Bringing to bear her extensive knowledge of the cultures of Renaissance Europe and sixteenth-century Mexico, M?a Dom?uez Torres here investigates the significance of military images and symbols in post-Conquest Mexico. She shows how the 'conquest' in fact involved dynamic exchanges between cultures; and that certain interconnections between martial, social and religious elements resonated with similar intensity among Mesoamericans and Europeans, creating indeed cultural bridges between these diverse communities. Multidisciplinary in approach, this study builds on scholarship in the fields of visual, literary and cultural studies to analyse the European and Mesoamerican content of the martial imagery fostered within the indigenous settlements of central Mexico, as well as the ways in which local communities and leaders appropriated, manipulated, modified and reinterpreted foreign visual codes. Military Ethos and Visual Culture in Post-Conquest Mexico draws on post-structuralist and post-colonial approaches to analyse the complex dynamics of identity formation in colonial communities.
Bringing to bear her extensive knowledge of the cultures of Renaissance Europe and sixteenth-century Mexico, Mónica Domínguez Torres here investigates the significance of military images and symbols in post-Conquest Mexico. She shows how the 'conquest' in fact involved dynamic exchanges between cultures; and that certain interconnections between martial, social and religious elements resonated with similar intensity among Mesoamericans and Europeans, creating indeed cultural bridges between these diverse communities. Multidisciplinary in approach, this study builds on scholarship in the fields of visual, literary and cultural studies to analyse the European and Mesoamerican content of the martial imagery fostered within the indigenous settlements of central Mexico, as well as the ways in which local communities and leaders appropriated, manipulated, modified and reinterpreted foreign visual codes. Military Ethos and Visual Culture in Post-Conquest Mexico draws on post-structuralist and post-colonial approaches to analyse the complex dynamics of identity formation in colonial communities.
This volume presents in-depth and contextualized analyses of a wealth of visual materials. These documents provide viewers with a mesmerizing and informative glimpse into how the early modern world was interpreted by image-makers and presented to viewers during a period that spans from manuscript culture to the age of caricature. The premise of this collection responds to a fundamental question: how are early modern texts, objects, and systems of knowledge imaged and consumed through bimodal, hybrid, or intermedial products that rely on both words and pictures to convey meaning? The twelve contributors to this collection go beyond traditional lines of inquiry into word-and-image interaction to deconstruct visual dynamics and politics—to show how images were shaped, manipulated, displayed, and distributed to represent the material world, to propagate official and commercial messages, to support religious practice and ideology, or to embody relations of power. These chapters are anchored in various theoretical and disciplinary points of departure, such as the history of collections and collecting, literary theory and criticism, the histories of science, art history and visual culture, word-and-image studies, as well as print culture and book illustration. Authors draw upon a wide range of visual material hitherto insufficiently explored and placed in context, in some cases hidden in museums and archives, or previously assessed only from a disciplinary standpoint that favored either the image or the text but not both in relation to each other. They include manuscript illuminations representing compilers and collections, frontispieces and other accompanying plates published in catalogues and museographies, astronomical diagrams, mixed pictographic-alphabetic accounting documents, Spanish baroque paintings, illustrative frontispieces or series inspired by or designed for single novels or anthologies, anatomical drawings featured in encyclopedic publications, visual patterns of volcanic formations, engravings representing the New World that accompany non-fictional travelogues, commonplace books that interlace text and images, and graphic satire. Geographically, the collection covers imperial centers (Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Spain), as well as their colonial periphery (New France; Mexico; Central America; South America, in particular Brazil; parts of Africa; and the island of Ceylon). Emblematic and thought-provoking, these images are only fragments of the multifaceted and comprehensive visual mosaic created during the early modern period, but their consideration has far reaching implications.
The Military Enlightenment brings to light a radically new narrative both on the Enlightenment and the French armed forces from Louis XIV to Napoleon. Christy Pichichero makes a striking discovery: the Geneva Conventions, post-traumatic stress disorder, the military "band of brothers," and soldierly heroism all found their antecedents in the eighteenth-century French armed forces. Readers of The Military Enlightenment will be startled to learn of the many ways in which French military officers, administrators, and medical personnel advanced ideas of human and political rights, military psychology, and social justice.
"Sacred gaze" denotes any way of seeing that invests its object—an image, a person, a time, a place—with spiritual significance. Drawing from many different fields, David Morgan investigates key aspects of vision and imagery in a variety of religious traditions. His lively, innovative book explores how viewers absorb and process religious imagery and how their experience contributes to the social, intellectual, and perceptual construction of reality. Ranging widely from thirteenth-century Japan and eighteenth-century Tibet to contemporary America, Thailand, and Africa, The Sacred Gaze discusses the religious functions of images and the tools viewers use to interpret them. Morgan questions how fear and disgust of images relate to one another and explains how scholars study the long and evolving histories of images as they pass from culture to culture. An intriguing strand of the narrative details how images have helped to shape popular conceptions of gender and masculinity. The opening chapter considers definitions of "visual culture" and how these relate to the traditional practice of art history. Amply illustrated with more than seventy images from diverse religious traditions, this masterful interdisciplinary study provides a comprehensive and accessible resource for everyone interested in how religious images and visual practice order space and time, communicate with the transcendent, and embody forms of communion with the divine. The Sacred Gaze is a vital introduction to the study of the visual culture of religions.
In 2015, the Mexican state counted how many of its citizens identified as Afro-Mexican for the first time since independence. Finding Afro-Mexico reveals the transnational interdisciplinary histories that led to this celebrated reformulation of Mexican national identity. It traces the Mexican, African American, and Cuban writers, poets, anthropologists, artists, composers, historians, and archaeologists who integrated Mexican history, culture, and society into the African Diaspora after the Revolution of 1910. Theodore W. Cohen persuasively shows how these intellectuals rejected the nineteenth-century racial paradigms that heralded black disappearance when they made blackness visible first in Mexican culture and then in post-revolutionary society. Drawing from more than twenty different archives across the Americas, this cultural and intellectual history of black visibility, invisibility, and community-formation questions the racial, cultural, and political dimensions of Mexican history and Afro-diasporic thought.
This is the first study of the Anglo-Welsh border region in the period before the Norman arrival in England, from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Its conclusions significantly alter our current picture of Anglo/Welsh relations before the Norman Conquest by overturning the longstanding critical belief that relations between these two peoples during this period were predominately contentious. Writing the Welsh borderlands in Anglo-Saxon England demonstrates that the region which would later become the March of Wales was not a military frontier in Anglo-Saxon England, but a distinctively mixed Anglo-Welsh cultural zone which was depicted as a singular place in contemporary Welsh and Anglo-Saxon texts. This study reveals that the region of the Welsh borderlands was much more culturally coherent, and the impact of the Norman Conquest on it much greater, than has been previously realised.
This timely and important book introduces readers to the largest and fastest-growing minority group in the United States - Latinos - and their diverse conditions of departure and reception. A central theme of the book is the tension between the fact that Latino categories are most often assigned from above, and how those defined as Latino seek to make sense of and enliven a shared notion of identity from below. Providing a sophisticated introduction to emerging theoretical trends and social formations specific to Latino immigrants, chapters are structured around the topics of Latinidad or the idea of a pan-ethnic Latino identity, pathways to citizenship, cultural citizenship, labor, gender, transnationalism, and globalization. Specific areas of focus include the 2006 marches of the immigrant rights movement and the rise in neoliberal nativism (including both state-sponsored restrictions such as Arizona’s SB1070 and the hate crimes associated with Minutemen vigilantism). The book is a valuable contribution to immigration courses in sociology, history, ethnic studies, American Studies, and Latino Studies. It is one of the first, and certainly the most accessible, to fully take into account the plurality of experiences, identities, and national origins constituting the Latino category.
"A major new history of how, between 1965 and 1985, African nations sought the restitution of works of art stolen during the colonial period, written by the most important and influential figure in the field"--
