Revisiting the Colonial Question in Latin America


Book Description

From the configuration of Empire in the colonial period to the multiple facets of modern coloniality, this book offers a challenging approach to the developments and effects of imperial domination and neocolonial rule in Latin American.




Colonial Legacies


Book Description

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.




Imperial Subjects


Book Description

In colonial Latin America, social identity did not correlate neatly with fixed categories of race and ethnicity. As Imperial Subjects demonstrates, from the early years of Spanish and Portuguese rule, understandings of race and ethnicity were fluid. In this collection, historians offer nuanced interpretations of identity as they investigate how Iberian settlers, African slaves, Native Americans, and their multi-ethnic progeny understood who they were as individuals, as members of various communities, and as imperial subjects. The contributors’ explorations of the relationship between colonial ideologies of difference and the identities historical actors presented span the entire colonial period and beyond: from early contact to the legacy of colonial identities in the new republics of the nineteenth century. The volume includes essays on the major colonial centers of Mexico, Peru, and Brazil, as well as the Caribbean basin and the imperial borderlands. Whether analyzing cases in which the Inquisition found that the individuals before it were “legally” Indians and thus exempt from prosecution, or considering late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century petitions for declarations of whiteness that entitled the mixed-race recipients to the legal and social benefits enjoyed by whites, the book’s contributors approach the question of identity by examining interactions between imperial subjects and colonial institutions. Colonial mandates, rulings, and legislation worked in conjunction with the exercise and negotiation of power between individual officials and an array of social actors engaged in countless brief interactions. Identities emerged out of the interplay between internalized understandings of self and group association and externalized social norms and categories. Contributors. Karen D. Caplan, R. Douglas Cope, Mariana L. R. Dantas, María Elena Díaz, Andrew B. Fisher, Jane Mangan, Jeremy Ravi Mumford, Matthew D. O’Hara, Cynthia Radding, Sergio Serulnikov, Irene Silverblatt, David Tavárez, Ann Twinam




Decolonial Existence and Urban Sensibility


Book Description

The book Decolonial Existence and Urban Sensibility: A Study on Mahesh Elkunchwar meticulously reflects upon some of the selected translated plays of Marathi playwright Mahesh Elkunchwar. It revolves around the themes of decolonial existence and urban sensibility in contemporary India as portrayed in his plays with respect to post-independent urban existence, socio-cultural existence and gender. The book also looks forward to establish a counterargument against the idealized and totalitarian definitions of West-centric existentialist philosophy, and establish indigenous dimensions of decolonial existence within specific contexts. It dismantles the colonially structured existing binaries of urban/rural, ethical/unethical and high culture/low culture through the diverse portrayal of human relationships in contemporary India and broadly addresses two inter-mingled perspectives. Firstly, it outlines the thematic and dramatic perspectives of the selected plays of Mahesh Elkunchwar and secondly, it explores the multi-dimensional philosophical perspectives that encapsulate the theoretical latitude of decoloniality and urban sensibility.




An Anthropological Trompe L'Oeil for a Common World


Book Description

Our political age is characterized by forms of description as ‘big’ as the world itself: talk of ‘public knowledge’ and ‘public goods,’ ‘the commons’ or ‘global justice’ create an exigency for modes of governance that leave little room for smallness itself. Rather than question the politics of adjudication between the big and the small, this book inquires instead into the cultural epistemology fueling the aggrandizement and miniaturization of description itself. Incorporating analytical frameworks from science studies, ethnography, and political and economic theory, this book charts an itinerary for an internal anthropology of theorizing. It suggests that many of the effects that social theory uses today to produce insights are the legacy of baroque epistemological tricks. In particular, the book undertakes its own trompe l’oeil as it places description at perpendicular angles to emerging forms of global public knowledge. The aesthetic ‘trap’ of the trompe l’oeil aims to capture knowledge, for only when knowledge is captured can it be properly released.




Afrodescendant Resistance to Deracination in Colombia


Book Description

This book provides a socio-historical analysis of the 2002 massacre at Bellavista-Bojayá-Chocó, Colombia. The author examines how the concepts of forced displacement and migration could be formulas for historical erasure. These concepts are used to name populations, such as the survivors of this massacre, and are limited in their ability to contribute to the demands for reparation of the affected populations. Instead, based on an ethnographic study of the pain and suffering generated in the survivors, the book proposes the concept of deracination as a tool to study land dispossession. It captures both the complex local specificities, the global linkages of this phenomenon and the strategies of resistance used by the people of this community to channel what seems as an impossible mourning.




Through Cracks in the Wall


Book Description

Recent comparative, interdisciplinary scholarship has underscored the Inquisition s function in the imperial and colonial Iberian world, particularly in relation to the development of modernity. This book illustrates and enhances these debates on the Inquisition s relationship to imperialism, colonialism, and modernity through specific case studies of New Christians who became the target of the Inquisition. Drawing on research in the archives of the Spanish and the Portuguese Inquisition in different parts of the Iberian Atlantic World, it analyzes literary writings and inquisitorial testimonies produced by individuals of Jewish heritage who lived in the Iberian Atlantic world during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and brings to light the direct and mediated discourse produced by New Christians, revealing the still veiled contributions of an important but understudied ethnic and social group.




Revisiting Gramsci’s Notebooks


Book Description

Revisiting Gramsci’s Notebooks offers a rich collection of historical, philosophical, and political studies addressing the thought of Antonio Gramsci, one of the most significant intellects of the twentieth century. Based on thorough analyses of Gramsci’s texts, these interdisciplinary investigations engage with ongoing debates in different fields of study. They are exciting evidence of the enduring capacity of Gramsci’s thought to generate and nurture innovative inquiries across diverse themes. Gathering scholars from different continents, the volume represents a global network of Gramscian thinkers from early-career researchers to experienced scholars. Combining rigorous explication of the past with a strategic analysis of the present, these studies mobilise underexplored resources from the Gramscian toolbox to confront the actuality of our ‘great and terrible’ world. Contributors include: F. Antonini, A. Bernstein, D. Boothman, W. Buddharaksa, T. Chino, R. Ciavolella, C. Conelli, A. Crézégut, V. Cuppi, Y. Douet, A. Freeland, F. Frosini, L. Fusaro, R. Jackson, A. Loftus, S. Meret, S. Neubauer, A. Panichi, I. Pohn-Lauggas, R. Roccu, B. Settis, A. Showstack Sassoon, A. Suceska, P.D. Thomas, N. Vandeviver, M.N. Wróblewska.




The Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Araucanian Resilience


Book Description

This volume examines the processes and patterns of Araucanian cultural development and resistance to foreign influences and control through the combined study of historical and ethnographic records complemented by archaeological investigation in south-central Chile. This examination is done through the lens of Resilience Theory, which has the potential to offer an interpretive framework for analyzing Araucanian culture through time and space. Resilience Theory describes “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbances and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain the same function.” The Araucanians incorporated certain Spanish material culture into their own, rejected others, and strategically restructured aspects of their political, economic, social, and ideological institutions in order to remain independent for over 350 years.




Domesticating Empire


Book Description

Why has the work of writers in eighteenth-century Latin America been forgotten? During the eighteenth century, enlightened thinkers in Spanish territories in the Americas engaged in lively exchanges with their counterparts in Europe and Anglo-America about a wide range of topics of mutual interest, responding in the context of increasing racial and economic diversification. Yet despite recent efforts to broaden our understanding of the global Enlightenment, the Ibero-American eighteenth century has often been overlooked. Through the work of five authors--Jose de Oviedo y Banos, Juan Ignacio Molina, Felix de Azara, Catalina de Jesus Herrera, and Jose Martin Felix de Arrate--Domesticating Empire explores the Ibero-American Enlightenment as a project that reflects both key Enlightenment concerns and the particular preoccupations of Bourbon Spain and its territories in the Americas. At a crucial moment in Spain's imperial trajectory, these authors domesticate topics central to empire--conquest, Indians, nature, God, and gold--by making them familiar and utilitarian. As a result, their works later proved resistant to overarching schemes of Latin American literary history and have been largely forgotten. Nevertheless, eighteenth-century Ibero-American writing complicates narratives about both the Enlightenment and Latin American cultural identity.