New World Baroque, Neobaroque, Brut Barroco: Latin American Postcolonialisms

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lois Parkinson Zamora

During the seventeenth century, the Baroque was exported wholesale to the areas of the world being colonized by Catholic Europe. It is one of the few satisfying ironies of European imperial domination worldwide that the baroque worked poorly as a colonizing instrument. Its visual and verbal forms are ample, dynamic, porous, and permeable, and in all areas colonized by Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the baroque was itself eventually colonized. In the New World, its transplants immediately began to incorporate the cultural perspectives and iconographies of the indigenous and African laborers and artisans who built and decorated Catholic structures. Cultural heresies (and heretics) often entered unnoticed or were ignored for reasons of expediency. Asian influences arrived on the Nao de China (the Manila Galleon) with artifacts from Japan, China, the Moluccas, and the Philippines, destined for Europe but portaged across New Spain, thus joining the diverse cultural streams that over time came to constitute the New World baroque. And, in time, the baroque was also transformed in Europe by New World influences: its materials (silver from Mexico and Peru, ivory from the Philippines), its motifs (fauna and flora from the Caribbean, the Orinoco, the Amazon), and its methods (artistic, doctrinal, indoctrinating).

2021 ◽  
pp. 235-246
Author(s):  
James F. Hancock

Abstract The chapter summarizes the Spanish conquests and navigation. It also provides a brief summary of how Ferdinand Magellan found another route to the Pacific and the Moluccas, which led to the signing of Treaty of Tordesillas. This divided any newly discovered lands between Spain and Portugal along a Meridian west of the Cape Verde Islands, but no line of demarcation had been set on the other side of the world. This meant that both countries could lay claim to the Spice Islands, as long as Portugal travelled there from the east and Spain from the west. After Magellan's conquest, the Spanish explore the Pacific, which gave them control over the Pacific countries including the Philippines. The chapter also discusses how the charting of 'Urdaneta's Route' made possible a trans-Pacific galleon trade and the profitable colonization of the Philippines and other Latin American countries. Soon ships were travelling regularly from Manila to New Spain. A complex trade network evolved that was truly global in nature. Into Manila would flow spices from the Moluccas and silk and porcelain from China. These would be shipped across the Pacific by the Spanish to Acapulco, a journey of four to six months. The silver came from Potosí, Bolivia where hundreds of thousands of enslaved Incan lives were sacrificed by the Spanish to extract that silver from the bowels of the earth. The mines became the centre of Spanish wealth and were the reason Spain remained powerful during the colonial period. From 1556 to 1783, they extracted some 45,000 tons of silver from these mines. Aside from these, is the silk production as New Spain had a native mulberry tree called the Morera criolla. The Spanish finished their conquest by 1521 and by 1523, the first silkworm eggs had been exported to Mexico. Finally, the chapter closes how England, by means of American privateers, fought off Portugal and Spain.


2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 301
Author(s):  
Stacey Marien

Kenny is an assistant professor of anthropology at Missouri State University with research experience in East and West Africa. Nichols is a professor of Spanish at Drury University with her research specializing in cultures of Latin America. Nichols has also co-written Pop Culture in Latin American and the Caribbean (ABC-CLIO, 2015) and authored a chapter on beauty in Venezuela for the book The Body Beautiful? Identity, Performance, Fashion and the Contemporary Female Body (Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2015). Both authors have taught extensively on the topic of beauty and bodies (xi). 


2017 ◽  
Vol 135 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-158
Author(s):  
Jan Rupp

AbstractCaribbean writing in English highlights the call for a pluralization of world literature(s) in a double sense. It is produced in multiple Caribbean spaces, both domestic and diasporic, and it clearly stands for the extension of what used to be a rather small set of (Western) world literature. Moreover, not least as a legacy of the colonial New World/Old World distinction, visions of the world are at the heart of the Caribbean spatial imaginary as probed in many literary works. This article explores the trajectory of Caribbean spaces and Anglophone world literatures as a matter of migration and circulation, but also in terms of the symbolic translation by which experiences of movement and space are aesthetically mediated. Because of its global span across different locations Caribbean writing in English is constituted as world literature almost by definition. However, some works pursue a more circumscribed concern with domestic spaces and local artistic idioms, which affects their translatability and redefines a conventional ‘from national to world literature’ narrative.


2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-48
Author(s):  
Tereza Hejzlarová ◽  
Martin Rychlík

This study deals with haircare, hair ornaments, hairstyles, and hairrelated rituals of the Southern Altaians (Altai Kizhi, Telengits) and their development over time. Haircare has played an important role in Altaian society for centuries. It has been a ritual symbol, an indicator of gender, age, marital or social status. In context, hair has played a significant cultural and social role across societies and historical periods around the world. For this reason, haircare has also been sometimes included among the so-called cultural or human universals, i.e. phenomena that are common to all known human cultures in time and space. The source of information for this study was the authors’ own field research, relevant literature and visual sources documenting the broader context of haircare. The issue is viewed from historical and cultural perspectives, with the main focus on the current haircare of the Altaian people in connection with changes compared to the past. The study focuses on selected phenomena that proved to be the most important in the field research in terms of their existence and the role they currently play in Altaian society. It does not therefore aim to cover the full breadth of the topic, but leaves room for further research on sub-topics.


Author(s):  
Orchid Mazurkiewicz

HAPI began as a local project at Arizona State University (ASU) in 1973. Its founder, Barbara G. Valk, the librarian responsible for Latin American materials at ASU, wanted to provide an index to the university’s periodical literature on the region, which was something that had been unavailable since the cessation of the OAS-sponsored Index to Latin American Periodicals in 1970. Following the success of the project, HAPI moved to the UCLA Latin American Center (now Latin American Institute) in 1976, where Valk used a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund further development of an annual printed edition of the index. This annual volume would continue to be published through 2008. HAPI was first searchable online via Telnet in 1991 and CD-ROM in 1992; its first website debuted in 1997. Now exclusively available online, HAPI is a self-supporting, not-for-profit publishing unit within UCLA, with subscribers (primarily university and college libraries) around the world. Free subscriptions are provided to institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean. HAPI now contains over 300,000 citations to journal articles about Latin America, the Caribbean, and Latina/os in the United States and around the world. Articles date back to 1968 following an early retrospective indexing project to cover the gap between the last volume of the Index to Latin American Periodicals and the first volume of HAPI. Almost 400 journal titles are currently indexed and over 600 titles have been included since HAPI’s creation. Subject coverage includes the social sciences and the humanities; history titles represent the largest single subject area covered. HAPI aims to provide access to the most well-known and influential titles in Latin American studies as well as to regional titles that are less well known and often underrepresented in disciplinary indexes with limited Latin American and Caribbean content. Librarians (staff and volunteers) with relevant subject training examine each article and create bibliographic descriptions, subject headings, and keywords for multiple access points to the journal content. Searches can be carried out in English, Spanish, or Portuguese on HAPI’s trilingual website. HAPI has provided links to the online full-text content of many of its indexed titles since 2003. At that time, with university and college libraries spending heavily on commercial databases, students and scholars were increasingly expecting easy access to the full text of journal articles, but few Latin American and Caribbean journals were included in these commercial products. With limited financial and technological resources, HAPI was unable to become a full-text publisher; instead, HAPI staff focused on tracking down and linking to the full text of the indexed journals wherever they could find it, especially in two Open Access regional databases: Mexico’s Redalyc and Brazil’s SciELO. A vibrant Open Access movement in Latin America has led to a dramatic increase in the free online availability of the region’s journals and unprecedented access to this content for scholars around the world. Over 75 percent of the Latin American journals indexed by HAPI now include links to freely available full text.


Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (15) ◽  
pp. 2954 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mun Ahmed ◽  
Koji Shimada

The objective of the paper is to figure out the nexus between renewable energy consumption and sustainable economic development for emerging and developing countries. In this paper, a panel of 30 emerging and developing countries is selected using the World Development Indicators (WDI) of the World Bank, Renewable Energy Country Attractiveness Index (RECAI) by Ernst and Young, and a random selection method based on the current trend of renewable energy consumption for five different regions of the world i.e., Asia, South-Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean. To achieve the objective, robust panel econometric models such as the Pesaran cross-section dependence (CD) test, second generation panel unit root test, e.g., cross-sectional augmented IPS test (CIPS) proposed by Pesran (2007), panel co-integration test, fully modified ordinary least square (FMOLS) and dynamic ordinary least square (DOLS) are applied to check the cross-sectional dependence, heterogeneity and long-term relationship among variables. The panel is strongly balanced and the findings suggest a significant long-run relationship between renewable energy consumption and economic growth for selected South Asian, Asian and most of the African countries (Ghana, Tunisia, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Cameroon). But for the Latin American and the Caribbean countries, economic growth depends on non-renewable energy consumption. Renewable energy consumption in the selected countries of these two regions are still at the initial stage. In case of the renewable energy consumption and CO 2 emissions nexus, for selected South Asian, Asian, Latin American and African countries both GDP and non-renewable energy consumption cause the increase of CO 2 emissions. For the Caribbean countries only non-renewable energy consumption causes the increase of CO 2 emissions. An important finding regarding renewable energy consumption-economic growth nexus indicates the existence of bi-directional causality. This supports the existence of a feedback hypothesis for the emerging and developing economies. In the case of renewable energy consumption- CO 2 emissions nexus, there exists unidirectional causality. This supports the existence of the conservation hypothesis, where CO 2 emissions necessitates the renewable energy consumptions. Based on the findings, the study proposes possible policy options. The countries, who have passed the take-off stage of renewable energy consumption, can take advanced policy initiatives e.g., feed-in tariff, renewable portfolio standard and green certificate for long-term economic development. Other countries can undertake subsidy, low interest loan and market development to facilitate the renewable energy investments.


2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 720-753
Author(s):  
PRAKASH KUMAR

AbstractThe knowledge of indigo culture that developed on indigo plantations in colonial Bengal was remarkably cosmopolitan in its borrowings. The protean knowledge that was assembled in the first plantations in the Caribbean in the mid-seventeenth century had roots in various peasant traditions on the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere in the world. French naturalists committed this knowledge to texts, making them legible and portable whilst the needs of European empires ensured the perfection of this knowledge on separate continents even as it picked up heterogeneous forms at numerous sites. The heterogeneity of the knowledge attached to the practice of indigo manufacture was reproduced on the Indian subcontinent when indigo was reinvented as a colonial commodity. European planters generously drew on the texts describing indigo-making that were easily available, as the practice of dye making continued to evolve in the colonial locality. Some surviving peasant traditions of indigo culture on the subcontinent also impinged on the evolving knowledge. Thus multiple logics rather than the single colonial logic lay beneath the development of colonial indigo plantations in Bengal. An understanding of the process requires attention to the global genealogies of this knowledge system.


2006 ◽  
Vol 80 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 45-62
Author(s):  
Paul Sutton

Reviews development in the Caribbean, especially since 1990 to the present, and highlights future development prospects. Author discusses 2 reports from 2005 on present developments problems in the Caribbean region: the economics-focussed 'A time to choose: Caribbean development in the 21st century' by the World Bank, and the UN ECLAC report 'The Millennium Development Goals: a Latin American and Caribbean perspective', with a broader, also social and political, development agenda. He relates what both reports recommend for the Caribbean on the basis of their evaluations of past development. The World Bank report advocates a move toward the services sector, including tourism, offshore education, ICT services, and health services as most viable. The ECLAC report notes some social and political advances in comparison to other developing countries, but also remaining problems and inequalities. The author finds that the World Bank report's neoliberal, one-size-fits-all approach is not mindful of specific Caribbean realities, while the ECLAC study is more sensitive to local realities, and espouses a mixed economy. He thus considers the ECLAC approach preferable, but argues that it needs to go further, as it excludes Cuba and Haiti as atypical states.


Author(s):  
Leonardo Gasparini ◽  
Pablo Glüzmann

This article takes advantage of a new source of information, the 2006 Gallup World Poll, to estimate and characterize income poverty and inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) at the country level, and to compare LAC with other regions in the world. The Gallup survey has the advantage of being conducted in over 130 nations with almost the same questionnaire; it stands as a complement to national household surveys for international comparison purposes. Our results confirm that Latin American countries are among the most unequal in the world, but we also find, considered as a single unit, Latin America is less unequal than other regions.


Author(s):  
Nan Goodman

The Puritans reconceptualized the millennium—their vision of peace in the world to come. As a religiously inspired end-of-the-world scenario, most political and legal historians see the millennium as the product of Christian universalism, whose exclusionary and apocalyptic nature the law of nations was designed to overcome. Looking closely at its changing profile among late seventeenth-century Puritans, we find that the millennium developed in parallel with and was informed by the cosmopolis that stood geopolitically and hermeneutically at the center of the law of nations. Once described in abstract terms lacking spatial specificity, the reorganized geopolitical millennium appears in three book-length sermons by Cotton Mather and includes a variety of jurisdictions in what the West had considered newly discovered territories, such as the New World colonies, as well as newly appreciated old territories, such as the Ottoman Empire, giving it many of the attributes of a cosmopolis itself.


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