Purity Of Blood Research Articles

Renaissance Impostors and Proofs of Identity by Miriam Eliav-Feldon (review)

Reviewed by: Renaissance Impostors and Proofs of Identity by Miriam Eliav-Feldon Mark S. Dawson Eliav-Feldon, Miriam, Renaissance Impostors and Proofs of Identity, Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; hardback; pp. viii, 292; R.R.P. US$92.00, £60.00; ISBN 9780230547063. This study examines the phenomenon of assumed identity, of passing for somebody one was not, in early modern Europe. It seeks to explain why [End Page 205] people perpetrated such frauds and how the powerful improvised technologies of authentication. Imposture flourished, or doubts about social authenticity were abnormally high in this period, for several reasons. However, the root cause, Miriam Eliav-Feldon contends (in Chapter 2, disproportionately the longest), was religious strife, compounded by serial failures in authentication; those who had claimed or been judged to be of one community were eventually found to belong to another confession or class, prompting further waves of anxiety that all were not as they seemed. The conversion of Jews and Muslims in Spain, Catholics in Protestant territories, and Europeans in the Moorish Mediterranean, triggered religious dissimulation and panic about fifth columns and raised questions concerning the nature of faith and the reliability of knowledge based on sensory perception. Paradoxically, the wars of religion within and without Christendom, between the later fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries, lent plausibility to impostures and otherwise help explain the credulity of contemporaries who took the bait. For example, in the early 1520s, David Reuveni presented himself as the princely emissary for several Tribes of Israel. Both Portuguese and Venetian authorities welcomed him because of the implications for their continuing – yet at times apocalyptic – struggle against Suleiman I. Similarly with the pretence of those alleging they came from the realm of Prester John to aid Western Christendom in its time of need. Layers of deception piled one on top of the other, and this circumstance seems to be the justification for discussing other sorts of impostor: sturdy beggars, false saints, witches, and gypsies (Chapters 4–5). Thus indigents could themselves pretend to be the victims of Ottoman tyranny. Witches masqueraded as proper Christians and mystics were exposed as servants of Satan. And there are suggestions that the Roma presented themselves as pilgrims before they became vagrant. Fatal assumptions were made about their true origin and character: assumptions the Roma may occasionally have owned but which were otherwise foisted on them and appropriated by false gypsies, serving only to tarnish further their reputation. The official response (Chapters 6–8) was varied. Some sought to cure the epidemic with a regime of corporal punishment. Prevention, or at least faltering attempts at it, relied upon policing the appearance of the well-to-do courtesy of sumptuary legislation and watching for bodies marked by earlier run-ins with the law. As more people were thought to be dressing above their station in the context of urban anonymity, or otherwise disguising past stigmas, attempts were made to use bureaucracy rather than bodies to prove identities. Veritable (and verifiable) paper trails were gradually established with central registers, licences and passports, health certificates, and university testimonials. [End Page 206] Citing examples from across Europe, Eliav-Feldon draws extensively on scholarship in several languages. Notwithstanding its ambitious scope and the evidentiary challenges, some will find this collation not quite to their taste. The Introduction avers that this is not a study of identity. However, this seems at odds with establishing imposters’ motives, or arguments for the growing prominence of lineage, and with it the emergence of a racialist mentality. Despite the importance of Spanish edicts concerning blood purity (limpieza de sangre), more than one reference to heraldry’s semiotics (p. 182) would strengthen the case that European elites were preoccupied with who was who. Likewise, consideration of transvestitism, as part of a deliberate fraud, probably requires acknowledgement of ambiguous premodern understandings of sexual difference per se. Notwithstanding some case studies, the book tantalises with terse references to the historiography. Particularly when it comes to the proving of identity, and unmasking impostors, mention is made of archives bearing final witness, but direct quotation from these materials is sparing. This abridges the very processes of identification, of identifying as someone or being identified as somebody else. Some...

Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction: Theorizing Foundling and Lyric Plots by Barbara L. Estrin

Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction: Theorizing Foundling and Lyric Plots. By Barbara L. Estrin. Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 2012. 255 pp. Reviewed by Erin Ellerbeck In a seminal essay on Shakespearean adaptation, Charles Marowitz declares Shakespeare “a living presence and a constant stimulus” (468). He proposes that Shakespeare’s plays have become Ur-texts that are “being used as paradigms for new texts”; what modern audiences most desire, he suggests, is not “the routine repetition of [Shakespeare’s] words and imagery,” but instead new works that dissolve and reshape the plays in order to create “that sense of vicissitude, variety, and intellectual vigor with which the author himself confronted the seventeenth century” (478). Marowitz employs a biologicalgenealogical metaphor to express his frustration with critics who want to preserve Shakespeare rather than adapt his works for the present era: Shakespeare’s “‘greatness’ is nothing more than the sperm-bank from which we must spawn our own offspring” (478). Shakespeare thus becomes, in Marowitz’s estimation, the (sometimes anonymous) father of literary children who are the heirs to an artistic achievement that must be adapted continually in order to maintain its vitality. In Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction: Theorizing Foundling and Lyric Plots, Barbara L. Estrin examines the offspring spawned from the Shakespearean sperm bank and uses her interpretations of novels to re-evaluate three of Shakespeare’s plays: she takes Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood, Liz Jensens’s Ark Baby, W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, and Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces as “theoretical lenses” to contest received critical opinions about The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale. Although the novels are not explicitly Shakespearean adaptations (Estrin terms some of them “Shakespearean re-visions”), their attitudes toward foundlings and familial formation prompt her to “read back” and revisit Shakespeare’s plays (13). Shakespeare’s creative achievements and his ability to adapt and adjust inherited narrative formulas, in other words, are brought to light by an examination of the concerns and accomplishments of his distant artistic descendants. Shakespeare and Contemporary Fiction is a substantial contribution to the field of adoption studies. It follows Marianne Novy’s influential Adoption & Culture Vol. 4 (2014) 232 Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama (2005), which analyzes adoption in literature from Sophocles to Barbara Kingsolver, by considering the influence of adoption narratives on the perception of adoptees and “suggest[ing] something of the great range in the possibilities for adoption plots” (2). It explores new territory, however, by deliberately eschewing Novy’s “standpoint theory” and avoiding the personal narratives of nonfictional adoptees in favor of an examination of the “mythological homogeneity” of the foundling plot (xx). Estrin links the continued influence of the foundling plot to contemporary cultural issues, providing readers with a “reverse” literary history of the perceived supremacy of bloodlines. In particular, she ties foundling plots to current immigration crises in Western Europe and the United States, connecting extreme forms of nationalism to the longstanding mythology of the purity of blood and lineage. In the chapters on The Nature of Blood, Austerlitz, and Fugitive Pieces, her focus is on narratives that deal with the Holocaust. The first half of Estrin’s book is dedicated to the four contemporary novels;thesecondhalfusesthemastheoreticalmodelsforunderstanding Shakespeare’s plays. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the study is its analysis of the ancient foundling plot alongside the Petrarchan lyric. Because the Petrarchan lyric speaker “generates” poetry when his beloved rejects him, Estrin proposes, he becomes a self-generator, making himself anew in the face of abandonment. In the same way that orphan or foundling characters are free to recreate their identities, the Petrarchan speaker is liberated from the ties of marriage and family. The four novels that she discusses question not only the supremacy of bloodlines but also the gendered, hierarchical structure of the lyric plot. In Austerlitz and Fugitive Pieces, for instance, the losses of family narratives and thus familial identities spur characters to invert the gender roles typical of Petrarchan love plots. By redefining both foundling plots and lyric plots, Estrin argues, the novels promote an “openness” to a model of culture that is not based in biology. In Shakespeare’s world...

There’s No Cure for That: Melezina and Mimetic Transference in Fuenteovejuna

At the wedding celebration for Laurencia and Frondoso in Fuenteovejuna , Barrildo and Mengo have a brief exchange (vv. 1491-500) in which the word melezina (enema) appears in three guises: it is a cure (“aunque es cosa saludable”), a prank (“haríalo por reír”) and a form of rough treatment (“llena de tinta y de chinas”). Analysis of the origin and usage of melezina and its sociolinguistic features points to the proposition that it resonated as an archaic and Jewish word which, in turn, suggests that Fuenteovejuna might enact mimetic transference between Jew and peasant, a position I stake out based on existing scholarship on Spain’s “Jewish problem” in relation to the comedia . Taking her cues from Américo Castro’s and others’ provocative comments on the relationship between limpieza de sangre and honor, Melveena McKendrick postulates that a process of mimetic transference was underway that involved caballeros ’ honor, women’s purity, and society’s obsession with limpieza de sangre . She characterizes it as a type of psychopathology, according to which one disease masks another; playwrights who could not write about blood purity addressed sexual pureness and male honor instead. More recently, Andrew Herskovits explores the transpositions of honor and limpieza de sangre , and Jew and woman, and the possibility that a positive image of the Jew emerges when plays draw parallels between a converso , on the one hand, and a female victim of the honor code on the other. Empathy explains them both. That is, what concern one elicits, the spectator or reader reassigns to the other (117-25). The notion of transference involving peasant and Jew may be operative in Fuenteovejuna . But in this instance, humor, not empathy, is behind the parallel. An analysis of melezina opens up the concept of mimetic transference to admit the figure of the peasant and the role of humor.

Juan de Ávila: su crítica a la limpieza de sangre y su condición conversa

Juan de Avila was one of the most important authors of spiritual literature during the 16 th century. This article presents the historical persona, focusing on the impact of his Jewish ancestry (on his father’s side) on his work and on the reaction to his writings. The fact that he was of Jewish descent, a circumstance well known in his time, and his special vision on the Converso issue, caused him some problems and also dramatic troubles with the Inquisition of Seville. In this article, we analyze through his writings ( Audi, Filia, Sermons, Epistolario Espiritual) Juan de Avila’s attitude and thoughts about the “Purity of Blood” in the Iberian tradition.

"Gloria de Deus, ao serviço do Rei e ao bem desta Republica”: freiras de Santa Mônica de Goa e a cristandade no oriente pela escrita do agostinho frei Diogo de Santa Anna na década de 1630

Este artigo analisa as convenções simbólicas que, na extremidade leste do reino de Portugal dos espaços asiáticos, deram forma às práticas de escrita no âmbito de uma monarquia de perfil confessional. Explora-se uma reflexão acerca da construção de categorias identitárias através de tópicas de nobreza/fidalguia e de limpeza de sangue.

Racism and Modernity: Festschrift for Wulf D. Hundt

Racism and Modernity: Festschrift for Wulf D. Hundt

El Peso de La Sangre: Limpios, Mestizos Y Nobles En El Mundo Hispánico

This collection of ten essays, prefaced by an introduction coauthored by the volume’s editors, originated as a colloquium convened at El Colegio de México in 2007. In keeping with María Elena Martínez’s recent study of limpieza de sangre, the volume traces how a set of religiously grounded hierarchies established in Spain was transformed in Spanish America into more overtly racial (or proto-racial) systems of difference based increasingly on phenotype. Although the book opens with an excellent overview of late medieval and early modern Iberian history by Max S. Hering Torres and concludes with a discussion of twentieth-century formulations of mestizaje by Guillermo Zermeño, it is firmly anchored in early Latin American history with a slight emphasis on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Likewise, a few of the chapters adopt a transatlantic framework, but the volume’s overall focus is New Spain with an occasional nod to the Andes.Several overarching questions and approaches hold the collection together. While proof of purity of blood was necessary to procure a wide range of offices, honors, and appointments, the authors highlight ecclesiastical institutions (mainly the Inquisition, but also confraternities, Jesuit-run schools, and the Franciscan order). They also emphasize disparities between policy and practice. Solange Alberro reminds us how genealogical inquiries were hampered by a host of challenges that beset early modern society, including faulty family and community oral histories that rarely extended beyond three or four generations, the ease and frequency by which individuals adopted new surnames and identities, and communication difficulties. Present in Spain, these obstacles were far more detrimental in the New World, where growing racial intermixture required an institutional and social recalibration of the meaning of purity and nobility. Churchmen and jurists recognized that these flaws not only enabled candidates to conceal their ancestral stains, but the spirit of the process itself could be undermined by attempts to sully a rival’s reputation through innuendo or false accusations. The volume showcases numerous instances of probable or definitive concealment. Yet more interesting, perhaps, is Javier Sanchiz’s suggestion that a great many of those found to have converso ancestry in sixteenth-century Mexico were likely as surprised as the Inquisitors themselves.The contributors accord as much attention to the men who headed ecclesiastical institutions as they do to those they vetted. The Inquisition, we learn, responded to evolving local social and political circumstances, evidencing, in the words of Nikolaus Böttcher, a “slow but effective modernization” to safeguard its continued relevance (p. 204). While this flexibility originally entailed overlooking the Jewish ancestry of influential colonial functionaries and later shifted to a concern over racial impurities of indios, mestizos, and castas, it ultimately involved a recognition that genealogical investigations had become “a mere formality” in a society as thoroughly intermixed as late colonial New Spain (p. 215). Alexandre Coello de la Rosa and Norma Angélica Castillo Palma highlight a similar willingness among some clergy to open educational opportunities to capable candidates of plebeian and uncertain racial stock, even if such tolerance proved fleeting (in one instance prompted by the need to fill Indian parishes with bilingual priests following a wave of secularization).The volume is best at revealing the attitudes and mores of colonial society’s elite and middle sectors. Even within these groups, however, our view is somewhat circumscribed. As Sanchiz points out, scholars working with official inquiries into purity of blood confront an unfortunate filter effect in that these processes excluded those who did not bother to submit to an investigation knowing full well what authorities might uncover. Castillo Palma extends her analysis the furthest down the social hierarchy, showing how late colonial mulattoes and Indians began producing their own proofs of descent that omitted ignoble branches of the family tree, thereby contributing to an ongoing process of social whitening (a point seconded by Böttcher). Such interpretations may suggest a top-down acceptance for the meaning of race, although Bernd Hausberger’s intriguing essay on the Basques moves in a different direction. Reminiscent of David Nirenberg’s study of the dialogical process at play in the rereading of lineage among fifteenth-century Jews, Christians, and conversos, Hausberger traces how Basque identity was shaped by a creative refashioning of Castilian notions of purity and nobility. By favoring language and a biblical forefather (Noah’s grandson Tubal) over religion, the Basques claimed to be the direct descendants of the original Iberians, untainted by subsequent influxes into the peninsula. This imagined past bolstered claims of a universal nobility (hidalguía universal) that extended even to those who practiced base occupations.Scholars of race and religion will welcome this fine collection. As is often the case with anthologies, some of the essays are more ambitious and fully developed than others, but on the whole they work well together, offering intriguing points of comparison concerning the function and meaning of purity of blood and nobility across the Spanish Atlantic.

Translation and Retranslation in the AnonymousRefranes y Sentencias of 1596

This article analyzes the ideological and sociological uses of literal translation in Refranes y Sentencias, an anonymous compilation of Basque proverbs, with Spanish translations, published in 1596. The compilation is published at the moment when Basques vie for influence in the Spanish court, using the alleged purity and antiquity of their language as a sign of “purity of blood”, thus claiming priority at court. Refranes y Sentencias illustrates how bilingualism works in the early modern Basque speaking areas, as well as how this bilingualism is perceived and refigured by Basque intellectuals. By resorting to linguistic archaism and the supposed “folk wisdom” reflected in the proverbs, the compilation contributes to cement Basque fictions of cultural and genealogical purity and deflect Castilian cultural and linguistic influence.

“Drowned in Blood”:

“Drowned in Blood”:

Does ethnic origin determine integration success? A comparison of immigration policies in Germany and Japan

The paper analyzes public policy and public opinion responses toward immigrants in Germany and Japan, two countries whose immigration policies have relied on blood purity (jus sanguinis). The paper retraces the rationale for jus sanguinis and contends that it was adopted at the turn of the century in both countries out of political convenience. The principles and goals of immigration policies are compared cautioning that better principles must not mean better outcomes. It is reiterated that Germany has made a politically motivated move away from the ethnic monocultural concept, whereas Japan still hangs on more or less to the old model of silent and subtle assimilation. The more dissuasive Japanese model of tight immigration control, deportation and monocultural assimilation isthen compared to the more permissive German immigration model. A comparison of identity discourses in the form of Japanese Nihonjinron and German Leitkultur shows that both countries struggle with identifying and asserting their core values and that this has a negative impact on integration issues. The paper concludes that Germany has failed to bear the full consequences of its ambitious plans by taking into account the values, beliefs and worldviews of its immigrants, whereas Japan continues to treat immigrants as temporary guests denying any need for long-term integration.

“Pure and Noble Indians, Untainted by Inferior Idolatrous Races”: Native Elites and the Discourse of Blood Purity in Late Colonial Mexico

Abstract As sixteenth-century Spaniards constructed their global empire, they carried with them the racial-religious concept of “limpieza de sangre,” or blood purity, which restricted marginalized communities from exercising prestige and authority. However, the complex demographic arena of early modern America, so different from the late medieval Iberia that gave rise to the discourse, necessarily destabilized and complicated limpieza’s meanings and modes of expression. This article explores a variety of ways by which indigenous elites in late colonial Mexico sought to take advantage of these ambiguities and describe themselves as “pure-blooded,” thereby reframing their local authority in terms recognized and respected by Spanish authorities. Specifically, savvy native lords naturalized the concept by portraying their own ancestors as the originators of “pure” bloodlines in America. In doing so, they reoriented the imagined metrics of purity so as to distinguish themselves from native commoners, mestizos, and the descendants of Africans. However, applying limpieza in native communities could backfire: after two centuries of extensive race mixing, many native lords found themselves vulnerable to accusations of uncleanliness and ancestral shame. Yet successful or not, indigenous participation in the discourse of limpieza helped influence what it meant in New Spain to be “honorable” and “pure,” and therefore eligible for social mobility.

O sangue e a fé: escrita e identidade de franciscanos nascidos em espaços coloniais ibéricos (Lima e Índia Portuguesa, século XVII)

This paper analyzes the 17th century writings of Buenaventura Salinas Y Cordova (born in Lima) and Miguel da Purificacao (born in Portuguese India), in defense of Spanish and Portuguese descendants born overseas, based on the supposed nobility of their ancestors , besides loyalty to the Crown and to Catholicism. The analysis demonstrates the similarity of their arguments and appropriations of the Iberian Peninsula blood purity concept in America and Portuguese India.

Frailes revoltosos: corrección y disciplinamiento social de los dominicos de Castilla en la primera mitad del siglo XVI

In Castile, at the dawn of the Modern Age, the reform movement led to a closer monitoring of the friars and a continuous process of disciplining them and correcting their behavior. Based on the legislation emanated from the provincial chapters of the Order of Preachers, moral theological treatises composed by the religious order itself and numerous files preserved in the State archives (letters of the Dominicans to the kings or the Holy See and records of blood cleansing from different convents), this article explores the relationship between reformation and exclusion of conversos in Castilian monasteries. Certainly, this is a rather complex process that will eventually give a new meaning to the word «observant.» Throughout the period studied, the exclusion of «New Christians» was not easy or final, as one might have thought. This procedure was rather unpopular among the Dominicans until the 1520s and was embraced only by the convent of Santo Tomas de Avila. In fact, the participation of many monks in the Revolt of the Comuneros, and the suspicions that were later brought on by Erasmism increased the repressive capacity of the superiors of the order, a situation that favored the subsequent imposition of the statute of purity of blood in monasteries that functioned as study centers.

The Context and Structure of the Meiji Nationality Law: The Establishment of 'Japanese' Nationality Through Assimilation and Exclusion

This paper (available in Japanese) examines the process by which the nationality was created during the Meiji revolutionary era of Japan. In particular, it explores the ideology behind the definition of nationality as established by the Meiji Nationality Law. This law was the first law that explicitly attempted to define the nationality in the context of the expansion of Western powers in East Asia. While insisting on the purity of Japanese blood, the Meiji Nationality Law also had to make maneuvers so as to allow Japan to expand its own territory and incorporate the Ainus, Okinawans, and a broader range of peoples in Asia. This paper primarily relies on the proceedings of the Imperial Diet that enacted this law, as well as manuscripts of major political and legal thinkers of the time. It was originally submitted as a Bachelor's thesis at Waseda University in 1999, but the author thinks that it contains materials that are worthy as a public asset and is making it available for the first time today (2011).

The Subject of the King and a Mercantile Ideology in Early Modern Spain

This article proposes an interpretation of Lope de Vega's El Brasil Restituido (1625) that points to the political, military, and economic crises of Spain in Europe as the underlying themes of the representation of the retaking of the Brazilian colony of Bahía from the Dutch. The Spanish monarchy faced a major challenge to its European supremacy during the first two decades of the seventeenth century. Not only was its military power being frontally contested at different sites of Europe, but its political and economic influence was rapidly deteriorating as well. One of the goals of the Count-Duke of Olivares, the powerful prime minister of Phillip IV, was to regain European leadership by mobilizing the mercantile segments of Spain. The play illustrates the confluence of two ideological systems during the transformation of Spanish feudal society. On the one hand, the dominant ideology of blood purity legitimizes the seigniorial structure of lineage; on the other hand, the representation of a new merchant as a good servant of the king discloses the important role that a mercantile enterprise and ethos had acquired in the formation of a subject to the monarchy.

Meanings of blood, bleeding and blood donations in Pakistan: implications for national vs global safe blood supply policies.

Contemporary public policy, supported by international arbitrators of blood policy such as the World Health Organization and the International Federation of the Red Cross, asserts that the safest blood is that donated by voluntary, non-remunerated donors from low-risk groups of the population. These policies promote anonymous donation and discourage kin-based or replacement donation. However, there is reason to question whether these policies, based largely on Western research and beliefs, are the most appropriate for ensuring an adequate safe blood supply in many other parts of the world.This research explored the various and complex meanings embedded in blood using empirical ethnographic data from Pakistan, with the intent of informing development of a national blood policy in that country. Using a focused ethnographic approach, data were collected in 26 in-depth interviews, 6 focus group discussions, 12 key informant interviews and 25 hours of observations in blood banks and maternity and surgical wards.The key finding was that notions of caste-based purity of blood, together with the belief that donors and recipients are symbolically knitted in a kin relationship, place a preference on kin-blood. The anonymity inherent in current systems of blood extraction, storage and use as embedded in contemporary policy discourse and practice was problematic as it blurred distinctions that were important within this society.The article highlights the importance—to ensuring a safe blood supply—of basing blood procurement policies on local, context-specific belief systems rather than relying on uniform, one-size-fits-all global policies. Drawing on our empirical findings and the literature, it is argued that the practice of kin-donated blood remains a feasible alternative to the global ideal of voluntary, anonymous donations. There is a need to focus on developing context-sensitive strategies for promoting blood safety, and critically revisit the assumptions underlying contemporary global blood procurement policies.

In the Business of Dying: Questioning the Commercialization of Hospice

This article critically questions the commercialization of hospice care and the ethical concerns associated with the industry's movement toward "market-driven medicine" at the end of life. For example, the article examines issues raised by an influx of for-profit hospice providers whose business model appears at its core to have an ethical conflict of interest between shareholders doing well and terminal patients dying well. Yet, empirical data analyzing the experience of patients across the hospice industry are limited, and general claims that end-of-life patient care is inferior among for-profit providers or even that their business practices are somehow unseemly when compared to nonprofit providers cannot be substantiated. In fact, non-profit providers are not immune to potentially conflicting concerns regarding financial viability (i.e., "no margin, no mission"). Given the limitations of existing empirical data and contrasting ideological commitments of for-profit versus non-profit providers, the questions raised by this article highlight important areas for reflection and further study. Policymakers and regulators are cautioned to keep ethical concerns in the fore as an increasingly commercialized hospice industry continues to emerge as a dominant component of the U.S. health care system. Both practitioners and researchers are encouraged to expand their efforts to better understand how business practices and commercial interests may compromise the death process of the patient and patient's family--a process premised upon a philosophy and ethical tradition that earlier generations of hospice providers and proponents established as a trusted, end-of-life alternative.

Pacific Revisions of Blackness: Blacks Address Race and Belonging in Hawai'i

Hawai'i is heralded as a model of U.S. multiculturalism due to its demographic diversity, yet those wishing to invalidate Barak Obama's “Americanness” and his “blackness” depict the state as extranational. Local debates over sovereignty, however, can divide islanders into Hawaiians and colonial settlers. These national and local discourses of Hawai'i curiously neglect Blacks, who are an absent presence and a present absence in the islands: despite the disproportionate influence that Black cultural forms (particularly hip hop and reggae) exercise on the islands’ culture, Hawai'i's Blacks and their histories remain virtually unknown. Hawai'i's colonial and immigrant history, imported U.S. racist thinking, and indigenous Hawaiian ideologies have shaped ideas of belonging and difference in which culture, race, and ancestry are intertwined. The biologization of race developed on the continent and is rooted in the notion of blood purity that benefits Whites. The quantification of blood and a hierarchical sortin...

"O lustre do seu sangue": bramanismo e tópicas de distinção no contexto português

Este artigo visa analisar o modo como os discursos bramânicos que circulavam no espaço indiano (nos quais a pureza ritual e a endogamia eram topoi recorrentes) foram percebidos, experienciados e apropriados pelos agentes ao serviço da coroa de Portugal. Entre outros aspectos, interessa-me perceber em que medida é que esses discursos tiveram paralelo em (ou dialogaram com) os discursos linhagísticos que alimentaram os estatutos de limpeza de sangue, cada vez com maior expansão e aplicação no contexto metropolitano ibérico e seus respectivos territórios imperiais

The Problem of Conversos and the Enactment of the Statutes of the Purity of Blood in Medieval Spain

The Problem of Conversos and the Enactment of the Statutes of the Purity of Blood in Medieval Spain