"La variedad de los exemplos" and "la verdad de la estampa": Race and Exemplarity in Virtudes vencen señales

Abstract:

Drawing from critical race theorists and focusing on premodern ideas of race, inheritance, and hereditary imprinting, this essay explores the alternative possibilities for governance suggested by Luis Vélez de Guevara in Virtudes vencen señales through his conceptualization of race, inherited traits, gender, and exemplarity. As the play's semiotic argument is anticipated by its title, an examination of exemplarity and precisely coded "señales"—that is, "signs," or "marks"—helps inform the disparity between who is initially assumed to be "virtuous" and who is ultimately proven to be so. The "señales" represented in the play confront ideas of political and hereditary continuity and rigid theories of legal and genetic succession that account for, mitigate, and hierarchize difference. In its engagement with exemplarity via key intertextual borrowings, Virtudes situates race and gender as the problematic backdrop for gauging an exemplar's replicability against its singularity and difference, thus offering a pointed critique of governmental continuity and hierarchal understandings of inheritance.