Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539-1640
by Miguel A. Valerio
Description
Sovereign Joy explores the performance of festive black kings and queens among Afro-Mexicans between 1539 and 1640. This fascinating study illustrates how the first African and Afro-creole people in colonial Mexico transformed their ancestral culture into a shared identity among Afro-Mexicans, with particular focus on how public festival participation expressed their culture and subjectivities, as well as redefined their colonial condition and social standing.
By analyzing this hitherto understudied aspect of Afro-Mexican Catholic confraternities in both literary texts and visual culture, Miguel A. Valerio teases out the deeply ambivalent and contradictory meanings behind these public processions and festivities that often re-inscribed structures of race and hierarchy. Were they markers of Catholic subjecthood, and what sort of corporate structures did they create to project standing and respectability? Sovereign Joy examines many of these possibilities, and in the process highlights the central place occupied by Africans and their descendants in colonial culture. Through performance, Afro-Mexicans affirmed their being: the sovereignty of joy, and the joy of sovereignty.
About the Author
Miguel A. Valerio is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on the African Diaspora in the literatures and cultures of the Iberian world. This is his first book.
Product Details
Category: History
Language: English
Format/Binding: Paperback
Book Condition: New
ISBN-10: 1009078208
ISBN-13: 978-1009078207
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Date Published: September 21, 2023
Pages: 282
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