The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity Thomas Beebee (bio) Ralph Bauer, The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xiii + 295 pp. $65. Ralph Bauer's book, in his own words, "places the transformations in Western knowledge occurring during the early modern period in the geo-political context of European settler colonialism in Spanish and British America from 1500 to 1800" (3). Ultimately, Bauer wishes to reveal through his study-examples [End Page 181] how the "epistemic mercantilism" visited on the New World by the Old was resisted and subverted through the writing of Creole subjects of the Spanish and British empires. His grounding of early American writing in history and geography includes a focus on genres specific to the New World—shipwreck, captivity, and travel—that exceeded Europe's catalog of noteworthy writing. He is adamantly comparative, juxtaposing texts in Spanish and English, treating geographies from Chile to New England, but often against the context of how these were published and read in Europe. Bauer thus reveals a North-South dialectic, in the mutual reading and translation of texts in various languages, as well as an East-West dialectic, where discourses of metropole and periphery contest and mutually condition one another. Bauer's first study example, Cabeza de Vaca's Naufragios, provides a good example of the latter dialectic. Thrown onto the Florida coast as the result of a failed incursion from Santo Domingo in 1528, Cabeza de Vaca survived an eight-year odyssey back to New Spain and eventually to Valladolid, where he published the "Relación" of his adventures seventeen years later. Bauer's chapter on Cabeza de Vaca begins on page 30, but he only turns to the text itself on page 48. In the meantime, Bauer has done a great deal of detail work in order to establish that the publication of the Relación was very much aligned with the policies of Charles V towards the New World, as the emperor attempted to abolish the feudal relations of the encomiendas granted to individual conquistadores in favor of central bureaucratic control by the empire. Bauer's reading of the narrative finds evidence of this bias in, for example, Cabeza de Vaca's warning to the expedition leader to protect the ships and see them to safe harbor, whereas Narváez insists on traveling by horse. Bauer traces the associations of the metaphor of ship with mother and nation, and of horse with the masculine individualist, arguing that this opposition is symbolic of the political struggle between mother Spain and her unruly Creole children. The densely argued reading of the Naufragios takes place in stereo, as key passages are compared against an earlier version to argue for the author's reshaping of the text away from the rugged and violent epic heroism of the conquistadores towards a spiritual autobiography and—Bauer's main point—an image of a centrally administered empire of peace. Cabeza de Vaca provides a smooth segue into the next chapter, since his relation is one of the many to appear in the Hakluytus posthumus of Samuel Purchas (1625), paraphrased and edited to suit the purposes of an author—so Bauer—who reshapes material from a variety of sources into an empirically oriented cultural geography whose heroes were Protestant [End Page 182] British merchants and traders rather than English (or Spanish) freebooters. The chapter returns to Spanish materials with a mention of Garcilaso de la Vega Inca's Comentarios reales as a source of the first-hand experiential account "from below" found as well in John Smith's General Historie of Virginia (1624), two foundational texts for a specifically Creole historiography and prose narrative. (Garcilaso will return as a source for passages of Carrió de la Vandera's work as well.) The innovative and geographically situated nature of captivity narratives has long been recognized, and Bauer examines two of them, Mary Rowlandson and Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, directly in his next chapter in a good, old-fashioned, point-by-point comparative exercise. The differences between the two texts—length and focus; gender of the narrators; religious...