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- Convenors:
-
Rachel Stein
(Columbia University)
Elizabeth Spragins (Stanford University)
Ana Mendez-Oliver (Columbia University)
- Location:
- Sala 78, Piso 1
- Sessions:
- Thursday 18 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This panel proposes the Iberian body as a lens through which to examine global and local power dynamics. Specifically, in the 16th-17th centuries, how did texts and images engage with the Portuguese/Iberian presence around the globe and how were conflicts played out in the textual space of the body?
Long Abstract:
Portuguese imperialism suffered several significant blows throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Failed military campaigns, submission to the Spanish Crown, and growing competition from the Dutch and English are some of the well-known factors that contributed to a general sense of the empire's decadence and decline. In this context, while complex local conflicts with a global impact were being played out on the ground from Brazil to Japan, so too competing texts and images portrayed Portuguese—or Iberian, from 1580-1640—activity from different vantage points, each underlain by unique political, social, and economic interests. In almost every written language, European and otherwise, and from distant and diverse sites of enunciation, textual and visual production represented and debated, praised and criticized, the Portuguese/ Iberian presence around the globe. These textual landscapes of sites such as Goa, al-Qasr al-Kabir, Macau, Lisbon, or Rome, to name a few, are populated and organized by bodies of all kinds, whether traveling, dead, sacred, or sexualized—without forgetting the ever-present concept of the body politic. This panel proposes the Iberian body in particular as a lens through which to examine global and local power dynamics. We especially invite proposals that approach the dialectic between body and landscape in a way that critiques or questions traditional scholarly notions of alterity or ethnographic discourse.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 18 July, 2013, -Rachel Stein (Columbia University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the production of presence of the body of St. Francis Xavier in Europe in 1614. Two objects—the Saint's arm, shipped from Goa to Rome, and an eyewitness account of his miracles printed in Lisbon—shed light on questions of proximity and distance in a global Iberian world.
Paper long abstract:
The mortal remains of St. Francis Xavier reached their permanent resting place in Goa in 1553. In the wake of their translation, local Christians fervently vied for any kind of contact with the Saint, calling him simply, "the Body." A concerted campaign was needed to foster the same kind of cult elsewhere: in addition to spreading hagiographical texts and images throughout Europe and beyond, the Jesuits decided to sever Xavier's right forearm and ship it to Rome in 1614. The relic was promptly displayed on an altar under a portrait of the Saint in the Jesuits' young Gesù Church, a powerful gesture in their final push for beatification and canonization. In that same year, an eyewitness account of Xavier's activities and miracles in Asia entered the public sphere in Lisbon as a licensed, printed book—Fernão Mendes Pinto's travel narrative, Peregrinaçam, which included several chapters on his first-hand contact with the Saint, had been sitting in obscurity in manuscript form for about forty years. I contend that the princeps edition of Peregrinaçam is configured, both with visual cues on its title page and narrative devices throughout, as a testimony to the life of Xavier that complements and supports the act of translating his arm into the European continent and imaginary. Read together, these two objects—body and printed book—shed light on questions of proximity and distance in a global Iberian world. A 1653 English edition of Peregrinaçam erases Xavier completely, revealing inter-European conflicts as well.
Elizabeth Spragins (Stanford University)
Paper short abstract:
In the Jornada de África, Jerónymo de Mendonça marshals a vast quantity of dead bodies as evidence of the truthfulness of his historiographical project. The overwhelming presence of these bodies circumvents his history and leaves him with a futile project of textual burial.
Paper long abstract:
Of all the elements within Jerónimo de Mendonça's Jornada de África (1607) that capture the reader's attention, perhaps none does so with such force as the immense quantity of dead bodies that Mendonça seeks to marshal for his historiographical project. This historiographical strategy, however, carries profound implications for Mendonça's broader project of Portuguese history writing during the Iberian union. I argue that both the sheer number and persistent materiality of corpses within the Jornada de África, the perished soldiers, nobles, and kings of the Battle of al-Qasr al-Kabir (1578), overwhelm what is meant to be a relatively straightforward, pro-Portuguese narration of events. I focus on the recollected materiality of the corpses of Mendonça's deceased companions. I argue that the piles of corpses, insistently evoked as present within Mendonça's text through various forms of deictic reference, command (or interrupt) Mendonça's attention and attest to the failure—at several levels—of the Portuguese imperial incursion into North Africa. After the battle, the pull of the unburied corpses remains so strong for Mendonça that the temporal and geographical distance between the act of narration and the battle itself ultimately collapses. Put another way, since the Portuguese defeat and the passage of twenty-nine years between the battle and the publication of Mendonça's account preclude the possibility of any sort of care for these bodies left to rot on a North African battlefield, Mendonça ultimately offers his fallen companions a textual burial.
Ana Mendez-Oliver (Columbia University)
Paper short abstract:
Van Linschoten’s Itinerario presents through literary and illustrated images a Goa, under Portuguese ruling at the end of the XVI century, as a site of excess and sensuality; a place where the intermingling of classes and ethnicities has lead to the decadence of the Portuguese political body.
Paper long abstract:
In 1583, John Huyghen van Linschoten embarks in Lisbon on his travels to the East, which included Mozambique, India, China and Japan, among others. In his narration of his travels, the Itinerario, the author not only describes maritime routes to the East to his Dutch audience and, later, English audience, routes that had been under the dominium of the Portuguese at the time, but also provides vivid descriptions in the text and the printed images of the different places, cultures and ethnicities that he encountered. The paper will present how van Linchoten's Itinerario provides to his audience a singular and distinctive optic as an outsider, neither Portuguese nor Indian, in his impressions of the socio-political conditions of the Indian territories under the rule of the Estado da India. Van Linschoten's text illustrates, through literary and illustrated images, the political situation of the Portuguese territories in India as decadent and tropicalized. Throughout the Itinerario, Goa emerges as an essentially feminized site according to European precepts; it is a fertile, luxurious and unstable place. Hence, Goa materializes in the text as both a rich place for economic venture, but also a site where the promiscuity of classes and bodies of the inhabitants lead to the decadence of Portuguese. In this way, the paper will explore the political body of the Portuguese in Goa as one that has turned into an effeminate, excessive and chaotic body: a political body that could be easily displaced by a more virile European political body like the Dutch or the English.