Baroque Sovereignty: A Colonial Poetics | 1. Mirrors

These lectures explore the idea that the baroque is the aesthetic of modernity because it is the one that most richly indexes the colonial encounters of the Americas. In thus ranging from the legal problematics of Spanish colonialism and the painterly receptions of those problematics to contemporary literary adaptations of those mirrors and superimpositions, these lectures develop a poetics for the historical and aesthetic structure of the baroque that are grounded in their political philosophy and situated in their literary ramification, with special attention to formation over form across indigenous, mestizo, colonial, and trans-oceanic worlds. The takeaway is an idea that the term baroque Americas is tautological and the European baroque is oxymoronic. And to see this a poetics of mirrors, giants, and fingernails is needed.

Edgar Garcia is a poet and scholar of the hemispheric cultures of the Americas. Garcia’s most recent book, Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022), is a collection of 9 essays that show what this foundational creation story of the Indigenous Americas (the Popol Vuh) has to teach people about the relation between emergency and emergence. Garcia’s scholarship and poetry are likewise inquiries into the relation between crisis and creativity or world creation — often experimenting with literary and disciplinary form to bring ideas and feelings to life. Along with books, Garcia’s work has appeared in such venues as publications of the Modern Language Association (PMLA), Modern Philology, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Portable Gray, and Fence (where Garcia served as editor-in-chief from 2022-24).