Imperial Subjects

by Fisher, Andrew B.; O'hara, Matthew D.; Silverblatt, Irene

• ISBN13: 9780822344018
• ISBN10: 0822344017
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-03-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

In colonial Latin America, social identity did not correlate neatly with fixed categories of race and ethnicity. AsImperial Subjectsdemonstrates, from the early years of Spanish and Portuguese rule, understandings of race and ethnicity were fluid. In this collection, historians offer nuanced interpretations of identity as they investigate how Iberian settlers, African slaves, Native Americans, and their multi-ethnic progeny understood who they were as individuals, as members of various communities, and as imperial subjects. The contributors' explorations of the relationship between colonial ideologies of difference and the identities historical actors presented span the entire colonial period and even beyond: from early contact to the legacy of colonial identities in the new republics of the nineteenth century. The volume includes essays on the major colonial centres of Mexico, Peru, and Brazil, as well as the Caribbean basin and the imperial borderlands. Whether analyzing cases in which the Inquisition found that the individuals before it were "legally" Indians and thus exempt from prosecution, or considering late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century petitions for declarations of whiteness entitling the mixed-race recipients to legal and social benefits enjoyed by whites, the book's contributors approach the question of identity by examining interactions between imperial subjects and colonial institutions. Colonial mandates, rulings, and legislation worked in conjunction with the actual exercise and negotiation of power between individual officials and an array of social actors engaged in countless brief interactions. Identities emerged out of the interplay between internalized understandings of self and group association and externalized social norms and categories.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Racial Identities and Their Interpreters in Colonial Latin America

Aristocracy on the Auction Block: Race, Lords, and the Perpetuity Controversy of Sixteenth-Century Peru

A Market of Identities: Women, Trade, and Ethnic Labels in Colonial Potosí

Legally Indian: Inquisitorial Readings of Indigenous Identity in New Spain

The Many Faces of Colonialism in Two Iberoamerican Borderlands: Northern New Spain and the Eastern Lowlands of Charcas

Humble Slaves and Loyal Vassals: Free Africans and Their Descendents in Eighteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil

Purchasing Whiteness: Conversations of the Essence of Parso-ness and Mulatto-ness at the End of Empire

Patricians and Plebians in Late Colonial Charcas: Identity, Representation, and Colonialism

Conjuring Identities: Race, Nativeness, Local Citizenship, and Royal Slavery on an Imperial Frontier (Revisiting El Cobre, Cuba)

Indigenous Citizenship: Liberalism, Political Participation, and Ethic Identity in Post-Independence Oaxaca and Yucatán

Conclusion

Bibliography

Contributors

Index

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