Exemplary Violence

Rewriting History in Colonial Colombia

Alberto Villate-Isaza

2021
270 pages
$39.95
ISBN 9781684482610
Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory

In Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire asserts that colonization ultimately works to decivilize the colonizer, awakening baser, brutalizing, and dehumanizing instincts in him. In Exemplary Violence: Rewriting History in Colonial Colombia, Villate-Isaza explores Colombia's violent colonial history by examining three seventeenth-century historical accounts of the New Kingdom of Granada (modern-day Colombia and Venezuela) - Pedro Simón's Noticias historiales (1626), Juan Rodríguez Freile's El carnero (1636), and Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita's Historia general (1676)­ - each of which reveals the colonizing elite's reliance on a constant threat of violence for sustaining colonial order. In spite of their attempts to convey a straightforward narrative of European political, technical, and moral superiority while conforming to Counter-Reformation Catholic orthodoxy, these accounts reveal tensions and highlight conflicts and ambiguities between the writers' social interests and personal identifications. As they attempt to reinforce the principal tenets of European culture in the New Kingdom, they also reveal contradictions inherent in a "more advanced" culture when colonizers behave in barbaric ways.

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Review

"Exemplary Violence makes an important contribution by putting Juan Rodríguez Freile's El carnero - long appreciated for its salacious anecdotes of sin in colonial society - in dialogue with lesser-known works by Pedro Simón and Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita. Villate-Isaza offers new insights on their efforts to reinforce European cultural values and ideologies even as they grapple with the evident failures of evangelization and colonial government in New Granada."
-Sarah Beckjord, author of Territories of History: Humanism, Rhetoric, and the Historical Imagination in the Early Chronicles of Spanish America

"Exemplary Violence offers a rigorous and innovative comparative analysis of three key figures in the literary colonial canon in Colombia: Fray Pedro Simón, Juan Rodríguez Freile, and Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita. Using the concept of baroque allegory, this book wisely explores the tension between culture and barbarism that inspired these authors to transform history in their attempt to overcome, in writing, the early crisis of the Spanish colonial discourse."
- Rubén Sánchez-Godoy, author of El peor de los remedios: Bartolomé de Las Casas y la crítica temprana a la esclavitud Africana en el Atlántico Ibérico

About the author:

Alberto Villate-Isaza is an assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Georgia, where he specializes in Latin American colonial literature, culture, and historiography, particularly in the New Kingdom of Granada. He is the author of "El lado oscuro de la sátira. Control y explotación en El carnero de Juan Rodríguez Freile," in Hispanic Studies Review and "Lorenzo's Devil: Allegory and History in Juan Rodríguez Freile and Fray Pedro Simón" in Revista de Estudios Colombianos.

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Cloth: $150.00, 9781684482627; PDF: $39.95, 9781684482658; EPUB: $39.95, 9781684482634