Bartolomé de las Casas and the Spanish-American War
Translation, appropriation and the 1898 edition of Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias
Roberto A. Valdeón | Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China | University of the Free State, South Africa | Universidad de Oviedo, Spain
This article explores the uses of Las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias in the United States of America, with a focus on the Spanish-American War. After introducing the concept of the Black Legend and its use in England, Spain’s main rival in the Americas during the early modern period, I briefly discuss the first two English translations of the tract by Las Casas. The ideological manipulation carried out by M. M. S. and by John Phillips set the tone for the future use of Las Casas as part of the anti-Spanish propaganda characteristic of Renaissance England first and of modern America later. I then proceed to examine how the narrative ascribed to Las Casas has contributed to forge an anti-Spanish feeling in the US, evident in the years before and after the Spanish-American War of 1898. This section suggests that Las Casas’s text was violated in many ways in order to support a narrative of hatred, as shown in the sermons of American Protestant ministers, books, and, above all, in the 1898 US edition of his work.
2000 “The Cannibal Butcher Shop. Protestant Uses of las Casas’s Brevísima relación in Europe and the American Colonies.” Early American Literature 35 (2): 107–136.
Coke, Thomas
1808A History of the West Indies. Liverpool: Nuttall, Fisher and Dixon.
Cunninghame Graham, Robert B.
1915Bernal Díaz del Castillo Being Some Account of Him, Taken from his True Story of the Conquest of New Spain. London: Eveleigh Nash.
Davis, Richard H.
1897Cuba in War Time. New York: R. H. Russell.
Delahaye, Marieke
2010 “Intertextuality and Historiography. Case Study: The European Trajectory of Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, 1552, de Bartolomé de las Casas.” Paper presented at the 6th EST Congress, University of Leuven, Leuven.
Evans, J. Martin
1996Milton’s Imperial Epic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Fuchs, Barbara
2011Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Hadfield, Andrew
2001Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels. Travel and Colonial Writing in English, 1550–1630: An Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hanke, Lewis
1951Bartolomé de las Casas: An Interpretation of His Life and Writings. The Hague: Nijhoff.
Hanke, Lewis
1953 “Bartolomé de las Casas and the Spanish Empire in America: Four Centuries of Misunderstanding.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 97 (1): 26–30.
Hakluyt, Richard
1584/1877A Discourse Concerning Western Planting. Cambridge, MA: Press of John Wilson and Son.
Hart, Jonathan
2003Comparing Empires. European Colonialism from Portuguese Expansion to the Spanish-American War. London: Palgrave.
Hart, Jonathan
2011Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. London: Palgrave.
Hodgson, Godfrey
2009The Myth of American Exceptionalism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Hubbard, William
1865/1677The History of the Indians Wars in New England. Roxbury, MA: W. Elliot Woodward.
Ingalls, John J.
1898America’s War for Humanity. New York: N. D. Thompson Publishing Company.
Las Casas, Bartolomé de
1898Horrible Atrocities of the Spaniards in Cuba. New York: J. Boller.
Lawson-Peebles, Robert
2014American Literature before 1880. London: Routledge.
López de Abiada, José Manuel
2007 “Spaniards.” In Imagology. The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters, ed. by Manfred Beller, and Joep Leerssen, 242–247. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
McCullough, Matthew
2014Studies in American Thought and Culture: Cross of War: Christian Nationalism and U.S. Expansion in the Spanish-American War. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Powell, Philip W.
2008/1971Tree of Hate. Propaganda and Prejudices Affecting United States Relations with the Hispanic World. Alburquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Smith, Cassender L.
2013 “Washing the Ethiop Red: Sir Francis Drake and the Cimarrons of Panama.” In Race and Displacement. Nation, Migration, and Identity in the 21st Century, ed. by Maha Marouan, and Merinda Simmons, 113–126. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press.
Smith, John
2013/1994The Spanish-American War: Conflict in the Caribbean and the Pacific 1895–1902. London: Routledge.
Thomas, Mark A.
1996 “The Press and the War.” In Historical Dictionary of the Spanish American War, ed. by Donald H. Dyal, 264–267. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Valdeón, Roberto A.
2012 “Tears of the Indies and the Power of Translation: John Phillips’ Version of Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies LXXXIX (6): 839–858.
Valdeón, Roberto A.
2014a “The 1992 English Retranslation of Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias.” Translation Studies 7 (1): 1–16.
2015 “Visiones inglesas sobre la region maya en el siglo XVI [English views on the Mayan region in the sixteenth century].” Península X (2): 71–96.
Vidal Claramonte, Carmen África
2014 “The Historian as Translator: Applying Pierre Bourdieu to the Translation of History.” In Remapping Habitus in Translation Studies, ed. by Gisella M. Vorderobermeier, 203–217. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Wilson, Robert A.
1859A New History of the Conquest of Mexico, in Which Las Casas’ Denunciation of the Popular Historians of that War are Fully Vindicated. Philadelphia: James Challen & Son.
Wilson, Woodrow
1903A History of the American People. Volume V1. New York and London: Harper and Brothers Publishers.
Cited by (3)
Cited by 3 other publications
Cobarsí-Morales, Josep
2022. Controversial ‘Black Legend’ Concept as Misinformation or Disinformation Related to History: Where Do We Go from Here in 21st Century Information Field?. In Information for a Better World: Shaping the Global Future [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 13192], ► pp. 21 ff.
2024. The translation of multimodal texts: challenges and theoretical approaches. Perspectives 32:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.