Chinese Silk and Globalization along the Hispanic American Road, from the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries

This essay analyzes one of the main elements of the economic relationship between China and colonial Latin America: the Chinese Silk Road. The road demonstrated a bipolarity of early globalization, and its impact across the Pacific enhanced the material culture of Hispanic American society from Mexico to Buenos Aires. The route of circulation was largely informal, due to prohibitions imposed by metropolitan Spain designed to guarantee the growth of European economic connections across the Atlantic Ocean. Quality variations and affordable prices made Chinese silks among the most valuable articles in Latin American markets before the nineteenth century, when British-Indian cotton emerged as the main textile of the global era.

Witchcraft in Colonial Latin America

The European ideas associated with witchcraft came to the Americas as a multipronged weapon of imperialism, a conception of non-Christian beliefs not as separate worldviews but as manifestations of evil and the reigning power of the devil over Indigenous peoples and, slightly later, African slaves and free people of African origins or heritage. To create this imperialist concept, colonizers drew from a late medieval demonological literature that defined witchcraft as ways of influencing one’s fate through a pact with the devil and the ritual of witches’ sabbaths. Through the court structure of the Holy Offices of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, Iberian imperialists set up judicial processes that they designed to elicit confessions from their colonial subjects regarding their involvement in what was labeled witchcraft and witches’ sabbaths, but which was most likely either non-European beliefs and practices, or even popular European ideas of healing. Archival documents from the Holy Office fueled Europeans’ vision of themselves as on the side of cosmic good as well as providing some details regarding popular practices such as divination and love magic. Whatever ethnographic details emerge from this documentation, the use of the terminology of witchcraft always signals an imperialistic lens.

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.

Modernity and Its Ruins in Of Love and Other Demons

In Of Love and Other Demons (1994), García Márquez presents a tableau of daily life in the city of Cartagena de Indias in the eighteenth century with the opening paragraphs of the novel, situating the center of the action in the harbor and a ship with slaves that had arrived from Guinea. In order to depict the city and its inhabitants, the narrator adopts the point of view of a chronicler, positioning himself within the discourses of power of the metropolis in colonial Latin America. This article analyzes the subversion of those discourses of power that the narrative voice carries out from within, as it seemingly anchors the action in an identifiable space and time, only to dismantle the pretension of progress, historical or otherwise. The narrator-chronicler—an extension of the author-journalist in the introductory pages to the novel—intertwines competing philosophies and ideologies not through the all-encompassing view of magical realism but by laying bare the binary oppositions enacted by “the lettered city.” Having been born from the bones discovered in the crypt of the convent, the whole narrative becomes a memento mori, its development punctuated by instances of illness and demise, such as the corpses of the slaves afloat in the harbor, or the annihilation of reason, both literally and metaphorically, signified in a diagnosis of rabies. Thus, the novel cannot but be an extension of death, an ironic chronicling of a progress arrested by its material and moral ruins.

Spiritualité, Spirituality, and Espiritualidad

This article offers a corrective to the widely held idea that the modern concept of spirituality is traceable to the seventeenth century French notion of spiritualité. Instead, the argument is made that the sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish terms spiritual and spiritualidad are earlier expressions of the modern concept of spirituality. The article opens with an examination of the place of spirituality in the academic study of religion and proceeds to a discussion of the premises of conceptual history and modern lexicography. In the closing section, the author analyses a plethora of lexicographical and other primary source material from the medieval to the early modern periods that demonstrate the usage of the terms spirital and espiritualidad in Spain as well as in colonial Latin America. Among the sources examined are Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana (Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1611); Fernando de Valverde, Vida de Jesu Christo nuestro señor (Lima: Luis de Lyra, 1657); and Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Madrid: En la imprenta de Francisco del Hierro, 1726–1739).