Santa Arias

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Scholarly Contributions

Books

• Arias, S. (2021). The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492–1898). London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315107189

Chapters

• Arias, S. (2021). Between Colonialism and Coloniality: Colonial Latin American  and Caribbean Studies Today.. In The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492- 1898)(pp 1-40). London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315107189-1
• Arias, S. (2016).

  A Chronicon of Crónicas: The New Spanish Prose Narrative

  . In Cambridge History of Mexican Literature. doi:10.1017/cbo9781316163207.003
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  The arrival of Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) to the shores of the Yucatán in 1519 was followed by a burst of histories, travel accounts, and epistolary exchanges on Spain's expansion abroad and individual contributions to the imperial mission. This historiographical corpus, celebrating the establishment of New Spain as the first Spanish viceroyalty in the Americas, shaped a long-lasting Eurocentric imaginary of a “people without history” (Wolf, 1982). Yet this corpus was complicated by the appearance of ecclesiastical and mestizo chronicles that recovered and produced layers of documents for a colonial archive that for us today reveals as much as it conceals about the people of Mexico and the conflicted process of hispanization.
• Arias, S. (2008).

  From Ancients to Moderns: The Geopolitics of Historiography from the Old World to the New

  . In The Spatial Turn. Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203891308-14

Journals/Publications

• Arias, S. (2021).

  Bartolomé de las Casas, OP: History, Philosophy, and Theology in the Age of European Expansion

  . HAHR. doi:10.1215/00182168-8897633
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  After more than five centuries since Bartolomé de Las Casas's arrival to Hispaniola, research on this central actor undoubtedly requires approaching carefully the vast corpus of transnational scholarship reframing his legacy within and across disciplines. This new volume's selection of themes and authors, as well as its overall design, makes it one of the last decade's most significant contributions to research on the sixteenth-century Dominican and bishop of Chiapas. Its detailed introduction and 16 essays (authored by leading colonial scholars) collectively offer new perspectives on Las Casas's theological thinking, humanitarianism, and critique of Spanish colonialism while also presenting new questions on landscapes of colonization.The introduction carefully maps three “waves” of research on this central figure of the contact era. The first includes the nineteenth-century Spanish scholars who published the first collections of Las Casas's writings to support new interpretations of Spanish colonialism and ideologically laden biographies and histories. In their assessment of the ex-inquisitor and historian Juan Antonio Llorente and the statesman Antonio María Fabié, David Thomas Orique and Rady Roldán-Figueroa ably explore the politics of publication. The second wave is exemplified by US historians Lewis Hanke and Benjamin Keen, who emphasized Las Casas as key to transatlantic negotiations to end the encomienda and war against American Native populations. Orique and Roldán-Figueroa discuss French and Latin American historians to examine tensions leading to both the hagiographic scholarship on Las Casas and his demonization. This volume's authors shape a third wave, led by Rolena Adorno and other US-based scholars, that demonstrates how Lascasian scholarship has escaped the disciplinary bounds of history.While the incisive introduction navigates 250 years of Lascasian scholarship, it missed critical interventions fueled by the mid-1980s postcolonial turn, subaltern studies, and the decolonial approach. Enrique Dussel's pioneering work cannot be ignored, his critique of political hegemony having origins in sixteenth-century theological and juridical disputes. Other notable omissions are Luis Rivera-Pagán and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, who also examine Las Casas's ideas within urgent calls for decolonization. The work by Diego von Vacano, Rubén Sánchez-Godoy, and Manuel Jiménez Fonseca are examples of the third wave's engaged scholarship inspired by social and spatial justice, global ethics, ecological imperialism, and slavery and racism. Some of these themes find their way in various essays of the volume.As several of the essays illustrate, the transdisciplinary logic of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries bolstered Las Casas's attitudes on natural theology, humanism, authorship, truth, and reason. He wrote in a rapidly changing intellectual environment that was sorting out the value and meaning of classical precepts put to the test with new knowledge about nature, earth, the cosmos, and American Native cultures. These dynamics influenced his arguments against war and the destruction of cultures and nature and for restitution and peaceful evangelization.Essays contribute to scholarship on Las Casas's ideas and on representations of his role as a cultural broker and a transatlantic actor and agent. Luis Fernando Restrepo underscores auto/biographical narratives that cast him as a problematic “humanitarian subject” unable to capture the radical ethics of his project (p. 261). While Las Casas has always been a keystone for examining the sixteenth-century origins of the struggle for human rights, Restrepo's essay and others by Alicia Mayer, Claus Dierksmeier, Daniel R. Brunstetter, and Víctor Zorrilla show Las Casas's relevance today as new inflections of imperiality have unsettled gains of the long-standing struggle for social justice globally. Tied to these themes is Las Casas's critique of colonialism and coloniality, addressed in essays (including Carlos Jáuregui and David Solodkow's) examining Las Casas's political theology and biopolitics.Various essays focus on emblematic sixteenth-century texts. In her essay, Rolena Adorno reexamines the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias' production context and far-reaching circulation by highlighting two of its most notable readers: Bernal Díaz del Castillo and Jacques de Miggrode. Miggrode, who prepared the text's first French translation, commissioned watercolors later used for Theodor de Bry's engravings. Matthew Restall examines how, after early friendly encounters, Las Casas and Hernando Cortés emerge as “monstrous doubles.” Restall's essay shows how comparative work can reveal new angles for conquest-era biographies and ideologies shaping the conquest era. Other essays compare the Dominican friar with Toribio de Benavente, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Martín González, and Antonio de Espinosa. Eyda Merediz foregrounds sixteenth-century ethnographic observations in missionary chronicles. She traces Las Casas's influence on how Espinosa described the Guanches of the Canary Islands.Merediz's essay is just one example of how this volume brings attention to Las Casas's unexpected geographies of influence (Paraguay, New England) while also revisiting his performance in Peru, Mexico, Guatemala, and the Caribbean. The final essay, by Armando Lampe, sheds more light on Las Casas as a historian of African slavery in the Caribbean and on his controversial propositions against Indigenous exploitation and for African slavery, which he maintained until the 1540s. Lampe demonstrates the difficulty of pinning down Las Casas's positions and the need for further research clarifying his motives, timing, and eventual departure from his original proposals.This volume contributes to knowledge on Las Casas's ideas and their genealogy, reasserting their significance for studying early modern theology, political philosophy, empire, colonialism, and global decolonization. Orique and Roldán-Figueroa have done splendid work as editors in selecting essays that demonstrate the enduring history and complexity of Las Casas's polemical propositions, which have shaped modern intellectual thinking about liberation, equality, and social justice.
• Arias, S. (2008).

  Equal Rights and Individual Freedom: Enlightenment Intellectuals and the Lascasian Apology for Black African Slavery

  . Romance Quarterly, 55(4), 279-291. doi:10.3200/rqtr.55.4.279-291
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  Juan Antonio Llorente's edition of Bartolome de Las Casas's writings, Coleccion de las obras del venerable Obispo de Chiapa, Don Bartolome de las Casas, defensor de la libertad de los Americanos, illustrates how Las Casas was perceived and condemned in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In this article, I seek to explain why and in what ways Bartolome de Las Casas's early propositions on African slavery played a fundamental role in Juan Antonio Llorente's edition of Coleccion, an ambitious editorial work that involved much more than selection, editing, and publication. By approaching the Coleccion's production and reception from the perspective of book history, I explore how Llorente's Coleccion reflects the role that colonial affairs and race had in the challenges faced by European rule and white hegemony.