During early modern European expansion, America emerged as dynamic meeting ground, continuously forging multidirectional global encounters.Relating Continents dismisses the semantics of 'encounter' which, in the politics of naming, euphemistically substitutes invasive violence, but invests in the notion's dimension as an enactment of literary, cultural, and social relations, fusing people, goods, texts, artifacts, ideas, and senses of belonging.
Under tanding the practice of relating as both connecting and narrating, this anthology investigates the linking of continents in Romance literary and cultural history, as well as the tales of entanglement produced in the process. The contributors revisit the worldwide impact of distant or in-person negotiations between conquerors and local actors; they assess how colonial interventions shift hemispheric native networks, and they examine the ties between America, Africa, and Asia. By doing so, they prove the global constitution of early modern Spanish and Portuguese American literatures, their historical and cultural contexts, and their long-lasting legacies.
Romana Radlwimmer, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Deutschland.
Imagining Globally during Early Modern Romance Expansionism
Is there one world, or are there many worlds? Inca Garcilaso’s celebrated 1609Comentarios Reales [Royal Commentaries] begin with an intriguing invitation to think globally. He asks “si hay muchos mundos”, whether many worlds exist, pondering how to conceive that round surface situated beneath wide skies and inhabited by humans and other species. He inquires how the globe dramatically changed when it was divided into two, the New World and the Old, and how its different zones are connected to each other (Inca Garcilaso 1985: 9–10). Five-hundred years later, in a global system shaped by the long shadows of colonialism – or “coloniality”, to use Aníbal Quijano’s term (Quijano 2008) – which excluded a plurality of world views, Inca Garcilaso’s questions still resonate. They direct the gaze towards the transcontinentalemplotments (White 2014 [1973];Ricœur 1984 [1983]), that is, the imaginary-narrative composition of historical representation, during early modern Romance expansionism. They stimulate further explorations: in which ways do the early modern Spanish and Portuguese Americas, which Inca Garcilaso referred to, participate in an emerging global literary system, and how do they coin it? How do they reflect on their contemporary world order, and how do they produce it?
In Romance literary and cultural history, colonial and global expansion form much-debated reciprocal relations. Globalization is often seen as a process triggered by early modern colonialism’s massive mobilization of technical and financial resources, when soldiers, clergymen, merchants, writers, and editors systematically expanded awareness about intercontinentally travelled routes to new possessions and modes of production (Wallerstein 2011 [1974];Braudel 1979;Gruzinski 2012;Hausberger 2018). The Spanish and Portuguese constitution of America served as a structural model for later colonial endeavors; together, they produced coloniality’s centuries-long cultural legacies of worldwide impact. In this panorama, the designation “encounter” has been exhaustively employed as a synonym for the global ramifications of conquest and has evoked equally much critical scholarship. The “encounter between Old World and New” became a main component of the discourse of discovery, generating alterity and excitement, and covering up the clashes and wars lying at the origin of coloniality’s hybrid practices (Todorov 1987 [1982];Greenblatt 1991;Verdesio 2002). Building on these debates, this anthology dismisses the semantics of “encounter” which, i
