chair /
- Ira Kazi, Western University
Inspired by my upcoming special issue of Religions (which I am co-editing with Dr. Cody Barteet and Dr. Alena Robin), I propose leading a panel exploring the movement of peoples, objects, and ideas in the early modern Hispanic World. Recent scholarship leads us to reconsider knowledge, art, spatial, religious, and historical formations, prior to, during, and after the colonial era, as we recognize that colonialism was formalized and transgressed by virtually all peoples involved. By considering the mobility of peoples, objects, themes, and social constructs throughout the global Spanish territories, the panel will explore the intersection of disparate religious traditions to consider the formation of new cultural knowledges and practices through the appropriation, assimilation, commodification, fetishization, marginalization, and hybridization of objects and practices. I look to examine the intersections of Hispanic cultural traditions with European, Indigenous/First Nations, Afro-Latin American/Afro-Caribbean, and Asian-Latin American in a developing global world.
keywords: objects, transcontinental, race, gender, religions
L.3.1 Beads and Ceremony: The Collision of Pan-American, European, African, and Asian Bead Networks in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Empire
- Lauren Beck, Mount Allison University
A powerful bead network that wove together a transcontinental tapestry of cultures predated the Spanish invasion of the Americas. Beads created in the northeastern Atlantic world found themselves in Aztec and Incan territories, as did beads made from rocks found in the Pacific northwest, all of which had been borne along trade networks that have existed for ages. Sixteenth-century illustrations found in the Mexican codices demonstrate the traditional manufacture of beads, which were used for a range of quotidian and ceremonial purposes. Since medieval times Spaniards employed beads, called rescate, as currency for inequitable trade, whether for slaves or precious metals. The Spanish invasion introduced beads manufactured in other parts of the world to the Americas, and vice versa, American beads made their way into Spanish clothing and religious objects such as the rosary. A significant infusion of new beads from Spain rushed into the American bead network in the sixteenth century, some of which had international origins from places such as Venice, India, and west Africa. As material objects, beads negotiated intercultural relationships in powerful ways throughout the Spanish empire: beads were involved in treaties, territorial agreements, prayer, spiritual relations, wayfinding, and most importantly, ceremony. This article maps out the collision of bead networks within the sixteenth century Spanish empire so to flesh out the similar and innovative uses of beads, whether among Native American, Afro-descendant, or European communities, and their connection to spiritual and ceremonial practices.
keywords: beads, trade networks, ceremony, intercultural encounter, Spanish empire
Dr. Lauren Beck (Mount Allison University, Canada) is Professor of Hispanic Studies who holds the Canada Research Chair in Intercultural Encounter. She researches early modern visual culture of the Atlantic world and has published several monographs, including Canada’s Place Names and How to Change Them (forthcoming), Illustrating el Cid, 1498-Today (2019), and Transforming the Enemy in Spanish Culture (2013), as well as edited collections, among them Firsting in the Early Modern Transatlantic World (2019) and Visualizing the Text: From Manuscript Culture to Caricature (2017). She is the series editor of the 6-volume Cultural History of Exploration (2024).
L.3.2 "yo la pinté un poquito morena." The Virgin of Guadalupe: Religious Identity in Colonial chuquisaca.
- Mariana C. Zinni, Queens College, CUNY
In the 17th century Colonial Andes, we witness a particular portrait version of altar sculptures with all their regalia and architectonical settings. These images re-created specific miraculous virgins (Guadalupe, Copacabana, Pomata, etc.) maintaining the illusion of the altar where they were emplaced, and proven to be a deep influence upon the spiritual life of the community. Some of the portraits were painted by indigenous artist, utilizing prehispanic pigments that carried religious and ideological meanings. Others, as the Virgen de Guadalupe in Chuquisaca, painted by fray Diego de Ocaña, were modified to match the skin color of her local congregation. In this presentation I will argue that color variations in skin tone of the Virgen de Guadalupe proved to be critical in her cult and its devotees, promoting a new religious identity among Indians, while becoming an agent of social change, and at the same time, reinforcing the sacred Andean landscape.
keywords: Diego de Ocaña, Virgen de Guadalupe, Andean religiosity, religious identity, statue painting
Dr. Mariana Zinni is an Associate Professor of Hispanic Literature with a specialization in Colonial Latin America in Queens College, CUNY. She is the author of the book Mimesis, exemplum, narración: la crisis de la hermeneusis cristiana en la encyclopedia doctrinal de Sahagún (2014). Her research and publications include Colonial Latin American Literature and Culture and Neo-Baroque Latin American prose. Dr. Zinni participated in numerous national and international conferences, and published book chapters and articles in academic journals such as Revista Hispánica Moderna, Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl, Revista de Indias, Estudios Hispánicos, Revista Iberoamericana, Revista Andina, Variaciones Borges, Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, among others. She was the recipient of the 2013 Isaias Lerner Memorial Award by The CUNY Academy for the Humanities & Sciences, and of the 2021 President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Full time Faculty in the School of Arts and Humanities.
L.3.3 Camouflaged by Cultural Accretion: The Limits of Knowing the Entangled Origins of Escudos de monjas
- Bradley J. Cavallo, Independent
Examining the origins of paintings on metal referred to as escudos de monjas affords an ideal case-study in confronting the limits of our knowledge about cultural production in early-modern, New Spain. Ostensibly, “nuns’ shields” survive as eminently Christian artefacts due to their unequivocally Christian iconography. And yet, escudos arguably retained pre-colonial characteristics adopted and then adapted to contribute to the wider process of evangelization. Revealing the process of accretion by which escudos developed into objects of such hybridity depends on appreciating that (as the anthropologist Loren Eiseley has written), “When the past intrudes into a modern setting…it is less apt to be visible…[as] the past is always camouflaged when it wears the clothes of the present.” This is to contend that, because of the establishment and perpetuation of traditions as old and as deeply embedded in the history of New Spain/Mexico as escudos, only in hindsight does their syncretistic ancestry reveal itself. Hence, escudos de monjas epitomize the entangled productions of New Spain generated through the incorporation of the exogenous and indigenous. So seamlessly and gradually did this occur that the etiology of escudos disappeared from a perception of them as grounded in both Western European, Christian, and also Meso-American, ritual-material cultures.
keywords: Escudos de monjas, New Spain, early Modern, immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary, skeuomorphism
Bradley J. Cavallo (Ph.D., 2017) presently writes independently as a scholar who earned a doctoral degree in Italian Renaissance art history from Temple University (studying under the tutelage of Drs. Marcia Hall, Tracy Cooper, and Ashley West). His current research encompasses the visual imaginary of early-modern trans-Atlantic intercultures, and broadly the iconographic implications and meanings underlying the materiality of paintings created on stone and metal supports.
