Abstract: 1542: Empire, Shipwreck, and the 'Culture of the Baroque' in Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca's Naufragios.

Presented by: Ralph Bauer, English

Alvar Nunez's narrative about his odyssey through the southern part of North America is appreciated today mainly for its ethnographic realism in the description of Native American cultures and for its apparently sympathetic "pro-Indian" attitudes. This paper analyzes the rhetorical structure of Alvar Nunez's narrative in the context of Spanish imperial politics and poetics of the 1540s and 1550s–the emergence of what Jose Antonio Maravall has called "the culture of the baroque." From this point of view, Nunez's narrative is complicit with a shift in Spanish imperial ideology, particularly Madrid's attempt to centralize not only the political administration of the Americas but also the production of knowledge about the empire through the implementation of a structured economy of knowledge production which the author characterizes as "epistemic mercantilism." By providing a delicately crafted narrative allegory of "shipwrecks," Nunez's narrative displaces an ideology of conquest–modeled on the feudal and chivalric cultural codes of the reconquista–for that of "pacification" / "education" and substitutes neo-platonic forms of knowledge production through eloquence for an empiricist epistemology that subordinates the "modern" imperial subject to the official historiographer of the absolutist Hapsburg state.

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