Predicting the Future: Black and Indigenous Counternarratives in Oviedo’s General History of the Indies (1526)

• In Event: Enslaved Insurrection

Description for Program

In Book IV, Chapter 4 of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés’s General History of the Indies (1526) he recounts the 1522 Christmas Day maroon rebellion on Diego Columbus’s sugar plantation on Hispaniola. Similar to Bartolomé de las Casas’s brief remarks concerning the rebellion, Oviedo expresses anxiety that the rebellion’s impact as both a novelty on the island and the beginning of much “harm” maroons would continue to exact as they disrupt the designs of colonial authorities. I measure the maroon’s agency by their ability to incite intellectual reflection, anxiety and narrative dissonance in Oviedo’s account that is repeated in Las Casas’s History of the Indies. In this paper I read Oviedo’s hegemonic narrative regarding the events, which centers accounts told by Spaniards, alongside embodied narratives produced by Wolof rebels and other Afrodescendants and Indigenous people involved. I sustain Oviedo inadvertently incorporates Black and Indigenous agency which complicates the Spanish epic narrative that Christians warriors definitively defeat the Black other. As a result, Oviedo’s account, like Las Casas’s, predicts a future in which Black Africans and their descendants would participate in cultural production in the Caribbean despite hegemonic narratives that silence their humanity.

Author

• Monica Styles, Howard University