ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the Río de la Plata region during the colonial period, mainly the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The purpose is to analyze the different ways in which the Río de la Plata spatiality appears in writing, the ways in which writing finds new forms of expression to account for it, and also, the ways in which words reproduce the forms of territorial appropriation in a kind of bidirectional relationship between discourse and geography.
The space dealt with is in general a dystopian space; the question that arises to whoever takes up the pen is how to give an account of himself/herself without obliterating what is real and at the same time without producing an illegible story. Readers’ horizon of expectations, the conditions of enunciation and publication, together with both the empiric voyage and the traveler are some of the variables to take into account at the time of analyzing this issue. This chapter is particularly interested in addressing the question that constitutes what might be called the initial difficulty of the Río de la Plata colonial account, but it is also interested in thinking that much of this initial difficulty, which can be found at a discursive level, exceeds the aforementioned scope. There are issues related to territorial practices, but also to ideological, political and economic ones, which are key both in the conformation of this type of geographical discourse and in its way of exercising and/or inaugurating it. In order to do this, to give account of a significant range, this chapter intends to work not only with chronicles and relationships but also with other types of discourse materials to offer as wide as possible a range of that diversity, often restricted to a Manichean spatial image.
