Jesuit accounts of the colonial Americas : intercultural transfers, intellectual disputes, and textualities

In recent years scholars have turned their attention to the rich experience of the Jesuits in France and Spain’s American colonies. That attention has brought a flow of new editions and translations of Jesuit accounts of the Americas; it is now time for a study that examines the full range of that work in a comparative perspective. Jesuit Accounts of the Colonial Americas offers the first comprehensive examination of such writings and the role they played in solidifying images of the Americas. The collection also provides a much-needed re-examination of the work of the Jesuits in relation to Enlightenment ideals and the modern social sciences and humanities – two systems of thought that have in the past appeared radically opposed, but which are brought together here under the rubric of modern ethnographic knowledge. Linking Jesuit texts, the rhetorical tradition, and the newly emerging anthropology of the Enlightenment, this collection traverses the vast expanses of Old and New World France and Spain in fascinating new ways. Contents 5 Acknowledgments 9 Introduction 11 PART I. INTERCULTURAL TRANSFERS 31 1. A Peculiar Idea of Empire: Missions and Missionaries of the Society of Jesus in Early Modern History 31 2. The Politics of Writing, Translating, and Publishing. New World Histories in Post-expulsion Italy: Filippo Salvatore Gilij’s 1784 Saggio di Storia Americana 60 3. Imagining the Kingdom of Quito: Reading History and National Identity in Juan de Velasco’s Historia del Reino de Quito 91 4. For Love of Patria: Locating Self and Nation in Clavigero’s Rendition of the Conquest of México 117 5. Between Ethnology and Romantic Discourse: Martin Dobrizhoffer’s History of the Abipones in a (Post)modern Perspective 137 6. From Sacred Rhetoric to the Republic of Letters: Jesuit Sermons in Seventeenth-Century New Spain 154 7. The Role of Culture and Art in France’s Colonial Strategy of the Seventeenth Century 179 PART II. INTELLECTUAL DISPUTES 199 8. José Basílio da Gama’s Epic Poem O Uraguay (1769): An Intellectual Dispute about the Jesuit State of Paraguay 199 9. Changing Perspectives: The Other, the Self, the In-Between of the Jesuit Experience in the Eighteenth Century 229 10. East from Eden: Domesticating Exile in Jesuit Accounts of Their 1767 Expulsion from Spanish America 253 11. “Ils estoient si subjects à leur bouche”: la Relation de 1616 face à la topique antijésuite 273 12. Les Relations des jésuites et la construction de l’observateur européen face au monde indigène 286 13. Une rhétorique du silence: l’oeuvre jésuite dans la Description de la Louisiane du récollet Louis Hennepin 301 PART III. TEXTUALITIES 317 14. L’héritage de José de Acosta 317 15. La Nouvelle-France dans l’imaginaire jésuite: terra doloris ou Jérusalem céleste? 336 16. The Legacy of Joseph Gumilla’s Orinoco Enlightened 354 17. Pierre Pelleprat’s Accounts of the Jesuit Missions in the Antilles and in Guyana (1655) 384 18. Dans le sillage du père Joseph-François Lafitau: les Avantures de Claude Le Beau 414 Postface: De l’usage de la comparaison dans les écrits des Jésuites sur les Amériques 428 Contributors 447 Index Nominum 453