Beyond Babel : translations of blackness in colonial Peru and New Granada / Larissa Brewer-García, University of Chicago.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brewer-García, Larissa, author.

Series:

Afro-Latin America

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sacabuche, Andrés.

Jesús, Ursula de, 1604-1666.

Jesús, Ursula de.

Black people--Missions--South America.

Black people.

Jesuits--Missions--South America.

Jesuits.

Missions.

Religion.

Black people--Missions.

South America.

Black people--South America--Religion.

Black people--South America.

Black people--Religion.

Physical Description:

xv, 303 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, [2020]

Summary:

In seventeenth-century Spanish America, black linguistic interpreters and spiritual intermediaries played key roles in the production of writings about black men and women. Focusing on the African diaspora in Peru and the southern continental Caribbean, Larissa Brewer-Garcia uncovers long-ignored or lost archival materials describing the experiences of black Christians in the transatlantic slave trade and the colonial societies where they arrived. Brewer-Garcia's analysis of these materials shows that black intermediaries bridged divisions among the populations implicated in the slave trade, exerting influence over colonial Spanish American writings and emerging racial hierarchies in the Atlantic world. The translated portrayals of blackness composed by these intermediaries stood in stark contrast to the pejorative stereotypes common in literary and legal texts of the period. Brewer-Garcia reconstructs the context of those translations and traces the contours and consequences of their notions of blackness, which were characterized by physical beauty and spiritual virtue.

Contents:

Introduction : linguistic and spiritual mediations in the earlier Black Atlantic

Black types between Renaissance humanism and Iberian counter Reformation theology

The transatlantic slave trade and Spanish American missionary translation policy

The mediations of black interpreters in colonial Cartagena de Indias

Conversion and the making of blackness in colonial Cartagena de Indias

Salvation and the making of blackness in colonial Cartagena de Indias

Coda : negros literarios

Appendix A: Whether learning the language of Angola should be established for Jesuits in Peru (ca. 1635-1638)

Appendix B: from Andrés Sacabuche's Testimony for Pedro Claver's beatification inquest (1659)

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 269-298) and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Brewer-García, Larissa, 1983- Beyond Babel.

ISBN:

9781108493000

1108493009

OCLC:

1132237463

Publisher Number:

99985410603