Volume 22, issue 42, January-June 2025
Literatures, languages and lands in Ibero-America 530 years after the Tratado de Tordesillas.
Editors: Jorge Uribe (Universidad EAFIT) and André Corrêa de Sá (University of California - Santa Barbara).
Opening date for receipt of articles: January 30, 2024.
Deadline for submission of articles: July 30, 2024.
Publication: January 30, 2025.
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.
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