Reviewed by: The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative Ralph Bauer Keywords Ralph Bauer, Rolena Adorno, The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative, Colonial Literature, Colonialism, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Garcilaso de la Vega Reinaldo Arenas, Alejo Carpentier, Spanish-American Literature, Spanish Conquest, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda Adorno, Rolena. The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2007. xix + 428 pp. In The Polemics of Possession, Rolena Adorno presents a grand synthesis of the many, more specifically focused books and articles that she has published in the last thirty years or so on such colonial writers as Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, as well as twentieth-century writers Reinaldo Arenas and Alejo Carpentier. Although many of the individual arguments and readings in Polemics of Possession may therefore be familiar to the reader, the book weaves them together into a coherent narrative of Spanish-American literary history by asserting that the sixteenth-century debate over the rights of conquest in the Americas constitutes a perennial theme in Spanish-American literary tradition throughout the centuries. At the center of this debate stand, of course, the historical figure and the writings of the Dominican monk Bartolomé de las Casas, as well as his great antagonist, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. Adorno argues that “all the writers who are commonly read in the colonial canon could be inserted into the Las Casas–Sepúlveda matrix” (xi). After a preface and introductory chapter, which together lay out the central thesis that “the incandescent core of the Spanish American literary tradition is constituted by the writings that debated the right of the Spanish conquest in the Americas and the treatment of their native inhabitants” (4), chapter 2 focuses on Guaman Poma de Ayala’s use of Lascasian arguments (especially those presented in Doce dudas) in his El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno. The Indies, Guaman Poma asserts, though subject to the supreme authority of the Christian God and the Spanish emperor, rightfully belong not to the Spanish conquerors but rather to the Indians, who are “natural lords” despite the fact that they may formerly have been pagans. Chapters 3 through 5 turn to Las Casas himself, his intellectual career, his controversy with Sepúlveda, and his pervasive literary legacy in the chronicles of the discovery and conquest, including those written by Francisco López de Gómara, Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl. Adorno identifies three major stages in Las Casas’s intellectual and political development—his early critiques during the 1510s and ’20s of Indian slavery and the abuses of the encomienda system; his proposals for the abolition of the encomienda leading to the New Laws of 1542; and his final calls during the 1560s that Spain abandon political rule over the Indies altogether. Regarding his confrontation with Sepúlveda, Adorno finds that, whereas Sepúlveda argued for the rights of possession on behalf of the Spanish conquerors based on Aristotelian social philosophy and anthropology, Las Casas argued against the conquerors’ claim to possession mainly [End Page 498] based on canon law. Overall, the discussion of the famous Valladolid debate of 1550–1551 and the documents surrounding it give a more nuanced reading of Sepúlveda than he has usually been accorded since the seminal studies by Lewis Hanke. Adorno insists that Sepúlveda’s arguments are “not a direct throwback to Aristotle’s theories of natural slavery, but rather a new position that finds inadequate both the philosophical notion of natural slavery and the juridical institution of civil slavery” concerning the relationship between Spain and the Indies (117). Chapters 6 and 7 focus on Bernal Díaz del Castillo, asserting that what was at stake in his Historia verdadera was not a simple correction of previous historians’ factual errors but “the personal and collective history of the conquistadores” (155). Adorno hereby emphasizes the importance of Bernal’s polemic against Las Casas and...