Geographies of Philological Knowledge: Postcoloniality and the Transatlantic National Epic

By Nadia R. Altschul

Geographies of Philological Knowledge examines the relationship between medievalism and colonialism in the nineteenth-century Hispanic American context through the striking case of the Creole Andrés Bello (1781–1865), a Venezuelan grammarian, editor, legal scholar, and politician, and his lifelong philological work on the medieval heroic narrative that would later become Spain’s national epic, the Poem of the Cid. Nadia R. Altschul combs Bello’s study of the poem and finds throughout it evidence of a “coloniality of knowledge.”
 
Altschul  reveals how, during the nineteenth century, the framework for philological scholarship established in and for core European nations—France, England, and especially Germany—was exported to Spain and Hispanic America as the proper way of doing medieval studies. She argues that the global designs of European philological scholarship are conspicuous in the domain of disciplinary historiography, especially when examining the local history of a Creole Hispanic American like Bello, who is neither fully European nor fully alien to European culture. Altschul likewise highlights Hispanic America’s intellectual internalization of coloniality and its understanding of itself as an extension of Europe.  
 
A timely example of interdisciplinary history, interconnected history, and transnational study, Geographies of Philological Knowledge breaks with previous nationalist and colonialist histories and thus forges a new path for the future of medieval studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9780226016191

Book preview

NADIA R. ALTSCHUL teaches in the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of La literatura, el autor y crítica textual and coeditor of Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of the Middle Ages Outside Europe.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2012 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2012.

Printed in the United States of America

21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12      1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01621-4 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-01621-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01619-1 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Altschul, Nadia.

Geographies of philological knowledge : postcoloniality and the Transatlantic national epic / Nadia R. Altschul.

          p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01621-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-01621-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Philology—Latin America—History—19th century.

2. Medievalism—Latin America—History—19th century.

3. Middle Ages—Study and teaching—Latin America—

History—19th century. 4. Postcolonialism—Latin

America. 5. Epic literature, Spanish—Latin America—History and criticism—19th century. 6. Cid (Epic cycle).

7. Bello, Andrés, 1781–1865. I. Title.

PC4060.L29A48 2012

409.2—dc23

2011023609

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Geographies of Philological Knowledge

Postcoloniality and the Transatlantic National Epic

NADIA R. ALTSCHUL

Para Lalu

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Creole Medievalism and Settler Postcolonial Studies

PART 1. THE COLONIALITY OF HISPANIC AMERICAN PHILOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE

1    The Global Standards of Intellectual and Disciplinary Historiography

2    Taken for Indians: Native Philology and Creole Culture Wars

PART 2. METROPOLITAN PHILOLOGY AND THE SETTLER CREOLE SCHOLAR

3    National Epic Denied: European Assertions of the Lack of a Spanish Epic

4     Andrés Bello and the Foundations of Spanish National Philology

PART 3. MEDIEVALIST OCCIDENTALISM FOR SPANISH AMERICA

5   Defining the Spanish American National Epic and Other Occidentalist Resistances

6    The Spanish Orient in Bello’s Spanish American Occidentalism

Coda

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I am especially thankful to the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University and to my two chairs, Stephen G. Nichols and William Egginton, for their constant support during the years in which I wrote and researched this book.

Among the colleagues who assisted me throughout the years in reflecting about the topics of this book, I owe distinctive thanks to Kathleen Davis for introducing me to postcolonial theory. Special thanks are due as well to those who shared their unpublished or hard-to-find works at different stages of writing—Elisabeth L. Austin, Guillermo Toscano, and Michelle R. Warren—and to Fernanda Macchi and José María Rodríguez García for reading and commenting on previous drafts. I am also grateful to the many colleagues who helped me test my thoughts in conferences and other scholarly settings, especially Txetxu Aguado, Sara Castro-Klarén, John Dagenais, Fernando Degiovanni, Simon Doubleday, Moira Fradinger, Jessica Fol­kart, Matthew Gabriele, George Greenia, Eduardo González, Aurora Hermida-Ruiz, Lucas Izquierdo, Beatriz Pastor, Marina Pérez de Mendiola, José del Pino, Lawrence Principe, David Rojinsky, Harry Sieber, Hernán Taboada, Richard Utz, David Wacks, Barbara Weissberger, and María Willstedt.

The review process can provide invaluable intellectual exchange, and I am especially grateful to the terrific anonymous readers enlisted by the University of Chicago Press, and to the second reader for offering Geographies of Philological Knowledge as a title. My thanks as well to Randolph Petilos, who backed this project from the start and expertly shepherded it to publication, and to Nicholas Murray for his skillful copyediting. I also owe special thanks to Marcela González, the chief librarian of the Archivo Central Andrés Bello of the University of Chile, who, in the midst of clashes between student protesters and police, went out of her way to help me locate Bello’s London Notebooks and allowed me to peruse them in the staff’s private offices.

I am most grateful to my family. My mother and South American relatives have always been there for me, no matter how may years I have lived abroad; and my family-in-law has been a closer blessing for many of those years. At home, Joel provides balance and joy, as well as extraordinary food, and our radiant daughter, who also had to share me with this book, turned life into an amazing affair. I dedicate this book to her, with a mami’s special love.

›››‹‹‹

Parts of this book have been previously published. An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared in La corónica 35, no. 2 (2007): 159–72 as On the Shores of Nationalism: Latin American Philology, Local Histories and Global Designs. Parts of chapter 4, with snippets from elsewhere in the volume, appeared in 2009 as "Andrés Bello and the Poem of the Cid: Latin America, Occidentalism, and the Foundations of Spain’s National Philology," in Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World, edited by Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, 219–36. © 2009 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Introduction: Creole Medievalism and Settler Postcolonial Studies

Thinking about settlers is deeply unfashionable in postcolonial criticism. Settlers have always been unpalatable subjects. Their writings bring to the fore the less defined cadences of postcolonialism: politically flawed texts which rest uncomfortably on the cusp of coloniality, writings which work with rather than against European models, and feature difficult and sometimes ambiguous engagements with a history of invasion and dispossession.

« GILLIAN WHITLOCK, The Intimate Empire»

The decision to study the European Middle Ages ineluctably implies an orientation toward Europe, a congeniality with its products, an investment in its culture.

«WILLIAM D. PADEN, Scholars at a Perilous Ford »

What does it mean to study the Middle Ages? How is this study inflected by one’s position as a scholar in or from the New World, sometimes as a settler or creole born and raised in former colonial lands? The second epigraph by William Paden, written from the United States, provides a particular response to these questions, positing in the contemporary decision to study the Middle Ages an internal and even emotional attachment to European culture. I remember my own puzzlement the first time I ran into Paden’s phrase in the library of my doctoral institution. Conversely, when I next read Paden’s The Future of the Middle Ages at my current university library, I was heartened to find that a previous reader not only seemed to share my discomfort but had written, in capital letters, a resounding no in the margin. It seems fair to presume that this reader did not identify with the assumed orientation toward Europe either. Unfortunately for those who do not acknowledge this ineluctable cultural congeniality, there is a rather generalized belief in an implicit alliance between studying the Middle Ages and the creation of cultural links with Europe.

The most prevalent critical perspective on the meaning of studying the Middle Ages has been the coupling of medievalism with nineteenth-century European nationalisms. A self-critical, historiographical branch of medieval studies has been devoted to elucidating this connection, especially since the foundation of the journal Studies in Medievalism (SIM) in 1976. Despite its long scholarly history, the appeal of the connection with nationalism does not seem to have diminished in the twenty-first century. Current studies continue to explore the relationship of medievalism and nationalism, such as Patrick Geary’s pan-European The Myth of Nations (2002) and Joep Leerssen’s several analyses of literary historicism.¹ As examined in these and other studies, medievalism has been generally understood since Romantic times as a quest for national origins and as a field that constructed a national identity out of medieval materials. Clearly, after the nineteenth-century wars of independence or in newly politically emancipated countries, such as the former Spanish America, the association between medievalist scholarly pursuits and national identity cannot be understood as an uncomplicated connection between the colonizers’ medieval past and the new national present and future. Considering in particular the former Spanish America, this book does not endeavor to dislodge the association of the nation-state with medieval studies but instead introduces still understudied connections between medievalism and empire into this nationalist disciplinary discourse. For one thing, the nationalist model in the historiography of medievalism is imprinted by a type of self-referentiality that we can call a self-referential nationalism: medievalist nationalism emphasizes the bond between scholars, their works, and the origins of their own nation and language. It is clear that scholars have not limited themselves to studying their own nations or the origins of their own language, and in the case of the more marginalized Iberian medievalism, it is not surprising to find that this scholarly periphery offers a good field in which to discern breaking points in self-referentiality. Iberian medievalism was both a belated field—with the foundation of its national philology at the very end of the nineteenth century—and a favored object of the nineteenth-century Romantic gaze. The panorama of Castilian medieval studies would be incomplete without the inclusion of, for instance, German and French Hispano-medievalists. As a telling example, the first editor in 1846 of the Mocedades de Rodrigo—an early fourteenth-century composition on the youth of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the Poem of the Cid’s main warrior and Spain’s national hero—was the Frenchman Francisque Michel, who was also the first editor of the canonical Oxford manuscript of the French national epic, the Song of Roland. Moreover, this first 1846 edition by Michel was achieved with the aid of Ferdinand Wolf, the most illustrious German Hispano-medievalist of his time.²

Fundamental French and German Hispano-medieval scholarship has not been in the forefront of the examination of the field, certainly not when compared to the extent to which Spain’s flagship medievalist, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, has been studied. Menéndez Pidal started his stellar career in 1896 and 1898 with works on narrative epic poems, and continued to exert strong influence over the field until the last years of his life with his 1959 The Song of Roland and Neotraditionalism (La Chanson de Roland y el neotradicionalismo). This last work was no less celebrated than his first studies and was translated into many European languages, exemplifying an international reach that very few Hispanists ever achieve. Yet despite the disproportion when compared to M. Pidal’s scholarship, foreign European authorities have had noticeable recognition in the Iberianist collective consciousness.³ In contrast to this understudied albeit recognized foreign European involvement, a much less explored disciplinary case is the work of nineteenth-century non-Europeans in the study of the Iberian Middle Ages. Of our particular concern here will be the situation of the criollo American, who can neither be subsumed as fully European nor regarded as fully alien to European culture.⁴

The particular criollo medievalism with which I engage here is that of a foundational nineteenth-century figure: the Venezuelan grammarian, editor, politician, and legal scholar Andrés Bello (1781–1865).⁵ Although the scope of postcoloniality is, in my view, the domain of post-contact societies, Bello did live through the wars of Spanish American political independence and was an important figure in the landscape of the foundational decades of the new Spanish American republics. Bello was born in 1781 in Caracas, Venezuela, to a middle-class criollo family.⁶ He was educated there as a Latinist, and, as a lettered man of reasonable social standing, he started a career in the colonial bureaucracy, where he was a loyal subject of Charles IV, the last king of Spain with full jurisdiction over the American colonies. However, after forcing Charles IV to abdicate in favor of his young son, Napoleonic troops entered Spain in 1808 and replaced the young king Ferdinand VII with Joseph Bonaparte. This situation compelled the ruling classes of the American colonies to choose between two kings. They either accepted the change in dynasty and with it Napoleon’s brother as their legitimate monarch, or they maintained their colonial alliance to Ferdinand VII and the defeated line of the Bourbon dynasty in Spain. Faced with accepting either a foreign French king or a deposed Bourbon king, Venezuela’s criollo elite decided on a third option: a junta in Caracas repudiated Napoleonic rule and took the government of the area into its own hands until Ferdinand should again assume the throne. As much as this third option could be construed as an attempt to maintain the political bond with Spain and its true deposed monarch, the fact that a local group of criollos chose self-jurisdiction could also be taken as a case of colonial secession. Faced with the shadow of secessionism and the possibility of a Napoleonic invasion in the Spanish colonies, the first Junta of Venezuela decided to seek the approval of the British Empire, which was itself attempting to curb Napoleonic expansion.

In 1810 the Venezuelan Junta sent three envoys on an official mission to London. The Liberator, Simón Bolívar, the diplomat Luis López Méndez, and Andrés Bello, who served as their secretary. Although there is scant documentary evidence of the particulars, the Venezuelan agenda in the meeting with the British authorities did not proceed without complications. Apparently, while Bello took the meeting as an appeal to the British Empire to approve the new provisional political situation, the general tone was set by Bolívar, who was more committed to tearing Venezuela away from the Spanish Empire and claiming the beginning of its political independence. England agreed not to take military measures against Venezuela, but it was not prepared to accept the independence of Spain’s territorial possessions in the Americas. Given this unclear yet not hostile situation, Bolívar instructed the two Venezuelan envoys to remain in London. In 1812, however, the first independent Venezuela collapsed, and the early separatist Francisco de Miranda—in whose London house the envoys lived—died in a Spanish prison after a military engagement in the Americas. Due to this situation, the two diplomatic members were left in the British capital with neither living quarters nor financial means. In the midst of these political and personal debacles, Bello turned his attention to the study of the origins of medieval languages and literatures. Specifically, he began to work on a new edition of the Poem of the Cid, the medieval heroic narrative of the exploits of El Cid that later in the century would become Spain’s national epic and thus the cornerstone of Spain’s national philology.⁷ Why would Bello edit the so-called foundational poem of Spain during the Spanish American wars of independence? What could this scholarship mean in the hands of a criollo subject like Bello? And how does this situation interact with the well-studied selfreferential nationalisms of nineteenth-century scholarship? The main questions of this volume meet in these crossings—in the criollo editing the colonial motherland’s national text; in his awkward placement within intellectual and disciplinary history; in the inquiry into the meaning of Bello’s medievalism for Spanish America.

Since this book is concerned with a critique of the national philologies and the national epic through the medievalist work of Andrés Bello, let me explain early on the parameters and relationships between the two in the nineteenth century. As the notion of a national philology implies, the Romantic medievalist project proposes a link between the nation and philology, or, to be more precise, between the nation-state and the philology of the dialect that was elevated as the state’s national language. Even though critics emphasize the difficulty of providing a description of philology, a simple recognition of its boundaries emerges from the differences between disciplinary names in places such as Spain and the United States: in Spain we typically find departments of French, Italian, or English Philology, but in the United States these same academic departments are typically known as departments of French, Italian, or English Language and Literature. The national aspect of this Romantic philology thus blends two features: the linguistic study of the particular dialect that a nation-state has elevated as its own national language (its language of culture, bureaucracy, and education), and the study of the literary compositions that use this language, starting with the very first examples and following with what are considered its greatest accomplishments. In languages like Castilian, the first examples of languages and literatures in terms of the nation-state were found in heroic vernacular compositions of the high Middle Ages.⁸ That is why, for instance, the Poem of the Cid functions as a foundational national text, while the Latin compositions Carmen Campidoctoris and Historia Roderici do not occupy this initial position, even though they are earlier texts recounting the life and heroic deeds of El Cid.⁹ By looking into the first literary compositions in the modern European vernaculars, the national philologies institute a link between the medieval texts written in what are now the national languages and the spiritual origins of the particular nation from which the nationstate was created. For early scholars of the Romantic period, who had been bred within the confined artistic walls of neoclassicism, the ballads and other unruly genres epitomized the spontaneous artistic compositions of the common peoples. Thus popular compositions were first and foremost those disparaged in previous theories of literary art, and they provided scholars with an escape from the overpowering neoclassical credo mostly associated with France and with an apparently living link to the spirit of the nation as it had lived unconstrained and outside the corseted foreign strictures of good taste. The national philologies thus venture into the study of the earliest popular literatures written in the state’s national language, with the idea that these earliest examples of literatures existing outside the neoclassical artistic walls were a living link to the essential character of the nation.

In terms of the Castilian national epics and the Spanish national philology, a particular problem in the discipline was that more central European scholars in the nineteenth century had been able to claim that Spain was a country that lacked a true national epic and could never produce this privileged cultural form, despite the existence of medieval ballads and the Poem of the Cid. This intra-European example (examined in chapter 3) shows for nineteenth-century Spain the importance of geopolitical location in the study of intellectual and disciplinary history, and it highlights a problem well recognized within Latin American studies: the coloniality of knowledge. A significant issue discussed in this book therefore concerns a set of concepts associated with the geopolitics of knowledge that has been successfully circulated by Walter Mignolo: the coloniality of knowledge, local history, and global designs. Mignolo pointed out that the imaginary of the modern/colonial world system located the production of knowledge in Europe.¹⁰ Under this system, the colonies were able to produce culture—a mode of living that could be found exotic, observed, collected, and generally made into an object of study—but they were placed outside the realm of knowledge production. Accompanying the European location of the production of knowledge was a projection of European thinking as hegemonic, so that its peculiarities became the standard against which other endeavors would be measured and explained. The coloniality of knowledge could thus be deployed by providing a global history that was nevertheless narrated from a European perspective. In the terms used by Mignolo, although knowledge is local—either in England, Mozambique, or Guatemala—European local knowledge could be projected to global designs, so that a universal history . . . could be narrated from a European (and therefore hegemonic) perspective, while other forms of local knowledge would be forced to accommodate themselves to such new realities.¹¹ Although Mignolo is concerned with colonial Spanish America, Spain in the nineteenth century was similarly considered as unable to produce knowledge and was positioned as a subject to be interpreted and studied according to the global designs of more powerful European imperial nations—it was construed from the perspective of the European empires of the second generation (England, France, and Germany).

This is to say that even within Europe temporal constructions and geographical constructions were likely to interact, and thus we will consider here, in particular, the fact that throughout the nineteenth century the heart of Europe perceived the Iberian Peninsula as an exotic and backward colonial space.¹² Informed by postcolonial theory, we can explain the position of nineteenth-century Spain within its European geographical surroundings through Johannes Fabian’s notion of the denial of coevalness.¹³ Postcolonial lands were considered stuck at a prior historical time, living in a never-ending past, while Europe was a historical and thus changing society that had progressed into the realm of modernity and the future. Léon-François Hoffmann presented facets of this denial of coevalness in a study of Spain’s image in France between 1800 and 1850, noting that the dream of a good French Romantic was to explore mysterious tropical lands such as the Americas, Africa, or the Orient. Since these travels were long, dangerous, and costly, a voyage in Spain offered almost all the ingredients of a far away exploration without its inconveniences.¹⁴ While the French Romantics wanted to move across space, they also dreamt of moving across time, and in both cases Spain offered the ideal alternative. Spain, Hoffmann finds in Stendhal, is Africa, and also a living, breathing medieval land.¹⁵ In De l’amour (1822) Stendhal considers the Spanish people as the living representative of the Middle Ages, and in Mémoires d’un touriste (1838), he states, Do you want to see the Middle Ages? Look at Spain.¹⁶

Of particular importance with regard to Spain’s position as an intra-European colonial land is the fact that Spain’s African character implied the country’s Oriental character in contemporary times. In the nineteenth century Southern Spain—associated with medieval al-Andalus—came to identify all of Spain, especially because of the discovery of the country by British and French travelers and the influence of German literature and scholarship.¹⁷ In fact, as noted by José F. Colmeiro, the well-known statement by Alexandre Dumas Pere that Africa begins at the Pyrenees might as well be interpreted as the Orient begins at the Pyrenees. Colmeiro associated this Orientalization with an endless repetition of inherited images, and presented a fine set of early nineteenth-century quotations regarding the Oriental character of Spain: Alfred Vigny’s statement that a Spaniard is a man from the East; he is a Catholic Turk (1826); Victor Hugo’s that Spain is still the Orient. Spain is half African, Africa is half Asiatic (1828); Stendhal’s that everything in Spain is African. If the Spaniard were a Muslim he would be a complete African (1829), and Chateaubriand’s view that Spaniards are Arab Christians (1838).¹⁸

The Orientalization of Spain in the nineteenth century was at the time also a problem for Spain’s former colonial subjects.¹⁹ Criollos found themselves contending with this intellectual heritage because of their Euro-American cultural alignment and their general understanding of the Americas as Western. For a criollo like Bello, in order to postulate the unself-conscious belonging of Spanish America, to the West, the Oriental character of their European colonizer had to be resolved. Another main issue considered in this book is therefore Occidentalism, a concept defined by Walter Mignolo as the understanding of America as an extension of the Occident. As he explains it,

The Occident [America] . . .was never Europe’s Other but the difference within sameness: Indias Occidentales . . . and later America . . . was the extreme West, not its alterity. America, contrary to Asia and Africa, was included as part of Europe’s extension and not as its difference. . . . Occidentalism was a transatlantic construction precisely in the sense that the Americas became conceptualized as the expansion of Europe.²⁰

Although apparently similar to Edward Said’s better-known concept of Orientalism, the conception of Occidentalism referred to here is not a reverse of Said’s model. While in Said’s scheme the Orient was a construction of the West, Occidentalism in Mignolo’s framework cannot be assimilated to the agency of non-Westerners in constructing and putting to use an imaginary West.²¹ Mignolo’s Occidentalism is instead closer to the concept of Europeanization. But this process of Europeanization, which has been identified in many cases with the application of Western power to so-called Third World countries—such as in forcing the adoption of a market economy—is instead approached more particularly at the level of thought and discourse. Occidentalism in this volume is thus discussed as the cultural self-understanding of the Americas as an extension of Europe and is therefore part of an intellectual internalization of coloniality.

In this work, however, I do not study the concept of Occidentalism in the form theorized by Mignolo but instead through the notion of Occidentalist resistances, which is based on a separation between the concepts of postcoloniality and post-Occidentalism. Here postcoloniality does not imply cultural or political emancipation but the myriad relationships created among all sides and aspects of a hierarchically uneven social situation after colonial contact; in the case of American criollos it envisions a resistance to the metropolis coupled with the internal colonialism of subjugated populations. The post-Occidental, also theorized by Mignolo, refers instead to a shift beyond a Europeanizing episteme to the ability to think and propose alternatives that do not inhabit the colonizing bounds of Occidentalism. The distinction between postcoloniality (as both collaboration and resistance) and post-Occidentalism (as emancipation form the Occidentalist worldview) allows us to locate Occidentalist resistances as a form of struggle with coloniality that is carried out from within the Occidentalist frame of mind.

In regarding criollo Occidentalism as both collaboration with colonialism and resistance to the