Coloniality, Religion, and the Law in the Early Iberian World

Description

From postcolonial, interdisciplinary, and transnational perspectives, this collection of original essays looks at the experience of Spain's empire in the Atlantic and the Pacific and its cultural production.


Hispanic Issues Series

Nicholas Spadaccini, Editor-in-Chief



Hispanic Issues Online

hispanicissues.umn.edu/online_main.html

Sujets

• Latin American Studies
• Histoire
• Religión
• Latin America
• Religion
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 10 mars 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826519580
• Langue: English

Extrait

Coloniality, Religion, and the Law in the Early Iberian World
HISPANIC ISSUES VOLUME 40
Coloniality, Religion, and the Law in the Early Iberian World
Santa Arias and Raúl Marrero-Fente
EDITORS
Vanderbilt University Press
NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE
2014
© 2014 Vanderbilt University Press
All rights reserved
First Edition 2014
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
The editors gratefully acknowledge assistance from the College of Liberal Arts and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Minnesota; and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa
The complete list of volumes in the Hispanic Issues series begins on page 279
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Coloniality, religion, and the law in the early Iberian world / eds. Santa Arias and Raúl Marrero-Fente.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8265-1956-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8265-1957-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8265-1958-0 (ebook)
1. New Spain—History—16th century. 2. Spain—Colonies—History—16th century. 3. Spain—Religion—16th century. 4. New Spain—Religion—16th century. 5. Law—Spain—History—16th century. 6. Law—Spain—Colonies—History—16th century. 7. Law—New Spain—History—16th century. I. Arias, Santa, editor of compilation. II. Marrero-Fente, Raúl, editor of compilation.
F1231.C647 2013
946'.04—dc23
2013013895
HISPANIC ISSUES
Nicholas Spadaccini
Editor-in-Chief
Antonio Ramos-Gascón and Jenaro Talens
General Editors
Nelsy Echávez-Solano, Adriana Gordillo
Luis Martín-Estudillo, and Kelly McDonough
Associate Editors
Cortney Benjamin, Megan Corbin, and Scott Ehrenburg
Assistant Editors
*Advisory Board/Editorial Board
Rolena Adorno (Yale University)
Román de la Campa (Unversity of Pennsylvania)
David Castillo (University at Buffalo)
Jaime Concha (University of California, San Diego)
Tom Conley (Harvard University)
William Egginton (Johns Hopkins University)
Brad Epps (University of Cambridge)
*Ana Forcinito (University of Minnesota)
David W. Foster (Arizona State University)
Edward Friedman (Vanderbilt University)
Wlad Godzich (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Antonio Gómez L-Quiñones (Dartmouth College)
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford University)
*Carol A. Klee (University of Minnesota)
Eukene Lacarra Lanz (Universidad del País Vasco)
Tom Lewis (University of Iowa)
Jorge Lozano (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
Raúl Marrero-Fente (University of Minnesota)
Walter D. Mignolo (Duke University)
*Louise Mirrer (The New-York Historical Society)
Mabel Moraña (Washington University in St. Louis)
Alberto Moreiras (Texas A & M University)
Bradley Nelson (Concordia University, Montreal)
Michael Nerlich (Université Blaise Pascal)
*Francisco Ocampo (University of Minnesota)
Miguel Tamen (Universidade de Lisboa)
Teresa Vilarós (Texas A & M University)
Iris M. Zavala (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)
Santos Zunzunegui (Universidad del País Vasco)
Contents
Introduction: Negotiation between Religion and the Law
Santa Arias and Raúl Marrero-Fente
PART I. Politics
1. José de Acosta: Colonial Regimes for a Globalized Christian World
Ivonne del Valle
2. Conquistador Counterpoint: Intimate Enmity in the Writings of Bernardo de Vargas Machuca
Kris Lane
3. Voices of the Altepetl : Nahua Epistemologies and Resistance in the Anales de Juan Bautista
Ezekiel Stear
4. Performances of Indigenous Authority in Postconquest Tlaxcalan Annals: Don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza’s Historia cronológica de la noble ciudad de Tlaxcala
Kelly S. McDonough
PART II. Religion
5. Translating the “Doctrine of Discovery”: Spain, England, and Native American Religions
Ralph Bauer
6. Narrating Conversion: Idolatry, the Sacred, and the Ambivalences of Christian Evangelization in Colonial Peru
Laura León Llerena
7. Old Enemies, New Contexts: Early Modern Spanish (Re)-Writing of Islam in the Philippines
Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez
8. Art That Pushes and Pulls: Visualizing Religion and Law in the Early Colonial Province of Toluca
Delia A. Cosentino
PART III. Law
9. The Rhetoric of War and Justice in the Conquest of the Americas: Ethnography, Law, and Humanism in Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de Las Casas
David M. Solodkow
10. Human Sacrifice, Conquest, and the Law: Cultural Interpretation and Colonial Sovereignty in New Spain
Cristian Roa
11. Legal Pluralism and the “India Pura” in New Spain: The School of Guadalupe and the Convent of the Company of Mary
Mónica Díaz
12. Our Lady of Anarchy: Iconography as Law on the Frontiers of the Spanish Empire
John D. (Jody) Blanco
Afterword: Teleiopoesis at the Crossroads of the Colonial/Postcolonial Divide
José Rabasa
Contributors
Index
Introduction: Negotiation between Religion and the Law
Santa Arias and Raúl Marrero-Fente
Coloniality, Religion, and the Law in the Early Iberian World reexamines the crucial role that the Catholic Church and newly created legal and colonial institutions played in the production of coloniality by directing attention to discourses that emerged from this experience of human inequality. 1 Most scholarship investigating the ties between religion, law, and conquest tends to emphasize the intellectual and legal debates that took place during the sixteenth century regarding the methods of conquest. This volume, on the other hand, takes a broader view that incorporates how other sectors of colonial society engaged with the political engineering legitimated by Spain’s laws and the Church’s doctrine of salvation, examining, beyond legal texts, a wide range of colonial discourses generated from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. The essays also emphasize the role of colonial subjects in the establishment, contestation, and reconfiguration of the colonial apparatus through the laws that ordered society. The discourse produced by this intra-imperial dialogue significantly altered the influence of the evangelization project and divine right embedded in the texts that legalized the Spanish conquest. Moreover, the existence of this dialogue represents a redefinition of “New World” coloniality (Maldonado Torres), the key element in the production of Europe’s modernity ( Dussel). Maldonado-Torres explains the impact of this change: “Se da un cambio en la visión de mundo que hace de la acumulación una indicación de la salvación, lo que abre las puertas para que el capitalismo pasara, de modo de producción solo en algunas zonas, al modo de producción dominante de un emergente eurocentrado sistema-mundo” (684) (There was a change in worldview that transformed accumulation into a sign of salvation, thus opening the way for capitalism to pass from the mode of production only present in certain regions to be the dominant mode of production of an emergent Euro-centered world-system). According to Enrique Dussel, religion and the law in the Spanish Americas had a pivotal role in the making of Spain as the first “modern” nation unified and strengthened by the Inquisition, military power, Nebrija’s Gramática de la lengua , and, more importantly, “the subordination of the church to the state” (“Europe” 470). In the process, these discourses contributed to the creation of new identities and ideologies, which reacted against the exploitation of people and the natural world for the acquisition of power and wealth. For many critics this is a point of origin of the postcolonial mentality.
Rethinking Colonial Law
In order to fully understand the pervasive force of the colonial/modern roots of domination in the Spanish global empire, it is crucial to examine the significance of two unique legal documents: the series of papal bulls issued by Alexander VI (1493–1494) and the Requerimiento , authored in 1513 by jurist Juan López de Palacios Rubios. These texts reveal the complicity of Catholicism with the beginnings of modern empire building, which for Spain meant the legal justification for territorial expansion and the overpowering of indigenous societies for the sake of expanding the frontiers of Christianity, and the development of its modern imperial economy. These central documents provide ample space for an interrogation of the role of textuality, representation, and the rhetoric of the law in early modern transoceanic colonial/religious projects.
Pope Alexander’s Bulls of Donation represent an inaugural act, asserting a right to conquest that tightened the bond between secular and spiritual powers. From a geopolitical standpoint, these decrees reasserted a foundational tenet of Christendom that God owned the globe and that the Pope had the power to oversee his domains. This geopolitical ideology took its colonialist form in the medieval reconceptualization of the notion of imperium and the millenarian theology that saw Catholic empires as “agents of God providential plan” (Muldoon 1