Genealogical Fictions

Genealogical Fictions PDF Author: María Elena Martínez
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804756481
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 425

Book Description
Genealogical Fictions examines how the state, church, Inquisition, and other institutions in colonial Mexico used the Spanish notion of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) over time and how the concept's enduring religious, genealogical, and gendered meanings came to shape the region's patriotic and racial ideologies.

Genealogical Fictions

Genealogical Fictions PDF Author: Jobst Welge
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 142141435X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Book Description
Moving through time, he uncovers often-unsuspected novelistic continuities and international transformations and echoes, from Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, published in 1800, to G. Tomasi di Lampedusa's 1958 book Il Gattopardo.By revealing the "family resemblance" of novels from Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Brazil, this volume shows how genealogical narratives take on special significance in contexts of cultural periphery. Welge links private and public histories, while simultaneously integrating detailed accounts of various literary fields across the globe. In combining theories of the novel, recent discussions of cultural geography, and new approaches to genealogical narratives, Genealogical Fictions addresses a significant part of European and Latin American literary history in which texts from different national cultures illuminate each other in unsuspected ways and reveal the repetition, as well as the variation, among them.

Genealogical Fictions

Genealogical Fictions PDF Author: Jobst Welge
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421414368
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Book Description
Explores the enduring link between national space and genealogy in the modern novel. Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRL Taking its cue from recent theories of literary geography and fiction, Genealogical Fictions argues that narratives of familial decline shape the history of the modern novel, as well as the novel’s relationship to history. Stories of families in crisis, Jobst Welge argues, reflect the experience of historical and social change in regions or nations perceived as “peripheral.” Though geographically and temporally diverse, the novels Welge considers all demonstrate a relation among family and national history, genealogical succession, and generational experience, along with social change and modernization. Welge’s wide-ranging comparative study focuses on the novels of the late nineteenth century, but it also includes detailed analyses of the pre-Victorian origin of the genealogical-historical novel and the evolution of similar themes in twentieth-century literature. Moving through time, he uncovers often-unsuspected novelistic continuities and international transformations and echoes, from Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, published in 1800, to G. Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 book Il Gattopardo. By revealing the “family resemblance” of novels from Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Brazil, this volume shows how genealogical narratives take on special significance in contexts of cultural periphery. Welge links private and public histories, while simultaneously integrating detailed accounts of various literary fields across the globe. In combining theories of the novel, recent discussions of cultural geography, and new approaches to genealogical narratives, Genealogical Fictions addresses a significant part of European and Latin American literary history in which texts from different national cultures illuminate each other in unsuspected ways and reveal the repetition, as well as the variation, among them. This book should be of interest to students and scholars of comparative literature, world literature, and the history and theory of the modern novel.

Playing in the Cathedral

Playing in the Cathedral PDF Author: Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190236825
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
Throughout Spanish colonial America, limpieza de sangre (literally, "purity of blood") determined an individual's status within the complex system of social hierarchy called casta. Within this socially stratified culture, those individuals at the top were considered to have the highest calidad-an all-encompassing estimation of a person's social status. At the top of the social pyramid were the Peninsulares: Spaniards born in Spain, who controlled most of the positions of power within the colonial governments and institutions. Making up most of the middle-class were criollos, locally born people of Spanish ancestry. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Peninsulare intellectuals asserted their cultural superiority over criollos by claiming that American Spaniards had a generally lower calidad because of their "impure" racial lineage. Still, given their Spanish heritage, criollos were allowed employment at many Spanish institutions in New Spain, including the center of Spanish religious practice in colonial America: Mexico City Cathedral. Indeed, most of the cathedral employees-in particular, musicians-were middle-class criollos. In Playing in the Cathedral, author Jesús Ramos-Kittrell explores how liturgical musicians-choristers and instrumentalists, as well as teachers and directors-at Mexico City Cathedral in the mid-eighteenth century navigated changing discourses about social status and racial purity. He argues that criollos cathedral musicians, influenced by Enlightenment values of self-industry and autonomy, fought against the Peninsulare-dominated, racialized casta system. Drawing on extensive archival research, Ramos-Kittrell shows that these musicians held up their musical training and knowledge, as well as their institutional affiliation with the cathedral, as characteristics that legitimized their calidad and aided their social advancement. The cathedral musicians invoked claims of "decency" and erudition in asserting their social worth, arguing that their performance capabilities and theoretical knowledge of counterpoint bespoke their calidad and status as hombres decentes. Ultimately, Ramos-Kittrell argues that music, as a performative and theoretical activity, was a highly dynamic factor in the cultural and religious life of New Spain, and an active agent in the changing discourses of social status and "Spanishness" in colonial America. Offering unique and fascinating insights into the social, institutional, and artistic spheres in New Spain, this book is a welcome addition to scholars and graduate students with particular interests in Latin American colonial music and cultural history, as well as those interested in the intersections of music and religion.

Making Black Los Angeles

Making Black Los Angeles PDF Author: Marne L. Campbell
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469629283
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Book Description
Black Los Angeles started small. The first census of the newly formed Los Angeles County in 1850 recorded only twelve Americans of African descent alongside a population of more than 3,500 Anglo Americans. Over the following seventy years, however, the African American founding families of Los Angeles forged a vibrant community within the increasingly segregated and stratified city. In this book, historian Marne L. Campbell examines the intersections of race, class, and gender to produce a social history of community formation and cultural expression in Los Angeles. Expanding on the traditional narrative of middle-class uplift, Campbell demonstrates that the black working class, largely through the efforts of women, fought to secure their own economic and social freedom by forging communal bonds with black elites and other communities of color. This women-led, black working-class agency and cross-racial community building, Campbell argues, was markedly more successful in Los Angeles than in any other region in the country. Drawing from an extensive database of all African American households between 1850 and 1910, Campbell vividly tells the story of how middle-class African Americans were able to live, work, and establish a community of their own in the growing city of Los Angeles.

The Mexican American Experience in Texas

The Mexican American Experience in Texas PDF Author: Martha Menchaca
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477324399
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
A historical overview of Mexican Americans' social and economic experiences in Texas For hundreds of years, Mexican Americans in Texas have fought against political oppression and exclusion—in courtrooms, in schools, at the ballot box, and beyond. Through a detailed exploration of this long battle for equality, this book illuminates critical moments of both struggle and triumph in the Mexican American experience. Martha Menchaca begins with the Spanish settlement of Texas, exploring how Mexican Americans’ racial heritage limited their incorporation into society after the territory’s annexation. She then illustrates their political struggles in the nineteenth century as they tried to assert their legal rights of citizenship and retain possession of their land, and goes on to explore their fight, in the twentieth century, against educational segregation, jury exclusion, and housing covenants. It was only in 1967, she shows, that the collective pressure placed on the state government by Mexican American and African American activists led to the beginning of desegregation. Menchaca concludes with a look at the crucial roles that Mexican Americans have played in national politics, education, philanthropy, and culture, while acknowledging the important work remaining to be done in the struggle for equality.

Imagined Communities: Constructing Collective Identities in Medieval Europe

Imagined Communities: Constructing Collective Identities in Medieval Europe PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004363793
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 405

Book Description
Imagined Communities: Constructing Collective Identities in Medieval Europe offers a series of studies focusing on how perceptions of community, its shared history and imagined present, created a collective identity in medieval societies.

Genealogy and Literature

Genealogy and Literature PDF Author: Lee Quinby
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816625604
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 478

Book Description
Traditionalists insist that literature transcends culture. Others counter that it is subversive by nature. By challenging both claims, Genealogy and Literature reveals the importance of literature for understanding dominant and often violent power/knowledge relations within a given society. The authors explore the ways in which literature functions as a cultural practice, the links between death and literature as a field of discourse, and the possibilities of dismantling modes of bodily regulation. Through wide-ranging investigations of writing from England, France, Nigeria, Peru, Japan, and the United States, they reinvigorate the study of literature as a means of understanding the complexities of everyday experience. Contributors: Claudette Kemper Columbus, Lennard J. Davis, Simon During, Michel Foucault, Ellen J. Goldner, Tom Hayes, Kate Mehuron, Donald Mengay, Imafedia Okhamafe, Lee Quinby, Jose David Saldivar, and Malini Johar Schueller.

Migration and Diaspora Formation

Migration and Diaspora Formation PDF Author: Ciprian Burlăcioiu
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110790165
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
The role of migration for Christianity as a world religion during the last two centuries has drawn considerable attention from scholars in different fields. The main issue this book seeks to address is the question whether and to what extent migration and diaspora formation should be considered as elements of a new historiography of global Christianity, including the reflection upon earlier epochs. By focusing on migration and diaspora, the emerging map of Christianity will include the dimension of movement and interaction between actors in different regions, providing a more comprehensive ‘map of agency’ of individuals and groups previously regarded as passive. Furthermore, local histories will become parts of a broader picture and historiography might correlate both local and transregional perspectives in a balanced manner. Behind this approach lies the desire to broaden the perspective of Ecclesiastical History – and religious history in general – in a more systematic manner by questioning the traditional criteria of selection. This might help us to recover previously lost actors and forgotten dynamics.

The Body of the Conquistador

The Body of the Conquistador PDF Author: Rebecca Earle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110737796X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Book Description
This fascinating history explores the dynamic relationship between overseas colonisation and the bodily experience of eating. It reveals the importance of food to the colonial project in Spanish America and reconceptualises the role of European colonial expansion in shaping the emergence of ideas of race during the Age of Discovery. Rebecca Earle shows that anxieties about food were fundamental to Spanish understandings of the new environment they inhabited and their interactions with the native populations of the New World. Settlers wondered whether Europeans could eat New World food, whether Indians could eat European food and what would happen to each if they did. By taking seriously their ideas about food we gain a richer understanding of how settlers understood the physical experience of colonialism and of how they thought about one of the central features of the colonial project. The result is simultaneously a history of food, colonialism and race.