The colonial genesis of modern literature: writing, power, and colonization in sixteenth-century Portuguese America

Abstract

This article investigates the colonial genesis of literature through the circulation and reconfiguration of discursive genres in the sixteenth-century Atlantic world, taking Portuguese America as a comparative laboratory of late-Renaissance writing regimes. It aims to question the anachronistic application of the modern concept of literature and to propose a functional approach to the literary as a heterogeneous system of textual practices—letters, chronicles, catechisms, grammars, poetry, drama, and legal records—articulated with catechesis, administration, and the classification of the world. Methodologically, the study combines discourse analysis, lexicographic examination, and transcontinental genre comparison, with particular attention to the polymorphic corpus of José de Anchieta. It argues that colonial Brazil should not be understood as an imitative periphery, but as a site of generic intensification and experimentation, where forms consolidated prior to the later aesthetic autonomization of the literary. The article concludes that modern literature emerges historically as structurally traversed by coloniality.