Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493-1793


Book Description

This fascinating book examines the particular importance of cities in Spanish and Hispanic-American culture as well as the different meanings that artists and cartographers invested in their depiction of New and Old Wold cities and towns. Kagan maintains that cities are both built human structures and human communities, and that representations of the urban form reflect both points of view. He discusses the peculiar character of Spain's empire of towns; the history and development of the cityscape as an independent artistic genre, both in Europe and the Americas; the interaction between European and native mapping traditions; differences between European maps of urban America and those produced by local residents, whether native or creole; and the urban iconography of four different New World towns. Lavishly illustrated with a variety of maps, pictures, and plans, many reproduced here for the first time, this interdisciplinary study will be of interest to general readers and to specialists in art history, cartography, history, urbanism, and related fields.




The Early Modern Hispanic World


Book Description

Iberia stands at the center of key trends in Atlantic and world histories, largely because Portugal and Spain were the first European kingdoms to 'go global'. The Early Modern Hispanic World engages with new ways of thinking about the early modern Hispanic past, as a field of study that has grown exponentially in recent years. It focuses predominantly on questions of how people understood the rapidly changing world in which they lived - how they defined, visualized, and constructed communities from family and city to kingdom and empire. To do so, it incorporates voices from across the Hispanic World and across disciplines. The volume considers the dynamic relationships between circulation and fixedness, space and place, and how new methodologies are reshaping global history, and Spain's place in it.




A Troubled Marriage


Book Description

A Troubled Marriage describes the lives of native leaders whose resilience and creativity allowed them to survive and prosper in the traumatic era of European conquest and colonial rule. They served as soldiers, scholars, artists, artisans, and missionaries within early transatlantic empires and later nation-states. These Indian and mestizo men and women wove together cultures, shaping the new traditions and institutions of the colonial Americas. In a comparative study that spans more than three centuries and much of the Western Hemisphere, McEnroe challenges common assumptions about the relationships among victors, vanquished, and their shared progeny.




Endangered City


Book Description

Security and risk have become central to how cities are planned, built, governed, and inhabited in the twenty-first century. In Endangered City, Austin Zeiderman focuses on this new political imperative to govern the present in anticipation of future harm. Through ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Bogotá, Colombia, he examines how state actors work to protect the lives of poor and vulnerable citizens from a range of threats, including environmental hazards and urban violence. By following both the governmental agencies charged with this mandate and the subjects governed by it, Endangered City reveals what happens when logics of endangerment shape the terrain of political engagement between citizens and the state. The self-built settlements of Bogotá’s urban periphery prove a critical site from which to examine the rising effect of security and risk on contemporary cities and urban life.




The Bishop's Utopia


Book Description

In December 1788, in the northern Peruvian city of Trujillo, fifty-one-year-old Spanish Bishop Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón stood surrounded by twenty-four large wooden crates, each numbered and marked with its final destination of Madrid. The crates contained carefully preserved zoological, botanical, and mineral specimens collected from Trujillo's steamy rainforests, agricultural valleys, rocky sierra, and coastal desert. To accompany this collection, the Bishop had also commissioned from Indian artisans nine volumes of hand-painted images portraying the people, plants, and animals of Trujillo. He imagined that the collection and the watercolors not only would contribute to his quest to study the native cultures of Northern Peru but also would supply valuable information for his plans to transform Trujillo into an orderly, profitable slice of the Spanish Empire. Based on intensive archival research in Peru, Spain, and Colombia and the unique visual data of more than a thousand extraordinary watercolors, The Bishop's Utopia recreates the intellectual, cultural, and political universe of the Spanish Atlantic world in the late eighteenth century. Emily Berquist Soule recounts the reform agenda of Martínez Compañón—including the construction of new towns, improvement of the mining industry, and promotion of indigenous education—and positions it within broader imperial debates; unlike many of his Enlightenment contemporaries, who elevated fellow Europeans above native peoples, Martínez Compañón saw Peruvian Indians as intelligent, productive subjects of the Spanish Crown. The Bishop's Utopia seamlessly weaves cultural history, natural history, colonial politics, and art into a cinematic retelling of the Bishop's life and work.




From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico


Book Description

In an age of revolution, Mexico's creole leaders held aloft the Virgin of Guadalupe and brandished an Aztec eagle perched upon a European tricolor. Their new constitution proclaimed 'the Mexican nation is forever free and independent'. Yet the genealogy of this new nation is not easy to trace. Colonial Mexico was a patchwork state whose new-world vassals served the crown, extended the empire's frontiers and lived out their civic lives in parallel Spanish and Indian republics. Theirs was a world of complex intercultural alliances, interlocking corporate structures and shared spiritual and temporal ambitions. Sean F. McEnroe describes this history at the greatest and smallest geographical scales, reconsidering what it meant to be an Indian vassal, nobleman, soldier or citizen over three centuries in northeastern Mexico. He argues that the Mexican municipality, state and citizen were not so much the sudden creations of a revolutionary age as the progeny of a mature multiethnic empire.




Mapping Latin America


Book Description

For many, a map is nothing more than a tool used to determine the location or distribution of something—a country, a city, or a natural resource. But maps reveal much more: to really read a map means to examine what it shows and what it doesn’t, and to ask who made it, why, and for whom. The contributors to this new volume ask these sorts of questions about maps of Latin America, and in doing so illuminate the ways cartography has helped to shape this region from the Rio Grande to Patagonia. In Mapping Latin America,Jordana Dym and Karl Offen bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to examine and interpret more than five centuries of Latin American maps.Individual chapters take on maps of every size and scale and from a wide variety of mapmakers—from the hand-drawn maps of Native Americans, to those by famed explorers such as Alexander von Humboldt, to those produced in today’s newspapers and magazines for the general public. The maps collected here, and the interpretations that accompany them, provide an excellent source to help readers better understand how Latin American countries, regions, provinces, and municipalities came to be defined, measured, organized, occupied, settled, disputed, and understood—that is, how they came to have specific meanings to specific people at specific moments in time. The first book to deal with the broad sweep of mapping activities across Latin America, this lavishly illustrated volume will be required reading for students and scholars of geography and Latin American history, and anyone interested in understanding the significance of maps in human cultures and societies.




Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America


Book Description

Rethinking the role of the artist and recovering the work of unacknowledged creators in colonial society This volume addresses and expands the role of the artist in colonial Latin American society, featuring essays by specialists in the field that consider the ways society conceived of artists and the ways artists defined themselves. Broadening the range of ways that creativity can be understood, contributors show that artists functioned as political figures, activists, agents in commerce, definers of a canon, and revolutionaries. Chapters provide studies of artists in Peru, Mexico, and Cuba between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Instead of adopting the paradigm of individuals working alone to chart new artistic paths, contributors focus on human relationships, collaborations, and exchanges. The volume offers new perspectives on colonial artworks, some well known and others previously overlooked, including discussions of manuscript painting, featherwork, oil painting, sculpture, and mural painting. Most notably, the volume examines attitudes and policies related to race and ethnicity, exploring various ethnoracial dynamics of artists within their social contexts. Through a decolonial lens not often used in the art history of the era and region, Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America examines artists’ engagement in society and their impact within it. Contributors: Derek S. Burdette | Ananda Cohen-Aponte | Emily C. Floyd | Aaron M. Hyman | Barbara E. Mundy | Linda Marie Rodriguez | Jennifer R. Saracino | Maya Stanfield-Mazzi | Margarita Vargas-Betancourt Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.




A Companion to Early Modern Lima


Book Description

A Companion to Early Modern Lima introduces readers to the Spanish American city which became a vibrant urban center in the sixteenth-century world. As part of Brill's Companions to the Americas series, this volume presents current interdisciplinary research focused on the Peruvian viceregal capital. From ancient roots to its foundation by Pizarro, Lima was transformed into an imperial capital positioned between Atlantic and Pacific exchange networks. An international team of scholars examines issues ranging from literary history, politics, and religion to philosophy, historiography, and modes of intercontinental influence. The volume is divided into three sections: urban development and government, society, and culture. The essays collectively represent the scope of contemporary approaches, methodologies, and source materials pertinent to the study of sixteenth-century Lima, a city at the center of global interchange in the early modern world.




Seville: Through the Urban Void


Book Description

Recent years have seen a growing interest in undetermined and unqualified urban spaces. Understanding cities as spaces for encounter, conflict and otherness, this book argues that this indeterminacy is not marginal but a key characteristic of urban space, and degrees of liberty foster change, creativity, and political action. The urban void is a conceptual construct that aims to render a principle of absence apprehensible, and to describe how it intervenes in place-making in the city. Seville: Through the Urban Void build mostly upon Henri Lefebvre’s work using concepts drawn on the social sciences, in order to articulate a biographic narrative of the Alameda de Hércules in Seville, Spain, which stands both as an outstanding instance of urban space and a very influential urban type. During its long historical span the Alameda has undergone alternating periods of decline and development, revealing the relations between successive urban paradigms and ideas of nature, territory, and the people. For the first time its whole history is told in a single account, which adds new perspectives to its understanding, and brings forward formerly disregarded aspects. This book shows how its liminal nature, which stubbornly persists over time, creates the conditions for creative processes.




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