Estudios de Teoría Literaria (Mar 2014)
Dangerous relationships: science and politics in the eighteenth century
Abstract
We will address the different (and contradictory) representations in two American texts belonging to the series of reports and works generated on occasion of the Franco-Spanish expedition of La Condamine in Ecuador (1735-1743): Antonio de Ulloa's Relación Histórica del Viage á la America Meridional (1748) and El discurso y reflexiones políticas sobre el estado presente de los reinos del Perú, written by Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa and unpublished before David Barry's edition in 1826 under the title of Noticias secretas de América. We wish to show in the first text how the "scientific" perspective, conceived as objective and detached from any political purpose, is constructed and how this perspective, however, reaffirms the long-standing stereotypes about American inferiority. Meanwhile, the second text appears as the reversed plot of the first, that is, it refutes "scientific" objectivity and unveils the inherent conflicts of the exacerbation of colonialism of the times.
