Colonial archive chiaroscuro

Fernández de Oviedo's writing about nature

Abstract

This article gives an account of the ways in which an official-imperial natural history approaches nature description in contexts of conquest and early colonization. To this end, I consider the rewriting, extension and transformation of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s (1478-1557) Natural History texts; specially, the Book of Deposits or Book VI on incomprehensible wonders of the West Indies. Methodologically and to analyze from de-centered and de-hierarchical visions, this work integrates tools of paleography, which examine the writing process. It also make use of tools of Literary,
Discursive and Colonial Studies, which formulate hypotheses for reading the texts. I propose that Book VI clearly exteriorizes the technologies of the colonial archive that classify, assimilate, homogenize or discard knowledge. But it also destabilizes and structurally transforms it, along with other writing technologies considered to be of second orde such as marginalia, commentaries, deletions, insertions
and linguistic forms of the ineffable.