American Race and Charismatic License: Finding Martín de Porres in Obama

8/10/2019 American Race and Charismatic License: Finding Martn de Porres in Obama

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Chris Garces

Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Volume 97, Number 3, 2014,pp. 376-384 (Article)

DOI: 10.1353/sij.2014.0018

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American Race and Charismatic License:Finding Martn de Porres in ObamaCHRIS GARCES, CORNELL U NIVERSITY

Abst ract

Problematizing the saintly reputation of seventeenth-century Dominican servantMartn de Porres, this article explores a little-known, late medieval Spanish form ofagency, or licencia , with which a mulato colonial monastic could inuence his SpanishCreole superiors, perform miracles, and gain a widespread reputation for superhu-man piety. I ask: under what specic conditions could licencia have been wielded bynonwhite Christian subjects to manipulate the shifting moral orders of early modernSpanish Creole hegemony? I also explore how the politicization of racialized charismacontinues to depend on a logic of licencia. Tracking resonances between the SpanishCreole veneration of a mulato gure in seventeenth-century Peru with the recentelection of a mixed race president in the United States, this article reads togethertheology and politics to demonstrate the fraught beauty, or legal beatication, ofracialized charisma.

When Barack Obama delivered his2008 speech on race in Philadelphia, my ownthoughts on his soaring rhetoric of intergenerational differences vis--vis the perni-cious legacies of slavery also took to the wings of timeall the way to seventeenth-century Lima, Peru. It was here, in this South American center of urban coloniallife, where in the rst-ever-recorded instance, an African American subject whoenjoyed a deeply absorbing charisma felt compelled to explain what his race meantto his inuence, effectively legitimizing his fast-growing Spanish Creole venera-

tion in the process. That gure, of course, was Fray Martn de Porres (15791639),a mulatto servant and celebrated friar of the Dominican order. Over a cloisteredlifetime, Martn de Porres had so impressed his Spanish Creole superiors with hismiracle working and heroic achievements of monastic piety that, some twentyyears after his death, his fellow Dominicans and Limas civic elite would initiatea proceso de beaticacin , or Catholic legal saint-making process, to promotethe cause of his Roman sancticationall of which took place as the triangletrade boomed and the institution of African slavery went nearly unquestioned inLima itself.

American theorists of race, you might say, have lived through their own,rather Nietzschian case of eternal recurrenceback in 2008dealing with


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d i s c u s s i o n T h e B e a u t y o f C h a r i s m a

popular claims that Obamas presidential victory would carry Americansbefore a new threshold of qualied colorblindness while racial discrimina-tion and violence churned around them. Indeed, the peculiar way in which

Martn de Porress racialized charisma was framed by his contemporaries, asI demonstrate below, remains immanent to the logic of ethno-racial worlds yetfundamentally misrecognized. The structure of history-as-trauma may neverreveal the full, intergenerational complexity of the damage wrought by theinstitution of African American slavery and its centrality to the age of reason(Buck-Morss2000). Yet one early colonial wave of such ethno-racial commonsense can be unambiguously identied and worked through in the language of

the seventeenth-century Spanish Creole project to sanctify Martn de Porreslinking this colonial gure to the unconventional ascendency of BarackObama, I claim, by way of a long-forgotten politico-theological concept.

For quite a while now, the scholarly termagency has been central to socialjustice and secular-liberal attempts at comprehending subjectivity before thelaw, or to better appreciate the cultural and gendered qualities of subalternresistance, endurance, or survival. In the hands of sensitive critics, the

word in different contexts has variably meant inuence, self-actualization,or the integrity of someone who makes good on his or her promisesthediscursive conditions of which Judith Butler has summarized as the para-dox of subjectivity: the peculiar, twofold state of being the subject of a con-science and a being subject to power (1997). Butler rightly turns a criticaleye to any such beings passionate attachments, including ones psychic oraffective foreclosures in the domain of self-exercise (723). It should comeas no surprise that re-reading Martn de Porress life as a highly teleologicalaccount of docile, mitigated, or even trickster agency, managing to befree as well as constrained in his passionate attachments, might recommenditself to students of decolonial critique. And yet what made Martn de Porresswords and deeds as venerable as they were, in the terms that he himself andhis seventeenth-century Lima interlocutors might have understood, wouldnot be recognizable but for his creative use oflicencia the taken-for-grantedlicense of implicit agreements with institutional superiors that could bemanipulated to ones advantage. Licencia is a long-forgotten courtly term formindful Christian self-government within the Spanish crowns domain ofauthority. To focus on Martn de Porress charismatic rupture within colonial


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histories of race is effectively to cast ones gaze on his management of licen-cia, a late medieval habitus of politicized self-mastery that cannot be easilyrecognized within the contemporary analysts liberal conceptual universe.

Since the mid-seventeenth century, hundreds of sacred biographies,pamphlets, and works of religious pedagogy, along with a handful of moresecular-historical treatments, have been written about Martn de Porres. Andyet none have lent more than a passing observation to his monastic handlingof licencia. Indeed, this late medieval legal gure remains largely unexaminedand ignored within the clusters of interdisciplinary research known today ascritical race theory, postcolonial or decolonial thought, or even Latin American

studies. Testimony gathered in his Proceso de Beaticacin (PBFMP 1960),however, may allow for systematic rethinking of African American racializa-tion using this key politico-theological term that animated the dispensationand partial actualization of Spanish sovereign order. Produced in1660, 1664,and 1671, this fascinating bundle of hundreds of testimonials constitutes one ofthe Americas earliest and most sizeable archives in which a subject of Africandescent describes his actions and situates his motivations entirely outside

the colonial jurisdiction of a criminal process. The Proceso as such may helpin part to better understand how late medieval practices were instrumentalin shaping the early modern language and lived understandings of Spanish American race in colonial context.

Barack Obamas election, in effect, pulled me all the way back into theworld of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Lima, as I immersedmyself in hagiographic literature and more recent critical scholarship on theDominican friar. In particular, I pored over Proceso testimonies searchingfor ways to appreciate the original framing context of his speech, in spite ofnotarial efforts to render the language of witnesses accounts more uniformand juridically legible before the Roman ofce of the Devils Advocate, whoserole it was to scrutinize these accounts for signs of demonic rather than godlyforces animating the saintly candidates words and deeds. Time and again,the Martn de Porres of these overdetermined testimonials embodied coremonastic virtues of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Yet it was rather the wayin which Spanish and Creole witnesses repeatedly bear witness to the friarshumility, or the specically racialized cast of this second-order virtue, thatshould concern analysts of the mulatto friars colonial predicament. To my way


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of reading these humble accounts, one narrative pattern stands out within hisown speech. Almost automatically, Martn de Porres seems to have denigratedhimself wherever and whenever he was praised for his extreme piety or super-

natural abilities. If personal monastic acclaim of any kind happened to fall onhis ears, he would immediately call himself a mulatto dog, situating himselfin a confessional vein as the least [brother] of this [monastic] house or thelowest creature in his [Gods] world (PBFMP1960, 9091, 116, 193, 2046,220, 266, 290).

A series of questions should be posed at this juncture. What, in hindsight,is the political status of this kind of religious humility? At what scale, or

register of speech, were these self-denigrating comments received by hisSpanish Creole interlocutors? Is it fair to say that Fray Martns humilitywas popularly contextualized or understood as exclusive to the domain of hisinwardly focused Dominican monastic world? Or might his speech bear theweight of unconscious imaginative idealsvirtual ramications of the actualextending their signicance across the cognitive map of colonial Lima, or thebroader domain of Spanish ethno-racial control? Oddly, both hagiographic

and secular-critical works of scholarship that examine Martn de Porress lifetend to consider his charisma in the context of historical events or culturalfactors, events and factors rather distant from the interactional details of hisown acts of speech. These works have assigned his implausible saintliness toany number of secular-rational and religious interpretations: (a) to his mixed-race mulato inuence, and the ethno-racial, geographically spatializedeconomy of his magical healing abilities (Iwasaki Cauti1994); or (b) to expres-sions of love for nonhuman beings, in particular the dogs and other urban ani-mals with whom he interacted and subtly identied himself in an inuential,countercolonial gesture (Garca Rivera 1995); or (c) to the Spanish Creoleneed for examples of black piety in a slave trade city imaginatively besiegedfrom within and without, as Spanish Creoles fears of rural indigenous idolatryand mixed-race subjects of African descent whose Christianity seemed ques-tionable formed a rapidly expanding domestic labor sector (Cussen1996).

All these religious and secular interpretations of Martn de Porressuncanny inuence over Spanish Creoles may be plausible. In particular,Celia Cussens agile historical account of the mulatto saints actions within thecity of Lima and its conceptual universe goes a long way toward showing that


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his monastic virtues were mirrors of new Creole desires and an understated Africanized Christianity (1996). Spanish Creoles were indeed fearful of idolatryand the accompanying specter of indigenous uprisings capable of threatening

colonial cities. However, early colonial subjects marked by African raceespecially mulatos , the often unacknowledged children of Spaniard fathersand mothers bonded into slavery or concubinagewere brought with greaterregularity before the Inquisitions tribunals in the Americas, the so-calledExtirpation of Idolatries, on charges of witchcraft and sorcery (hechicera ).By the same token, Martn de Porress self-denigrating acts of public speechenabled a Spanish Creole regime to venerate his Catholic heroism and super-

natural capabilities, instead of denouncing them as the by-product of diaboli-cal possession. That is to say, it was precisely his unprecedented racializationof Catholic humility in a period of acute Spanish colonial religious crisis, ofethno-racial unmooring and trans-Atlantic refashioning within Christendom,that managed to defuse any Spanish Creole suspicion of Martn de Porresspotential idolatryrevealing the confessional origins of race insofar as histori-cal charisma is concerned.

Here, too, the political gure of Barack Obama kept leaping back intothe frame of my research, silently guiding my thoughts about and interest inthe anomalous seventeenth-century friar. It wasnt necessarily that Obama, inwhat analysts alternately considered a humble or humorous gesture, famouslycalled himself a mutt on the popular U.S. morning TV showThe View , pre-emptively defusing the milquetoast celebrity hosts anxieties about questionsof race while drawing attention to his international family background andthe problem with assigning race stereotypes. Nor was it Obamas linguisticcode-switching, his capacity to dissimulate his speech in such a way thatdifferent political constituencies might consider him one of their own,leading to a rather symptomatic comment from Chris Matthews, during hisnightly cable news program on national politics after Obamas2010 State ofthe Union address, when he said, I forgot he was black tonight for an hourperfectly illustrating the white-washing synonymous with so-called postracialpolitics. Instead, what Obamas successful run for the U.S. presidency andhis rst term in ofce exhibited was a veritable explosion of public confes-sional moments, which the racialized charismatic happened to bring out inothers leading to the surprises that such disclosures all too predictably pro-ducedand that carried me away, as if riding a historical zip line into one ofthe earliest and least well recognized examples of colonial common sense.


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In Martn de Porress Proceso , we can observe through hundreds of witnessaccounts how the charismatic yet racially stigmatized colonial subject elicitsconfessional speech and unpredictably sets in motion a modied regime of

newly ethno-racialized self-identication(s) in its wake. Whereas the vast majority of commentators have celebrated the historic

achievements of both Obama and de Porres, I personally have felt more than alittle troubled by the fact that, in spite of the temporal, linguistic, religious, andpolitical gulf separating them, both could be said to occupy a similar gurea biracial subject whose charisma could be vouchsafed only once he denedwhat his race meant to his political inuence. To my amazement, however,

few if any commentators on the2008 presidential election noticed the poten-tially endless chain of discriminatory consequences of the way Obama wasconscripted into making his own racial motives more transparent.

Take, for example, New Yorker editor in chief David Remnicks journal-istic account of Obamas 2008 campaign, The Bridge (2010), which drawsparticular attention to the events leading up to the candidates famous speechin Philadelphia, A More Perfect Union, broadly considered the rhetorical

tipping point, setting his campaign on a course to electoral victory. The bookscentral thesis hinges on the way Obamas2008 campaign would have poten-tially foundered had he not justied his personal association with his pastor,the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, when video clips of Wright stridently damningthe United States for its unbroken legacy of racial discrimination grabbednews headlines in the center rights twenty-four-hour news media cycle, andwould not loosen its grip, leading many white Americans to question Obamaspreviously undisclosed racial beliefs and presidential tness. Remnick bor-rows from A More Perfect Union to situate Obama as an intergenerationallytranscendent gure, a Joshua to Wrights Mosesthe Old Testament allu-sion suggesting that the battles fought by black veterans of the civil rights erawere no longer the problems facing subsequent generations of their childrenand grandchildren, who enjoy the fruits of the formers self-sacrice, yet oftenfeel disconnected from their tragic vision of national history.

While many such as Remnick celebrated the speech in Philadelphia,I nevertheless saw in its remarkable inuence on the white vote and its rede-nition of black political subjectivity something of the old colonial predicamentof racialized charisma. That is to say, U.S. whites were the tacit addressee forObamas speech on the reinvention of U.S. black political subjectivity, just asSpanish Creoles were the addressees for Martn de Porresthe community


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that, once elicited, would either accept or reject his charismatic inuence,depending on whether the performance of his political calling would seemagreeably integral to hegemonic ethno-racial order. A problem nevertheless

emerges from this juxtaposition of the two historical gures. Can critics simul-taneously acknowledge the historicity of what compelled Martn de Porresto racialize his inuence, while questioning the future charismatic subjectsneed to pass through such a perpetual and discriminating procedure?

Max Webers denition of charisma , of course, is that form of authoritytemporarily charged with grace or power because of its fundamental opposi-tionality (2007). For Weber, whose sociological system (Verstehen methodol-

ogy) shrouded a strong modernist teleology with a cloak of timelessly shiftingideal social types, charisma could be actualized only in relation to the two,more established and worldly modes of inuence with which it was nega-tively associated: traditional/patriarchal authority or bureaucratic authority.In early modern Spainand particularly in Spanish Americathese two lat-ter domains of authority were closely braided with/in Church practices thatactively dened and constrained charismatic authority. For the charismatic

to lay successful claim to authority, he or she needed to effectively demon-strate how the spirit of the law was betrayed and must be supplemented by thecharismatic force of the upstart gures spiritual gift or personalized innercalling. Not surprisingly, the charismatic subject emerged most often from theparadigmatic Spanish American religious and secular contexts (monasteries,barracks, and town councils), where the friction generated between the perfor-mance of traditional patriarchal and early modern bureaucratic ideals, fromtime to time, proved unsustainable.

Looking more closely at Martn de Porress monastic words and actions,one considers how racial charisma in seventeenth-century Spanish Americawas intelligible only through the politico-theological practice of licencia,which held that all subjects within Christendom, particularly charismatic sub-jects, were directly accountable to a superiors will. Only Catholic license, justas in Weberian charisma, allows for legitimate transgressionas long as thetransgressor can demonstrate that his or her actions fall within the sovereigninterests of the particular higher authority, whether immediate or distant.

Trying to understand how Martn de Porres moved through Limas con-ventual world and made the broader city into a stage for his own performanceof Catholic self-mastery, I was able to locate a distinctly premodern form ofagency in his licencia, one whose racial logic was bound up in feudal notions


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of monarchic oversight and the subjects normalized responsibilities withina so-called natural hierarchy. Across the Republic of Spaniards, monasteriesserved as the colonial eras sacred centers, a city within the city, of and for

the production of exemplary Christian subjects. As architectural sites in whichCatholics lived out their idealized encounters and staged their fantasies ofcolonial power, the monasteries also played a dominant, albeit poorly under-stood role in the cultivation of fast-emerging and highly circumscribed racerelations. The local Catholic promotion of a gure such as Martn de Porres,for example, gave Limas slave andmulato religious brotherhoods (cofradas )a worldly exemplar that lay individuals with pious aspirations might be reason-

ably expected to emulate.Licencia , I suggest, was a key word for Spanish American colonialism

as a politico-theological project, and a critical practice for the reworking ofidealized race relations that served mimetic discriminatory and productivefunctions across the New Worlds overlapping territories. The concept gainedpolitical traction in monastic contexts as a temporary dispensation to engage inotherwise prohibited behavior, as long as the subject acting on his license could

prove that his actions were in edifying agreement with the will of his superior.Hence Martn de Porress self-denigrating humility served a well-calibratedSpanish Creole calculus of racialized dominion at the same time as his wordsvaunted him within the circle of Spanish American saintly gures, those undeadindividuals worthy of prayer and veneration, tucked deep inside the heart of thecolonial missionary project itself. One could make a strong argument that evenbeyond the beatication trial of Martn de Porres, licencia lay at the very foun-dations of the imperial Spanish conceptual universe, from the civil logic of thelettered city to its latticework of notarial practices denotingencomiendas , dona-tions, trusts, and other extractive contracts subject to the Spanish crown (Burns2010; Rama 1996). Even conquistadors were beholden to the same sovereignlogic, as Hernn Corts would write to King Charles V of the cupidity of thegovernor of Cuba, Diego Velzquez de Cullar, the local authority who senthim to explore the continental coastline, in his personal bid to be granted thelicencia to settle Mexico instead of his immediate superior (Corts2001).

Licencia worked its strange logica courtly, monarchical compo-nent of the early modern force of law. On the one hand, the colonial gureof the Dominican servant was not a world-historical subject like that ofCorts, and hagiographers and secular-liberal critics alike have conspiredto reinvent a locally celebrated monastic gure, only canonized in the


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mid-twentieth century, as someone whose agency helps to edify black resis-tance or self-actualization under colonial domination. The view from hissubtle management of licencia, on the other hand, highlights the urgency to

more fully rehabilitate, and only then to critique, the lived extent of his (post)colonial predicaments. In this regard, perhaps it would be more appropriate tosay Martn de Porres was an anomalousmulato subject, someone with exceed-ingly self-denigrating humility and a knack for charismatic healing, who onlybecame charismatic in the eyes of his Creole superiors when they deemedhis potential transgressions were in line with the resettling colonial groundsof Spanish Church authority. This perspective on licencia in early American

colonialism, I hope, should serve to expose some of the earliest formationsof racialized agency in their proper politico-theological context. At the veryleast, studying licencia lets us critique the most pernicious and misunderstoodtranshistorical paradox of American race: namely, why charismatic yet raciallystigmatized gures, whether a Martn de Porres or a Barack Obama, still feelcompelled to explain what their race means to their inuence.

Works Cited

Buck-Morss, Susan. 2000 . Hegel and Haiti. Critical Inquiry 26 , no. 4 :821 65 .Burns, Kathryn. 2010 . Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru . Durham :

Duke University Press.Butler, Judith. 1997 . The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection . Stanford:

Stanford University Press.Corts, Hernn . 2001 . Letters from Mexico . Translated by Anthony Pagden. New

Haven: Yale University Press.Cussen, Celia Langdeau . 1996 . Fray Martin de Porres and the Religious Imaginationof Creole Lima. PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania.

Garca Rivera, Alex. 1995 . St. Martn de Porres: The Little Stories and the Semiotics ofCulture . New York: Orbis.

Iwasaki Cauti, Fernando. 1994 . Fray Martn de Porres: Santo, ensalmador y sacamu-elas Colonial Latin American Review 3 , no. 1 2 :159 84 .

PBFMP. 1960 . Proceso de Beaticacin de fray Martn de Porres . Palencia, Spain:Secretariado Martn de Porres.

Rama, Angel. 1996 . The Lettered City . Durham : Duke University Press.Remnick, David. 2010 . The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama . New York: Vintage.

Weber, Max. 2007 . The Sociology of Charismatic Authority. In From MaxWeber: Essays in Sociology , edited and translated by C. Wright Mills andH. H. Gewirth, 245 52 . New York: Routledge.

American Race and Charismatic License: Finding Martín de Porres in Obama

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