Lope's Imperial Geography: Cosmography, Gender, and Dietetics in Los guanches de Tenerife y conquista de Canaria

Abstract

This essay examines the legitimizing role that the interaction between cosmography, gender, and dietetics plays in the troping of conquest and land acquisition in Lope de Vega's Comedia famosa de los guanches de Tenerife y conquista de Canaria . In Lope's play, the political desire for control and possession of Tenerife as a colonial space is articulated through images of penetration and ingestion that find their ultimate source of legitimacy in the cosmographic, sexual, and dietary discourses of early modern Europe and the Spanish crónicas de Indias . The discourses intersect at various points in the play to shape the contours of an "imperial geography" whose purpose is to validate and supplement the ethnographic and cultural strategies of dispossession that Lope employs throughout the comedia : his depiction of the guanches or native Canarians as primitive and unaware of the economic potential of their land, their technological backwardness, and their ignorance of the "true faith." While these strategies have been sufficiently analyzed and contextualized in previous studies of the play, the complex geography that codifies and justifies the appropriation of the guanches ' land has received almost no attention from the critics. By focusing on this particular aspect of the play, my essay fills a substantial gap in the existing critical literature on the play and offers new insights into the colonial complicities of early modern Spanish drama as revealed through its peculiar reading of space.