Ripensare il Nazionalismo nell'America Spagnola Tardo-Coloniale: Narrazioni Gesuite della Patria Cilena del XVIII Secolo

Major changes in the political and social panorama affected the eighteenth-century world. Ideas connected to the Enlightenment and modernity penetrated in the ancien régime societies and a re-evaluation of the role of the Church took place. In the Spanish Empire, the regalist policies of the Bourbon reformist era culminated with the expulsion of the religious order of the Society of Jesus from the imperial domains in 1767. Jesuits have been forced to move to the Papal State territories of central Italy and they continued their intellectual work during the exile. Many of them were Creoles, with Spanish origin but of American birth. The object of this work is the cultural and political identity of the expelled Creole Jesuits and the development of a patriotic perception of their homeland through the study of their own narrations. In particular, I analysed the literature produced by members of the Society of Jesus exiled from the General Captaincy of Chile. Their contribution to the eighteenth-century intellectual debates goes beyond their role as religious actors, but rather is fundamental for its scientific impact and the significance of such works composed by the Creoles exiled community. The particular situation of exiled they were suffering increased the sense of belonging to a distant homeland on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The patriotic discourse that displays in their literary production is capable to describe a picture of the late-colonial Spanish imperial world and to rethink nationalism - in purely anthropological terms. As things stand, dominant historiography denies the existence of a Creole nationalism before the nineteenth century’s Independences in the Spanish American colonies. However, this view underrates the high potential of a cultural-shared Creole background, even if it was merely cultural and not political. Nations could exist before states, as imagined in their essence through public opinion or literature. Following this paradigm and through the rereading of primary sources, I analysed the intellectual works of Creoles former Jesuits from Chile, namely Juan Ignacio Molina and Felipe Gómez de Vidaurre y Girón, who spent their exile in Imola after the expulsion from the Spanish Empire, and the patriotic narrative they elaborated about their distant homeland in these accounts.