Subproject Prof. Dr. Anne Kraume

Abstract

Against the backdrop of the literary analysis of Cornelius de Pauw's works undertaken in the first subproject, the second subproject examines its reception in Hispanic America. It mainly focuses on the discursive relationship between the Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains and the writings of Hispanic American (late) Enlightenment thinkers and pioneers of the independence from Spain who engage with this text. Using authors such as Francisco Javier Clavijero and Fray Servando Teresa de Mier from New Spain and Juan Ignacio Molina from Chile as examples, this research project analyses the possibilities and operating principles of the transatlantic knowledge transfer on the eve of the 19th century.

The European Enlightenment thinkers, and Cornelius de Pauw in particular, conceived of America primarily as the "Other" of European Enlightenment reasoning. Yet this supposedly clear-cut division is undermined in the texts of Hispanic American intellectuals by the fact that their translation of knowledge into literature occurs in a way that relies on interdependence and circulation rather than on unidirectional dependencies.

The keystone of my literary analysis are the literary genres and forms to which Hispanic American authors resort in their responses to de Pauw: while the latter's approach relies on updating the traditional book-based scientific methods for ordering and conveying knowledge (see subproject 1), the self-confidence of the Hispanic American Creoles manifests itself not only in the critical discussion of the European scholar's hypotheses, but also in a productive and sometimes decidedly ironic development of the literary forms and dispositifs of genre used by him. At a time when the political space between Europe and Hispanic America was being restructured, it was thus also possible to remap and redefine the literary space.