‘What is at stake in the continuing privilege accorded to Baroque and neo-Baroque aesthetics in Spanish American literary scholarship and writing?’, asked the late Antony Higgins in a study that, perhaps more than any other I am aware of in recent decades, brought sharply into focus the need for a new paradigm in Baroque studies on both sides of the Atlantic. This question is also, directly or indirectly, the central preoccupation of these essays, written and published over the course of the last thirty years or so. Let me frame briefly the debate in which they participate, along with Higgins's own work, to which I shall return later. On the one hand, it is clear that the Baroque is a cultural form imposed, along with the Catholic religion and the Spanish language itself, on the populations of New World (and parts of Africa and Asia), often with great violence and with disastrous demographic consequences, intended or not. In this sense, it could be argued that the appropriate model of the colonial Baroque might be something more like the culture of apartheid in South Africa than the benevolent process of ‘mestizaje cultural’ envisioned by the dominant school in Latin American literary criticism.

On the other hand, it was also the model provided by the Baroque texts and artefacts that colonial letrados used to generate over time, and with an ever more acute sense of differentiation from the Spanish metropolis, a properly ‘creole’ or ‘American’ literature with its own thematic and formal characteristics. It is not difficult to trace in that respect a genealogical line that goes from figures like Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora, Juan de Espinosa Medrano, or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in the mid to late seventeenth century to Rafael Landívar's Rusticatio Mexicana (written in Latin) in the eighteenth century and the post-Independence Silvas of Andres Bello —both celebrations of the American landscape; to the ‘rarezas’ of Rubén Darío and the modernistas; to the ‘barroquismo’ of writers like Alfonso Reyes, Borges, Octavio Paz, Lezama Lima, and Carpentier; to Severo Sarduy's ‘barroco de revolución’ and the neo-Baroque; to something like the postmodernist ‘neobarroso’ of the Argentine poet Nestor Perlongher. Some, like Alfredo Roggiano, have suggested the existence of a ‘barroco indígena’ that was prior to, and a condition for, the absorption of the European Baroque in the New World.3 Others.