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Operating within the framework of postcolonial studies and decolonial theory, this important work starts from the assumption that the violence exercised by European colonialism was not only physical and economic, but also ‘epistemic’. Santiago Castro-Gómez argues that toward the end of the eighteenth century, this epistemic violence of the Spanish Empire assumed a specific form: zero-point hubris. The ‘many forms of knowing’ were integrated into a chronological hierarchy in which scientific-enlightened knowledge appears at the highest point on the cognitive scale, while all other epistemes are seen as constituting its past. Enlightened criollo thinkers did not hesitate to situate the Black, Indigenous, and mestizo peoples of New Granada in the lowest position on this cognitive scale. Castro-Gómez argues that in the colonial periphery of the Spanish Americas, Enlightenment constituted not only the position of epistemic distance separating science from all other knowledges, but also the position of ethnic distance separating the criollos from the ‘castes’. Epistemic violence—and not only physical violence—is thereby found at the very origin of Colombian nationality.
Opening a window on a dynamic realm far beyond imperial courts, anatomical theaters, and learned societies, Pablo F. Gomez examines the strategies that Caribbean people used to create authoritative, experientially based knowledge about the human body and the natural world during the long seventeenth century. Gomez treats the early modern intellectual culture of these mostly black and free Caribbean communities on its own merits and not only as it relates to well-known frameworks for the study of science and medicine. Drawing on an array of governmental and ecclesiastical sources—notably Inquisition records—Gomez highlights more than one hundred black ritual practitioners regarded as mast...
Reflecting on humanity's shared desire for certainty, this book explores the discrepancies between religious adherence and inner belief specific to the early modern period, a time marred by forced conversions and inquisition.
International Humanitarian Law (IHL) is in a state of some turbulence, as a result of, among other things, non-international armed conflicts, terrorist threats and the rise of new technologies. This incisive book observes that while states appear to be reluctant to act as agents of change, informal methods of law-making are flourishing. Illustrating that not only courts, but various non-state actors, push for legal developments, this timely work offers an insight into the causes of this somewhat ambivalent state of IHL by focusing attention on both the legitimacy of law-making processes and the actors involved.
This book highlights newly-discovered and underutilized sources for the study of slavery and abolition. It features the contributions of scholars who work with Portuguese, Spanish, German, Dutch, and Swedish materials from Europe, Africa and Latin America. Their work draws on legal suits, merchant correspondence, Catholic sacramental records, and rare newspapers dating from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Essays cover the volume of the early South Atlantic slave trade; African and African-descended religious and cultural communities in Rio de Janeiro and the Spanish circum-Caribbean; Eurafrican trade alliances on the Gold Coast; and public participation in abolition in nineteenth-century Brazil. These essays change and enrich our understandings of slavery and its end in the Atlantic World. This book was originally published as a special issue of Slavery and Abolition.
An exploration of Colombian maps in New Granada. During the late Spanish colonial period, the Pacific Lowlands, also called the Greater Chocó, was famed for its rich placer deposits. Gold mined here was central to New Granada’s economy yet this Pacific frontier in today’s Colombia was considered the “periphery of the periphery.” Infamous for its fierce, unconquered Indigenous inhabitants and its brutal tropical climate, it was rarely visited by Spanish administrators, engineers, or topographers and seldom appeared in detail on printed maps of the period. In this lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched volume, Juliet Wiersema uncovers little-known manuscript cartography and makes visible an unexamined corner of the Spanish empire. In concert with thousands of archival documents from Colombia, Spain, and the United States, she reveals how a "periphery" was imagined and projected, largely for political or economic reasons. Along the way, she unearths untold narratives about ephemeral settlements, African adaptation and autonomy, Indigenous strategies of resistance, and tenuous colonialisms on the margins of a beleaguered viceroyalty.
A partir de la segunda mitad del siglo xviii, en la ciudad de Santafé de Bogotá aparece una reglamentación orientada a establecer un nuevo "orden" con medidas como censos de población, formación de gremios, encierro de pobres y mendigos en hospicios, creación de milicias urbanas, leyes antivagancia o control de chicherías. En la aplicación de estas disposiciones se consideraba a una parte importante de la población como desordenada, perezosa y poco dada al trabajo. A partir de la insistencia y la recurrencia de estas afirmaciones, vamos a realizar una reflexión sobre su concreción y naturaleza, sobre las costumbres que describían, sobre las actitudes que alababan o condenaban y s...