The panelists will combine historical and hermeneutic approaches with critical reflections on material and symbolic spaces, in order to illuminate different aspects of colonial subjectivity. Professor Stephanie Kirk will approach epistolary texts exchanged between Sor Juana and Peruvian readers. These epistles shed invaluable and unusual light upon literary and cultural relations between the two main viceroyalties of the Spanish empire along with the obstacles their authors’ colonial status placed in the way of the formation of connections. In their works, all the poets evince a trans-American creole pride but at the same time demonstrate a consciousness of the rewards of transatlantic success such as that enjoyed by Sor Juana alone among them. The Peruvians address Sor Juana’s transatlantic publishing triumphs and how these intersect with their utopian trans-American itineraries of cultural exchange between the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru. This triangulation of cultural spaces (Mexico, Spain and Peru) is of fundamental importance since it stretches the conventional boundaries of compartmentalized colonial territories and metropolitan centers, thus creating an intellectual web for the exchange of ideas and textualities. Professor Kirk analyzes this poetic exchange as a evidence of hidden trans-American cultural networks. Despite the Spanish Crown and its colonial administrators privileging transatlantic cultural circulation and employing protectionist measures to inhibit trans-American connections, exchanges between the two viceroyalties still occurred – albeit in ways that avoided official circulations. The symbolic capital of the transatlantic loomed large over American poetic production and we see this manifested in the Peruvian poets’ epistles to Sor Juana as they wrestle with how to promote the cultural benefits of the trans-American and inter-Viceregal.
In the presentation on the works of Luis Jéronimo de Oré, Catalina Andrango will focus on the Symbolo Catholico Indiano (1598), which was the first evangelization manual by a Peruvian-born author to be printed in Peru. This opera prima not only responded to the need for missionary material to more effectively communicate with the natives, but also responded to the insufficient understanding of Andean culture in the process of evangelization. In 1605, Oré arrived in Europe to represent the interests of the Franciscan Order. In 1614, after several years in Spain and Italy, Oré was sent to Florida where he inspected the Franciscan missions, which is chronicled in his Relación de los mártires que ha habido en la Florida (1619). Symbolo and Relación Oré includes Ore's critique of imperial politics regarding the complex relationship between Spaniards and native people. As an authority sent by the Spanish crown to unfamiliar territories, Oré applies the missionary experience he acquired in his homeland, the Viceroyalty of Peru, to evangelize the indigenous people of La Florida. This paper demonstrates that Symbolo and Relación contribute to put into perspective not only the missionary experience in both Viceroyalties, but also the imperial failures of an expansionist mission as Oré subtly exposes the chaos of La Florida, which equally relates to the Andean situation.
As for the paper titled "Refugee Camps and Displaced Indians. Las Casas and the Biopolitical", it will concentrate on the conception of a safe space in which indigenous subjects could be saved from the rigors of forced work and the threat of illnesses and hunger. While responding to humanitarian reasons, this conception also attempts to secure the continuous availability of laborers for the Crown. The paper analyzes the following context: By the beginning of the 1510s and before the “discovery”and conquest of Mexico (1517-1519), there is a sense of colonial “crisis” related to this demographic catastrophe that threatened the Spanish colonial establishment in the New World. The population decline of the natives of the Greater Antilles led to the importation of people from the “useless Islands” or the Bahamas and to the expansion of the borders of devastation and death. Within this context, Bartolomé de las Casas proposes to the king a form of “peaceful” colonialism and a series policies for saving and multiplying the Indians, for humanely extracting work, and for the governing of the natives under the sovereignty and protection of the king. But what about the people at the borders of the colonial expansion who were not subjects of the king yet? Las Casas imagined the biopolitical protection for this precarious life, and advances the idea of conducting rescue expeditions and organizing refugee camps run by the friars, to save the Lucayos from the Bahamas. This design represent an unprecedented biopolitical paradigm, not subordinated to the old Christian imperative of saving the poor, the sick and the hungry. On the contrary, Las Casas insists on the King's obligation to rescuing those whose lives were deprived of rights and protection.
This academic exchange hopes to illuminate the importance of spaces as the platform for the creation of intellectual networks, religious dissemination and humanitarian conceptions of a "remedial colonialism" that could at least preserve the lives of Indigenous workers. Each panelist will read his/her paper for 16-18 minutes leaving time for questions from the audience and for exchange with each other. A series of open questions will be discussed at the end of the session in order to share possible avenues of research for the analysis of the topic of space in colonial times, and its relations to subjectivity, power, race and resistance.