Casta paintings and the Virgin of Guadalupe: a link

Luis de Mena, casta painting, c. 1750. Museo de América, Madrid. Click on image to enlarge. Image found here.

(A couple of earlier posts on casta painting are here. A long post on the meaning of the Virgin of Guadalupe in connection with the New World as a miscegenated space is here.)

As part of my research for the book project, the other day I revisited this post's accompanying image, and some further reading--especially in reading the historical record supporting the authenticity of the story and, more directly, here--I was reminded, in a different way this time, of the contested nature of just about everything regarding the story of the Virgin's appearance to Juan Diego, from the very earliest days of that story (she appeared to the Indian Juan Diego in 1531). Some (much?) of that argument, we find between the lines, was driven by rivalries among bishops and their respective orders (which I first speculated on here). Thus, it makes sense that we also have overt written and visual assertions of Juan Diego's worthiness as a way of asserting the truth of the Virgin's appearance to him on the hill of Tepeyac; hence, in the frieze over the east entrance of the old basilica dedicated to the Virgin, Juan Diego's accompanying hat and staff, which mark him iconographically not only as a shepherd but also as someone making a pilgrimage to a shrine, and the beaver in the foreground (a symbol of chastity in medieval bestiaries).

Anyway, that and the fact of the Virgin's appearance as a mestiza to an indigenous person--that is, she appears, in effect, as always already of mixed ethnicity--made me wonder about linkages, whether direct or thematic, between depictions of the Virgin and the genre of casta painting that arose in Mexico and, to a lesser extent, in Peru during the colonial era. Those paintings are not merely secular in content, they are quite literally domestic: often their settings are the interiors of houses, or they show a family out for a promenade; some standardized depictions of castes show physical violence occurring between the spouses, their child attempting to intervene. So, off to Wichita State University's library I went yesterday, and in one of the books I looked at I ran across the Luis de Mena painting you see at the top of this post. As it turns out, this same image also appears in Ilona Katzew's excellent book on the subject; I own this book, but I didn't remember seeing it in there and so didn't bother to look again before last night. (Man: the things I tell you people.)

In a way, it's my forgetting this image that really prompts this post.

Casta paintings that also include images of the Virgin apparently are not very common: this is the only such example in Katzew's book, and I know I've not seen any others like this. At one level, that near-absence of juxtapositions is to be expected: The Virgin is, of course, the embodiment of chastity, while the most direct message of the casta paintings is, ahem, the consequences of the procreative act; moreover, though interracial marriages were officially permitted in Mexico, some, as I discussed in this post, were more approved-of than others were with regard to the social standing of the children of that marriage--more approved-of because of the matter of their racial purity. These were clearly not sacred but secular matters, as regarded the rules governing the painting guilds and their permitted subjects; to directly link the Virgin to such paintings would cross not only legal bounds but also those of propriety. I can be forgiven for not having remembered Mena's painting, then: it's something of an anomaly within this genre.

Katzew herself doesn't spend too much time on Mena's painting, either. She briefly discusses it within the context of a book by Juan Manuel de San Vicente, a book published in 1768 whose purpose was to extol New Spain's virtues and whose language Katzew describes as an example of "creole discourses of pride" (193)--even though San Vicente was a Spaniard. This book

ends majestically with a discussion of the Virgin of Guadalupe, of whom he quotes the famous verse from Psalm 147 (20): "Non fecit taliter omni nationi" (He has not done the like for any other nation), pointing to the honor that God bestowed on Mexico by having the Virgin appear in that country. The Virgin of Guadalupe also features prominently in Mena's casta painting along with the fruits of the land, the city's famous retreats [shown in the upper-right corner], and the Virgin's sanctuary [in the upper-left corner], allowing us to see how the work might have been interpreted by contemporary audiences. (194)

Katzew, as is typical of her book, doesn't go into those interpretations. But, especially when compared to other casta paintings, it becomes pretty clear that Mena wants to insist on a more benign interpretation of these different castas by placing their depiction within a context in which Mexico's other virtues are submitted for our admiration. The castas occupy the middle two registers of the painting; they are framed, below, by a depiction of native fruits and vegetables (it is no accident that the costumes of the figures in the casta paintings are in the same colors as the produce--as if to suggest that these many-hued people are likewise the fruit of the same Mexican soil) and, above, by the Virgin, her basilica and Ixtacalco, a popular place to visit on the southeast of the capital known for its canals. The painting's overall message is that of exuberant variety that is clearly and distinctly Mexican, a variety, moreover, presided over approvingly by the Virgin herself.

But as soon as I saw Mena's painting, I was immediately reminded of the painting below, which I saw for the first time when the Mrs. and I went on our Mexico City trip back in the fall of 2008:

Anon., Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de México, Patrona de la Nueva España. 18th cen. Museo de la Basilica de Guadalupe, Mexico City. Image found here.

(Apologies, by the way, for the poor quality of the image. For details I describe below, I'm working from a picture in a small booklet I bought at the museum.)

The Museum caters to a niche audience, obviously, but if you've read this far and ever find yourself in Mexico City with a few extra hours to spare at the basilica, it's well worth the 30 pesos admission fee to visit. Fortunately for the Mrs. and me, it wasn't too crowded the day we went because when I saw this painting, I couldn't help but stare and stare at it.

In remembering this painting, it suddenly occurred to me that it bears some compositional similarities to the standard casta painting: we have a male and female of different races (here, the female figure on the left symbolizes Europe; the male figure, dressed in indigenous garb, represents the Americas. (The male figure, by the way, is speaking the same verse from Psalm 140 that Katzew reports San Vicente as quoting regarding the Virgin's appearance.) But other images in the painting seem to argue for the Virgin's distinctive Mexican-ness. Directly below the angel who is directly under the Virgin's feet (the angel, by the way, is part of her traditional depiction--it's on the framed cloth with the miraculous image that hangs over the altar in the new basilica), we see two small scenes depicting, on the left, the Virgin's final appearance to Juan Diego and, on the right, Juan Diego showing the bishop his ayate with the Virgin's image on it. But those two scenes rest on the outspread wings of an eagle perched on a prickly pear cactus, which itself is emerging from a body of water: the Aztecs' sign from the gods to build their city on that place and, now, the emblem in the center of the Mexican flag.

Clearly, this painting functions as more than an image honoring the Virgin or as one depicting particular scenes from the story of her appearances to Juan Diego. It contains, in the allegorical figures of Europe and the Americas, themselves explicitly female and male, "parents" for the Virgin--whose respective races would account for the Virgin's mestiza appearance, were this a typical casta painting. Moreover, her placement over the eagle on the cactus seems both to locate her in a very specific place and to explicitly associate her appearance with that earlier tradition (pagan though it was) of miraculous signs to the people in the Valle de Anahuac.

But no matter the truth of the Virgin's origins, no religious syncretism is at work here: The Conquest was by now two centuries past for both Mena and the anonymous painter of the painting I have been discussing. San Vicente, whom I quoted above, introduced his work on Mexico by celebrating the Aztec emperors who preceded Cortés' arrival, "because it is one of the circumstances that truly makes this city great, for having as its children (although heathen) eleven so great and illustrious emperors." Katzew goes on to comment, "In other words, Mexico's precolonial past is deployed to legitimize the uniqueness of the country and to set the stage for the remainder of his description [of the country]" (194). The latter half of 18th century was a time among Mexicans of growing pride of place and of culture, and the Virgin was most definitely included in that pride, so much so that in 1746 she would be declared the patroness of New Spain by the archbishop. What is at work in this painting is an allegorizing of the Virgin's cultural parentage, and that her parentage is a miscegenated one. To see a painting of the Virgin from this time borrowing the basic form of the casta paintings is certainly startling from the point of view of religion and of veneration, but from that of culture, specifically Mexican culture, it makes perfect sense. But even more importantly, the Church's official embracing of the Virgin as New Spain's patroness implicitly validated the mixed-race populations who venerated her.

In a later post, I want to address at greater length something I said in this post--in particular, this:

Whatever happened in December of 1531 and the weeks and months following–whether miracle or fraud or some now-irrecoverable combination of the two–the Church lost control over the meaning of the Virgin and the resulting manner of her veneration in the instant that she appeared to an Indian as a mestiza. Which, of course, is tantamount to saying that it thus never had control over her. Such is her power in Mexico and throughout Hispanic America: that everyone knows this; all the Church can do is acknowledge it and appear to grant it official sanction as it is able via such means as papal visits and the move to canonize Juan Diego.

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A reading of a casta painting

EDIT: Now cross-posted, with some brief additional commentary, at Domestic Issue, as well as a brief note at the end of this post.

Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Yale, 2004). Amazon link here. Image found here.

This post from March on the genre of casta painting continues to draw a fair amount of traffic to this blog, so as a follow-up to that post I thought I would post some brief comments on Katzew's book and offer up not so much a reading of a painting as a kind of wading-into of the various social codes casta paintings participated in.

Here are some things I hadn't know before reading this book that seem to me of significance: First of all, casta paintings are apparently exclusively a Spanish colonial--more precisely Mexican--genre (though Katzew notes the existence of one known casta painting set from Peru). This was surprising to me because the French Caribbean colonies likewise had worked out elaborate nomenclatures for various racial combinations--though theirs involved black-white combinations, and the New Spain system carried within it an implicit didactic element for its audience, about which more later. The other thing I didn't know was the extent of these paintings' popularity: Katzew notes that there are 100 known complete sets of these paintings (a set usually consists of 16 paintings; some depict up to 19 racial combinations) and any number of paintings belonging to now-incomplete sets. The other sign of their popularity is that, similar to but stricter than the guild system for painters in Dutch and Flemish culture, the Spanish crown regulated the licensing of artist workshops and who could paint what subjects in the colonies. Specifically, the Crown determined through examination who could paint religious and royal subjects and how to paint them, but no such regulations governed casta paintings; Katzew politely suggests that this lack of regulation accounts for these paintings' "wide range of quality" (9).

If you have more than passing (no pun, about which more later) interest in this subject, look for this book. Katzew's book is exemplary art history, with the emphasis here on the "history" part. But though there is lots of history, it serves to provide much-needed context for what would otherwise be rather enigmatic paintings. But neither does it skimp on images: there are 265 of them, most of them in color, not counting large closeups of some of the paintings. Moreover, many of the paintings included here are held privately and published here for the first time, thus adding to the book's value.

Reading Katzew's book reassured me that for the most part I hadn't just been talking through my hat in that earlier post regarding these paintings' ambiguities for their audiences. Because her book is a work of art history, as opposed to criticism, she does not in the end argue for a definitive way to think about them. Rather, by so firmly establishing their cultural and social and legal contexts, Katzew makes clear that a far safer way for us to think about these paintings is that how they were understood in the 18th century depended on a whole complex of issues. They are part American exotica for primarily Spanish consumption, part visual codification of class and racial codes (and, thus, reassurance for Spaniards that everything is under control) . . . and yet, something about the very necessity to create a casta system in the first place would lead to its eventual (partial) deconstruction in the form of the wars for independence in the first quarter of the 19th century. The title of Katzew's conclusion pretty much sums it up: "A genre with many meanings." It's outside the scope of her book to do so, but I would push that conclusion harder: Given that these series of paintings are intended to be part dictionary of racial types, part social code, and part visual cabinet of curiosities, I tend to think that their audiences, if they thought about the correspondences between the paintings and the realities of New Spain, could not escape the uneasy feeling that a social order founded on racial difference would eventually become untenable--especially given that part of these paintings' very point (and whether this point was intended or not is difficult to determine) is that those differences were becoming ever harder to discern in real life. These paintings end up implicitly depicting their own inadequacy to depict the very thing they're intended to depict--another version of something I was trying to get at in this post with regard to American literature.

Imagine if the King of Ambiguity in American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne, had instead been a painter in 18th-century colonial Mexico. I think you'd have a pretty good sense of the complexities casta paintings presented for their immediate audiences--and, for that matter, for us.

An example of what I mean is below the fold.

Attributed to Juan Rodríguez Juárez. "De mulatto y mestiza, produce mulatto es torna atrás" (Mulatto and Mestiza Produce a Mulatto Return-Backwards), c. 1715 (image found here).

This is a very typical casta painting: the parents and child shown in a relaxed setting and enjoying each other's company. Based on their dress, they appear to be well off. One thing the viewer cannot see, though, is that this painting is not meant to stand alone. It is one of a series of 16 paintings, each of which depicts a father and mother of different racial designations and their resulting offspring. Earlier paintings in the series would show the racial combinations that would produce a mulatto/a and a mestizo/a (Spaniard-Negro and Spaniard-Indian, respectively); knowing this means we can place this painting approximately in the middle of the series--which also serves as an implicit social ranking for this couple as well.

The didactic portion of this painting, as with all casta paintings, is in the child's racial designation. Katzew notes that while "pure" Spaniards occupied the undisputed pinnacle of the colonies' social hierarchies, Spanish-Indian intermarriage was tolerated because indigenous peoples were likewise regarded as a "pure" race. Moreover, mestizos/as who themselves "married up," ethnically speaking, would in three generations produce offspring regarded as "Spanish." The offspring of Spanish-African intermarriage, however, had no such corresponding promises if they also married up: People of African descent were regarded as a degenerate people for biblical reasons; thus, no one with African blood in his/her family's past, no matter how remote, could be regarded as white. The mestiza mother, had she married a Spaniard, would have produced a castizo/a, who then, had s/he married a Spaniard, would produce offspring considered by law to be Spaniards. Those combinations, by the way, would have been depicted in preceding paintings in the series. Instead, this mother has married a mulatto; their son's designation as a "Return-Backwards" refers to the fact that for his offspring there is no hope of their whitening, whether or not they marry up in the hierarchy. The official message of this painting, then, could not be clearer--if, that is, one is interested in achieving the eventual racial redemption of one's progeny. I should quickly add here that miscegenation in the abstract was officially regarded by Spaniards as a sign of moral degeneracy; casta paintings from the second half of the 18th century would seek to combat this attitude by depicting such things as lighter-skinned mothers breast-feeding their children (it was thought at the time that having infants nourished by wet-nurses (who tended to be Indians or blacks) contributed to that moral degeneracy) and depicting all but the very lowest of the racial castes as prosperous or engaged in honest labor. At this point in the history of the genre, I think one could make a case for an implicit politics present in these paintings: By the latter half of the 18th century, New Spain was demographically a criollo (Creole) society, and many of these paintings make an implicit case that the most prosperous of the Spanish colonies was not suffering as a result. On the contrary: almost all its subjects, no matter their caste, were contributing to that prosperity.

But even as this painting implicitly dramatizes what is officially seen to be (in this case) a mother's unfortunate choice in a husband, Katzew's book also is at pains to discuss markers of social class other than race in New Spain, one of which is on display in this painting: clothes. One's ethnicity consigned one to a certain status in the colony, and certain jobs, especially those having to do with the administering of the colony's affairs, were reserved for Spaniards. However, there were apparently no restrictions on business ownership; thus, some mulattoes and others of lower racial castes became quite wealthy and dressed the part. You can see where this is headed: At least some lighter-skinned members of lower castes who had the means would pass as wealthy castizos so as to secure status and plum positions either for themselves or for their children. Katzew makes note of the fact that the viceroys passed laws forbidding the ostentatious display of wealth via the wearing of expensive fabrics and placing limits on the number of pieces of jewelry one could wear in public. The official reason given had to do with the fact that such displays ran contrary to the more preferred public image of humility; surely, though, the codified rigidity of the casta system could not change the obvious fact that, as intermarriage over time blurred and further blurred obvious physical distinctions among whites, blacks and Indians, one could no longer be certain of others' castes just by looking at them. The regulations placed on clothes, then, were intended to create more surety along these lines. This painting, though, and many other casta paintings' subjects, make pretty clear what Katzew's text confirms: that people ignored the regulations, which weren't stringently enforced anyway.

A fair question arises: Did Rodríguez Juárez intend for his casta paintings to raise all this? The short answer is, Who knows? And it's that response, which I'm not at all dismissive of, that Katzew is at pains to make clear in her book by staying away from definitive readings of these paintings' ultimate intentions. Though casta paintings were a popular genre, they weren't the sort of things that were painted "just because." Often, they were commissioned by a patron as souvenirs of his time in New Spain or to be given as gifts to friends or associates. Moreover, over time a certain standardization arose within this genre: within these series certain scenes became associated with certain caste groupings as painters took their cues from their peers. So, all those factors--the market-driven nature of the genre; the patron's purpose(s) in commissioning a set; the beginnings of standardization--also make it harder to know what, if anything, the artist might have wanted to say about his subject via his work. It's nevertheless true, though, that these paintings participate in Spanish and colonial debates on race and class and serve to reveal the complexities and subtleties of that debate.

UPDATE: In case you're wondering . . . These paintings interest me because there continues to be simply no equivalent mainstream sustained discourse of miscegenation, either visual or textual, from the U.S. during the corresponding period in our history--or, indeed, well into our own times. To be sure, there were plenty of texts that treated this subject in various soap opera-like or sensationalized ways, but--with the exception of some works by African-American writers--no dispassionate treatments such as those which these paintings seem to present to the viewer. There are various reasons why this is so, but the contrast is striking nonetheless.

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Three casta paintings

Attrib. José de Alcíbar, 6. De Español y Negra, Mulato, ca. 1760-1770. Denver Art Museum. Image found here; specifics on the painting from Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico.

Two worlds God has placed in the hands of our Catholic Monarch, and the New does not resemble the Old, not in its climate, its customs, nor its inhabitants; it has another legislative body, another council for governing, yet always with the end of making them alike: In the Old Spain only a single caste of men is recognized, in the New many and different.
--Francisco Antonio Lorenzana, Spanish prelate and archbishop of Mexico from 1766 to 1772¹

In Antonio Lorenzana's statement we find a basic stating of something that the Spanish crown was simply blind to, at least on an official level: that its colonies were not merely just really far away from Madrid but could not have been more different from Spain. Certainly by Antonio Lorenzana's time those differences were inescapable; Mexico's revolt from Spain would begin only 40 years later.

All art is the human imagination's attempt to make sense of the world and the things and people in it, and casta paintings are a distinctly New World genre that attempts to depict and codify the bewildering variety of racial combinations arising from the commingling of indigenous, African and European populations in this hemisphere. At times these paintings, reflecting the Enlightenment era's fascination with describing racial and ethnic distinctions and, for that matter, taxonomies more generally, produced chart-like paintings such as this one (click on the image to enlarge it), as well as larger portraits like those I've posted here. Closely related to this fascination (even mania?) for categorizing is the Old World's fascination with New World exotica of all kinds--and not just the indigenous flora and fauna, either. These depictions of various mixed-blood couples and their offspring would have counted as exotica as well. Surely, one subconscious message of these paintings, given their subject matter of father, mother and child, is, well, sex with people who clearly were not Spaniards: a still-touchy subject in race-conscious Spain.

Alternately, one could be rather Freudian about all this and say that casta paintings are a manifestation of the uncanny: Spaniards, themselves more than a little preoccupied with racial purity yet confronted with the undeniable fact of 700 years of mixing of Moorish and Jewish and Spanish populations, perhaps saw in these depictions of commingling populations in New Spain an outlet for their own anxieties and yet, at the same time, an opportunity to assert the superiority (whether racial or socioeconomic) of the "Spanish race." That seems to be an implicit message in the both the painting at the beginning of this post and this one (image found here).

Their obvious compositional similarities surely serve to make that argument: in each, set in a kitchen, the Spaniard is dressed to go out to conduct business; the woman is dressed in housework garb and stands in the background--in the shadows, in more ways than one. The son, meanwhile, though dressed differently in each, nevertheless is in a position of servitude relative to the father--head respectfully bowed, offering up a dish to the father--but both males are interposed between the viewer and the mother. There is also present in the staging of the mother in this scene what Joshua Lund, in the midst of discussing a Brazilian text describing "the symbolic colonized woman," would describe as a visual depiction of a woman as "a subject within narratives of hybridity. She is a 'subject' in both senses: insofar as she is subjectified as an agent, and insofar as she is subjugated by a system of patriarchy" (The Impure Imagination: Toward a Critical Hybridity in Latin American Writing, 137, his italics).

The complicated relationship between miscegenation and class, some speculate, is also something to be considered when looking at casta paintings. That message could not be more explicit than it is in these little paintings by Pedro Alonso O'Crouley from 1774 (originally found here). The caption for the top painting reads, in English, "Spaniard and Indian, Mestizo"; that for the bottom reads, "Indian and Mulatto, 'Lobo.'" But what is more important to be read in the text that is this painting: In the top panel, the Spaniard is well-dressed, and the Indian woman, though plainly dressed, seems to be well-cared for--and perhaps, judging from the image, may be pregnant again. As she holds the baby toward the Spaniard, he points toward the baby, a calm, self-assured look on his face. The same can't be said for the couple in the lower panel: both are clearly impoverished; the man, his hands full, cannot gesture toward his child, who in any case is bundled, papoose-like, on his mother's back--a culturally-accurate depiction, but perhaps also suggestive of the figurative burden this child will be to her.

The homepage for the website Casta Paintings: The Construction and Depiction of Race in Colonial Mexico offers up a survey of prevailing opinions regarding the cultural/social forces that led to their making, some of which I've touched on above. If you're at all curious about this subject, the whole page is worth your time; here, though, is the summation:

[Casta painting] cannot be understood without recognizing its position in contemporary philosophical, scientific, and artistic traditions. Nor can it be separated from the interwoven history of Spain and New Spain during the colonial period. It reveals the fascinations and preoccupations of the era and offers insight into the construction of ethnorace in colonial times.

I'd just say that that last sentence, though accurate, is awfully polite. Though miscegenation was not policed in Latin America nearly to the extent that it was in the United States, during the colonial era it clearly caused more than a little anxiety on the part of the ruling class (European-born Spaniards--even people born in the New World of Spanish-born parents were seen as lower in rank by virtue of their having been born in this hemisphere). The Spaniard men in each of these paintings are well-dressed, serene, being served by their offspring: all visual messages meant to signify their control of their world, never mind the ethnic, cultural and political gumbo simmering all about them, all but unacknowledged.

(Cross-posted at Domestic Issue)

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And over at Domestic Issue . . .

Sor María Antonia de la Purísima Concepcíon. 18th century. Ex Convento de Culhuacán (some pictures here and here), Mexico City. Click on the image to enlarge. The caption records her parents’ names, her birthdate, and the date and place she took the habit for the first time.

Some of you have been kindly indulgent of my relatively frequent posts on Mexican colonial Catholicism--in particular, the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe--and casta painting (most recently, this one). Over at Domestic Issue, I have a new post on this subject that, finally, feels close to right.

Maybe I can move on to something else now.

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Where do nations come from?: Some comments on Imagined Communities

Image found here.

Note: More sabbatical-project reading.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. Ed. London: Verso, 2006.

It's difficult to overstate the importance of this book to people interested in the question posed in the title of this post--not to mention the questions that arise from the answers to that question. Anderson's book is seminal because, while prior to it there had been any number of historical studies of the emergence of specific nations, no book had addressed what cultural work first had to occur before something like a nation, in our sense of that word, could appear. Anderson's book's position in this discussion, then, is analogous to that of Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel for students of the English novel or, in my own field of American literature, F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance: agree or disagree with it, you have to be familiar with it.

Anderson's first important move is to discuss nationalism not as an ideology but "as if it belonged with 'kinship' and 'religion', rather than with 'liberalism' or 'fascism'" (5). (As one can see, such a move has the effect of rendering the term more neutral in its charge--in the post-war wake of National Socialism's defeat, "nationalism" had become an extraordinarily pejorative term. To be sure, the example of Nazism reveals the potential for horror within nationalism; but, as Anderson's analogous examples of kinship and religion indicate, there is much that is positive contained within a people's sense of itself as a nation.) He then offers this simple definition: "[I]t is an imagined political community--and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign" (6). They are imagined because, within them, no one can possibly know all its other members--yet, despite that, one feels a political (in its broadest sense) link to those other members. They are limited because, no matter how expansive a nation is or wants to be, it always recognizes the existence of other nations beyond its boundaries. And finally, they are sovereign in that the people have some small say in their own governance (6-7).

Before I get into the wonkier stuff, I'd urge you who are the least bit curious about any of this but who don't want to pony up $20 or so for the book to go to the library and read the chapters "Cultural Roots" and "The Origins of National Consciousness." Here, Anderson identifies and discusses those cultural trends that to his mind had to be in place before nationalism could emerge as a political force. All these will be familiar to anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with late-medieval to Renaissance history and culture; what's striking (for me, anyway) is how Anderson can make one see these trends in a new, compelling light as they--the trends--are revealed to also be performing a latent political work that wouldn't fully manifest itself for another 200 years. The crucial trend Anderson identifies is the gradually-waning power of the Church's ability to define the realities of this world on its own terms. Out of that trend emerged the others: the waning of Latin as educated/empowered/priestly Europe's privileged language and its gradual supplanting by vernaculars ("The determinative fact about Latin--aside from its sacrality--was that it was a language of bilinguals. Relatively few were born to speak it and even fewer, one imagines, dreamed in it" [38]); the fading of the notion of the dynasty as the sole legitimate form of governance; and, finally and most fascinating, a movement from what Anderson, referring to Walter Benjamin, calls "Messianic time--a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present" (in other words, the traditionally-Christian way of conceiving how God perceives time) to (in reference to Benjamin again) a sense of time as being "'homogeneous [and] empty,' in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfillment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar" (24). Anderson then notes that "homogeneous, empty time" is also precisely that of the novel-as-genre. I should also note here (though Anderson doesn't) that Mikhail Bakhtin (he of the idea of the chronotope that I mentioned in the previous post) notes precisely these two different senses of time as marking the chief difference between epic and novel.

The chapter "The Origins of National Consciousness," meanwhile, concentrates on the invention of movable type as simultaneously making possible the rapid production of texts and, more crucially, through its products' privileging of vernaculars, gradually turning educated Europeans from a collective who could understand each other via Latin no matter where they lived into linguistically-segregated groupings of monoglots who, now, began to feel connections with other speakers of their vernacular in ways that Latin had not done. From here, it's easy to see how a notion of nation-ness would gradually emerged: first (Anderson nowhere mentions this, but it seems inescapable to conclude otherwise) its prefigurement in the Protestant Reformation--many of the events of which were driven as much by (local) politics as by theology--and the Counterreformation; then in terms of politics.

Anderson's other important move--and the one that begins to explain why I'm reading and writing about this book--is that he locates the origins of nationalism not in Europe, as had been assumed by his predecessors, but in the Americas: specifically, not just in the American Revolution but also in the nearly-simultaneously-occurring wars for independence from Spain and France around the turn of the 18th-19th centuries that very self-consciously modelled themselves politically on the American example. Just as happened in American literature, in Latin America there appeared an explosion of literary works that in various ways attempted to articulate what it meant to be a [name of your new nation here]--and recall Anderson's noting the coincidence of the emergence of the novel-as-genre as accompanying the emergence of modern nationalisms. Using these observations their starting points, a whole slew of books, led by the example of Doris Sommer's Foundational Fictions: The National Romance of Latin America, examine the novels and other literature that emerged in the decades following these revolutions--many of which have as their protagonists men and women of different ethnicities who fall in love with each other--and posit that the work these novels perform is not (or not entirely) "artistic" in intent. Instead, their goal is, as Sommer's book's title states, to help these new states define themselves as inhabited by new peoples. It's no mistake, after all, that the authors of these works were more often than not also bureaucrats in these new governments. Put in Andersonian terms, they are purposefully intended to help these new communities imagine themselves, with the state dictating the terms of the imagining.

Well, yes. Sort of. I think.

Not just wonkiness but vaguely-formulated wonkiness follows.

I've read and thought a fair amount about how the Powers That Be in what are now what we call Latin America tried, on the one hand, to pretend that there was no essential difference between these colonies and themselves and yet, as I posted on here, produced an enormous variety of visual and textual rhetorics whose intents were to try to account precisely for the differences they found themselves immersed in. In these matters, the state's acountings always lagged far behind realities as racial comminglings became ever more complex in the Latin American colonies. To my mind, the byzantine casta-painting charts of the Mexicans and racial charts from the French colonies are, in the end, less testimonies to the desire to catalogue than Sisyphean exercises in futility. I didn't quite say in my post on Reading Columbus that one way of thinking about the mixture of rhetorics in the Columbian texts might be that they are an example of a recurring feature of the literature of the Americas: the seeking out of a language that will make sense of something for which a vocabulary barely exists, if at all. These various pictorial and textual catalogues of racial combinations are other examples of that same seeking out.

Sure: I can certainly see that the state has a vested interest in controlling how it gets defined; what I have more trouble buying, though, is that after 300 years of latent and, at times, not-so-latent anxiety about these new racial combinations and their implications on down the road, the state--even this new one--would suddenly be comfortable with presenting a vision of its people's future as a mixed-race one. The region's fascination, from the mid-19th century until well into the 20th, with applying the principles of eugenics to shape such things political institutions and educational systems suggests a continuing ambivalence about all this. Never mind that it was precisely not that vision but the actuality of a mixed-race present that gave at least partial form to these particular imagined communities. And therein lies my point of disagreement with Sommer's basic argument. I think.

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"This Delta": Landscape, Race, and American Narrative

Antonio Ruíz, El sueño de Malinche ("The Dream of Malinche").

What follows is basically a place-holding post because I don't have time just now to explore all its various directions (one of which, you may have guessed, is indicated by the Ruíz painting at the beginning of this post). The road to Austin, and a Christmas-weekend visit with my mother, calls. But I'll be working out these ideas in various ways next week.

In the meantime, best wishes to all for a peace-filled and joyous Christmas season.

The holidays for me have come to mean, in addition to those things they are supposed to mean, both sacred and secular, the chance to do further reading/writing/thinking on my book project. So it's been in that spirit that I've been doing some reading I've long been needing to do--in particular, Edouard Glissant's seminal study, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. It's been in reading Glissant's dense but provocative writing that I've been reminded of some critical preoccupations of my own, which has made the past few days rewarding for me.

Some of you may remember Glissant's name from my discussions of his book Faulkner, Mississippi here and here. And indeed, Faulkner--in particular his novel Absalom, Absalom!--gets passing mention, along with other writers from this hemisphere. Despite its title, in Caribbean Discourse Glissant is in fact laying out an alternative literary and cultural history of the Americas, one that does not serve merely as an extension or branch of European history but is distinct from it: "[A] national literature emerges when a community whose collective existence is called into question tries to put together the reasons for its existence" ("Cross-Cultural Poetics," 104). The United States and most other nations in this hemisphere, by this definition, have national literatures, but Glissant's primary audience is his native Martinique and those other Caribbean nations that are cultural and economic wards of the European nations that had once possessed them as colonies.

Here's a passage I've spent some time musing on:

An immediate consequence of [New World writers' rejection of realism in favor of magical realism, as exemplified by Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude] can be found in the function of landscape [author's italics]. The relationship with the land, one that is even more threatened because the community is alienated from the land, becomes so fundamental in this discourse that landscape in the work stops being merely decorative or supportive and emerges as a full character. Describing the landscape is not enough. The individual, the community, the land are inextricable in the process of creating history. Landscape is a character in this process. Its deepest meanings need to be understood. ("Cross-Cultural Poetics," 105-106)

Some comments below the fold.

This intersects in intriguing, complicated ways with Ralph Ellison's central contention in "Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity," which you can find in his essay collection Shadow and Act, and which I've posted on before:

Thus on the moral level I propose that we view the whole of American life as a drama acted out upon the body of a Negro giant, who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and scene upon which and within which the action unfolds. If we examine the beginning of the Colonies, the application of this view is not, in its economic connotations at least, too far-fetched or too difficult to see. For then the Negro's body was exploited as amorally as the soil and climate. It was later, when white men drew up a plan for a democratic way of life, that the Negro began slowly to exert an influence upon America's moral consciousness. (28)

There's not an exact equivalence here between Glissant and Ellison, but they are certainly headed in the same direction. One reason why they don't quite arrive in the same place, as it were, is in Ellison's own "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke," another well-known essay in Shadow and Act. In it, one of his arguments is that American culture is in essence one big minstrel show, and makes this provocative statement in its midst: "When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical" (54). Given that Ellison wrote all these essays at the mid-point of the 20th century, one needs to remember that context and qualify accordingly. But the fact that Ellison does not talk about miscegenation in these essays, at least, except in their cultural manifestations, suggests to me that racial commingling can be talked about as a figurative equivalent to landscape: that is, it as fact/consequence creates a resistance to dominant (read: European) narratives in the same way that landscape did (and does?)--indeed, a quick re-read of Hortense Spillers' important essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" (pdf file; it's long and dense reading, just so you know) both updates Ellison's "Twentieth-Century Fiction" and, in places, uses language strikingly similar to Glissant's.

Faulkner, for all these writers, is central in these matters, and "this Delta," a phrase Ike McCaslin uses near the close of "Delta Autumn," seems to embody for me that centrality: it's the delta's literal fecundity that makes slavery flourish . . . but it is also the fecundity of human bodies, black and white, who work the land that leads to what Faulkner (through Ike) understood as the dooming of the South.

As I said above, I don't have time to develop what I see as the implications of all this, so I'll do no more than list them here. The most significant thing for me is that, at long last, I have in this image of landscape-as-character a frame for the book-project which in various ways will allow me to unify some otherwise disparate materials and genres: Columbus mis-reading the Caribbean because his map is (a literal reading of) the Bible; casta paintings (and even the Virgin of Guadalupe herself) as depictions of a cultural landscape that the Church and Crown wanted to read in one way but Mexicans grew to read in another; a way to finally make sense of the very odd things regarding the treatment of race in Show Boat (some of which I addressed here long ago).

This listing feels very inadequate to me, but I hope it may pique some curiosity among my reader(s) for later posts.

And to those of you who read this far: Thank you and, again, a blessed holiday season to you and yours.

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