Spanish Colonial Research Articles

Descend or Defend: Iligan as a Toponym and its Relevance to Local Historiography

The history of Iligan City in Northern Mindanao, the Philippine Islands, stretches back as far as the beginning of Spanish colonization in the second half of the 17th century. Although its contemporary history ranging from the later American Period during the Second World War to its rise as an industrial city in the following three decades after the war is well- examined, Iligan’s history during the Spanish Period remains a difficult picture to imagine. It is not only because documentary evidence is very limited, its indigenous population relies on oral tradition to tell the story of its past. The difficulty of access to primary sources which are either tucked away in the national archives or that they are written in a language that in contrast to the rest of the then Spanish Empire never became the primary language of the country contributed to local historiography in the Philippines making use of oral accounts by indigenous peoples, and this is similar when it comes to Iligan. Specifically, this paper examines Iligan as a toponym to trace the possible origin and meaning of the term. By looking into both readily available archival sources and the cultural memory of the tribal authorities of one of the city’s indigenous peoples, the Higaunon, this paper shows that they are the first settlers of Iligan and that one of the earliest sites of culture contact was the mouth- river of Iligan, which perhaps one of the reasons why Spaniards chose this area to establish a fort. Most importantly, this paper proves that Iligan as a toponym is not empty in meaning, but rather mirrors past relations and activities, which are relevant in the writing of local history.

Spanish Influence among Filipinos: A Sociolinguistic Theory

Spanish colonialism has led to raising a significant issue of how much influence Filipino millennials have felt from it until today, particularly on our language, culture, and identity. Several research undertakings have been conducted, but there was rare to none that is conducted specifically for the prevalence of Spanish Colonialism through a linguistic perspective in the Visayan Region, which becomes the drive of the conduct of this research. This paper aimed to explore the prevalence of Spanish influence through linguistic perspective among Visayan college freshmen. The study used qualitative design employing the interpretative phenological method of investigation to offer insights into how informants make sense of a given situation. Seven (7) informants were purposively and conveniently selected for an in-depth interview to elicit the necessary information. The qualitative data gathered from the interviews were transcribed and encoded using a word document to tabulate and generate codes with their emerging themes. The study revealed seven themes which are: Religious Practice and Language Use; Cultural Transmission; Familiarity with the Spanish Language; Variation of Affective Impressions; Comfortability of Using the Language and Preference of Learning the Native Visayan Language; Assimilation of Spanish Mentality and its Influences to our Language, Culture and Identity; and Confirmation of Spanish influence. It was concluded then that Spanish Colonialism is still prevalent today from a sociolinguistic perspective, in other words, the confirmation of the relationship between language and culture. The intertwined relationship between these two makes the Spanish colonization very alive and prevalent up until today, which was keenly used by the colonizer to maintain their holds on the colonized. The results of this study could generate efforts to revive our language and culture because doing so is tantamount to reviving our own identity as Visayan Filipino. However, we will still continue to assimilate or conform to what we are used to speaking. Certainly, the beauty with the effort of preservation will enrich our language and culture as the trend of assimilating the Spanish one goes on.

The Role of French Algeria in American Incorporation of the Philippines and Puerto Rico

This article argues that France’s conquest and subsequent legal treatment of Algeria as an integral part of France, though without French citizenship for Algerians, served as a transnational precedent for US incorporation of former Spanish colonies in the early twentieth century. While the United States also drew lessons from British colonial policy, as scholarship has shown, France’s republican empire offered particular tools, which scholars have not studied, for US courts to designate Filipinos and Puerto Ricans like French Algerians. In essence, French Algeria provided an example for US jurists to create an imperial category for new territorial peoples as neither US citizens nor foreign subjects but as “nationals.” The article draws principally on the so-called Insular Cases, US newspapers, and political documents. The article exposes transnational connections between the United States and France in constructing empires of white freedom, no less important than imagined Anglo-Saxonism at the time.

Lazarillo de Tormes: A Graphic Novel by Enriqueta Zafra

Reviewed by: Lazarillo de Tormes: A Graphic Novel by Enriqueta Zafra Debora Zamorano Zafra, Enriqueta. Lazarillo de Tormes: A Graphic Novel. U of Toronto P, 2021. Pp. 124. ISBN 978-1-4875-2938. Lazarrilo de Tormes, a graphical novel, is an innovative and captivating adaptation of one of the classics of Spanish Literature, the anonymous sixteenth-century work, Lazarillo de Tormes. Lazarillo was the bastard son of a prostitute. He works for various masters who teach him dirty ways to survive. His life with his different masters reveals the corruption in imperial Spain. This work created the picaresque novel, a genre that, according to the author, shows injustice while amusing the reader. Zafra’s graphic novel is based on the first four versions of the book as well as the censored version of 1573. One of Zafra’s objectives in writing her graphic novel is to explain the historical context of the original novel to the modern reader. Therefore, she concentrates the original novel history on different periods of time: before 1554, when the novel was first written; the period when it was first printed; the period when it was censored; and when it was published again after being censored. The author also mentions the combination of its final version and other works. Because the original book had many different editions, there is a chronological disruption of six centuries among these various editions of the book. These disruptions are captured in the structure of the book. The structure includes Zafra’s acknowledgments and the introduction, where she gives the reader an overview of the history of the original novel and the main differences [End Page 632] in her novel. Zafra then dedicates a page to the 1553 book, where she briefly explains the anonymity of the anti-hero. Following this, she displays the history of the first translation of the book and why it was translated from Spanish to English. Next, Zafra shows the readers the illustrations of the four editions of the book, and Lazarillo begins his case as the predecessor of many literary anti-heroes which leads to the first chapter of Zafra’s novel. In this first chapter, Lazarillo gives an account of his childhood. The author believes that the last conversation of the chapter, where Lazarillo accused religious people of robbing their flocks, possibly took place before the publication of the censored version of the book. Lazarillo went against powerful men in Spanish society at the time; hence the need to censor the book. The author then makes a pause in the story and details the characters implicated in Lazarillo’s editorial history. The editorial history is particularly important and clarifying for todays’ readers. As Zafra points out: “Our graphic novel reconstructs his [censor Juan López de Velasco] editorial input in an interactive way so that the reader is able to witness the reasons behind his decisions, his network and alliances and entrepreneurial approach to the export of his version to the American market” (xv). The following section mentions the importance of the year 1599, when the success of the censored Lazarillo version occurred. Through a funny conversation, Zafra depicts Miguel de Cervantes supposedly giving his opinion about the book. In chapter two, Zafra describes how Lazarillo settled down with a priest and what happened to him. Zafra then gives the story another pause to explain the conversations about the versions of the novel in 2019. The illustrations show a professor teaching to his students about the transformations and adversities of Lazarilo’s editorial history. Zafra then goes back to the story in the remaining chapters of her novel. One of the successes of the original book stems from its influencing of other books with similar style, such as works as Guzmán de Alfarache’s and Miguel de Cervantes’s works. Zafra follows the graphic novel Don Quixote (2011) by Rob Davis, adapted from the novel written by Miguel de Cervantes in 1605. This may be a reason why Zafra features Miguel de Cervantes as probably the ultimate reader of Lazarillo de Tormes in her graphic novel. In it, Zafra discusses how Cervantes could have reacted to some issues he might have had with...

Review: Philip II of Spain and the Architecture of Empire

Review: <i>Philip II of Spain and the Architecture of Empire</i>

Antonia Mercé “La Argentina” in the Philippines: Spanish Dance and Colonial Gesture

This article examines Antonia Mercé La Argentina's stay in Manila in 1929 and the creation of her solo La Cariñosa as a case study to analyze the place of Spanish dance as both colonizing and colonized on the basis of the cultural legacies since Romanticism, when Spanish dance was an exoticized and racialized “Other dance” in relation to the canon and hierarchies of Western dance. La Argentina's supposed homage to the Filipino people in the creation of a solo that stylized their national dance performed for Western audiences continued the exercise of colonial power. The result of those processes of appropriation would be the creation of a repertoire of “Hispanic essences” of that constructed postcolonial “community”; a catalogue equivalent to the rock-hard monumentality of a Hispanidad—the commemoration through Columbus statues and colonial architecture—now celebrated from the body, its performativity, its symbolism, and its gesture.

De la inversión de los roles tradicionales o el declive de un mito familiar africano en Las tinieblas de tu memoria Negra de Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo

This article analyzes, from the novel (colonial) Las tinieblas de tu memoria negra by Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo, the reversal of traditional roles or the decline of an African family myth from a postcolonial perspective. The novel is about an innominate child who is forced to become one of the best defenders of vernacular customs of his people to the detriment of the Judeo-Christian religion chosen by his father. The central problem of the work to study is the difficult attempt to preserve the African tradition in a world that has changed after the arrival of the Spanish colonizers in Equatorial Guinea, in the case at hand. The main objective of the study is to show the importance of Occident colonization in what we can call the decline of an African family myth. Another task of this work is to show the survival of the perennial tradition-modernity dichotomy not only in literature but also in contemporary African societies.

Urban Layout of the First Ibero-American Cities on the Continent through Conventual Foundations: The Cases of Santo Domingo (1502) and Panama Viejo (1519)

In the present investigation, we study the influence of conventual foundations on the origin of the urban layout of two of the first cities in the Spanish colonization of America: Santo Domingo (1502) and Panama Viejo (1519), examples of early colonial urbanism. Starting with cartography and historical bibliography, as well as recent studies on their urban evolution and using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for graphic representation, a comparative study is carried out between both cities divided into stages of urban expansion until their consolidation (or disappearance in the case of Panama in 1671). We have been able to verify how, in Santo Domingo, the religious orders settled on the outskirts of the city, marking the axes of expansion as an instrument of control and consolidation of an urban layout closer to the idea of a grid, which will materialize more precisely in later cities. Meanwhile, in Panama Viejo, the city was formed longitudinally on the streets occupied by the convents, which served as the main axes that defined the urban design of the city. This article aims to demonstrate the importance of the role of religious power in the formation of the cities presented here.

Sino-Filipino Artistic Collaboration

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The Hispano-Philippine style of ivory sculpture production in colonial Manila is almost synonymous with the growth of Spain’s global empire from the sixteenth century onward. These sculptures have been studied by historians and art critics alike in terms of Latin American consumer demand, marketability, Catholic devotion and conversion, and “Chineseness,” among other veins of inquiry. Common across these investigations is discussion of the significance of Chinese immigrants within the Spanish colony, who have been consistently identified as the creators of these sculptures. One community of artisans important to Philippine sculpture-making, however, has been understudied: the native Filipinos of colonial Manila, by far the largest group in the city. Why has the role of native Filipinos, despite being documented as painters and sculptors contemporaneous with the Chinese immigrants, been disregarded in the art-historical record of ivory sculpture production? In this article, I address these “silences” within the Hispano-Philippine sculptural archive by historicizing the sociocultural milieu of colonial Manila, performing visual analysis informed by postcolonial theory, and interrogating commonly referenced sources and narratives, an endeavor I maintain will enable art historians to contextualize these sculptures within a larger imperial, intercultural, and intersubjective framework of artistic creation.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

Kolonialer Sprachkontakt: Spuren der indigenen Lebenswelt und der lenguas generales des historischen Paraguays im Spanischen der Jesuiten

Abstract The aim of this contribution is to examine the contact situation between Spanish and indigenous languages in historical Paraguay, using a corpus of one hundred texts written by Jesuits in the 18th century. To overcome cultural and linguistic barriers, the members of the Jesuit Order used various strategies, especially learning the two lenguas generales Guaraní and Quichua for missionary work, which resulted in a certain multilingualism among the religious. The main focus is on the linguistic influences on colonial Spanish, coming from older indigenous varieties and especially from the lenguas generales Guaraní and Quichua, both widespread across the region in historical Paraguay. The traces of this historical contact situation can be found in toponymic designations, and as lexical and even morphological borrowings, which are still vital today, especially in the American varieties of Spanish.

Benedicto Sáenz 'Libera Me': Occidentalisms in Latin America Nineteenth-Century Sacred Music

This article uses concepts of Occidentalism and the musical analysis of a funerary responsory by nineteenth-century Guatemalan composer Benedicto Sáenz (1807-1857) to examine possible reasons why music from nineteenth-century Latin America remains relatively neglected in the region and beyond, unlike the better explored repertoires from colonial times and from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Based on Latin American postcolonial notions of Occidentalism as the construction of the Western Hemisphere by Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and analysis of Sáenzs responsory&nbsp;Libera Me within the context of changing political, social, and musical trends in nineteenth-century Guatemala, I argue that nineteenth-century music in Latin America reflects local struggles to engage with two competing models of European modernity: the “first modernity” of the Spanish colonial empire and the “second modernity” of the Enlightenment, Liberalism, and the French Revolution. Responding to influences from both modernities,&nbsp;Libera Me expresses local European habiti that do not fit Orientalist narratives of Latin American Otherness or nationalist narratives of local distinctiveness which have influenced the musical historiography in the region.

In the Blood of Our Brothers: Abolitionism and the End of the Slave Trade in Spain's Atlantic Empire, 1800–1870

Jesús Sanjurjo posits that the end of the slave trade to the Spanish empire was largely the result of “international political negotiations that excluded the Spanish authorities and ignored Spanish political actors”—an argument that echoes older, Anglocentric scholarship on the topic and fails to engage with the literature's recent focus on the role that the enslaved themselves played in pushing for abolition (p. 2). (White) Spanish anti–slave trade activists, he sustains, contributed only in terms of turning public sentiment against the slave trade. In so doing, they worked concurrently with the growth of liberalism in the Spanish empire, which Sanjurjo rightly points out looks different in the Spanish context. In Spanish liberalism, liberal political actors privileged preserving what was left of the empire, safeguarding the wealth of Cuba, and generally placating the Cuban elite. This argument about the ties between slavery and Spanish liberalism is intriguing, but it remains unclear whether the book's research, writing, and analysis do it justice.Chapter 1 treats the familiar early Spanish anti–slave trade activists: the statesman Agustín de Argüelles, law student Isidoro de Antillón, and expatriate journalist José Blanco White. With just a few allies, these men singlehandedly initiated public discussion about outlawing the slave trade and slavery itself in Spain—an essential aspect of the author's argument that they “contributed to building the public consensus” against the slave trade (p. 2). But strangely, Sanjurjo barely references—much less analyzes with any thoughtfulness—the body of work that they produced. This is a curious choice because their speeches and publications not only evince deep engagement with the broader abolitionist movements throughout the Atlantic world but also present uniquely Spanish arguments and proposals that merit attention.The next chapter outlines the British diplomatic pressure that resulted in the deeply flawed—and unenforced—Treaty of 1817, by which Madrid agreed to a plan to end the slave trade to the Spanish territories. Here, Sanjurjo references the related 1816 Council of the Indies report that recommended the abolition of the slave trade. He refers to it as “extraordinarily important”—even though it was a dead letter—but does so while attacking other scholars who have written on this topic for downplaying it, misinterpreting it, or failing to mention it altogether (p. 29). Unfortunately, such ruthless attacks against existing scholarship mar much of the book.Chapter 3 has some useful aspects, as it explains the “necessary evil” argument that Spanish elites forged in response to British abolitionist pressure. Sanjurjo shows how instead of attempting to directly counter British arguments about the immorality of the slave trade, proslavery Spanish and Spanish American elites argued that it was a “necessary evil” that would preserve the Cuban economy—and by extension, the economy of the entire empire. Its proponents, Francisco Arango y Parreño among them, framed British abolitionist pressure in terms of nationalistic discourse, suggesting that to be Spanish and Cuban would mean to push back against foreign interlopers who sought to harm Spanish interests under the guise of abolitionism.Chapter 4 examines Cuban historian and politician José Antonio Saco, who is sometimes considered as having contributed to antislavery sentiment. Sanjurjo rightly characterizes Saco as arguing against the slave trade not because he believed it was wrong but because he was convinced that the island's sugar industry and white population would be better off without it. But here again, when given an opportunity to execute original research with new archival sources that could have shed light on such important concepts, the author fails to do so, instead relying on just a few well-known published sources and secondary literature. Throughout the book, in fact, there is a notable lack of substantive engagement with archival sources in England, Spain, and Spanish America. The final chapter—the book is quite short, at only 123 pages of body text—outlines the rise of the Spanish Abolitionist Society in Madrid but strangely fails to engage with Christopher Schmidt-Nowara's groundbreaking work on the topic or the archives he used, instead delivering a basic outline of historical events largely based on secondary sources.The epilogue offers a thesis that frames antislavery and anti–slave trade thinking as “contradictory and complementary . . . Liberal and absolutist, progressive and conservative, egalitarian and racist” (p. 121). While in theory this gesture toward the confounding complexity of Spanish political sentiment regarding the slave trade is suggestive, the book is simply not up to the task of illustrating such historical nuance. It is hampered by an excessively combative approach to the existing literature and an impoverished understanding of the relevant archival documentation. Throughout, its organization is difficult to follow, and the argumentation is both scant and unclear. The book will be of interest to scholars who work on antislavery and abolition in the Spanish empire, but it brings little new to their table.

The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean

In this book, Tessa Murphy examines the cultural, political, and economic transformations of “the Creole Archipelago,” an interconnected island grouping composed of Dominica, Grenada, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, and Tobago. Murphy successfully demonstrates how this space evolved into a “center of broader imperial experimentation and contestation” during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (p. 4). However, this is not a story of imperial competition for political and commercial supremacy. Instead, Murphy persuades readers to rethink the history of the colonial Caribbean. Rather than portraying the Lesser Antilles as discrete national dominions, The Creole Archipelago recounts how these archipelagic borderlands were shaped by the interplay of Europeans, Indigenous Kalinagos, and free and enslaved African descendants. Murphy depicts the emergence of a culturally, politically, and religiously entangled archipelago connected to the Atlantic world but also molded by local dynamics and people. The author's meticulous analysis of multi-imperial sources from repositories in France, the United Kingdom, Martinique, Dominica, Grenada, and the United States allows her to elucidate the formation of this interconnected zone—a hub of new notions of colonial subjecthood, race, and dominion.The book is organized chronologically. After a chapter analyzing how treaty making between Indigenous Kalinagos and French and English colonists was critical in determining seventeenth-century Antillean geopolitics, chapter 2 examines the development of peculiar colonial spaces in Kalinago territories. Ordinary people from the French Antilles looked for opportunity and mobility on Kalinago islands, creating autonomous slave societies beyond imperial control. Chapter 3 analyzes how the Seven Years' War facilitated the development of an absentee plantocracy in the eastern Caribbean with direct connections to slave traders operating in Africa. The Creole Archipelago aligns perfectly with scholarship examining the role of Afro-descendants as legal subjects in the Atlantic world. In chapter 4, Murphy's masterful use of colonial correspondence as well as parish and land records allows her to demonstrate how the post–Seven Years' War eastern Caribbean—not nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa and Asia—became the epicenter of early debates and disputes over the rights and privileges of colonial subjects. While Great Britain challenged French Catholics' landownership rights in former Kalinago islands, French settlers and free Afro-descendants embraced British legal culture to protect their rights. Chapter 5 illuminates the relationship between the expansion of sugar plantations, marronage, and racialization in the Creole Archipelago. Murphy also invites us to reexamine the course of important events in Atlantic history. Chapters 6 and 7 explore the American and French Revolutions as episodes of civil and interimperial warfare.The Creole Archipelago joins recent studies that persuasively historicize colonial expansion in the Americas as a process of cross-cultural contact, diplomacy, and contestation. Moreover, the author paints a picture of Caribbean history that is much more intricate than narratives centered exclusively on mercantilism, the slave trade, and plantations. By exploring this space through the lenses of creolization and cultural symbiosis, Murphy makes significant contributions to the literature on imperial formations, race, and subjecthood. The Lesser Antilles were a contested space and served as a laboratory for colonial regulations on people of African descent, regulations that were subsequently implemented in places such as Saint-Domingue and Louisiana. Similarly, the legacy of French colonial society continued under British rule after the Seven Years' War, facilitating spaces of participation and opportunity for French Catholics, both white and free Afro-descendants. The Creole Archipelago also highlights the limitations of exploring turmoil during the Age of Revolutions as responses to political forces emanating from Europe, the 13 colonies, or even Saint-Domingue. In the Creole Archipelago, ordinary people forged alliances that responded more to local political conditions and personal interests than to metropolitan forces, loyalties, and ideologies.Given this journal's Latin American focus, this reviewer wonders whether more emphasis could have been placed on the role of Spanish people in the Creole Archipelago. Certainly, Murphy underscores how Spanish traders from Margarita, Cumaná, and Caracas patronized cacao markets in Saint Vincent. The author also points out the significance of Spanish troops in the French Revolutionary wars. Yet readers might be curious about the relationships between islands such as Tobago and Grenada and Spanish South America, and to what extent these interactions also shaped the Creole Archipelago. Nonetheless, these omissions do not undermine Murphy's sophisticated argument and important scholarly contributions in the least. By seriously considering Indigenous and Black agency, she is better able to portray the Lesser Antilles' complexity beyond the restrictive paradigms of the British West Indies and the French Antilles. The Creole Archipelago is an excellent book that questions established notions of subjecthood and empire “in order to understand the region in a way that would have made sense to those who lived there” (p. 16).

Review: Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing: The Akimel O’odham and Cycles of Agricultural Transformation in the Phoenix Basin, by Jennifer Bess

In Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing, Jennifer Bess offers a political economic history of the Akimel O’odham agrarian economy, from prehistory to the 1930s Indian Reorganization Act era, emphasizing adaptive irrigation and agricultural invention. Impressively researched, integrating archival data with oral knowledge, Blackbirds narrates a careful agricultural history of Indigenous social and ecological strategies of “survivance,” offering a counterpoint to what scholar Eve Tuck has called the “damage-centered research” that often prevails in research on Indigenous Peoples.1Theoretically, Bess makes three important moves. First, Bess follows work by Stephen Gudeman and other political anthropologists who emphasize a practice theory approach to economy—as something cultures “do” rather than as a “structure” of culture itself. This shift enables a liveliness and agency for Akimel O’odham innovation in “tribal capitalism” (Duane Champagne, quoted in Bess), especially during the nineteenth-century migration of settlers through Akimel O’odham territory to the California Gold Rush as well as in other periods in the Sonoran Desert, in which the Akimel O’odham engage wider markets of exchange as a mode of asserting what Bess presents as a distinct sense of ancestral “peoplehood.” Second, Bess sidesteps the allure of heavy-handed framings of settler colonialism to engage, instead, practices of persistence, creativity, and contemporary enactments of the Akimel O’odham epistemology of himdag, which anchors Akimel O’odham self-determination. While not disavowing the violence of settlement and war, Bess’s decision to work from another angle than settler colonial theory enables a text that is alive with Akimel O’odham perspectives and the “world building techniques” of agricultural economy, underscoring the contemporaneity and ingenuity of Akimel O’odham peoples in their multiple and complex encounters with first, the Spanish colonists who called them “Pima,” and later, the Anglo-Americans who settled their homelands. Third, Bess centers Akimel O’odham storytelling as central, critical historical method and ontologically, as dynamic, relational, place-based narrations of collective identities and not as “static relics” of the past (p. 230). By placing sacred stories and teachings from Akimel O’odham knowledge keepers and elders into equal standing and conversation with scholars, Bess generates a polyvocal text in which the expertise is distributed and weighted toward Akimel O’odham representations.Across seven chapters charting agrarian change in the context of colonial encounters, Blackbirds highlights Akimel O’odham resistance and adaptation during waves of conquest, examining the wider geopolitical, global context across periods of colonial encounter, and specific crops, especially wheat and later, cotton, and the farming implements these required. As such, Bess’s book offers not only an environmental history, but a history of agricultural technology in a wider context of Indigenous invention and global markets (for instance, for Pima Cotton). Throughout, the historical emphasis on Akimel O’odham resistance and leadership in the face of political, economic, and ecological crisis (Spanish conquest to the late nineteenth century’s forty-year famine) tells a story of the Akimel O’odham as early defenders of their territory and lifeways, as U.S. Federal Indian Policies and interagency “experimental stations” for the global expansion of Euro-American cotton markets created the conditions for water resource deprivation, labor extraction, and white settler encroachment into their River-desert homelands.As a cautionary note, the approach to theories of culture are antiquated in many places, drawing upon early mid-twentieth century anthropology (e.g. Edward Spicer and Hohokam “culture areas”), creating a tension with the book’s broader project of emphasizing Akimel O’odham world-building. Similarly, one wonders why Bess writes of Akimel O’odham “time-tested values” rather than knowledges, as such. Yet overall, the poetics of the text, which incorporates Akimel O’odham philosophy in songs, poetry, and diverse nomenclature makes this history of the Indigenous Southwest stand out as a project of Indigenous-centered humanities that will transform how we understand the environmental and economic history of one of the most urbanized areas of the Southwest, and the significant role of the Akimel O’odham, on their own terms, for U.S. history.

John Huxtable Elliott (1930–2022)

John Huxtable Elliott (1930–2022)

A Mexican Semiramide: García and Rossini in Postcolonial Latin America

AbstractIn 1828, five years after the premiere in Venice of Rossini's final Italian opera, Semiramide, Gaetano Rossi's libretto was again set to music, this time by the famed bel canto tenor and composer Manuel García in Mexico City. The opera, one of the first to be composed in Latin America after the collapse of the Spanish empire, was intended to demonstrate independent Mexico's ability not just to import Italian opera from Europe but also to produce new works. Instead of proving Mexico's credentials as a successful operatic nation, however, García's Semiramide became a problematic space for bringing to light tensions between underlying colonial resistance and the new liberal influence of France, England and Italy. This article contextualises this momentous operatic event within the wider frame of Mexico's nation building and investigates how the manifold political tensions and cultural contradictions of Mexico's postcolonial transition were absorbed and amplified by both García's composition and its staging.

“Twins in Spite of Themselves”: Spanish and Ottoman Empires’ “Issues of Decline” in XVIIIth Century

Spanish and Ottoman empires had more similarities that could be found at first glance. Both experienced the take-off as leading force in Europe and Asia respectively, being for a while the most fearful and powerful states during XVI, faced economic and political blunders in XVII century and slightly ended with stagnation in XVIII century (as conventional wisdom says). Using comparative method and cultural analysis, article tries to answer a question – how unique or regular was that issues which stroke Spain and Ottoman Empires, how deeply they were engaged in so called decline narrative, created in XIX century European historiography and is it possible to create common trend for empire`s stagnation using not only historical sociology method (sociology of revolution used by Jack Goldstone and Teda Skocpole) and world-system analysis provided by Immanuel Wallerstein, with emphasis on history of ideas or begriffsgeschichte by Reinhardt Kosseleck. Main results are going to provide a more correct view on the status of Spanish and Turkish Empires during the XVIII century. Despite that Ottomans and Spaniards had obvious differences in political distribution, economic capabilities, warfare tactics and external actions, almost simultaneous decline was based on clear and exact reasons: lack of industrialization (production with high surplus value), hush incorporation of Ottoman and Spanish Empires into World-Economy, lack of defending tariffs, ineffective fiscal system and policy, devastating and lasting wars, decreasing price for agricultural products, down warding Kondratieff cycle, rigid political and social units, which constrain strict political actions. These gaps made the Empire’s decline possible notwithstanding those problems which they had previously. Oppositely, major European states (England, France, Prussia) had made reversed actions, which took a long time, but made European “take-off” inevitable, assured their economical breakaway to further domination over the Ottomans and Spaniards as well.

"… In the extremity of an impotent despair": "Whatever Singularity," Postcolonial Ab-Use, and Erik Matti's On The Job

This essay investigates how concepts with a European provenance may be productively utilized as tools for analysis in the postcolony without reproducing the epistemic violence characteristic of colonial discourse. More specifically, this essay examines the key ideas of Giorgio Agamben, a philosopher repeatedly accused of insufficiently addressing the role empire plays in shaping history, to determine how his political ontology might be conscripted to understand the biopolitical logic of postcolonial states. We subject Agamben's ideas to what Gayatri Spivak refers to as "ab-use" by placing them in a staged confrontation with a postcolonial text, which we argue could stand in as a generative dialectical antithesis. We argue that Erik Matti's On the Job (2013), a cinematic text about prisoners who serve as government agents, is marked by the Philippines' history of multiple colonizations, a historical legacy that serves to mark the limits of Agamben's philosophy. We examine the discourse of religion and benevolent assimilation—emblematic of Spanish and American colonization of the Philippines, respectively—which are expressed metaphorically in the film in terms of sacrifice and cleanliness. We suggest that this method of discrediting the universal address of Agamben's thought clarifies its utility as it renders legible the unique form of biopower exerted by the Philippine postcolonial state.

Ricardo Padrón. The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West

Ricardo Padrón. <i>The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West</i>

Nicole Legnani. The Business of Conquest. Empire, Love and Law in the Atlantic World

Nicole Legnani. <i>The Business of Conquest. Empire, Love and Law in the Atlantic World</i>