The Colonizers' Idols


Book Description

In this work, Christina Harker deconstructs the prevailing treatment of the New Testament as anti-imperial by contextualizing both New Testament scholarship and the Galatian experience within imperialist discourses that survived the dissolution of conventional empires in the twentieth century. She critiques simplistic treatments of empire as post-imperial (that is, replicating patterns of imperialist ideology, albeit unwittingly). To solve the problem, a new interpretation of Galatians is proposed that reworks and complicates the portrait of the Galatians themselves, rather than Paul, within what then emerges as a diverse social world peopled by complex individuals with heterogeneous social and cultural identities. The author is thus able to show how New Testament scholars who rehabilitate the Bible and Paul as anti-empire perpetuate the same imperialist modes of interpretation they seek to repudiate.




Idolatry and the Construction of the Spanish Empire


Book Description

An ethnohistory on the spiritual and governmental conquest of the indigenous people in colonial Mexico, Idolatry and the Construction of the Spanish Empire examines the role played by the shifting concept of idolatry in the conquest of the Americas, as well as its relation to the subsequent construction of imperial power and hegemony. Contrasting readings of evangelization plays and chronicles from the Indies and legislation and literature produced in Spain, author Mina García Soormally places theoretical analysis of state formation in Colonial Latin America within the historical context. The conquest of America was presented, in its first instances, as a virtual extension of the Reconquista, which had taken place in Spain since 711, during which Spaniards fought to build an empire based in part on religious discrimination. The fight against the “heathens” (Moors and Jews) provided the experience and mindset to practice the repression of the other, making Spain a cultural laboratory that was transported across the Atlantic Ocean. Idolatry and the Construction of the Spanish Empire is a wide-ranging explication of religious orthodoxy and unorthodoxy during Spain’s medieval and early modern period as they relate to idolatry, with analysis of events that occurred on both sides of the Atlantic. The book contributes to the growing field of transatlantic studies and explores the redefinition that took place in Europe and in the colonies.




Fallen Idols


Book Description

An Economist Best Book of the Year In this timely and lively look at the act of toppling monuments, the popular historian and author of Blood and Sand explores the vital question of how a society remembers—and confronts—the past. In 2020, history came tumbling down. From the US and the UK to Belgium, New Zealand, and Bangladesh, Black Lives Matter protesters defaced, and in some cases, hauled down statues of Confederate icons, slaveholders, and imperialists. General Robert E. Lee, head of the Confederate Army, was covered in graffiti in Richmond, Virginia. Edward Colston, a member of Parliament and slave trader, was knocked off his plinth in Bristol, England, and hurled into the harbor. Statues of Christopher Columbus were toppled in Minnesota, burned and thrown into a lake in Virginia, and beheaded in Massachusetts. Belgian King Leopold II was set on fire in Antwerp and doused in red paint in Ghent. Winston Churchill’s monument in London was daubed with the word “racist.” As these iconic effigies fell, the backlash was swift and intense. But as the past three hundred years have shown, history is not erased when statues are removed. If anything, Alex von Tunzelmann reminds us, it is made. Exploring the rise and fall of twelve famous, yet now controversial statues, she takes us on a fascinating global historical tour around North America, Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia, filled with larger than life characters and dramatic stories. Von Tunzelmann reveals that statues are not historical records but political statements and distinguishes between statuary—the representation of “virtuous” individuals, usually “Great Men”—and other forms of sculpture, public art, and memorialization. Nobody wants to get rid of all memorials. But Fallen Idols asks: have statues had their day?




Decolonizing the Sodomite


Book Description

Early Andean historiography reveals a subaltern history of indigenous gender and sexuality that saw masculinity and femininity not as essential absolutes. Third-gender ritualists, Ipas, mediated between the masculine and feminine spheres of culture in important ceremonies and were recorded in fragments of myths and transcribed oral accounts. Ritual performance by cross-dressed men symbolically created a third space of mediation that invoked the mythic androgyne of the pre-Hispanic Andes. The missionaries and civil authorities colonizing the Andes deemed these performances transgressive and sodomitical. In this book, Michael J. Horswell examines alternative gender and sexuality in the colonial Andean world, and uses the concept of the third gender to reconsider some fundamental paradigms of Andean culture. By deconstructing what literary tropes of sexuality reveal about Andean pre-Hispanic and colonial indigenous culture, he provides an alternative history and interpretation of the much-maligned aboriginal subjects the Spanish often referred to as "sodomites." Horswell traces the origin of the dominant tropes of masculinist sexuality from canonical medieval texts to early modern Spanish secular and moralist literature produced in the context of material persecution of effeminates and sodomites in Spain. These values traveled to the Andes and were used as powerful rhetorical weapons in the struggle to justify the conquest of the Incas.







Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil


Book Description

Doña Marina (La Malinche) ...Pocahontas ...Sacagawea—their names live on in historical memory because these women bridged the indigenous American and European worlds, opening the way for the cultural encounters, collisions, and fusions that shaped the social and even physical landscape of the modern Americas. But these famous individuals were only a few of the many thousands of people who, intentionally or otherwise, served as "go-betweens" as Europeans explored and colonized the New World. In this innovative history, Alida Metcalf thoroughly investigates the many roles played by go-betweens in the colonization of sixteenth-century Brazil. She finds that many individuals created physical links among Europe, Africa, and Brazil—explorers, traders, settlers, and slaves circulated goods, plants, animals, and diseases. Intercultural liaisons produced mixed-race children. At the cultural level, Jesuit priests and African slaves infused native Brazilian traditions with their own religious practices, while translators became influential go-betweens, negotiating the terms of trade, interaction, and exchange. Most powerful of all, as Metcalf shows, were those go-betweens who interpreted or represented new lands and peoples through writings, maps, religion, and the oral tradition. Metcalf's convincing demonstration that colonization is always mediated by third parties has relevance far beyond the Brazilian case, even as it opens a revealing new window on the first century of Brazilian history.




Colonizing Paradise


Book Description

"Dillman elegantly explores the evolution of English and British perceptions of the landscape of the West Indies and how their representations were used to support the development of the islands they colonized"--







Images at War


Book Description

DIVExplores Mexico and its romance with the image as well as othe issues of Spanish colonialism./div







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