Foreword

Geographies of martyrdom and Enlightenment imagery, religious authorities who rail against local customs, and shifting histories of urban devotion—all are addressed by articles in this issue of CLAR. Also published here are meditations on the future of colonial Latin American Studies. The essays traverse an expansive swathe of territory, from Brazil and Baja to cities in the Philippines and Europe. The disciplinary lenses—history, literary studies, anthropology and art history—will be familiar, yet collectively the writing in this issue poses two broad and knotty questions. The first of these queries: what aspects of the past deserve our attention? Often scholars answer by enlisting the phrases ‘little-studied,’ ‘overlooked,’ or ‘misunderstood.’ These are prudent responses, although I do not find them particularly sustaining. For they imply that the primary work of scholarship is to fill lacunae in or correct already-charted maps of knowledge. Even if such cartographies exist, it is not at all clear that we should trust them as guides. The second, related question concerns the binding relationships of current work to that of previous generations: how do scholars decide what, if anything, they owe those who came before?

In a recent essay on inheritance, anthropologist Tim Ingold calls for rethinking both term and concept (Ingold 2023). For him, inheritance fails to adequately explain the creative and long-term cultural practices that passing along requires (be it a family farm or academic knowledge). He further argues that inheritance elevates ancestral relations, minimizing transmissions that occur within a single generation. In sidelining inheritance, Ingold instead prioritizes perdurance and learning—both of which incorporate environmental, not strictly human-centric change over time. As he notes, ‘knowledge […] does not “descend” from generation to generation but is regrown in each through their practical overlap as generations carry on their lives together. What every generation brings to the next are the conditions of development for this regrowth to occur’ (Ingold 2023, S41).

While Ingold’s interests occupy the intersection of anthropology and biology, his thinking implicates those who write histories of colonial life and experience.¹ Our work would be impossible without multiple kinds of passing down. ‘The colonial,’ however we wish to define or describe it, is far more than a finite period on a timeline that has come and gone, leaving traces in archives and museum collections. Those of us living in the 2020s see, feel, and experience its enduring dynamics every day. Moreover, people who study and write about colonial histories leverage—indeed depend upon—texts, archives and collections that have crossed a long durée. Also enchaining our academic practices across generations are habits of building and demonstrating expertise, of marking authority and tutoring new scholars. Ways of naming can come into play, as titles, disciplinary rubrics and even buildings cue institutional memories. And passing down functions, rather transactionally, in academic publishing, as when new editors inherit queues of material built by predecessors. There is no unbinding from certain aspects of colonialism, but academic inheritances hinge upon values that are shared, contestable, negotiable. How we adjudicate these values … this is a troublesome challenge.

I take Ingold’s point that inheritance, which comes to us via property law, presumes and privileges stable, definable entities. As such, it circumvents the creative labor of both making and receiving things worth passing on.² Following his biological analogies, inheritance can demote our ethical responsibilities to both past and future generations. After all, how much say do living creatures have in the genes that comprise their bodies, their ancestral trace? Despite Ingold’s exhortations, I see how one aspect of inheritance could be worth holding onto for its evocative, if not explanatory power. The metaphor of inheritance—as opposed to historiography or historical context—alters our frame of reference in an important way: it calls attention to elders and renders our work more relational. It asks us to account for that which binds (and breaks) generations.

In the pages of CLAR, a number of concepts perdure. These include what constitutes the ‘human,’ an almost sacred trust in authority of the archive, and a healthy dissatisfaction with status quo interpretations of the colonial past. Some of this descends from academic tradition. Some has had to be invented. None of it emerges unbidden, from nowhere. This is why the concept of ‘inheritance’ still matters, as it obliges critical reckoning with the complex vectors of kinship. Of course, kinship, even in academia, can be mercurial. It might take form in genealogical fashion, mentor to mentor. Kin can be idiosyncratically assembled. They can be imagined or imaginary. However they become, the twinned concepts of inheritance and kin raise the spectres of wealth and indebtedness, of burden and refusal. Could acknowledging this—openly and often—change our scholarship?

To do so would, at the least, mean pressing harder on that which undergirds scholarship on the colonial past in the first place. That is, on the lineaments of the systems in which we toil, and our commitments to beget and hold dear particular kinds of knowing. I am not proposing here a return to styles of institutional critiques of the1980s, or harsher disclosures about underwriters of our research. There are cleverer, more inspired ways of writing about our relations and responsibilities. And our thinking should not be stingy. Kin and elders need not take human form.³

This does not mean that inheritance is always a gift. For any number of reasons, we may wish to refuse what elders proffer, to dispense with it hastily or shift its burden elsewhere. And so, whether welcome or not, inheritance reminds us that the histories we write, the interpretations we craft may well be ours—they may qualify as ‘original’ by particular academically sanctioned criteria— but they are forever bound to those who came before. In this, affinity will be as common as contrast. Consequently, there may be debts owed, reparations required, lessons to be contested and refuted. There may also be honors to bestow. To write about this—as a fundamental part of our scholarship, and not simply in a few words before ‘the real work’ begins—may strike some as a sentimental ask, one born of privilege. Perhaps. But I see it as an opportunity to set things on a righter footing with the past. Yes, reckoning with inheritance and kin will, some days, bring cold comfort. Yet to give inheritance and kin their due—whether with warmth or indignation—is to know what aspects of the past both deserve and motivate our attention.

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Highlighting relationships among colonialism, conversion and geography, Nicole Hughes addresses the creation of martyrs in the Americas. ‘Set in stone: Jesuit martyrdom at land and sea in sixteenth-century Brazil’ describes literary constructions of the two settings that held the most promise for producing martyrs—the territorial backlands of Brazil and the seas. Considering the criteria for martyrdom (to be killed in hatred of the faith), Hughes shows how the sea’s narrative tropes were better suited to martyrial death than those of land. Centering the writings of José de Anchieta, a foundational figure in Brazilian literature and culture, Hughes discusses the poetic and metaphoric strategies that rendered death at sea worthy of martyrdom. She also argues that the images of land and sea constructed in Anchieta’s work (and Jesuit counterparts) extend well beyond the sixteenth century, evoking habits of thinking that loom large in Brazilian cultural imaginaries.

The political implications of religious discourse take center stage in Fernando Aguerre Core’s essay, ‘La condena de la costumbre o la controversia por las libertades criollas en el discurso eclesiástico de la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII en el Río de la Plata.’ At issue are the ways that custom became pitted against law (and thus royal authority) in the late 1700s in Buenos Aires. Taking bishop Manual A. de la Torre as a case study, Aguerre reveals how fervent a religious leader’s devotion to rule-by-law could be. For de la Torre, custom was a weed to be pulled out by the roots, as it opened opportunities for Creoles and local clergy to undermine and thwart royal power. By reading de la Torre’s writings against the grain, Aguerre demonstrates how extensive was the invocation of custom in Río de la Plata, broadening our perspectives on local experiences that fueled emancipatory environments in Latin America.

‘Representations of Baja California Indians as ethnographic art,’ by Max Carocci, turns to pictorial imagery and its ability to anchor the production of knowledge. Carocci’s interest is in part documentary, and towards this end, his essay surveys early modern images of Indigenous residents of Baja (all of which were made by outsiders). Carocci also analyzes relationships between these images and Indigenous belongings collected from the region, looking for alignments and disparities. Through comparative work, he explains that, in spite of European ambitions to depict lived realities, prints and drawings of Baja create knowledge in complex, and highly mediated ways. No simple dichotomies separate the objective from the fanciful. Carocci also explains how early modern images of Baja participate in Enlightenment projects dedicated to understanding Indigenous America, projects in which pictorial evocations could both hold more sway and circulate more widely than written words.

Josepfina Schenke, in ‘Imágenes en disputa: rivalidades devotas contra epiemias, sequías y temblores en Santiago de Chile (siglos XVII y XVIII),’ discusses the performative labor of sacred images. From San Sebastián to the Virgen de la Merced and el Señor de la Agonía, this essay attends to the shifting power of sacred beings, their cult images, and the orders that supported them. Schenke traces not only relationships between devotion and urban anxieties about plagues, droughts and earthquakes, but also connections between devotion and civic rivalries. Working largely with ecclesiastical archives and actas de cabildo, Schenke’s work reveals a ‘dynamics of substitution’ in devotional practice. Over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, devotions with stronger ties to local (rather than European) events became most potent, their images most trusted. In addressing a politics of prayer, Schenke’s work shows us the flux—and not only the stabilities—that characterized urban colonial religion.

The ‘Futures of the past’ section of this issue presents seven positions on the field of colonial Latin American Studies. Each author addresses the fault lines, or complexities, that challenge work done under the rubric ‘colonial Latin America.’ Each also proposes new ways of thinking about the concepts and implied meanings of ‘colonial’ and ‘Latin America.’ These themes provided the framework and focus of a symposium held at Tulane University in November of 2022 to celebrate CLAR’s thirtieth anniversary.⁴ While we expected some ‘taking stock,’ our intention was not to look back nor to smooth the road we’ve travelled. Instead, we sought conversation and debate about histories yet to be written, narratives yet to be crafted, ways of understanding the past yet to be envisioned. What emerged in New Orleans—and surfaces here in the essays based on remarks made at the symposium: a clear sense of the many changes that hover on the near horizon.

As a suite, these essays advocate for quite different—and at times, still inchoate—ways of thinking and working. While none directly contradicts the others, the epistemological implications of these meditations range widely. So much so, that it would be impossible, given the current shape of the field, to address all they propose (but the stretch is good to think with!). Among the more intractable, and to my eye provocative issues these essays raise: whose sense of the colonial should matter most; when, if ever, does ‘the colonial’ end; and how distinctive are Latin American experiences and contributions to global history? Among the other challenges discussed, I would point out the need to rethink the capaciousness—geographically and culturally— of ‘Latin America’ and the ‘Iberian world,’ and what might it mean to reckon with the past spatially rather than through more traditional lenses. Alongside these issues and queries, these essays make it clear that how and where one steps into an archive (however defined) is a deeply political project: objects and documents are not simply awaiting our arrival. Moreover, the history of this journal, as Ana María Presta, long-time Advisory Board member, argues, should be tracked and kept alive, as CLAR has shaped and settled into a field that, three decades ago, looked very different from the way it does now.

Notes

1 I wish to thank Kenneth Mills, Barbara E. Mundy and Ana María Presta, whose questions about and discussion of elders at the symposium, ‘Futures of the past: Colonial Latin American Studies after 2022,’ (November 2022, Tulane University) prompted me to think about inheritance in relation to colonial studies.

2 Ingold does not address generational trauma. Had he done so, his position on inheritance might have held, but it might also have been more pliant. For an evocative consideration of the theme, see, for instance, Christina Sharpe 2016.

3 Lisa Trever’s book, Image encounters: Moche murals and archeo art history, suggests how w’akas can be teachers—even for people whose ancestors did not create or care for them; and many colleagues in Indigenous Studies and allied fields have spoken and written eloquently of the varied ways that human and others open knowledge for those alive today. For a range of such perspectives, see, for instance, Cadena 2015; Liboiron 2021; TallBear 2020.

4 ‘Futures of the past: Colonial Latin American Studies after 2022,’ sponsored by CLAR and the Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies. The invited speakers were: Miruna Achim, Luis Cárcamo-Huechante, Kristie Flannery, Cécile Fromont, Kathleen Myers, Ana María Presta, Miguel Valerio, and Bartolomé Yun-Casallila (some of whom chose to speak, but not also write for this issue of CLAR).