Conferences

Jesuit Accounts of the Colonial Americas: Textualities, Intellectual Disputes, Intercultural Transfers

Date/Time
Friday, April 8, 2005–Saturday, April 9, 2005
All Day

Location
UCLA William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
2520 Cimarron Street

—a conference organized by Marc André Bernier, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières; Clorinda Donato, California State University, Long Beach; and Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, Universität des Saarlandes

The primary focus of the conference is the Jesuit new-world narrative and its evolving legacy. Although the Jesuits were responsible for the vast majority of the production and diffusion of knowledge about the New World—both in Europe and in the New World itself—no systematic assessment of the numerous editions and translations of these French, German, Italian and Spanish narratives has ever been conducted. The conference addresses the accounts of the New World in the histories, chronicles, relaciones, relations and récits written by the Jesuits, focusing on the Jesuits’ role in fixing a particular image of the New World through their writings.

Program
Session 1: Textualities
Chair: Clorinda Donato, California State University, Long Beach

Réal Ouellet, Université Laval
“Pierre Pelleprat’s Accounts of the Jesuit Missions in the Antilles and in Guyana” (1)

Marc André Bernier, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières
“Pierre Pelleprat’s Accounts of the Jesuit Missions in the Antilles and in Guyana” (2)

Margaret R. Ewalt, Wake Forest University
“The Legacy of Joseph Gumilla’s Orinoco Illustrated

Session 2: Images of Empire
Chair: Marc André Bernier, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières

Eileen Willingham, University of Iowa
“Imagining the Kingdom of Quito: Reading History and National Identity in Juan de Velasco’s Historia del Reino de Quito

Beatriz de Alba-Koch, University of Victoria
“For Love of Patria: Locating Self and Nation in Clavijero’s Rendition of the Conquest of Mexico

Girolamo Imbruglia, Università degli Studi di Napoli
“’L’Orientale’: Jesuit Missions of Paraguay between Apostolic Evangelization and Catholic Utopianism”

Session 3: Intellectual Disputes
Chair: Catherine Komisaruk, California State University, Long Beach

Wiebke Röben de Alencar Xavier, Universidade Federal do Ceará
“Religious Writings in Eighteenth-Century Colonial Brazil and the Anti-Jesuitic Thrust of José Basílio da Gama’s O Uraguai

Ute Fendler, Universität des Saarlandes
“Changing Perspectives: the Other, the Self, the In-between of the Jesuit Experience in the Eighteenth-Century”

Karen Stolley, Emory University
“East from Eden: Domesticating Exile in Jesuit Accounts of Their 1767 Expulsion from Spanish America”

Session 4: Intellectual Transfers
Chair: Peter H. Reill, University of California, Los Angeles

Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, Universität des Saarlandes
“Romantizing the Jesuit Accounts on South America: Martin Dobrizhoffer’s History of the Abiponi between Ethnology and Romantic Discourse”

Clorinda Donato, California State University, Long Beach
“’Ninguno habla las lenguas major que ellos’: Converting Shamans in Filippo Salvatore Gilij’s Saggio di Storia Americana, 1780–1784″

Perla Chinchilla Pawling, Universidad Iberoamericana
“From Sacred Rhetoric to the Republic of Letters: Jesuit Sermons in Seventeenth-Century New Spain”

Closing Remarks
Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, Universität des Saarlandes