear in female religious writings as a crucial means of practicing everyday spirituality, particularly for black and indigenous religious women. It argues that the references to taste and sound in female religious writings should be analyzed in the context of the collaborative and conflictive context of the convent kitchen, where spiritual, bodily, and daily material practices in colonial Latin America collided. The embodied and multisensorial experience of cooking was, she shows, inseparable both from the matter of spiritual salvation and the performance of social rank within convents.

In the final paper, “The Sounds of Failure in Spanish American Conversion Narratives,” Matthew Goldmark studies portrayals of indigenous mothers who refuse to speak about killing their children in the Brevísima relación de la destruición de las Indias (1552) by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas. Given Las Casas’s tight control of this text and his rhetorical skill, scholars have treated the text’s scenes of silence around infanticide as either an allegory of the effects of violence or a projection of a universal motherly emotion to invoke pathos in readers. Goldmark argues that our interpretations of these silences need not be confined to Las Casas’s purposes. Even as texts such as the Brevísima relación attempt to “make sense” of the colonial mission by having indigenous women testify to its horrors, attending to the sound of silence in their testimonies can open the text’s horizons to alternative directions of colonial critique.

This panel explores textual traces of smell, taste, and sound in colonial Spanish American writings to show that a study of “being human” in the pre-enlightenment context of colonial Spanish America must consider multiple senses beyond the visual. Our panel’s presider, Anna More, will respond to the papers, incorporating insight from her own recent research on the portrayal of the senses in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s poetry.