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“Specters
of History: the Incan and the
African in the Bolivarian Revolution”
Maureen
G. Shanahan
School
of Art and Art History
James
Madison University (Virginia)
The narrative of Simón
Bolívar, known as the Liberator of the South (El Libertador), and his
liberation of South America from colonial Spain has been the subject of
many histories, documentaries, and anthologies over the past two centuries.
Since World War II, a wealth of fictionalized accounts of his
exploits and his famous love affair with Manuela Saenz have emerged,
notably: the French opera Simón Bolívar (1950) composed by Darius Milhaud; a sculpture by
Venezuelan Pop artist Marisol; the English language opera Simón Bolívar (1995) by the Scottish composer Thea Musgrave; a
Venevision film about the life of Bolívar’s famous lover, Manuela Sáenz (Diego Risquez 2000); the novel by Nobel Prize-winner
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General
in his Labyrinth (1990); Gregory Kaufman’s Manuela
Saenz (2000), and Jaime Manrique’s Our
Lives are the Rivers (2006). Indeed, the Bolivar narrative raises themes of
colonialism, slavery, liberation, nation formation, embattled leadership,
and authoritarianism. Its
cast of characters include: the
revolutionary hero, Bolivar himself; Manuela Saenz, his lover and
cross-dressing female general; Sucre, Santander, Miranda, San Martin,
O’Leary and other generals, who variously represent Bolivar’s
loyalists or detractors; Rodriquez, Bolivar’s Spanish tutor who taught
him to desire liberty; Incan priests or people; and various African slaves.
If they appear at all,
Incans and Africans are at best marginal figures to the narrative of
Bolivar’s revolution, the idea of liberation from Spanish colonialism,
rather than central figures motivating and shaping the history of the
continent. This paper will consider the various significations of Incans
and Africans as figures of exoticism (the Incan priest), eroticism (Natan
and Jonatas, Saenz’s slaves), loyalty (Palacios, Bolivar’s slave),
maternity and resistance (Hipolita, Palacios’ mother). Although these representations often disavow or minimize
ongoing conditions of slavery and degradation, the historical context of
their production provoked political debates. Milhaud’s opera imagined a story of liberation in the
context of post-war French freedom from Nazi occupation, yet reviews
indicate that the image of the liberated slave provoked debates about
ongoing French colonization. Musgrave’s
opera uses Hipolita to frame the opera with tears (at the beginning) and
warnings about police reprisal (at the end), suggesting that she serves as
a sign of repression and resistance.
Diego Risquez’s film provides important secondary roles for Natan
and Jonatas, who are represented not as slaves but as Manuela Saenz’s
co-conspirators and loyal friends. Only Manrique’s novel imagines the lives of Natan and
Jonatas in more complex ways, suggesting their personal traumas, loves,
and revolutionary interventions.
What these various
narratives and figurations represent are shifting conceptions not only of
history and who counts as historical actors but also the way that the
narrative itself, with its contradictory tensions between liberation and
slavery, reveals the way liberation is, as Jacques Derrida has argued
about Marx’s theory of class, haunted.
Judith Butler has similarly argued that democratic politics is
constituted through exclusions and predicated on the spectral figure of
the “incomplete or barred subject.” |