Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- PART I LITERATURE AND SOCIETY IN COLOMBIA
- 1 Colonial realities and colonial literature in “Colombia”
- 2 Cosmography, ethnography, and the literary imagination of the New Kingdom of Granada
- 3 Colombian poetry from the colonial period to Modernismo (1500–1920)
- 4 Reflections on the historiography of the Colombian novel: 1844–1953 and beyond
- 5 Modern Colombian poetry: from modernismo to the twenty-first century
- 6 The late twentieth-century Colombian novel (1970–1999)
- 7 Twenty-first century fiction
- 8 Colombian theater: staging the sociopolitical body
- 9 The Colombian essay
- PART II COLOMBIAN CULTURE AND SOCIETY IN REGIONAL CONTEXTS
- PART III BEYOND THE BOUNDARIES
- AFTERWORDS
- Index
- References
2 - Cosmography, ethnography, and the literary imagination of the New Kingdom of Granada
from PART I - LITERATURE AND SOCIETY IN COLOMBIA
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- PART I LITERATURE AND SOCIETY IN COLOMBIA
- 1 Colonial realities and colonial literature in “Colombia”
- 2 Cosmography, ethnography, and the literary imagination of the New Kingdom of Granada
- 3 Colombian poetry from the colonial period to Modernismo (1500–1920)
- 4 Reflections on the historiography of the Colombian novel: 1844–1953 and beyond
- 5 Modern Colombian poetry: from modernismo to the twenty-first century
- 6 The late twentieth-century Colombian novel (1970–1999)
- 7 Twenty-first century fiction
- 8 Colombian theater: staging the sociopolitical body
- 9 The Colombian essay
- PART II COLOMBIAN CULTURE AND SOCIETY IN REGIONAL CONTEXTS
- PART III BEYOND THE BOUNDARIES
- AFTERWORDS
- Index
- References
Summary
The Epítome de las conquistas del Nuevo Reino de Granada (1538) is the earliest text to present the region of the New Kingdom of Granada to the imagination of the European world. The work has offered scholars the first characterization of the peoples of the region alongside with the description of its landscape. It was penned by Alonso de Santa Cruz, a most influential chronicler, astronomer, and cartographer to Charles V and Philip II, who dedicated his life to crafting a coherent notion of the orbis terrarum by incorporating the discoveries brought by trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific exploration. The Epítome has puzzled scholars for its apparently incomplete, fragmentary nature and its coverage of myriad topics, which imbue it with a sensibility not shared in later works informed by Santa Cruz's description, such as Juan Lopez de Velasco's Geografía y Descripción Universal de las Indias (1574) and Antonio de Herrera's Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos (1601) among others. In particular, the treatment accorded the indigenous Moxca and Panche peoples in this foundational work bewilders readers, subverting their expectation of a presumably instructive account of exotic alterity among the inhabitants of the Equinox. A report on the abuses committed by conquerors in the region and the frustrations endured by missions of discovery led by Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, founder of Santafé de Bogotá, breaks with generic conventions that dictated praise of the heroic deeds of explorers and the utopian landscapes they traversed. It was slighted as little more than a scientific and ethnographic reference source and relegated to literary oblivion.
Perhaps the absence of topical focus in the manuscript can be viewed differently, less as a failing than as a literary strategy. Santa Cruz's treatment of the material can be seen as an exercise of creative fragmentation in which the author inscribes the region through the mobile point of view of an itinerary along the Magdalena River, interposing abstract representations of New Granada, and invites readers to join him in a fluidity of inquiry through the deployment of multiple viewpoints. His mode of description rearranges inherited taxonomies of knowledge, crafting “ethnographic fictions” that venture new answers to the paradox of the Amerindian through an entanglement of the literary, cosmographic, chorographic, and historical realms.
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- Information
- A History of Colombian Literature , pp. 54 - 67Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016