Colonial Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Rolena Adorno

Author:Rolena Adorno [Adorno, Rolena]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011-11-04T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Urban Baroque

The European literary and artistic phenomenon called the Baroque (etymologically, a misshapen pearl) has been defined variously as a historical movement, spanning the seventeenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries, or as an artistic sensibility and creative impulse that can occur in any period. As a style in the literary, plastic, and musical arts it is characterized by movement, contrast, exuberance, wit, and high drama. Its aesthetics consists of carrying to their ultimate consequences the artistic tendencies of the Renaissance that went before it. The representation of the world of nature is one of its most arresting topics. With the Baroque, for example, the sculpture of a tree does not take the geometric form of the column, as in Renaissance Doric style; instead, the column is transformed into a tree, as in the works of Bernini. In colonial Latin America the Baroque has been called El barroco de Indias, the Baroque of the Indies, and it has been characterized as the apogee of cultural originality in colonial Spanish America. Its distinctive feature is the convergence of three cultures—the immigrant European, the indigenous American, and the transplanted African—and it embraces the seventeenth and a portion of the eighteenth centuries.

In the plastic arts the Baroque’s greatest visible legacy in Latin America is its great Baroque churches. These creations of European and creole architects and indigenous American artists and artisans are, to the Western eye, at once familiar in architectural structure, yet new and strange in exterior and interior motifs and décor. The works of the eighteenth-century native Andean sculptor Kondori, who decorated the magnificent church of San Lorenzo in silver-rich Potosí, and the Brazilian mulatto architect and sculptor Antonio Francisco Lisboa, known as Aleijadinho and hailed as the master of the Minas Gerais Baroque, exemplify this achievement. This convergence of artistic styles and cultural traditions occurs in colonial literature, too, where popular and learned motifs, narrative, epic, and lyric impulses came together.

If sixteenth-century colonial Latin American literature is permeated by the polemics that accompanied Spain’s taking political possession of the Indies, the colonial Baroque can be characterized as the endeavor to take possession of the Indies culturally, not only from without but, significantly, from within. The 1552–53 foundation of the universities of the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru was complemented in the seventeenth century by the creation of literary academies and salons, or tertulias, and the ongoing study of America’s natural world and native peoples. Spanish American creole and native writers began to take intellectual and literary possession of the domains they did not control politically, and Spanish immigrant authors, too, paid homage to their adopted land.

For all of them, “taking possession” included furthering geographical and historical knowledge of the lands into which they were born or to which they emigrated. The world of American nature was celebrated in poetry from the Spanish-born admirer of the city of Mexico Bernardo de Balbuena to the celebrated Mexican Hieronymite nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The creole polymath Carlos de Sigüenza y

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