Beyond Tordesillas: New Approaches to Comparative Luso-Hispanic Studies ed. by Robert Patrick Newcomb and Richard A. Gordon

Abstract

Reviewed by: Beyond Tordesillas: New Approaches to Comparative Luso-Hispanic Studies ed. by Robert Patrick Newcomb and Richard A. Gordon James R. Krause Newcomb, Robert Patrick, and Richard A. Gordon, editors. Beyond Tordesillas: New Approaches to Comparative Luso-Hispanic Studies. The Ohio State UP, 2017. ISBN 978-0-81421-347-6. Robert Newcomb and Richard Gordon provide a fundamental anthology of essays in Beyond Tordesillas: New Approaches to Comparative Luso-Hispanic Studies. The title references the 1494 treaty, brokered by the Pope, that divided the known world between Spain and Portugal—a failed pursuit that precluded potential colonizing projects of other European powers and completely disregarded the autonomy of non-European cultures. The title also references a 1993 essay, “Abaixo Tordesilhas!” (“Down with Tordesillas”) by Jorge Schwartz, an Argentine-born scholar who spent his career at the University of São Paulo. In this essay, Schwartz argues for a Luso-Hispanic comparative model, one that specifically includes greater integration of Brazil. (It would have been apropos to have included a translation or bilingual version of this essay, since it seems to be a touchstone of so many other essays included in the volume.) Building upon and moving beyond related fields—such as Iberian, Inter-American, and Transoceanic or Transatlantic studies—Beyond Tordesillas presents a series of provocative essays that seek to establish theoretical and practical models for comparative Luso-Hispanic studies. Due to the shared linguistic, geographic, and historical similarities between Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking regions of the world, the justification of such an academic project may seem self-evident. Nevertheless, Newcomb and Gordon point out in the introduction that “the academic fields of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian studies . . . developed independently and generally remain isolated from one another, even in close institutional quarters” (2). The authors of [End Page 128] sixteen essays, organized into four sections, seek to address and rectify the historical, ideological, and disciplinary factors that created this disjunction. In Part One, “Luso-Hispanic Studies and Related Lines of Inquiry: A Series of Proposals,” Pedro Schacht Pereira, Héctor Hoyos, David William Foster, Tracy Devine Guzmán, and Pedro Meira Monteiro examine points of contact among Luso-Hispanic traditions, be they epistemological, linguistic, political, cultural, or historical. Each essay provides both a theoretical and practical model for Luso-Hispanic studies. Pereira and Hoyos both examine the institutional and disciplinary separation of Spanish and Portuguese while arguing for greater flexibility in considering more comparative approaches. Foster, a long-term adherent of more comparative models, argues that a fully contextualized study of queer Luso-Hispanic literature must take into consideration both “complex issues of sociocultural context and linguistic creation” and “the presence of hegemonic and heteronormative priorities and the degree to which a writer may develop a transgressive voice relative to them” (61). Devine Guzmán adopts a hemispheric approach in analyzing issues of Indianness and indigeneity in the work of three authors—D’Arcy McNickle (United States), José María Arguedas (Peru), and Darcy Ribeiro (Brazil). Finally, Pedro Meira Monteiro connects Brazilian essayist and historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda with Uruguayan writer-critic José Enrique Rodó and US Latin Americanist scholar Richard Morse. He argues that an effective way to “jump” Tordesillas is to examine the formulation of the North American “Other” by Brazilian and Spanish American writers as an antagonist force that is either attacked or imitated. In Part Two, “Written Fictional Narrative: Brazil and Spanish-Speaking Latin America,” Robert Moser, Earl E. Fitz, and Leila Lehnen present comparative Luso-Hispanic approaches to written fictional narrative. Moser analyses the revenant as a literary topos of ambiguity as well as the “converging and diverging means” in which Latin America “[relates] to its past” (95). Fitz, an early proponent of Luso-Hispanic and Inter-American studies, treads familiar territory in examining Machado de Assis, Jorge Luis Borges, and Clarice Lispector as innovators of Latin American new narratives. Finally, Leila Lehnen “examines the conjunction between urban space and the constitution/erosion of citizenship” in the fragmented narratives of Luiz Ruffato’s Inferno provisorio and Guillermo Saccomanno’s El pibe (120). Part Three, “Luso-Hispanic Poetry, Music, and Expressive Culture,” contains essays by Alfredo Bosi, Sarah Moody, Charles A. Perrone, and...