Rolena Adorno, "Literary Production and Suppression: Reading and Writing about Amerindians in Colonial Spanish America"
In this article, colonial Spanish American literary scholar Rolena Adorno addresses how the portrayal of the figure and culture of the Amerindian were depicted in colonial writing and how these depictions were a key determinant in period publication and suppression. Adorno also seeks to explain why the representation of native American experience was considered a discourse too dangerous to disseminate. When representing Amerindians became central in the two dominant forms of colonial literary production, historical/ethnohistorical chronicles and epic poems, authors both religious and lay expressed an unusual self-consciousness in relaying details about this new subject. Ethnographic, philosophical, and fictional accounts were commonly introduced with justifications or disclaimers indicating how it should be taken, by the reader, that the author was writing about Indians. Adorno asserts that “although we are familiar with the fact that European writers used European concepts of culture and languages of representation to describe the newfound humanity, we have yet to uncover the reasons why writing about Amerindians provoked the self-conscious self-justifications that writers commonly used when they introduced their novel subject matter”(1).
Adorno explores depictions of Amerindians in four different facets of colonial literary production: 1) the historiographic presentation of Indian rite and custom; 2) the poetic production of the exotic; 3) Amerindian culture and censorship in Bernardino Sahagún’s Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (1569) and José de Acosta’s Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias (1590); and 4) chivalric romance and narratives of the conquest of America. Adorno concludes her article by claiming that “the fundamental and insurmountable problem that stood at the heart of colonial discourse [was] the introduction of the Amerindian, not only as a new literary subject matter but as a cultural entity for which the existing literary, cultural, and political theory could provide no ready accommodations”(19).
Through this article, Adorno, who is one of the seminal scholars in the field of colonial Spanish American literature, helps to situate colonial literary production and representations of Amerindians within the larger cultural sphere of print culture and textual transmission in New Spain. While book history as a field deals with the material aspects of the creation, dissemination, and reception of print culture, Adorno provides a critical, cultural historic approach to analyzing the literary content of colonial print materials and engages with the discourses surrounding colonial representations of Amerindians. Her literary perspectives help to ground my book historical research to the content of the books printed during that era, and not just to more traditional book historical lines of inquiry that treat the physical book as central object of study, and overlook, to a certain extent, the actual literary content—i.e. message—being relayed using the book form as vessel.
