Estudios de Teoría Literaria (Mar 2019)
The linguistic representation of the other in colonial literature: the indian in 18th. Century Andean Bolivia
Abstract
The following essay explores the literary character of the Indio –as it appears in an entremés drafted in Potosí during the Eighteenth Century– in order to provide a comprehensive look at the linguistic representation of indigenous populations within Bolivian baroque literature. For this purpose, speeches and dialogues performed by indigenous characters are analyzed thoroughly, taking into account the main linguistic phenomena (phonic, morphosyntactic, and lexical). Our article examines both: similarities –regarding the category of this linguistic stereotype– as well as differences – concerning the representation of other Indigenous characters in Andean colonial literature. This paper concludes that although the archetype of the so-called “funny” Indio character originates in the cultural background of the Spanish Golden Age, some characteristics and functions differ from the original model as the New World provides a set of linguistic features adapted to the Spanish American context.
