Larissa Brewer-García. Beyond Babel

In Beyond Babel: Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada, Larissa Brewer-García focuses on Black spiritual intermediaries and interpreters to recover ideas that diverge in significant ways from many baroque texts. The book argues that this influential group of African and Afrodescendant men and women promoted their own positive characterizations of Blackness in seventeenth-century Peru and New Granada. Beyond Babel introduces a new perspective on how new converts from African societies encountered Catholic beliefs and rites when they reached the Americas. The author effectively recovers and analyzes Black Christian spiritual journeys guided not only by priestly authorities but by Black interpreters and visionaries. Brewer-García follows a trend of recuperating positive associations with Blackness in Latin America that can be traced through two decades of scholarship. Beyond Babel adds to a historiography that centers enslaved people in the urban early Americas as they influenced their surroundings by doing business, engaging the law, forming corporate entities, and building (in multiple senses) the foundations of colonial cities. The book engages a specific group of colonial Latin Americanist historians to explore the opportunities Black people had to propose meanings of Blackness itself. Significantly, the author does not aim to trace the rise of race but instead the contributions of Black people to “shaping what blackness meant as it happened” (20–21).

Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Garcia · Historiography · Humanities · Latin Americans · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Anthropology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society