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Constructing and controlling women in colonial South America
The essays inquire into the spatial configurations of colonial Spanish America and its inhabitants as they both relate to isues of alterity, identity, the economy of geographical representation, gender, and the construction of the colonial city. The volume indicated a variety of essays dealing with different geographical regions, including the centers of cultural production (such as Mexico and Peru) as well as marginalized colonial territories.
Explores the conditions of women and perceptions of the female body throughout the Viceroyalty of Peru, introducing woman rebel Micaela Bastidas to reveal how her brutal punishment reflected state responses to women who challenged the system, in an account that also explores economic and religious representations of the period.
In Andean Bolivia, racial and cultural differences are most visibly marked on women, who often still wear native dress and speak an indigenous language rather than Spanish. In this study of modernity in Bolivia, Marcia Stephenson explores how the state's desire for a racially and culturally homogenous society has been deployed through images of womanhood that promote the notion of an idealized, acculturated female body. Stephenson engages a variety of texts—critical essays, novels, indigenous testimonials, education manuals, self-help pamphlets, and position papers of diverse women's organizations—to analyze how the interlocking tropes of fashion, motherhood, domestication, hygiene, and hunger are used as tools for the production of dominant, racialized ideologies of womanhood. At the same time, she also uncovers long-standing patterns of resistance to the modernizing impulse, especially in the large-scale mobilization of indigenous peoples who have made it clear that they will negotiate the terms of modernity, but always "as Indians."
Cuban author Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) was a key figure in the foundation of contemporary Latin American fiction. By taking a critical position vis-a-vis the restitutionary current in Latin American studies, James Pancrazio provides a highly innovative re-reading of Carpentier's work.
The term "crosscurrents" seems especially fitting for a volume of essays that explores the cultural exchanges that resulted from the encounter between Spain and the New World. The nautical metaphor alludes to the actual crossing of ships that occurred during the discovery, conquest, and colonization of the Americas by the Spanish as it emphasizes the changes that occurred at these cultural intersections.
This volume uses a biography-as-history approach to illuminate the interconnectedness of the peoples of the Americas, West Africa, and Europe. Contributors highlight individuals' and people's experiences made possible by their participation in the creation of an Atlantic world, where conflict, cooperation, neccessity and invention led to new societies and cultures. Composed of chapters that span a broad chronological, topical and thematic range, Atlantic Biographies highlights the uniqueness of the Atlantic as a social, political, economic, and cultural theater bound together to illustrate what the Atlantic meant to those subjects of each chapter. This is a book about people, their resilience, and their resolve to carve a niche or have a broader impact in the ever-changing world around them.
This collection of essays offers alternative readings of historical and literary texts produced during Latin America's colonial period. By considering the political and ideological implications of the texts' interpretation yesterday and today, it attempts to "decolonize" the field of Latin American studies and promote an ethical, interdisciplinary practice that does not falsify or appropriate knowledge produced by both the colonial subjects of the past and the oppressed subjects of the present. Using recent developments in postcolonial theory, the contributors challenge traditional approaches to Hispanism. The colonial situation under which these texts were composed, with all its injustices and prejudices, still lingers, and most studies have consistently avoided the connection between this colonial legacy and the situation of disenfranchised groups today. Colonialism Past and Present challenges discursive strategies that celebrate only European cultural traits, dismiss non-European cultural legacies, and solidify constructions of national projects considered natural extensions of European civilization since independence from Spain.
Includes appendices.