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.

“Essa Dama Bate Bué” e o cânone literário angolano

Essa Dama Bate Bué and the Angolan Literary Canon. A relevant topic for the history of literature, the literary canon has been widely questioned and the Angolan literary canon is no exception, being constantly susceptible to changes. The current paper aims at challenging the Angolan literary canon and defending the necessity of including the novel Essa Dama Bate Bué by Yara Monteiro. Published in 2018, it represents an example of silenced literature about women and guerrilla movements during the war for national independence, the subsequent civil war, and the post-conflict period. The book problematizes the presence of women in national wars, the countless roles they played, but also their integration in the post-colonial society, giving insights into a topic largely ignored in Angolan literature. Keywords: Angola, Angolan women, canon, Yara Monteiro, guerrilla movements

The Anomaly of ‘Animal’

This chapter uses carters’ strikes led by bullock-cart drivers in late 19th- and early 20th-century Calcutta to explicate the tensions inherent in colonial animal protection legislations. More specifically, it illustrates how a single decisive event – the carters’ strike of 1862 – confronted two parallel and conflicting worlds, that of the poor, uneducated carters and the Calcutta Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (CSPCA). This historic moment is significant not only because it witnessed the meeting of these two worlds, but because by making the animals a mere proxy protagonist, it revealed the complex fault-lines within a colonial society. The human and the nonhuman subalterns – carters and bullocks, found their fates intertwined as the disadvantaged actors in a powerful, but unsuccessful protectionist crusade. Finally, the chapter reveals that while legislations and newer inventions all worked to unburden the overloaded animal, however, in a perfect colonial irony, the meaning of “animal” itself was left vague and amorphous in the British imagination.

Discipline and Defence: The Military Influence on Policing and Imprisonment, c.1870-1913

<p>Discipline and Defence follows the influence of military discipline, tactics and personnel through New Zealand's police and prisons from the end of the New Zealand Wars until the eve of the Great War. At the beginning of this era, constables and prison guards were recruited almost entirely from the ranks of soldiers, and were used to "settle" Maori resistance to the growing Pakeha state by constructing infrastructure as well as wielding coercive force. As colonial society became increasingly settled by the 1890s, criticism of soldiers' drunken indiscipline coincided with an increasing separation between the police and military, although prisons remained under a military hand. However, the popularity of the Anglo-Boer War recreated the soldier as the epitome of virtuous manhood, and administrators once more sought former soldiers to fill the ranks of the police and prison service. Rising industrial strikes and labour's opposition to such popular militarism by 1913 brought an open conflict between these partially re-militarised institutions and strikers. Throughout the entire period, arguments over the correct form of discipline for New Zealand's men intersected with practical necessities to influence the ongoing role of the military in domestic policing and punishment.</p>