<em xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.

org/1998/Math/MathML"
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Geographies of Philological
Knowledge: Postcoloniality and the Transatlantic National Epic
by Nadia R. Altschul (review)
Juan Poblete
Early American Literature, Volume 48, Number 3, 2013, pp. 783-787
(Article)
Published by The University of North Carolina Press
DOI: 10.1353/eal.2013.0041
For additional information about this article
Access provided by University of California @ Santa Cruz (3 Feb 2014 15:01 GMT)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/eal/summary/v048/48.3.poblete.html
Book Reviews{ 783
cago Worlds Fair, ostensibly a quadricentennial commemoration of the
Columbus voyages.
Kolodny closes her study with an investigation of Indian perspectives on
the Viking colony. While the shadowy presence of Norse colonists in east-
ern Algonquian contact stories remains elusive, she fruitfully establishes
striking juxtapositions between native, Icelandic, and Anglo- American
narratives. She brings to light the fgure of Joseph Nicolar, a Penobscot
scholar who complied the folklore of his people in a self- published book
titled Te Life and Traditions of the Red Man, appearing in 1893, the same
year as the Columbian Exposition. Te parallels between his scholarship
and Rafns seem evident, especially in his attention to little- known origi-
nal sources: he boasts that no historical works of the white man were
used as sources for his chronicle (311). And in her reading of a wide range
of Wabenaki contact stories, Kolodny points out the persistent elements of
prophecy that mirror the themes of Icelandic sagas of Vinland. Yet when
visiting present- day Penobscot historians, she fnds that most have little
interest in the question of early native- Norse contacts, seeing as these
indigenous storytellers already feel quite secure in the vast depth of the
American past with or without Vikings.
Ultimately, the elusive target that concerns Koldony remains the story
of how people become confdent in their place in the world, far more than
the specifc search for Vinland. Norsemen, Anglo- Americans, and natives
alike shared a common quest for a long and satisfying story to answer
never- ending questions about identity, origin, and destiny.
Andrew LipmAn Syracuse University
Geographies of Philological Knowledge:
Postcoloniality and the Transatlantic National Epic
nAdiA r. ALtschuL
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012
248 pp.
Tis excellent volume sets out to chart an interesting, multilin-
gual, and ambitious territory. How can we productively reread the national
philological traditions of Europe, and more specifcally their nineteenth-
784 }eArLY Ameri cAn Li terAture: VOLume 48, numBer 3
century national epics, from the viewpoint of the postcolonial periphery,
in this case the work of Venezuelan polymath Andrs Bello (17811865)?
Given its scope, Geographies of Philological Knowledge exhibits, not always
by design, a tension between doing justice to its coverage of those national
traditions in a European context and doing the same for the complex,
abundant, and crucial work of Bello in the Latin American one. An addi-
tional complication is the claim to intervene in postcolonial studies. In this
study, Altschul skillfully engages in original transnational and transfeld
work, while facing the risks of any study willing to cross these boundaries.
Te book is divided into an introduction, six chapters, and a coda.
Te introduction (Creole Medievalism and Settler Postcolonial Studies)
clearly states the studys focus: this book is concerned with a critique of
the national philologies and the national epic through the medievalist
work of Andrs Bello (7). Tis will require: frst, mapping the nineteenth-
century evolution of the main European (mostly French and German)
national philologies as distinct from the subordinated and belated Span-
ish ones; and second, understanding the work of Bello as an instance of
criollo nationalism with repercussions for both the scholarly and national-
istic traditions of the colonial motherland and Spanish America. Using the
work of Walter Mignolo on the coloniality of power and on interactions
between local histories and global designs, Altschul asserts that Spain in
the nineteenth century was considered by the other European imperial na-
tions to be an exotic and backward colonial space incapable of produc-
ing knowledge (10). According to the imperial narrative Altschul identi-
fes, Spain could only produce culture, not knowledge: a culture moreover
heavily infuenced by the impact of the Arab presence in the Peninsula.
Tis double colonial- Orientalizing efect was the challenge to be overcome
by any Latin American criollo nationalist, like Bello, who was then forced
to come to terms with the claim of belonging to the West by virtue of a
form of European colonization the rest of the West considered backward.
Altschul defnes the relevance of Mignolos concepts to her study by
modifying them with the help of postcolonial theory. Following Mig-
nolo, she defnes Occidentalism as the cultural self- understanding of the
Americas as an extension of Europe, resulting in an intellectual internal-
ization of coloniality (13). Unlike Mignolos view of postoccidentalism as
the epistemic going beyond the boundaries of the weltanschauung of Occi-
dentalism, for Altschul the term, as manifested in the nineteenth- century
Book Reviews{ 785
practice of criollos like Andrs Bello, refers to Occidentalist resistances
or a form of struggle with coloniality that is carried out from within the
Occidentalist frame of mind and involves resistance to the metropolis
coupled with the internal colonialism of subjugated populations [Amer-
indians and Afro- Americans] (13). Tis latter understanding comes, for
Altschul, from postcolonial theorys idea of the white settler, as if the psy-
chic and cultural contradictions between internal and external colonial-
ism were not a crucial part of Mignolos view or an integral aspect of Latin
American discussions on the concept of criollos: Settler postcolonial
theory thus describes their position with the axiom that settler- colonists
are both colonized and colonizing (14). Armed with this otherwise well
known premise about Latin American criollos, Altschul proceeds to de-
velop the six chapters of her study.
Te frst chapter, Te Global Standards of Intellectual and Disciplinary
Historiography, follows the trajectories of two famous German twentieth-
century husband- and- wife Hispanists (Yakov Malkiel and Maria Rosa
Lida), on the one hand, and of nineteenth- century Spanish philolo-
gist Luis Galvn, on the other, in a discussion of Bellos scholarship on
El Cid. Chapter 2, Taken for Indians: Native Philology and Creole Cul-
ture Wars, ambitiously sets out to bring neocolonialism as a category to
bear upon Latin American studies and postcolonial studies by examining
a much later Chilean polemics. It revolves around the alleged Germaniza-
tion of the country and some criollo reactions to it toward the end of the
nineteenth century. At the time, the two famous German philologists re-
ferred to above were brought in by the Chilean government to found the
Pedagogical Institute (from then on in charge of the education of Chilean
secondary teachers), and their arrival unleashed a signifcant nationalistic
backlash. Although Altschul does not go into this, they were in fact two
among many other German professionals enticed to come to Chile as part
of a much more encompassing efort at modernizing the Chilean state and
army. In this chapter, however, Altschul does confrm through the analy-
sis of this philological dispute at the end of the nineteenth century what
criollos have known since Independence: modernity is much more com-
plex than simply freeing oneself from the imperial metropolis when such
a metropolis has been efectively defned as retrograde and premodern by
new imperial European powers claiming to have the key to what is the
modern. Chapter 3, National Epic Denied: European Assertions of the
786 }eArLY Ameri cAn Li terAture: VOLume 48, numBer 3
lack of a Spanish Epic, provides an instantiation of such imperial postur-
ing in the work of Ferdinand Wolf and other nineteenth- century French
and German philologists who deny Spain the right to a national epic (and
in the process deny the epic nature of the Poem of the Cid) and to the forms
of popular nationality thus entailed.
In chapter 4, Andrs Bello and the Foundations of Spanish National
Philology, the book arrives at its ostensible core: Bellos philological
work and the ways in which it, frst, negotiated his own place as a criollo
within European philological contexts and, second, had a deconstructive
efect on the possibility of any Spanish national philology. Bellos work in
Alstchuls assessment is an accommodation efort geared toward present-
ing his own ideas about the Poem of the Cid (an imitation of French origi-
nals in his view) and, even more importantly, his thesis on La Araucana
(156989)Alonso de Ercillas poem recounting the Spanish conquest of
the Mapucheas an epic Chilean text. Te latter hypothesisthe core of
chapter 5, Defning the Spanish American National Epic and Other Occi-
dentalist Resistancesis, for Altschul, an example of Bellos Occidental-
ist resistances, also manifested in other philological and poetic writings
by the Venezuelan.
Chapter 6, Te Spanish Orient in Bellos Spanish American Occiden-
talism, seeks to explain this concept of Occidentalist resistance by con-
necting Bellos erasure of Spains Muslim cultural infuence (as pertaining
to Spanish medieval assonance, which he saw as frmly rooted in European
sources) with his view of the inexorable disappearance of the Mapuche
natives from Chilean culture. At stake in both cases was, on the one hand,
the challenge Bello faced of overcoming the dual colonization of Spain by
other European powers in the European nineteenth century (an exotic,
still medieval country and a Muslim- infected one) and, on the other, the
efort to produce a cleanly Occidental (meaning European- American)
genealogy for the Chilean people as seen by criollo eyes.
Te main argument throughout this fne book is that nationalist Ger-
man nineteenth- century philology became globally infuential in its ability
to create standards that managed to relegate Spanish philology and the
Spanish national epic to the secondary level of imitation and underdevel-
opment. In this German- (and French- ) infuenced space, the Poem of the
Cid, produced by a people allegedly incapable of reaching the spiritual
Book Reviews{ 787
heights of their European neighbors, was deemed defcient and derivative
when compared to the German and French national epics. Andrs Bello
devoted considerable time and energy to the writing of his study of the
Poem of the Cid and then to the one on Ercillas La Araucana. Both of these
studies involved challenges to Spanish national philology and European
single- nationality- based national epics. Both of them can be read as Occi-
dentalist resistances.
Altschuls valuable book makes at least two important contributions.
Foremost, to studies of Andrs Bello and Latin American national philolo-
gies, she brings a detailed reconstruction of the heady mix of nineteenth-
century European philological nationalism and reconstructed imperial
trajectories that function as both some of the intellectual sources of Bellos
medievalist work and the conditions of its possibility. Finally, to postcolo-
nial studies she brings a welcome interest in an expansion of the geopoliti-
cal and geoepistemological limits that have kept the feld focused on the
Anglo- speaking world.
JuAn pOBLete University of California- Santa Cruz
Separated by Teir Sex: Women in Public
and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World
mArY Beth nOrtOn
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011
247 pp.
It is safe to say that when Mary Beth Norton published her path-
breaking 1980 book Libertys Daughters: Te Revolutionary Experience of
American Women, 17501800 (Cornell University Press), she had no idea
that she had written the frst (and chronologically last) part of a trilogy that
would examine gender constructs throughout early America. Te second
book in that trilogy, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and
the Forming of American Society (Vintage, 1996), reached back to the earli-
est days of colonization, bringing to life a Filmerian world that was both
authoritarian and organic. Separated by Teir Sex not only bridges the gap
between these two monumental studies (it is a prequel to Libertys Daugh-