Remembering Home and Imagining Independence: The Spanish American Jesuit Diaspora in Italy, 1767-1810

• In Event: La construcción de la identidad nacional antes y después de la independencia

Abstract

During the closing decades of the eighteenth-century, the idea of Spanish American independence gained widespread popularity across Europe and was praised as a moment of world historical importance both in terms of its implications for transatlantic cultural relations as well as its global economic consequences. This paper examines how eighteenth-century debates about the possibilities of Spanish American independence prompted images of the New World as a space ripe for economic and political transformation; images that were first created by authors expelled from their homeland and later championed by leaders who fought for continental emancipation against Spain. Focusing on the Spanish American Jesuit diaspora in Italy—a community of clerics expatriated to the Papal States by the Spanish crown—I plan to examine how their works reveal images of the New World as a geography of revolutionary narrative possibilities nearly a century and a half before the advent of magical realism. How do representations of the New World as a continent ripe for economic and political emancipation inform the writings of Spanish American Jesuits exiled in Italy? How does an economic discourse that measures the benefits of independence against its potential risks in commercial terms inform their multiple visions? Finally, how do their works anticipate the literary and political vocabulary of a future generation of pro-independence leaders such as Francisco de Miranda and Andrés Bello?

Author

• Luis Ramos, NYU