Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam and
European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
xiv + 211pp, ISBN 0521 801028
Barbara Fuchs’ fascinating book explores the contradictions and
problems implicit in early modern imperial discourses, which strove to
produce coherent accounts of European cultural identities in
contradistinction to Islam and the New World. Her argument centres on
the rich interpretative possibilities of the concept of mimesis as a
deliberate performance of sameness that by imperfectly copying its
original destabilises and calls it into question. In the first chapter, she
analyses the anxieties surrounding the circulation of chivalric literature in
the New World. It was feared that the excessive formalism of the Indians
would lead them to conflate sacred and profane texts. To prevent the
imputation of a suspect fictionality to Holy Scripture, all imaginative
literature was prohibited. The conquistadors, however, repeatedly
redeployed precisely these texts to assimilate the estrangement and
exoticism of the New World, casting themselves more familiarly as
chivalric knights replaying in the New World the reconquista of southern
Spain from Islam. Debates on the advisability of educating the Indians
were fuelled by figures like Don Pablo Nazareo, whose rehearsal of
European culture for his own purposes challenged the exclusivity and
employment of that culture as an axis differentiating coloniser and
colonised.
In the second chapter, there is an insightful reading of Alonso de
Ercilla’s epic poem La Araucana, ostensibly a triumphalist celebration of
Spain’s expansionist imperialism, that in fact exposes the fragility of
those very imperial ambitions, constantly evoking and harping back to the
Islamic threat in the Eastern Mediterranean. Ercilla’s first-hand
experience of the struggle and introduction of ethnographic topoi into the
epic complicates its message, as the narrator’s imaginative sympathy
wanders into the indeterminate spaces between natives and Spaniards.
This text is set alongside Pérez de Hita’s Guerras civiles de Granada, an
account of the 1568 Morisco uprising in the Alpujarras. The sympathetic
portrayal of the Moriscos again exposes the vulnerability of expansionist
justifications based on ethnic or religious difference. The mixture of
romance and epic breaks down distinctions between Spaniard and Moor,
challenging the notion of the Moriscos as a fifth column of domestic
others whose allegiance was to the Turks rather than to Spain.
In chapter three, Fuchs discusses two colonial subjects, the mestizo
Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and the Indian Guaman Poma. Garcilaso’s
negotiation of his divided identity in the Comentarios reales involves the
idealisation of a chivalric Spain, at the same time that he translates
Indians from being infidels, New World ‘Moors’, into pious converts. His
text exposed the glaring contradiction between the creation of numerous
converts in the New World (one of the principal justification for the
conquest) and the exclusion of their counterparts, converted Jews and
Moors, ‘New Christians’, in Spain itself. Poma invoked Spain’s racialised
religious ideology in order to argue against the increasing mestizaje in
Peru. Chapter 4 turns to writers like the Morisco Miguel de Luna, who
called into question the traditional historiography of a heroic Gothic
Spain, tragically falling to Islam. Fuchs argues that he along with Alonso
de Castillo were the authors of a hoax in Granada, involving the
discovery of Christian artefacts, relics, and writings in Arabic. These
fraudulent sacred texts revealed a syncretic vision of Christianity and
Islam, which reinserted Arabs and Arabic back into the history of
Christian Spain. In the next chapter, there is a masterful discussion of the
development of imperial ideology in England. It traces shifting attitudes
towards piracy, from the Elizabethans rather desperate willingness to
attack Spain and unofficially sanction privateering raids, to the more
circumspect recognition under James that if England was to conceive
itself as a mercantile state, its pirates needed to be reigned in and
transformed into merchants, extending the boundaries of commerce rather
than creating conditions in which trade became impossible. Privateering
provided the opportunity for adventurers to rapidly acquire riches.
However, the heroisation of figures like Sir Francis Drake contradicted
the increasing stake of gentry and aristocracy in mercantile excursions.
The confused nature of official attitudes in England led many privateers
to renounce their allegiance to the state altogether and become
renegadoes. While the privateer’s private quarrels were problematically
harnessed in the service of the state, and the pirate threatened the
possibility of licit commerce, the renegadoe represented a highly unstable
renunciation of allegiance to any state. The existence of a renegade
community on the Barbary coast formed the subject of a number of plays
discussed here, such as Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turn’d Turk
(1612), and Heywood and Rowley’s Fortune by Land and Sea (?1607–
1609). There are also discussions of Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West
and Massinger’s The Renegado (1623), in which social mobility is
punished by castration and the relationship between England and other
empires is conceived in terms of emasculation and a dangerous
femininity.
Fuchs’ book concludes with a discussion of Lope de Vega’s epic
poem about Sir Francis Drake, La Dragontea (1598), and two plays of
North African captivity by Cervantes. This book is a triumph. It contains
a brilliant discussion of the vexed question of national identity in early
modern Europe. There is a fascinating range of material on offer as well
and the discussions of it are highly insightful and original, successfully
linked together by her theme of mimesis.
Alexander Samson
University of Warwick