Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas by Roland Green (review)

Abstract

MLRy 98.1, 2003 267 today, 'others' as well equipped as the current editors to handle the difficultvocabulary of multilingual texts in this specialist area of knowledge will be very hard to find. One or two small points: crabot(p. 109. 220) given as 'beetle' looks more like 'toad', cf. crapaude (p. 33. 290). Both are to be reduced to powder and burnt?a burnt beetle would hardly be worth the trouble. 'A mile-wey denotes a period of twenty minutes, approx. the time to run a mile' (p. 154. 80)?for 'run' read 'walk'; in 'casten out the wicke wirm' (p. 174. 113), the 'wicke' may well be the northern dialect 'wick=living, lively, wriggly', rather than 'wicked'. Manchester W. Rothwell Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas. By Roland Green. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2000. xiii + 289 pp. $47; ?33 (pbk $18; ?13). ISBN 0-226-30669-0 (pbk 0-226-30670-4). Building upon his previous work, Roland Greene explores how the century following the clash of European and American worlds continually refigured that relationship through the Petrarchan love lyric. While epic, in decline in the early modern period, might be defined as exclusive and representative, the lyric was participatory and flexible, providing a space in which the dichotomies of conquest might be explored. Conceding that 'nothing about imperialism ever changed because of a poem' (p. 5), Greene demonstrates how in the sixteenth century a dialectical momentum was estab? lished through which the lyric defied conventional bounds to present internationalist and multifarious perspectives, representing both sides of an unstable imperial divide. The 'unrequitedness' characteristic of Petrarchan form proves the central element to the lyric's malleability, creating a discourse of differences in which iove' becomes an intersection of social, cultural, and religious forces. Thus the Americas become the autoreflexive, irreducible object of European desire that, while materially conquerable , are never entirely known. It is this association in its numerous forms that Greene demonstrates to be continually reproduced throughout the sixteenth century. Situated in the wake of the recent quincentennial explosion in studies focusing upon 1492, the opening chapter explores the assertion that Columbus was actively Petrarchan, resorting to a lyric model of experience when his received models failed adequately to quantify reality. Greene's illuminating discussion highlights the way in which modern versions of Columbus are the heavily invested consequence of nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideals that have created a 'Romance' identity which exerts profound authority over ideas of empire. Countering this influence in the second chapter, he identifies Brazil as the 'quintessential object' of early modern imperialist discourse and its commodities?in particular Brazilwood (or pau-brasil)?as objects onto which European power and desire were projected. In the third, the work of the 'first-generation' mid-century European poets is explored?in particular the work of those who belonged to the courtly diplomatic class exemplified by men like Thomas Wyatt (1503-42), Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (1504-75), Francisco Lopez de Gomara (1511-64), and the younger Labe (1520-66) and de Cetina (?i520~57). Weaving them together into an increasingly complex Western European Petrarchan formulation, Greene builds upon foundations laid by Greenblatt to provide some remarkable insights into the work of Wyatt which demonstrate how interconnected this lyric form had become. It is a theme he carries into his fourth chapter, devoted almost entirely to a consideration of Philip Sidney (1554-86). Despite establishing a rather laboured connection between Sidney and Philip II of Spain and oversimplifying the profoundly important conflict between their two countries throughout the second half of the sixteenth century, Greene provides an intriguing reading of Astrophil and 268 Reviews Stella that explores the anxieties attendant upon expressions of imperial power. In his final revelatory chapter, the chronologically oriented thrust of the argument focuses upon the writer known as Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (i539-1616), the mestizo child of both Inca and Spanish parents, whose work represents perhaps 'the last moment in which the lyric discourse that shaped empire could still be manipulated to work critically against its own erstwhile purposes' (p. 24). Unrequited Conquests offers a remarkable array of radical new avenues of enquiry...