Stories for the Empire: The Translation of Conquest in Colonial Spanish America

• In Event: Navigating Language and Power: Insights into Translation in Political Theory

Abstract

Conquest narratives in Political Theory are few and far in-between, but scholarly interpretations of conquest have almost always invoked a continuity to their distinct vocabularies. From Athens to the Soviet Union, empires are often represented in the political language of ambition, growth, or more simply, might makes right. Indeed, despite sustained efforts attending to the agency of the oppressed in relations of domination, most histories of empire remain written by, for, and in the vernaculars of imperial rule. What would it look like to render those silenced stories and worlds more intelligible? That is to say, how have translators helped to establish the standards of memory, history, and forgetting that allow for future interpretations of politics? Central to the colonial infrastructure of the early modern Spanish empire in the Americas, for instance, translators made possible several strategic goals of imperial rule: negotiations, trade networks, surveys, medicinal cultures, naturalist inquiry, indoctrination, and multiple other facets of everyday life during and after the military and spiritual conquests. In this paper, I seek to unpack the interface at which languages meet as a feature of comparative and historical political inquiry. Rather than thinking of imperial encounters as one-directional moments, I use the memory of conquest and its reproduction in distinct linguistic and rhetorical settings to interpret the Spanish empire’s evolving meanings in the New World. Specifically, I consider the extent to which the question of domination in the Spanish conquests was a problem of language as much as one of violence. Once the fervor of military and spiritual zealotry subsided, so began the long task of writing and retelling the story of conquest, a feat made possible by the very subjects who were forced to adopt a strange tongue.

Author

• Mauro J. Caraccioli, Virginia Tech