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Crafting a Republic for the World
In the wake of independence, Spanish American leaders perceived the colonial past as looming over their present. Crafting a Republic for the World examines how the vibrant postcolonial public sphere in Colombia invented narratives of the Spanish “colonial legacy.” Those supposed legacies included a lack of effective geographic knowledge, blockages to a circulatory political economy, existing patterns of land tenure, entrenched inequalities, and ignorance among popular sectors. At times collaboratively, and at times combatively, Colombian leaders tackled these “colonial” legacies to forge a republic in a hostile world of monarchies and empires. The highly partisan, yet uniformly repub...
Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America
Highlighting the relationship among science, politics, and culture in Latin American history Challenging the common view that Latin America has lagged behind Europe and North America in the global history of science, this volume reveals that the region has long been a center for scientific innovation and imagination. It highlights the important relationship among science, politics, and culture in Latin American history. Scholars from a variety of fields including literature, sociology, and geography bring to light many of the cultural exchanges that have produced and spread scientific knowledge from the early colonial period to the present day. Among many topics, these essays describe ideas ...
Decolonizing the Map
Almost universally, newly independent states make the production of new maps and atlases affirming their independence and identity a top priority, but the processes and practices by which previously colonized peoples become more engaged or re-engaged in mapping their own territories are rarely straightforward. This collection explores the relationship between mapping and decolonization while engaging recent theoretical debates about the nature of decolonization itself. The essays, originally delivered as the 2010 Kenneth Nebenzahl Jr. Lectures in the History of Cartography at the Newberry Library, encompass more than two centuries (from the late eighteenth through the twentieth) and three continents (Latin America, Africa, and Asia). Topics range from mapping and national identity in late colonial Mexico to the enduring crisis created by the partition of British India and the persistence of racial prejudices and the racialized organization of space in apartheid and postapartheid South Africa.
We, the King
We, the King challenges the dominant top-down interpretation of the Spanish Empire and its monarchs' decrees in the New World, revealing how ordinary subjects had much more say in government and law-making than previously acknowledged. During the viceregal period spanning the post-1492 conquest until 1598, the King signed more than 110,000 pages of decrees concerning state policies, minutiae, and everything in between. Through careful analysis of these decrees, Adrian Masters illustrates how law-making was aided and abetted by subjects from various backgrounds, including powerful court women, indigenous commoners, Afro-descendant raftsmen, secret saboteurs, pirates, sovereign Chiriguano Indians, and secretaries' wives. Subjects' innumerable petitions and labor prompted – and even phrased - a complex body of legislation and legal categories demonstrating the degree to which this empire was created from the “bottom up”. Innovative and unique, We, the King reimagines our understandings of kingship, imperial rule, colonialism, and the origins of racial categories.
Women Who Live Evil Lives
Women Who Live Evil Lives documents the lives and practices of mixed-race, Black, Spanish, and Maya women sorcerers, spell-casters, magical healers, and midwives in the social relations of power in Santiago de Guatemala, the capital of colonial Central America. Men and women from all sectors of society consulted them to intervene in sexual and familial relations and disputes between neighbors and rival shop owners; to counter abusive colonial officials, employers, or husbands; and in cases of inexplicable illness. Applying historical, anthropological, and gender studies analysis, Martha Few argues that women's local practices of magic, curing, and religion revealed opportunities for women's cultural authority and power in colonial Guatemala. Few draws on archival research conducted in Guatemala, Mexico, and Spain to shed new light on women's critical public roles in Santiago, the cultural and social connections between the capital city and the countryside, and the gender dynamics of power in the ethnic and cultural contestation of Spanish colonial rule in daily life.
Salt and the Colombian State
In republican Colombia, salt became an important source of revenue not just to individuals, but to the state, which levied taxes on it and in some cases controlled and profited from its production. The salt trade consistently accounted for roughly 10 percent of government income. In the town of La Salina de Chita, in Boyaca province, thermal springs offered vast amounts of salt, and its procurement and distribution was placed under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Finance. Focusing his study on La Salina, Joshua M. Rosenthal presents a fascinating glimpse into the workings of the early Colombian state, its institutions, and their interactions with local citizens during this formative peri...
Latin American Literature in Transition 1800–1870: Volume 2
Latin American Literature in Transition 1800-1870 uses affect as an analytical tool to uncover the countervailing forces that shaped Latin American literatures and cultures during the first six decades of the nineteenth century. Chapters provide perspectives on colonial violence and its representation, on the development of the national idea, on communities within and beyond the nation, and on the intersectional development of subjectivity during and after processes of cultural and political independence. This volume includes interdisciplinary approaches to nineteenth-century Latin American cultures that range from visual and art history to historiography to comparative literature and the study of literary and popular print culture. This book engages with the complex and sometimes counterintuitive relationship between felt ideas of community and the political changes that shaped these affective networks and communities.
Before the West Was West
Before the West Was West examines the extent to which scholars have engaged in-depth with pre-1800 “western” texts and asks what we mean by “western” American literature in the first place and when that designation originated. Calling into question the implicit temporal boundaries of the “American West” in literature, a literature often viewed as having commenced only at the beginning of the 1800s, Before the West Was West explores the concrete, meaningful connections between different texts as well as the development of national ideologies and mythologies. Examining pre-nineteenth-century writings that do not fit conceptions of the Wild West or of cowboys, cattle ranching, and t...
Purchasing Whiteness
“A magisterial tour de force that will be received as a significant contribution to the historiography of race in colonial Latin America.” —Cecily Jones, H-Caribbean The colonization of Spanish America resulted in the mixing of Natives, Europeans, and Africans and the subsequent creation of a casta system that discriminated against them. Members of mixed races could, however, free themselves from such burdensome restrictions through the purchase of a gracias al sacar—a royal exemption that provided the privileges of Whiteness. For more than a century, the whitening gracias al sacar has fascinated historians. Even while the documents remained elusive, scholars continually mentioned th...
Religious Culture in Modern Mexico
This nuanced book considers the role of religion and religiosity in modern Mexico, breaking new ground with an emphasis on popular religion and its relationship to politics. The contributors highlight the multifaceted role of religion, illuminating the ways that religion and religious devotion have persisted and changed since Mexican independence. They explore such themes as the relationship between church and state, the resurgence of religiosity and religious societies in the post-reform period, the religious values of the liberals of the 1850s, and the ways that popular expressions of religion often trumped formal and universal proscriptions. Focusing on individual stories and vignettes an...
