...border negotiations the Portuguese, I became a diedochista not by original intent but rather thanks to a series of coincidences. Azara's life and works blur the often-times overly rigid boundaries between criollos and gachupines, between Spanish America and Spain (and the rest of Europe), between pracutioners and scientists or scholars, between the colonial period and the eighteenth-century. Similar boundaries and border negotiations have informed my own experiences teaching the eighteenth century; like Azara, I've found them to be both a source of frustration and--eventually--rich with potential for exploration and learning.

Trained as a colonial scholar under Roberto González Echevarría at Yale in the early 80's, I did very little graduate coursework on the eighteenth century. In fact, my sense at the time was that few doctoral programs in Spanish gave much attention to this period (the University of Pennsylvania, where the distinguished peninsularist Russell P. Sebold taught for many years, was one exception). The Latín American 'boom' was still a magnet for many graduate students, and the study of colonial literature was also receiving increasing attention in anticipation of the Columbian Quincentenary. I wrote a dissertation on Alonso Carrió de la Vandera's El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes in which I discussed the various 'masks' employed by the narrator (one was that of an eighteenth-century traveler), but despite El lazarillo's publication date--1775--I continued to think of myself more as a scholar of the colonial period than the eighteenth century. In my teaching, first at Vassar (where I was hired as a generalist to teach a range of undergraduate Spanish language and Latin American literature courses) and then at Emory (where I was hired as a colonialist to teach both graduate and undergraduate courses), my primary responsibility has been to cover the Spanish American colonial period. I've taught courses on Columbus, Guaman Poma, and Sor Juana; on historiographical narrative and representations of the Other; on the Barroco de Indias and on contemporary rewritings of the Encounter. In most of these courses, I regret to say, the eighteenth century appeared merely as an afterthought. During these same years, however, my scholarship focused increasingly on the late colonial period, moving inexorably toward a focus on the eighteenth century. The dissertation on El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes became a book that engaged more explicitly the eighteenth-century context in which Carrió de la Vandera was operating. (1) An invitation from Enrique Pupo Walker and Roberto Gonzalez Echevarría to write the chapter on "Narrative Forms, Scholarship and Learning in the XVIII Century" for The Cambridge History of Latín American Literature (published in 1996), provided me with an opportunity to read widely among authors whose names I'd only considered in passing--Eguiara y Eguren, Clavigero, Landívar, Oviedo y Baños, Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela, Velasco, and others. These readings led me to a sharpened awareness of the invisibility of the eighteenth century in most Spanish and Spanish American literary histories, anthologies, and curricula. This invisibility, aggravated by the relative scarcity of easily accessible editions of many eighteenth-century Spanish and Spanish American titles, has an inevitable impact on how we teach (or not) the eighteenth century at the undergraduate and graduate level, as other contributors to this issue have pointed out. (2)

This invisibility has implications for comparative study, as well. In Hispanism, of course, we face a very different situation than that of our colleagues in French, English, or American literature. In those fields, the eighteenth century (long or short) is understood to be a key period that lays claim to a lengthy list of canonical works and pride of place in the evolution of a national literature. What's more, "the...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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