American Passions: Affective Schemes in Colonial Latin American Literature

AÑÓN, VALERIA

Virtual

Congreso; Renaissance Society of America. 66th Annual Meeting; 2021

Renaissance Society of the Americas

The chronicles of the Mexican conquest have been understood through different paradigms and disciplines, as they are considered the founding texts of the American archive. Moreover, between 2019 and 2021, the V Centenary of the conquest of Mexico is commemorated throughout the world. Nevertheless, much remains untouched or silenced. In this regard, this paper aims to revisit some classical chronicles, such as the accounts by Hernán Cortés and Bernal Díaz, and compare them with the indigenous accounts transcript by fray Bernardino de Sahagún and fray Diego Durán, emphasising the textual configuration of México-Tenochtitlan as an “affective space”. This concept, described by Redwicz and Broomhall for the Renaissance Europe, helps us intertwine space and affects, so as to understand how space is organized within affective frames and, at the same time, how these images help to configure new subjects in the early colonial America.