Hortensia Calvo, "The Politics of Print: The Historiography of the Book in Early Spanish America"
Hortensia Calvo is a book historian and literary scholar who is currently the director of the Latin American Library at Tulane University. In this essay, Calvo surveys the field of Book History in Latin America and describes the state of the discipline in the early 2000s. She begins by outlining the historical contours and foundations of book studies within colonial Spanish America. According to Calvo, the core of the traditional literature concentrates on two lines of inquiry. The first primarily concerns the establishment of print technology and its first publications in Mexico and Peru, and the second traces the proliferation of published European thought in the colonies. Following a thorough historiography of the discipline, Calvo addresses how “recent theoretical developments in the field of early Spanish American studies have generated strong critiques of the traditional methods and concerns of book historians, while new avenues of inquiry aim to account for the complex politics and material realities of symbolic exchange in the colonial world”(284).
Calvo then explains how “the underlying assumptions that guided traditional approaches to the book, that is, colonized Criollos stifled by Spanish oppression or, conversely, the civilizing role of benevolent Spanish institutions in the New World, have been modified by a number of scholarly developments, including postmodern theories of discourse, new insights into the intellectual history of early Spanish American urban elites, and research on symbolic and historical resistance to Spanish rule in Amerindian societies. In the past decade these developments have brought about strong critiques of the methods and concerns of traditional book historians, or, more commonly, a less explicit disregard for the Western book as a relevant or primary vehicle of colonial knowledge and communication. They have also generated interest in the role of books and printed works in processes of Europeanization and cultural transformation of native societies”(292).
Calvo’s survey of book historical research in early Spanish America is an important contribution to the field because it provides a critical inventory of the historic developments of the discipline and outlines the trajectories current and past scholarship have taken. For my research, Calvo’s historiography has been an invaluable orientation to the general thematic trends of book historical research. It has also provided extensively annotated citations to critical scholarship in the field. Calvo’s historiographic essay provides a map to navigate the different lines of inquiry and central concerns of book history in early Spanish America.
