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Week 9: Race and Identity (workshop)

Essential Reading arellanomulata
  • Rebecca Earle, ‘”Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!!” Clothing, Race and Identity in the Americas, 17th-19th Centuries’, History Workshop Journal, 52 (2001), pp. 175-95
  • Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in 18th Century Mexico(London, 2004), pp.5-9, 39-53 and 201-204
  • Tamar Herzog, 'Identities and Processes of Identification in the Atlantic World', in Handbook of the Atlantic World c. 1450-c. 1820, edited by Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan (2011), 480–495.
Seminar Questions: 

- Think about the relationship between image and social reality in Casta paintings. What can they tell us about the construction of race (and racial stereotypes) in New Spain? How should we read these images? How might we interpret the vision of colonial society they reflect?

- Look at the set of casta paintings by Miguel Cabrera. What is the role of clothing in the articulation of perceived differences/attributes of the race and gender?

Further Reading
  • James M. Córdova, The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico: Crowned-Nun Portraits and Reform in the Convent, (University of Texas, 2014)
  • Allyson M. Poska, ‘From Peasants to Slave Owners: Race, Class, and Gender in the Spanish Empire’, and Marta R. Vicente, ‘Staging Femininity in Early Modern Spain, in Kimberly Lynn (ed.), The Early Modern Hispanic World: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Approaches(Cambridge, 2017), pp. 174-190 and pp. 341-361
  • Susan Deans-Smith, ‘Creating the Colonial Subject: Casta Paintings, Collectors, and Critics in Eighteenth-Century Mexico and Spain,’ Colonial Latin American Review14, no. 2 (2005), pp. 169-204
  • Rebecca Earle, ‘Luxury, Clothing and Race in Colonial Spanish America,’ in Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eder (eds.), in Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires, and Delectable Goods (London, 2003), pp. 219-227
  • Thomas B. F. Cumins, ‘We are the Other: Peruvian Portraits of Colonial Kurakakuna, in Kenneth K. Andrien and Rolena Adorno (eds.), Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 1991).
  • Gauvin Bailey, 'A Mughal Princess in Baroque Spain: Catarina de San Juan (1606–1688), the China Poblana', Anales de Investigaciones Estéticas(1997): 37–73.
  • Nancy E. van Deusen, ‘Passing in sixteenth-century Castile’, Colonial Latin American Review26: 1 (2017), pp. 85-103
  • Tanya J. Tiffany, Diego Velázquez’s Early Paintings and the Culture of Seventeenth Century Seville(Pennsylvania, 2012). Chapter 2: Portraiture and the Virile Woman, Madre Jerónima de la Fuente
  • Elena Phipps, 'Garments and Identity in the Colonial Andes', in Elena Phipps, Johanna Hecht, and Cristina Esteras Martín (eds.), The Colonial Andes: Tapestries and Silverwork, 1530-1830(London, 2004)
  • Annemarie Jordan, “Images of Empire: Slaves in the Lisbon household and Court of Catherine of Austria,” in T.F. Early and K.J.P. Lowe (eds.), Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 155-180
  • Suzanne P. Blier, "Imaging Otherness in Ivory: African Portrayals of the Portuguese ca. 1492," Art Bulletin75: 3 (September 1993)
  • Elizabeth Hill Boone, ‘Seeking Indianness: Christoph Weiditz, the Aztecs, and feathered Amerindians,’ Colonial Latin American Review26: 1 (2017), pp. 39-61
  • Carolyn Dean, “Inka Nobles: Portraiture and Paradox in Colonial Peru,” in Donna Pierce (ed.), Exploring New World Imagery: Spanish Colonial papers from the 2002 Mayer Centre Symposium(Denver, 2005).