Search

In this dissertation I study the fractality of the Spanish Empire in the Amazon, in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, and its effect on the creation of letters, petitions and chronicles written by Spanish evangelizers, civil agents, and travelers during this period of conquest and colonization. In chapter one, I rethink the concept of Ciudad Letrada with the notion of geontology (coined by Elizabeth Povinelli), which is a social contract whereby the members of a specific community-following their traditions, expectations, and symbolic structures-agree about what and who is a living being, and what and who manifests as an inert object in their community. In the case of the ciudades letradas, this geontological pact established the collective signs of the imperial power (words, maps, plans, emblems, and images produced by the letrados) as the most alive creature of the colonial city. With this assumption, Spanish colonial power was founded on the autonomy of signs as an animate organism; autonomy as the expression of a living and vital being through which the colonial order imposed its rule. In chapter two, I use the concept of fractality developed by Benoit Mandelbrot to propose that life in this period of the Spanish Empire circulated through networks and communication "trees" whose main characteristic was their irregularity and discontinuity. I followed the works of Sandra Negro and Pilar García Jordán to explain that the colonization of the Amazon, through the foundation of missions, reductions, and small towns, used intricate rivers routes as access to the Amazon. Spaniards built their missions and small towns on riverbanks to facilitate communication and connection. Consequently, the network of Franciscan and Jesuit missions had the same shape as the network of Amazonian rivers, which means that communication between missions followed irregular water routes. Unlike the literate circuits proposed by Ángel Rama (who explains that alphabetic colonial documents moved in Euclidean communication networks: square or rectangular circuits similar to the checkerboard structure of colonial cities), I propose that written communication in the Spanish Empire in the Amazon moved in fractal circuits characterized by intermittence. For example, a document written by Hernando Benavente in the 16th century had a path of communication intervened by the forces of insects, animals, excessive rain, and threats of war by the Xíbaro community. His document, like the ones written by Samuel Fritz and Gaspar de Carvajal, among others, communicates multiple interferences and an irregular colonial communication circuit. These circuits are alternative historical models to the colonial/literate/orderly cities, and elucidate the modernity/coloniality of America from prototypes and communication models where the constant interference of things and bodies is recognized. These prototypes function like literate cities, but in the opposite direction, revealing a model of irregularity in colonial/modern power in the Amazon. In chapter three I propose a new way of studying colonial documents that contests the generally accepted idea that historical texts represent, invent, or conceal colonial reality. The primary sources suggest that four basic agents participated in the production of colonial texts: Spanish authors/writers; Amazonian Indigenous communities (and their social and historical backgrounds); documents (understood as the materiality of writing: paper, ink, grammatical structures, syntax, etc.); and bodies of animals, plants, fungi, larvae, and viruses. I argued that these basic agents have a frictional relationship to the point that the production of the text is the result of their interaction and mutual influence. The kinesic structure and the metaplasm of the Amazonian colonial document captured the intersection of multiple forces and perspectives, human and non-human, and the influence of agents such as humidity, rain, and the resistance of the Andaquí community, suggesting that these forces were neither exogenous nor external to the document. As a result, I conclude that the Amazonian colonial document not only contains the perspective of the colonizing author, but also the perspective and pressure of these agents. The legibility of the historical image produced by these documents implies a different perception of the past: an image of the decline of tobacco revenue in the 18th century in the Amazon, for example, is built on the intervention, action, and participation of the tobacco plants themselves. Amazonian colonial documents emerged from the mediation of what I call “relational archive,” which is a system of friction between ecological, social, and material forces that occurs during the process of creating a written document. Examination of the corpus of these texts will show that colonial documents in the Amazonian space emerged, in part, from a non-binary archive in situations where the borders between subject/object, sign/reality, and culture/nature were fluid and not in opposition, revealing a model of irregularity that questions the Euclidean communication network as the norm for the Americas.

My dissertation studies a broad corpus of writers’ diaries in twentieth-century Latin American literature, and examines how the diary genre has developed in the region. I show that the diary has enjoyed historical continuity and has matured in contact with Latin American and foreign literary traditions.I propose the concept of the ‘diario de escritor’ (writer’s diary) in order to systematize the presence and function of the diary in Latin America through the articulation of a critical framework that encompasses diaries published by their authors in the 20th and 21st centuries. By drawing on a wide variety of theoretical approaches to the diary as an essentially complex and hybrid genre, including reception theory and hermeneutics, I discuss the diary’s structural and literary implications in Latin America.In my first chapter, I focus on the works of Rufino Blanco Fombona (Venezuela), Federico Gamboa (Mexico), Mario Levrero (Uruguay), Julio Ramón Ribeyro (Peru), and Ricardo Piglia (Argentina). This chapter analyses scenes of reading presented in Latin American diaries and focuses on the inter-textual mechanisms used by the writers to link their diaries to Europe’s diary-writing tradition. I show that Latin American diarists’ engagement with European diary forms allowed them to enhance the rhetorical possibilities of their writing. The second chapter is a product of my research at Princeton University’s Firestone Library, where I consulted the manuscripts of the diaries, notebooks, and personal papers of José Donoso (Chile), Alberto Girri (Argentina), Augusto Monterroso (Guatemala) and Alejandra Pizarnik (Argentina). This archival research helps me to analyze the diaries’ transitions from manuscripts to published works. By analyzing the process of rewriting, I discuss the restitution of diaries as literary works capable of transforming the idea of genre in literature. I also argue for a proper place for so-called “fragmentary writing” in contemporary diaries. My third chapter examines representations of travel in the diaries of Mario Levrero (Uruguay), César Aira (Argentina), Andres Neuman (Argentina), and Eduardo Lalo (Puerto Rico). This chapter focuses on the diarists’ practice of rethinking writing through travel. I propose that contemporary writers’ diaries, in the context of travel, transform the genre into a hybrid form close to the short novel, the fragment, and the essay. These diaries convert the traditional idea of travel into an interior experience in which the exploration takes place in the writing.My final chapter analyzes the metaphors of illness (cancer, AIDS, and arthritis) and the representation of corporeal fragility in the diaries of Gonzalo Millán (Chile), Pablo Pérez (Argentina), and María Luisa Puga (México). Through the analysis of metaphoric and obscene language, I discuss the representation of corporality as a material sign of the disease and as a space of transformation of identity.