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Theorizing Transatlantic Women's Writing

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Theorizing Transatlantic Women's Writing Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2013, vol. 8 Theorizing Transatlantic Women’s Writing: Imperial Crossings and the Production of Knowledge Mónica Díaz and Stephanie Kirk he transatlantic paradigm, together with other recent methodologi- Tcal frameworks that privilege spatial considerations, has significantly influenced recent scholarly work on colonial Latin American and early modern Iberian studies.1 This paradigm, which incorporates Europe and the Americas as a coherent area of study and is deemed by some histori- ans as constituting a field in its own right, has led to fruitful discussions about the possibilities and shortcomings of studying the communities surrounding the Atlantic Ocean without taking into account national or imperial histories.2 The move to decenter previous normative historical 1 The other frameworks discussed at length by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel in From Lack to Excess: “Minor” Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2008) are hemispheric studies and early modern perspec- tives. Also relevant here would be the increasing interest in transpacific studies; see, for example, Ricardo Padrón, “Recordando las Indias del poniente: episodios en la historia de una metageografía olvidada,” in Estudios coloniales latinoamericanos en el siglo XXI: Nuevos itinerarios, ed. Stephanie Kirk (Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2011). Recent research using the transatlantic model includes, but is not limited to, Ida Altman, Transatlantic Ties in the Spanish Empire: Brihuega, Spain, and Puebla, Mexico, 1560–1620 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Lisa Voigt, Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Nicolás Wey-Gómez, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008). 2 Philip Morgan and Jack Greene locate the emergence of the concept “Atlantic history” in the late 1960s, yet they clarify that its practice can be traced back to the 1870s. 53 54 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Mónica Díaz and Stephanie Kirk narratives has allowed for a more global understanding of the fluidity of cultural exchanges during the early modern period.3 In their enlightening collection of essays, Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800), Daniela Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf contribute to the scholarship that observes this paradigm, paying particular attention to the intersections of gender and religion. Although Kostroun and Vollendorf reference numer- ous scholars in the disciplines of Hispanic and women’s studies, history, and comparative literature who have mapped important connections that situate early modern women within a broader Atlantic geographic frame, they conclude that the transatlantic paradigm remains to be fully explored vis-à-vis the study of women and religion.4 More recently, Vollendorf, in collaboration with Grady Wray, has reiterated the need to acknowledge the centrality of women’s textual and cultural contributions to the Atlantic, urging scholars to adopt an approach to gender history that transcends traditional lines between Europeanists and Latin Americanists in order to map the role of women more successfully across the Atlantic.5 This article responds to that plea by means of a comparative study of the experiences of two religious women in the Atlantic world that explores their engagement with traditionally male concepts of language See their introduction “The Present State of Atlantic History,” Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3. 3 Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550– 1700 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 215. 4 Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf, eds., Introduction, Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 6; see also 7–8, for an entire review of individual scholarly efforts that chart linkages among Atlantic communities. The authors also mention the works of Susan Dinan and Deborah Meyers, eds., Women and Religion in Old and New Worlds (New York: Routledge, 2001); and Nora Jaffary, Gender, Race, and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007). The most recent contribution in the scholarship that explores this methodological framework is the edited volume by Anne Cruz and Rosilie Hernández, Women’s Literacy in Early Modern Spain and the New World (Aldershot, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011). 5 Lisa Vollendorf and Grady Wray, “Gender in the Atlantic World: Women’s Writing in Iberia and Latin America,” in Theorising the Ibero-Atlantic World, ed. Harald Braun, Kristy Hooper, and Lisa Vollendorf (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming), 3. Transatlantic Women’s Writing 55 and authority. This analysis, we contend, allows us to delve further into the Atlantic paradigm in order to examine women’s implicit understand- ing of and active encounter with the spatial dimension of the transatlantic region. We will examine what role this dimension played in the acquisition of epistemological authority by two notable seventeenth-century nuns, the Mexican Hieronymite Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–1695) and the Spanish Franciscan Sor María de Ágreda (1602–1655). One of the meanings given to the Atlantic during the post-contact period, according to Joyce Chaplin, was that of a “space in which to make or imagine physical connections.” 6 Sor Juana and Sor María were not only able to imagine these connections across the Atlantic but they actually established their presence transatlantically without leaving their cloisters in Mexico and Spain, respectively. Through an exploration of the ways in which colonial spaces became rhetorical constructions and at the same time powerful devices to acquire authority, we will investigate the different connections that these women established through their “crossings” of the Atlantic. We will elucidate how both women writers engaged with lan- guage to create textual journeys across the Atlantic and to establish their presence in a localized site in which they self-identified as agents. Finally, we will explore how the Atlantic space functions not only as a topic in their writings but also provides a rhetoric with which they might demonstrate and legitimize their knowledge. In 2000, Kathleen Ann Myers referred to female religious writing in colonial Latin America as a booming subfield within colonial studies; eight years later in a review essay, Myers asserted that the subfield of female conventual writing had gone beyond defining texts and contexts and had become more encompassing in its thematic analysis, sources employed, and methodologies.7 Myers noted the opening of the field for new disciplines 6 Joyce Chaplin, “The Atlantic Ocean and its Contemporary Meanings, 1492– 1808” in Atlantic History, ed. Greene and Morgan, 36. 7 Kathleen Myers, “Crossing Boundaries: Defining the Field of Female Religious Writing in Colonial Latin America,” Colonial Latin American Review 9 (2000): 151–65; and Kathleen Myers, “Recent Trends in the Study of Women and Religion in Colonial Mexico,” Latin American Research Review 43, no. 2 (2008): 290–301. 56 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Mónica Díaz and Stephanie Kirk and anticipated the “future directions” the field would take.8 One of the directions taken by studies of Hispanic religious women’s writings is that of comparative and collaborative works in which space considerations are central. The investigation of what we are calling the transatlantic para- digm is a fairly recent development within this subfield, one that, although implicit in our colleagues’ pioneering scholarship, had not been problema- tized to identify clearly transatlantic cultural activity on the part of women writers. There are important examples of scholarship that do take a more explicit approach to transatlantic questions. An example is Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (1989), by Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau and translated by Amanda Powell, which compiles writings by early modern women on both sides of the Atlantic.9 More recently, the volume Approaches to Teaching the Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (2007), edited by Emilie Bergmann and Schlau, includes several essays that place Sor Juana and her work within transatlantic, hemispheric, and Continental contexts.10 8 Myers, “Recent Trends,” 301. 9 Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau, Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in their Own Works, trans. Amanda Powell (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989). Other examples of scholars who have established links among women across the Atlantic are Electa Arenal, “The Convent as Catalyst of Autonomy: Two Hispanic Nuns of the Seventeenth Century,” in Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols, ed. Beth Miller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 147–83; Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, The Answer/La Respuesta, ed. and trans. Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell (New York: Feminist Press, 1994); Georgina Sabat-Rivers, “Autobiografías: Santa Teresa y Sor Juana” in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Studies, ed. Luis Cortesi (Asunción: Centro de Estudios de Economía & Soc., 1989); and Nina Scott, “‘La gran turba de las que merecieron nombres’: Sor Juana’s Foremothers in ‘La Respuesta a Sor Filotea,’” in Coded Encounters: Writing, Gender, and Ethnicity in Colonial Latin
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