Call for papers: Literatures, languages and territories in Ibero-America - Perspectives on the 530th anniversary of the Treaty of Tordesillas

Posted on 2024-02-21

Call for papers: Literatures, languages and territories in Ibero-America - Perspectives on the 530th anniversary of the Treaty of Tordesillas

  • Initial date: 2024-01-30
  • Deadline for submission: 2024-07-30
  • Online Edition: 2025-01-30

This thematic issue calls for papers that address the separation of the cultural history of Ibero-America into two blocks following the signing of the Treaty of Tordesillas on June 7, 1494, under the mediation of the Roman Catholic Church. This event created a hegemonic and expansionist tension that marked a pivotal moment in the competitive negotiations between the two emerging powers of Europe: Portugal and Spain. It also provided the discursive context for which the representation of the world as a globe was not only possible but considered crucial. Tordesillas, from this perspective, gave materiality to the claim of sovereignty over a territory and its inhabitants that, just two years after Christopher Columbus’s first voyage, were largely imaginary to the signatories and therefore susceptible to being “invented” (O’Gorman, 2010).

While drawing a line on 15th or 16th century maps may seem merely symbolic, mythic, or even a testimony to a form of provincial arrogance or bigotry, literary critics like Jorge Schwartz have highlighted its tangible impact on the cultural trajectory of the region now called Latin America. This delimitation underscores the tangible presence of a “Tordesillas wall” (Schwartz, 1991) separating Brazilian literature and that of Hispanic America. This “wall” has shaped the continuities and disconnects in the cultural evolution of both America and the Iberian Peninsula, leading to a peculiar uncommonness of the common, evident in the contrast of artistic traditions from both these blocks. Through this lens, the way people and territories have constructed identities or have been objects of identification by others is brought to focus. What are the implications of studying this historical event and its cultural impact? We propose that "Tordesillas” serves as example of a symbolic representation of the world or, in other words, an anchor for the “critique of a narrative reason” of the “Anthropocene/Eurocene” (Sloterdijk, 2016), where representational mechanisms act as agents in the formation, promotion, and annihilation of life.

With this in mind, we aim to provide readers with opportunities to connect a line of analysis centered on Ibero/Hispanic/Latin/Luso-America, its histories, literatures, and the various levels of performance of its cultural diversity and artistic expressions, from “Tordesillas” to present times, with a conceptual framework relevant in the academic assessment of the importance of the Humanities in today’s pressing debates. In this context, ecocritical and postcolonial readings, literary studies, and historiography are invited to reflect on how representations and fiction play a part in the human experience, in harmony or divergence with other forms of life, both human and non-human (Puchner 2022). The critiques of colonization, extractivism, and environmental transformation (Frankopan, 2023), and the labor and social relations of oppression and resistance that stem from them (Graeber, 2012), will be a foundational step in searching for intersections, mixtures, and resonances. Through artistic expressions, these seek to transcend boundaries in favor of territories and people who demand recognition of their interdependence. A case in point is the global tensions surrounding the sovereignty of the Amazonian territory, an issue that defines our era. All these reflections seek to reclaim new ways of addressing local ways of life (Escobar, 2000), considering the potentially catastrophic implications they hold for a globalized world and vice versa (Heise, 2008). In conclusion, we welcome contributions from various disciplinary perspectives that expand our critical understanding of the entanglement between living beings and the environment, and how the latter categorization, also a border fiction, has been the subject of discourse in literary, musical, and filmic works from the XVth century into actuality.

 

Topics and general framework:

  • Territorial representations, environmental imagination and planetary identities
  • Crossing borders, translation, immigration, and alternative systems of appropriation
  • World literature as debate
  • Exploitation, exploration, and labor
  • Environmental imagination and cosmopolitan studies
  • The Humanities and other Indigenous knowledge
  • Representations of capitalism
  • Iberoamerica as separate, Iberoamerica as one (Iberism)
  • The Idea of Latin America
  • Imagology and comparative cultural studies

Suggested bibliography

  1. Besse, J.M. (2010) La sombra de las cosas: Sobre paisaje y geografía. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva.
  2. Corrêa de Sá, A. (2023) Ecofagias. 1-Portugal. Lisboa: Gradiva.
  3. Cunha, E. da. (2016). Os Sertões. (W. N. Galvão, Ed.). 2ª Ed. São Paulo: Ática.
  4. Escobar, A. (2000). El lugar de la naturaleza y la naturaleza del lugar: ¿globalización o postdesarrollo? En La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas. Buenos Aires: CLACSO.
  5. Esposito, R. (2009) [1998] Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
  6. Ferreira de Castro (1930) A selva: romance. Lisboa: Empresa Nacional de Publicidade.
  7. Flys, C. et al. (Eds.). (2010) Ecocríticas. Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert.
  8. Frankopan, P. (2023) Earth Transformed: An Untold History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
  9. French J. (2005) Nature, Neo-Colonialism, and the Spanish American Regional Writers. Dartmouth College Press.
  10. Graeber, D. (2012) Debt: the first 5000 years. New York: Melville House
  11. Greenblatt, S. (1992) Marvelous Possessions. University of Chicago Press.
  12. Heise, U. (2008) Sense of place and sense of planet: the Environmental imagination of the global. Oxford University Press.
  13. Latour, B. (2017) Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Polity Press.
  14. O’Gorman, E. (2010) [1973] La invención de américa: Investigación acerca de la estructura histórica del nuevo mundo y del sentido de su devenir. México: FCE.
  15. Pizarro, A. (2009) Amazonía: el río tiene voces. Santiago: FCE.
  16. Puchner, Martin (2022) Literature for a Changing Planet. Princeton University Press.
  17. Rama, Ángel (1985) La crítica de la cultura en América Latina. Caracas: Ayacucho.
  18. Rivera, José Eustásio (2023) La vorágine: Una edición cosmográfica. Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes
  19. Saramago, Victoria (2020) Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America. Northwestern University Press.
  20. Sloterdijk, Peter (2016) ¿Qué pasó en el siglo XX?. Barcelona: Siruela.
  21. Schwartz, Jorge (1991) Las vanguardias latinoamericanas: textos programáticos. México: FCE.

On line submissions:  https://publicaciones.eafit.edu.co/index.php/co-herencia/about/submissions