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Spain, a global history
\"From the late fifteenth to the nineteenth centurires, the Hispanic Monarchy was one of the largest and most diverse political communities known in history. At its apogee, it stretched from the Castilian plateau to the high peaks of the Andes; from the cosmopolitan cities of Seville, Naples, or Mexico City to Sante Fe and San Francisco; from Brussels to Buenos Aires and from Milan to Manila. During those centuries, Spain left its imprint across vast continents and distant oceans contributing in no minor way to the emergence of our globalized era. This was true not only in an economic sense--the Hispano-American silver peso transported across the Atlantic and the Pacific by the Spanish fleets was arguably the first global currency, thus facilitating the creation of a world economic system--but intellecutally and artistically as well. The most extraordinary cultural exchanges took place in practically every corner of the Hispanic world, no matter how distant from the metropolis. At various time a descendent of the Aztec nobility was translating a Baroque play into Nahuatl to the delight of an Amerindian and mixed audience in the market of Tlatelolco; an Andalusian Dominican priest was writing the first Western grammar of the Chinese language in Fuzhou, a Chinese city that enjoyed a trade monopoly with the Spanish Philippines; a Franciscan friar was composing a piece of polyphonic music with lyrics in Quechua to be played in a church decorated with Moorish-style ceilings in a Peruvian valley; or a multi-ethnic team of Amerindian and Spanish naturalists was describing in Latin, Spanish and local vernacular languages thousands of medicinal plants, animals and minerals previously unknown to the West. And, most probably, at the same time that one of those exchanges were happening, the members of the School of Salamanca were laying the foundations of modern international law or formulating some of the first modern theories of price, value and money, Cervantes as writing 'Don Quixote', Velazquez was painting 'Las Meninas', or Goya was exposing both the dark and bright sides of the European Enlightenment.\" --publisher's description, lower flap
Rome and Byzantium in the Visigothic Kingdom
This volume interrogates the assumption that Visigothic practices and institutions were mere imitations of the Byzantine empire. Contributors rethink these practices not as uncritical and derivative adoptions of Byzantine customs, but as dynamic processes in dialogue with not only the Byzantine empire but also with the contemporary Iberian context, as well as the Roman past. The goal of the volume is to approach Visigothic customs not as an uncritical adoption and imitatio of contemporary Roman models (an 'acculturation' model), but as unique interpretations of a common pool of symbols, practices, and institutions that formed the legacy of Rome. The contributors argue that it is necessary to reconsider the idea of imitatio imperii as a process that involved specific actors taking strategic decisions in historically contingent circumstances.
eBook
Disorientations
This book explores from a new perspective the fraught processes of Spaniards' efforts to formulate a national identity, from the Enlightenment to the present day. Focusing on the nation's Islamic-African legacy, Susan Martin-Márquez disputes received wisdom that Spain has consistently rejected its historical relationship to Muslims and Africans. Instead, she argues, Spaniards have sometimes denied and sometimes embraced this legacy, and that vacillation has served to destabilize presumably fixed borders between Europe and the Muslim world and between Europe and Africa.
Martin-Márquez analyzes a wealth of texts produced by Spaniards as well as by Africans and Afro-Spaniards from the early nineteenth century forward. She illuminates the complexities and disorientations of Spanish identity and shows how its evolution has important implications for current debates not only in Spanish culture but also in other countries involved in negotiating a modern identity.
eBook
Catalonia's Human Towers
The building of human towers (
castells ) is a centuries-old
traditional sport where hundreds of men, women, and children gather
in Catalan squares to create breathtaking edifices through a feat
of collective athleticism. The result is a great spectacle of
effort and overcoming, tension and release.
Catalonia's Human Towers is an ethnographic look at the
thriving castells practice-a symbol of Catalan cultural heritage
and identity amid debates around national autonomy and secession
from Spain. While the main function of building castells is to grow
community through a low-cost, intergenerational, and inclusive
leisure activity, Mariann Vaczi reveals how this unique sport also
provides a social base, image, and vocabulary for the independence
movement.
Highlighting the intersection of folklore, performance, and
sport, Catalonia's Human Towers captures the subtle
processes by which the body becomes politicized and ideology
becomes embodied, with all the desires, risks and precarities of
collective constructions.
eBook
Ritual, Spectacle, and Theatre in Late Medieval Seville
From the fall of Islamic Išbīliya in 1248 to the conquest of the New World, Seville was a nexus of economic and religious power where interconfessional living among Christians, Jews, and Muslims was negotiated on public stages. From out of seemingly irreconcilable ideologies of faith, hybrid performance culture emerged in spectacles of miraculous transformation, disciplinary processionals, and representations of religious identity.
Ritual, Spectacle, and Theatre in Late Medieval Seville reinvigorates the study of medieval Iberian theatre by revealing the ways in which public expressions of devotion, penance, and power fostered cultural reciprocity, rehearsed religious difference, and ultimately helped establish Seville as the imperial centre of Christian Spain.
eBook
Exotic Nation
In the Western imagination, Spain often evokes the colorful culture of al-Andalus, the Iberian region once ruled by Muslims. Tourist brochures inviting visitors to sunny and romantic Andalusia, home of the ingenious gardens and intricate arabesques of Granada's Alhambra Palace, are not the first texts to trade on Spain's relationship to its Moorish past. Despite the fall of Granada to the Catholic Monarchs in 1492 and the subsequent repression of Islam in Spain, Moorish civilization continued to influence both the reality and the perception of the Christian nation that emerged in place of al-Andalus. InExotic Nation, Barbara Fuchs explores the paradoxes in the cultural construction of Spain in relation to its Moorish heritage through an analysis of Spanish literature, costume, language, architecture, and chivalric practices. Between 1492 and the expulsion of the Moriscos (Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity) in 1609, Spain attempted to come to terms with its own Moorishness by simultaneously repressing Muslim subjects and appropriating their rich cultural heritage. Fuchs examines the explicit romanticization of the Moors in Spanish literature-often referred to as \"literary maurophilia\"-and the complex, often silent presence of Moorish forms in Spanish material culture. The extensive hybridization of Iberian culture suggests that the sympathetic depiction of Moors in the literature of the period does not trade in exoticism but instead reminded Spaniards of the place of Moors and their descendants within Spain. Meanwhile, observers from outside Spain recognized its cultural debt to al-Andalus, often deliberately casting Spain as the exotic racial other of Europe.
eBook