Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America

Employing a transregional and interdisciplinary approach, this volume explores indigenous and black confraternities –or lay Catholic brotherhoods– founded in colonial Spanish America and Brazil between the sixteenth and eighteenth century. It presents a varied group of cases of religious confraternities founded by subaltern subjects, both in rural and urban spaces of colonial Latin America, to understand the dynamics and relations between the peripheral and central areas of colonial society, underlying the ways in which colonialized subjects navigated the colonial domain with forms of social organization and cultural and religious practices. The book analyzes indigenous and black confraternal cultural practices as forms of negotiation and resistance shaped by local devotional identities that also transgressed imperial religious and racial hierarchies. The analysis of these practices explores the intersections between ethnic identity and ritual devotion, as well as how the establishment of black and indigenous religious confraternities carried the potential to subvert colonial discourse.

The Later Work of Gabriel García Márquez

If the Bolívar novel embodies the collective memory of a region in a manner spare yet ingenious, the novelist’s other major late work tends toward personal memory. In Of Love and Other Demons, García Márquez comes as close to magical realism as in any work since the short stories and One Hundred Years of Solitude and reaffirms the multiracial and Caribbean character of the author’s own definition of Spanish America. In News of a Kidnapping, García Márquez ventures onto the territory of drug cartels and violence, which became the preoccupation of the next generation of Colombian writers, relating this material from the deadpan, appalled stance that is as characteristic of his viewpoint as the mesmeric incantations so commonly associated with him. In Memories of My Melancholy Whores, a late in life moral transformation redeems a lifetime of iniquity and testifies to the strangeness of the new territory of extreme old age, in a sense as unexplored a country as Macondo once was. In Living to Tell the Tale, García Márquez reflects upon the first half of his own life. Unlike in the case of Bolívar, García Márquez did not get to tell the ending of the story, leaving later writers and readers to do so in their own minds, as the great master had done for the General.