UC Irvine FlashPoints Title Figurative Inquistions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso Hispanic Atlantic Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/51s3m550 ISBN 978-0-8101-2945 Author Graff Zivin, Erin Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Figurative Inquisitions 8flashpoints The FlashPoints series is devoted to books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, and that are distinguished both by their historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual strength. Our books engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how lit- erature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Series titles are available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/fl ashpoints. series editors: Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA), Founding Editor; Ju- dith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Michelle Clayton (Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown Univer- sity); Edward Dimendberg (Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and European Languages and Studies, UC Irvine), Coordinator; Catherine Gallagher (English, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Nouri Gana (Comparative Literature & Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA); Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Susan Gillman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz) 1. On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the First Order and the Literary Rant, Dina Al-Kassim 2. Moses and Multiculturalism, Barbara Johnson, with a foreword by Barbara Rietveld 3. The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature, Adam Barrows 4. Poetry in Pieces: César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity, Michelle Clayton 5. Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt, Shaden M. Tageldin 6. Wings for Our Courage: Gender, Erudition, and Republican Thought, Stephanie H. Jed 7. The Cultural Return, Susan Hegeman 8. English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India, Rashmi Sadana 9. The Cylinder: Kinematics of the Nineteenth Century, Helmut Müller-Sievers 10. Polymorphous Domesticities: Pets, Bodies, and Desire in Four Modern Writers, Juliana Schiesari 11. Flesh and Fish Blood: Postcolonialism, Translation, and the Vernacular, S. Shankar 12. The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolution- ary Americas, Sara E. Johnson 13. Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic, Erin Graff Zivin 14. Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America, Mariano Siskind 15. Fiction Beyond Secularism, Justin Neuman Figurative Inquisitions Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic Erin Graff Zivin northwestern university press ❘ evanston, illinois Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2014 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2014. All rights reserved. Digital Printing Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Graff Zivin, Erin, author. Figurative inquisitions : conversion, torture, and truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic / Erin Graff Zivin. pages cm. — (FlashPoints) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8101-2945-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Latin American literature—History and criticism. 2. Portuguese literature— History and criticism. 3. Torture in literature. 4. Inquisition in literature. 5. Torture in motion pictures. 6. Inquisition in motion pictures. 7. Torture—Social aspects. I. Title. II. Series: FlashPoints (Evanston, Ill.) PQ7081.G684 2014 860.9358—dc23 2013032441 For Miles and Elias Contents Acknowledgments ix Preface: Inquisitional Logic xi Introduction: Conversion, Torture, and Truth 3 1. Aporias of Marranismo 17 2. Allegory and Hauntology 57 3. Interrogative Signs 87 4. Other Inquisitions 123 Notes 145 Bibliography 155 Index 163 Acknowledgments The experience of writing a second book is markedly different from that of writing a fi rst book. If the fi rst book has its roots in the dissertation, and therefore always feels as if it were being written “for” something or someone else, the second book emerges out of a strange freedom: one is writing, simply, because one must write. At the same time, this project is the fruit of provocative and inspiring conversations and exchanges with a great number of people and, in this sense, is very much written “for” these others: if not out of an institutional or professional obligation, then out of a genuine intellectual debt. These people—teachers and stu- dents, colleagues and interlocutors—populate each page of this book, beginning with my former professors who are now dear friends, Sylvia Molloy and Gabriela Basterra. I had the good fortune to begin my academic career at one of the most stimulating places to research Latin American literary and cultural studies. At the University of Pittsburgh, I taught—and learned from—a wonderful group of graduate students in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures. I want to thank the participants of the “In- terrogative Signs” seminar in spring 2008 for debating some of the early ideas for this book. The Center for Latin American Studies and the Uni- versity Research Council Small Grants Program at Pitt supported pre- liminary research on this book. After four years of being part of a commuting family, I won the lot- tery and was offered a wonderful job close to relatives and dear friends ix x ❘ Acknowledgments in California. Joining the faculty at the University of Southern Cali- fornia has thus felt like a homecoming in many ways. I can say with confi dence that I have the best colleagues around: in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Sherry Velasco and Roberto Ignacio Díaz have been incredible mentors and friends, and my newest colleagues—Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla, Sam Steinberg, and Natalia Pérez—make the future at once incalculable and promising. I am also fortunate to be part of the Department of Comparative Literature and the Doctoral Program in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture with Peggy Kamuf, Panivong Norindr, and many others who are protagonists in USC’s vibrant intellectual culture. I want to extend a special thanks to the graduate students who participated in the “Aesthetics of Torture” seminar in spring 2011. My work would be impoverished without the brilliance of the fol- lowing interlocutors and friends: Nathalie Bouzaglo, Patrick Dove, Jonathan Freedman, Michal Friedman, Kate Jenckes, David E. John- son, Jeffrey Lesser, Brett Levinson, Jacques Lezra, Emily Maguire, Al- berto Moreiras, Ronnie Perelis, Justin Read, and Mariano Siskind, all of whom have had an impact upon this book. Many thanks to Vivaldo Andrade dos Santos and Ana Lee for proofreading the Portuguese trans- lations, Ryan Trombley for his meticulous editing, the anonymous read- ers at Northwestern University Press for their invaluable feedback on the manuscript, and Henry L. Carrigan for his enthusiastic support of this project. I am grateful to live just down the coast from Karina Miller and Jessica Pressman, with whom I read, write, revise, laugh, complain, and practice yoga on a weekly basis, and without whom I would be in complete intellectual exile here in beautiful, sunny Solana Beach. A lot has happened since I began to write Figurative Inquisitions. Miles and Elias—to whom this book is dedicated—were born and learned to crawl, walk, talk, run, and dribble a soccer ball as I drafted chapters. Simon began to read with a hunger that I remember experienc- ing as a child, and would often read next to me as I wrote. My parents, as well as Salina Bastos and Haley Calabrese, have loved and helped to care for my three wonderful boys so that I could work. Finally, for nearly twenty years, Josh has been my partner in crime and my rock. I owe him everything. Preface: Inquisitional Logic The interrelated practices of interrogation, torture, and confession are global phenomena that, while they have existed for several millennia, have resurfaced in public debates since the early 2000s after accounts of human rights abuses in U.S. prisons and “black sites” abroad began to circulate and, in early 2009, after a newly elected President Obama issued a directive to close the Guantánamo Bay detention camp as one of his fi rst orders of business (a promise that has yet to be fulfi lled).1 In the years following these events, there has been a proliferation of discussion about the use of torture that has remained restricted to three principal fi elds: the legal (is it allowed?), the pragmatic (does it work?), and the moral (is it right?). What has often remained left out of the con- versation—which revolves around the ostensibly competing demands of national security and universal human rights—is the seemingly less im- mediate but vital question of what torture does. What happens within the scene of interrogation and torture? What kinds of subjects and truths are produced through the acts of questioning and confession? Why, indeed, do we torture? This book dwells upon the relationship between scenes of interroga- tion and the identities and discourses