Exemplary Violence : : Rewriting History in Colonial Colombia / / Alberto Villate-Isaza.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2021 English
• VerfasserIn: Villate-Isaza, Alberto,
• Place / Publishing House: Lewisburg, PA : : Bucknell University Press, , [2021]; ©2021
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Series: Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (243 p.) :; n-a

In his seminal essay Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire asserts that colonization ultimately works to decivilize the colonizer, awakening baser, brutalizing, and dehumanizing instincts. In this crucial new study, Villate-Isaza explores the violent colonial history of the New Kingdom of Granada (modern-day Colombia and Venezuela) by examining three seventeenth-century historical accounts—Pedro Simón’s Noticias historiales, Juan Rodríguez Freile’s El carnero, and Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita’s Historia general—each of which reveals the colonizer’s reliance on the threat of violence to sustain order. Despite their attempts to convey a narrative of European political, technical, and moral superiority, these accounts reveal tensions between the writers’ social interests and personal identifications. As they attempt to reinforce the principal tenets of European civilization and Catholic Reformation orthodoxy, they also reveal contradictions that emerge when colonizers behave in barbaric ways.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- PART I Narrative Tensions -- 1 A Rhetorical Balancing Act -- 2 Instructing through Negative Examples -- 3 Nudity Is the Disguise: Political and Moral Instruction -- PART II Authority and Evasion -- 4 The Authority to Displace and Adapt the Past -- 5 Founding Principles -- 6 The Constant Threat of Beauty and Wealth -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index