Footnotes to Empire: Imaginary Borders and Colonial Ambivalence The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:39987977 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Footnotes to Empire: Imaginary Borders and Colonial Ambivalence A dissertation presented by Ernest Rafael Hartwell to The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Romance Languages and Literatures Harvard University Cambridge, MA September 2017 © 2017 Ernest Rafael Hartwell All rights reserved. ! Dissertation advisor: Professor Doris Sommer Ernest Rafael Hartwell Footnotes to Empire: Imaginary Borders and Colonial Ambivalence Abstract While other regions colonized by Spain achieved independence in the first half of the 19th century, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines remained under Spanish imperial rule until 1898. Nearly all research about Latin American literature of this era focuses on writers who embraced their freedom by articulating new communities through novels and essays that openly elected and erected national patrimonies and mythologies. 19th-century writers from Spain’s late colonies, however, had to reflect on their communities and prospects of nationhood through texts rife with subterfuge and dangerous supplements. They had to install their voices, both literally and figuratively, into the history of nationhood through the footnotes. “Footnotes to Empire” examines late 19th-century Philippine, Puerto Rican and Cuban literature, sketching a constellation of strategies for evading censorship, undermining authority, and constructing innovative notions of community. These strategies become apparent through experiments in historiography, travel writing, and the novel. This dissertation engages in the fields of border studies, postcolonial theory, gender studies, and the study of nationalism, addressing the following problems. How to trace the borders of a country that does not exist yet? Do colonized intellectuals strive for freedom or for power? Does their undermining of authority push for reform or revolution? Do they derive an advantage from their knowledge or their doubt? How does the tricky form of these writings compound or contradict the writers’ projects of national imagining? After a thorough analysis of writings from José Rizal, Antonio Luna, José Martí, Eugenio María de Hostos, and José Julián Acosta, “Footnotes to Empire” concludes that the ambivalence iii ! that underlines these texts proves to be both a source of discursive advantage and perpetuated exclusions of popular classes, slaves, queer people, and women. Within the logic of these “enlightened” writings, education forms the hinge that vacillates between the emancipation and further exclusion of the disenfranchised classes. In these works, social and geopolitical borders are both an obstacle that these authors seek to transgress and overcome, as well as the breakwalls that hold back the masses, whose mobilization and capacity to execute revolution threatened the writers’ social standing. In the end, the lasting legacy of Caribbean and Philippine anti-colonial literature of this era is the transformation of discourses of colonialism, like the “encomienda” or other assertions of colonized peoples’ inevitable inferiority, from declarations into debates. iv ! Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................................iii Front Matter ........................................................................................................................................................vi Introduction: Borders, Imagination, and Ambivalence.......................................................................................1 Chapter One: Footnotes to Empire: The Borders of Prehistory........................................................................ 38 Chapter Two: Fresh Impressions: Performing Language and Gender Borders................................................108 Chapter Three: Dangerous Differences: The Stakes of Interpretation in Novels of Return..............................168 Bibliography .....................................................................................................................................................223 v ! Acknowledgements My readers’ time, rigor, and guidance were indispensable. Thank you, Mariano and Vicente. Meetings with my advisor were tertulias of the highest intellectual kind. Thank you, Doris, for the patient and inspired conversations and readings. Thank you for the support, the ideas, the trust, the post-its, and the coffee. My friends gave this work context and depth. They also allowed me a couple of meaningful breaks from the library grunt work. I salute my classmates and teaching mates, students, course heads and teachers. Thank you basketball buddies from Parlor Sports, the MAC, Boyne City, Buenos Aires, Manila, Culebra, and La Habana. Thank you friends from Sant’Egidio, Cambridge Rehab Nursing Home, and the School of Peace in Jamaica Plain. Family, thank you for your belief, your confidence, and your vigor. Penny gave me enthusiasm, unwavering curiosity, and microwaveable rice. Dad gave me impromptu meetings in JP Licks, Occupy Boston, and the Queen’s Head, warm meals waiting for me at home, and excursions to Concord to dig up our roots. My mom, the original doctor, was my quiet example of strength and fearlessness. Ultimately, my wife Natalie, you are my north. You challenged me to be a better scholar. You taught me everything. You trusted and you understood me through the murk and muck of this dissertation’s most trying moments. Without you, this doesn’t happen. vi ! To my mom, who said not to hide our light under a bushel basket. vii ! Among the Naturals of these islands there are three states of people in which its republic is divided; principals, about whom much has been said; and Timaguas which is the same as plebeians; and slaves of the principals and of the Timaguas (2). These slaves were diverse; some do all types of service and subjugation, like the ones we have, and these are called Saguiguilires (3), that serve indoors and the same for their children. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (2) This is the eternal division that is found and will be found in all parts in all the kingdoms and republics; dominant class, productive class and servile class; head, body and feet. (3) It is impossible to find the etymology of this word, that in its Tagalog form must have been Sagigilid. The root gílid means in Tagalog, border, riverside, bank; the reproduction of the first syllable, if it is tonic, means an active action in the future tense, and if not and one adds the suffix an, it denotes the place where the action of the verb often is executed: the preposition sa indicates place, time, reference. The unstressed reduplication could mean plurality also, and in this case the noun in singular would be sagílid; that is, on the border, the last one, that is, the slave... -Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas by Dr. Antonio Morga (1609) with annotations by José Rizal (1889) (my translation) viii ! If you put me in a jail cell, all I need is a piece of chalk to be free. I will trace a line just within the limits of the cell’s walls, a border that I will refuse to cross. The prison has no power over me if I make and follow my own walls or constraints. -Antanas Mockus Bogotà Mayor/Artist ! ix ! Introduction: Borders, Imagination, and Ambivalence Why should we resent being called Indios by the Spaniards? Look at the American Indians. They were not ashamed of their race. Let us be like them. Let us be proud of the name Indio and make the Spaniards revise their conception of the term. We shall become Indios Bravos! -José Rizal In 1868, Puerto Rican writer José Julián Acosta republishes an imperial history from 1788 by Friar Íñigo Abbad, Historia geográfica, civil y natural de la Isla de Puerto Rico. Acosta’s endnotes corroborate, contradict and complicate the claims put forth in the original text. One of the issues he disputes is the accuracy of the details provided by the history about the cartography and coordinates of Puerto Rico. In this nine-page endnote, he enumerates a wide array of divergent maps and coordinates of the border between the island and the waters that surround it, citing Spanish, French, German, and Puerto Rican explorers, historians, and cartographers. These elaborate annotations cause several questions to arise. Why the fascination with coordinates and maps? What is the importance of the location of these borders between land and water? Why not write directly about the wide array of other problems Puerto Rico faces: under-representation in the Spanish cortes, numerous obstacles to the prospect of educating and preparing the Puerto Rican people for autonomy or independence, a fiscal structure fully dependent on slavery and the strong-armed economics of imperial trade protectionism? Why republish an imperial history? Why limit ones’ voice to the space of the endnotes, a gesture that seems