Race, Bodies, and Colonialism in the Americas

Race, Bodies, and Colonialism in the Americas Anne S. Macpherson Medicine and Nation-Building in the Americas, 1890–1940 By José Amador. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2015. Punishment in Paradise: Race, slavery, human rights, and a nineteenth century Brazilian penal colony By Peter Beattie. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, culture, and the struggle for the Canal Zone By Michael Donoghue. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring difference in the colonial New Kingdom of Granada By Joanne Rappaport. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Ever Faithful: Race, loyalty, and the ends of empire in Spanish Cuba By David Sartorius. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, mulattos, and the quest for social mobility in the Spanish Indies By Ann Twinam. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. Scholarship on the historical elaboration of racial categories, hierarchies, identities, and modes of exploitation and resistance in the Americas has become a vast ramified tree. The books reviewed here illustrate the relevance of constructivist racial analysis to understandings of imperial legitimacy and bureaucracy, state management of subjects’ and citizens’ health and punishment, and clashes between empires and nations. They span the 1500s to the 1900s, the Caribbean and Central America to the Venezuelan coast, Colombian Andes, Lima, and Brazil’s peripheries, and deal with Spanish colonialism from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and United States formal and informal empire for the 1900s. The anticolonial nationalism of late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Cuba is addressed by José Amador, the nationalism of imperial and Old Republic Brazil by him and Peter Beattie. Joanne Rappaport, Ann Twinam and David Sartorius scrutinize racial issues in places that Spain was bringing under control, ruling or seeking to retain. Rappaport initially defines her topic as the meaning of “mestizo” in sixteenth-century Nuevo Reino de Granada, specifically the Santafé and Tunja highlands, but stretches well into the eighteenth century. Twinam’s core interest is how the possibility for pardos to purchase whitening from the Crown came into existence and was handled in the 1760s–1810s; she contextualizes her far-flung cases as flowing from long-term struggles for mobility within the imperial system by enslaved Africans and their descendants. Sartorius’ focus is Cuban loyalty to Spain; he picks up where Twinam leaves off, with the 1812 Cádiz Constitution, and ends with the withering of the possibility of a liberalized Spanish colonialism in the 1890s. Rappaport’s book adds to historiography that since at least the 1990s has illuminated the classificatory practices that emerged as Spanish invaders and bureaucrats, Indigenous leaders and commoners, enslaved and free Africans and the generations emerging from sexual unions among these groups all sought to make sense of diversity and hybridity, though with varying purposes and degrees of intensity.1 Since Douglas Cope demonstrated that even in Mexico City circa 1700 the sistema de castas existed only as elite ideology, and not as social reality, scholars have been exploring the range of elite ideas about categorization—versions of which became legally codified—and the greater pluralism of non-elite views. This is a scholarship that fully recognizes that the language of “race” was developing in the early colonial period, and was distinct from later biological essentialism. Close contextualized reading of archival documents is standard practice, and the constructed, contested and somewhat fluid nature of “racial” classification is assumed. Rappaport has found an interesting body of archival evidence about early colonial Nuevo Reino de Granadans’ uncertain and shifting views of their own and others’ calidad—a summation of their physical, cultural and reputational attributes. She argues that there was no settled elite or state system of classification in the 1500s and 1600s, let alone settled patterns of non-elite self-classification. She suggests that this and the appearance of a majority-mestizo population in the central highlands led to eighteenth-century Nuevo Reino classifications that were quite different from the sistema de castas ideology of New Spain’s elite and also distinct from what Cope found to be plebeian indifference to most racial classification. Rappaport is most successful in elucidating pre-conquest Spanish conventions for describing physical appearance, in showing that some women of mixed Spanish and indigenous

Ancient history · Archaeology · Colonialism · Empire · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Anthropology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Cuban History and Society · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law

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