Mexican Jesuits write the history of the Americas by Ramos, Luis;

Long description:

This book examines how three exiled Jesuits from colonial Mexico—Rafael Landívar, Francisco Clavijero, and Pedro Márquez—shaped the discourse of continental emancipation from Spain. By considering their works in relation to critical debates about the root causes of the international expulsion and suppression of the Jesuits and scholarship about the Spanish American Wars of Independence, Luis Ramos examines these pivotal events as inextricably linked. All three authors arrived in Italy at different stages of their spiritual and intellectual development and extolled their homeland through similar and distinct strategies of representation. They instilled in their compatriots a bolder understanding of colonial Mexico’s place within the broader Republic of Letters while prompting their Italian readers to question their assumptions about the New World. They broadened the horizon of an eighteenth-century European reading public eager for the most reliable information about the New World and gave the discourse of creole patriotism a past, present, and futurist dimension. In so doing, Landívar, Clavijero, and Márquez established the spatial and political parameters of an emerging continental poetics of independence, and their works served as a wellspring of literary inspiration that subsequent authors from Spain’s recently emancipated colonies would draw from.

Table of Contents:

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: an intellectual polemic gives birth to a New World literary genre

Chapter 1: Enemies of the enlightened state: Francisco Clavijero on exiled Jesuits, sovereign power, and the contested futures of Spanish America

Introduction

Recovering the Spanish American Jesuit diaspora in late Settecento Italy

Reform Catholicism and the enlightened state

A baroque critique of empire in an age of reason

Counter-Reformation tradition against enlightened renovation

Transregional dimensions of the Jesuit expulsion from the Hispanic world

Anticipating independence

Conclusion

Chapter 2: Creole patriotism at a crossroads: mapping New Spain in Rafael Landívar's Rusticatio mexicana

Introduction

Mapping New Spain

Poetry and exile

New World sublime

A poetics of restoration

Creole patriotism at a crossroads

Allegories of racial harmony

Patriotism and enlightenment

Toward a poetics of independence

Conclusion

Chapter 3: Sacralizing Mexico in an age of reason: nostalgia and divine providence in Francisco Clavijero's Storia antica del Messico and Breve ragguaglio

Introduction

The politics of translation: between Spanish and Italian reading publics

Against climate theory

Natural wonders and iconic landscapes

Recasting New Spain's agriculture in a global framework

A poetics of nostalgia

Inventing antiquity and foreshadowing conquest

From Vico to Boturini: New World history and divine providence

Expelling the devil from the New World

Rethinking the conquest of Mexico in an age of reason

Conclusion

Chapter 4: Antiquity in an age of revolution: Pedro Márquez on the transatlantic cultures of classical revival and universal rights

Introduction

Pedro José Márquez, José Nicolás de Azara, and the cultures of classical revival in late Settecento Rome

Antiquarian studies and the shifting parameters of race and universality

From Naples to Mexico City: classical revival in the global Hispanic world

Decentering Europe in the Republic of Letters

Translation as cultural vindication

Recasting the Mexica as historical agents

Comparing Mesoamerican and Mediterranean expressions of sacred violence

Cosmopolitanism from below

Toward a new language of universal rights

Conclusion