'Black but Human'

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carmen Fracchia
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Human Diversity ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Power And Resistance ◽  
Collective Resistance ◽  
Visual Regimes ◽  
Main Thread

The African presence in imperial Spain, of between 10-15 per cent of the population, was due to the institutionalization of the transatlantic slave trade that brought between seven- to eight hundred thousand Africans as slaves to Spain and Portugal. If we add those slaves born in these European territories and the three to four hundred thousand Moor, Berber and Turk slaves, there were approximately two million slaves living in the Iberian Peninsula during this period. The Afro-Hispanic proverb ‘Black but Human’ that provides part of the book’s title, serves as a lens through which to explore the ways in which certain visual representations of slavery both embody and reproduce hegemonic visions of subaltern groups, and at the same time provide material for critical and emancipatory practices by Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves themselves. It thus allows us to generate critical insights into the articulations of slave subjectivity by exploring the links between visual regimes and the early modern Spanish and New World discourses on slavery and human diversity. My book provides a complex new reading of neglected moments of artistic production in Hapsburg Spain establishing their importance as relays of power and resistance. We could claim that the ‘Black but Human’ topos encodes the multilayered processes through which a black emancipatory subject emerges and a ‘black nation’ forges a collective resistance, and the ways in which these moments are articulated visually by a range of artists. Thus, this proverb is the main thread of the six chapters of this book.

Witches as Rebels against Patriarchy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Per Faxneld
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
The Witch

Chapter 6 provides a reading of how the subversive potential of the figure of the witch was utilized to attack the oppression of women. It commences with a discussion of Jules Michelet’s La Sorcière (1862), then considers how medical discourse on historical witches as hysterics was conflated with slander of feminists as hysterical and caricatures of them as witches. After that follows a treatment of American feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage, who presented the early modern witch cult as a Satanic rebellion against patriarchal injustice, and folklorist Charles Leland, who drew approbatory parallels between witches and the feminism of his day. The chapter demonstrates how Gage borrowed from both Michelet and Blavatsky in her texts. Finally, visual representations of the witch are discussed, focusing on how she was a symbol of female strength in both positive and negative ways in the sculptures and paintings of male as well as female artists.

Early Modern Spaces in Motion

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Brain ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
Social Behaviour ◽  
New World ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The Earth ◽  
German Speaking

Stretching back to antiquity, motion had been a key means of designing and describing the physical environment. But during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, individuals across Europe increasingly designed, experienced, and described a new world of motion: one characterized by continuous, rather than segmented, movement. New spaces that included vistas along house interiors and uninterrupted library reading rooms offered open expanses for shaping sequences of social behaviour, scientists observed how the Earth rotated around the sun, and philosophers attributed emotions to neural vibrations in the human brain. Early Modern Spaces in Motion examines this increased emphasis on motion with eight essays encompassing a geographical span of Portugal to German-speaking lands and a disciplinary range from architectural history to English. It consequently merges longstanding strands of analysis considering people in motion and buildings in motion to explore the cultural historical attitudes underpinning the varied impacts of motion in early modern Europe.

Production, Communication, and Comprehension of Knowledge of the New World: Ethnographic Descriptions in Caspar Barlaeus’ Rerum per Octennium

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 223-246
Author(s):  
Britt Dams
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Careful Selection ◽  
The Bible ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
Trading Network ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Dutch Brazil

This article deals with the textual legacy of Dutch Brazil, in particular the ethnographic descriptions in one of the most popular works about the colony: Barlaeus’ Rerum per Octennium in Brasilia et alibi nuper gestarum. Barlaeus never set foot in Brazil, but was an important Dutch intellectual authority in the seventeenth century. To compose the Rerum per Octennium, he relied on a wide variety of available sources, not only firsthand observations, but also classical, biblical and other contemporary sources. From these, he made a careful selection to produce his descriptions. Recent research shows that the Dutch participated in networks of knowledge and imagination as well as in a more familiar early modern trading network. This article reveals that Barlaeus’ descriptions not only circulated as knowledge, but also produced new knowledge. The Rerum soon became one of the standard works about the colony due to the importance of its author and its composition. Furthermore, the article discusses the rhetorical techniques used in some selected descriptions in order to shed light upon the strategies Barlaeus used in his discourse on the strange reality of the New World. For example, his ethnographic descriptions employed parallel customs or events from the classical Antiquity or the Bible. In these comparisons he displays both his intellectual capacities and shows his desire to comprehend this exotic reality.

Cuba

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matt D. Childs ◽  
Manuel Barcia
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Foreign Capital ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Spanish Colonialism ◽  
Political Pressure ◽  
Domestic Servants ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Plantation Slavery

This article reviews scholarship on the history and historiography of slavery in Cuba. In the sixteenth-century, Africans crossed the Atlantic and accompanied Diego Velésquez and other Spanish conquistadors in the first expeditions sent to subjugate Cuba. Africans served in post-conquest Cuba as enslaved assistants to powerful military and political officials or as domestic servants. During the nineteenth-century heyday of plantation slavery, Cuban social and political life centred on the master-slave relation. Foreign capital and foreign political pressure — British abolitionism and United States annexationism, for example — began to shape Cuban slavery beyond the contours of Spanish colonialism alone. The transatlantic slave trade lasted longer to Cuba than to any other New World slave society with final abolition coming only in 1867.

Breeched and Unbridled: Bifurcated Equestrian Garments for Women in Early Modern Europe

Costume ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-185
Author(s):  
Valerio Zanetti
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Affective Meaning ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Modern Europe

This article discusses the wearing of bifurcated equestrian garments for women in early modern Europe. Considering visual representations as well as documentary sources, the first section examines the fashion for red riding breeches between the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Worn for their comfort and functionality in the saddle, these garments were also invested with powerful symbolic and affective meaning. The second section provides new insights about female equestrian outfits in late seventeenth-century France. Through the close reading of two written accounts, the author sheds light on the use of breeches as undergarments in the saddle and discusses the appearance of a hybrid riding uniform that incorporated knee-length culottes. By presenting horsewomen who wore bifurcated garments in the pursuit of leisure rather than transgression, this study revises historical narratives that cast the breeched woman exclusively as a symbol of gender upheaval.

The Generation of Art as the Generation of Philosophy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanna Berger
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Mental Representations ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Artistic Works ◽  
Girard Desargues ◽  
Philosophical Understanding

This chapter studies how early modern thinkers understood the connection between the generation of art and the generation of philosophical understanding. It argues that in this period, the generation of mental representations was understood through practices of artistic production, and that the notion of generation itself was central to philosophy. The first section explores descriptions of cognition that compare thinking to the creation of artistic works. It discusses the accounts of a broad range of artists and scholars, including Dürer and Willibald Pirckheimer (1470–1530), Bosse and Girard Desargues (1591–1661), Descartes, and others to show how constant the association between artistic generation and mental generation was in this period. The second section examines the celebrated frontispiece to the Leviathan that Bosse created in collaboration with Hobbes. It argues that previous accounts of the frontispiece have failed to capture the full complexity of this etching. It offers a new account of this famous image — one that emphasizes the process of the state's generation.

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