Una sociedad legalista: Abogados, procuradores de causas y la creación de una cultura legal colonial en Lima y Potosí, 1540–1670

This study deals with the formation, reproduction, and the role in litigation of two branches of the legal profession, lawyers and procurators. They were the experts in charge of civil, criminal, and ecclesiastical litigation during the Old Regime. While the lawyers provided erudite legal advice, procurators oriented and drove the procedure as legal representatives of their clients. The European legal revolutions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries forged a new legal culture in which the lawsuit was reputed to be the best way to settle disputes. Likewise, that legal culture conferred an important place to specialists as legal facilitators of the contending parties. When Castilians exported their legal system to the New World, they spread a complex and bureaucratic framework, contributing to the reproduction of a class of experts in urban spaces. Lima and Potosi, two urban centers created in the sixteenth century, quickly became significant ‘legal cities’. This dissertation explores how the legal markets of these cities operated, the careers of their specialists, their professional options, social images regarding them, and litigation costs. This study examines the careers of 267 facilitators and demonstrates that they constituted a class of distinctive legal professionals. Legal culture embodies the representation and use of law. The closeness of specialists with litigants, in particular of procurators familiarized the parties with litigation and its complex processes. These specialists forged dominant legal discourses and manipulated juridical order. Litigants were not passive agents of their specialists. Caciques and members of the Hispanicized communities appropriated the law in a visible way as the growing litigiousness illustrates. Colonial law (of a pluralistic basis) was an arena of assertion and discussion of rights by different social actors, encomenderos, leading citizens, widows, native chieftains, artisans, and commoners. This study concludes that this struggle and manipulation served to legitimate the role of those legal experts and gave birth to a complex legalistic society in the Andes under Spanish Habsburg rule.

Buried voices: Genres and types of female authorship during the Spanish American colonial period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries)

This dissertation analyzes various types of non-canonical texts authorized by women from a wide spectrum of classes and races in the Spanish colonies. The female voice, generally absent from official colonial documents of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteen centuries, left a gap in the complex subject of women's history and social participation. Through the study of personal letters, autobiographies, journals, court documents, inquisitorial transcripts, wills and testaments, edicts, orders, proclamations and posters, that voice is recovered. Thus, the Indigenous, Spaniards and African women and their descendants who lived during this period left their written legacy and proof of participation. Beginning with a thorough history of the native woman's interest in writing, this study focuses on how women of all social levels utilized the few means of writing available at their disposal to display a testimonial, critical and sometimes fictional narrative of their surroundings. ^ This investigation concludes that it is necessary to change the traditional image of the passive women of the colonies, subjected to a patriarchal authority and unable to speak or grow on their own. The documents under study, introduced women who were able to self represent themselves as followers of the tradition while at the same time their writings were denying that very same statement. They passed from the private arena to the public one with discourses that confessed their innermost feelings and concerns, challenged the authority of the Inquisitor or the Governor, exposed their sexual freedom and transvestite narratives, successfully developed stratagems that challenged the official ideology of the oppressive religious environment and established their own authority reaching at last the freedom of their souls. ^

Using data from an encounter sampler to model fish dispersal

A method to estimate speed of free-ranging fishes using a passive sampling device is described and illustrated with data from the Everglades, U.S.A. Catch per unit effort (CPUE) from minnow traps embedded in drift fences was treated as an encounter rate and used to estimate speed, when combined with an independent estimate of density obtained by use of throw traps that enclose 1 m2 of marsh habitat. Underwater video was used to evaluate capture efficiency and species-specific bias of minnow traps and two sampling studies were used to estimate trap saturation and diel-movement patterns; these results were used to optimize sampling and derive correction factors to adjust species-specific encounter rates for bias and capture efficiency. Sailfin mollies Poecilia latipinna displayed a high frequency of escape from traps, whereas eastern mosquitofish Gambusia holbrooki were most likely to avoid a trap once they encountered it; dollar sunfish Lepomis marginatus were least likely to avoid the trap once they encountered it or to escape once they were captured. Length of sampling and time of day affected CPUE; fishes generally had a very low retention rate over a 24 h sample time and only the Everglades pygmy sunfish Elassoma evergladei were commonly captured at night. Dispersal speed of fishes in the Florida Everglades, U.S.A., was shown to vary seasonally and among species, ranging from 0· 05 to 0· 15 m s−1 for small poeciliids and fundulids to 0· 1 to 1· 8 m s−1 for L. marginatus. Speed was generally highest late in the wet season and lowest in the dry season, possibly tied to dispersal behaviours linked to finding and remaining in dry-season refuges. These speed estimates can be used to estimate the diffusive movement rate, which is commonly employed in spatial ecological models.

Arquitetura, cidade e território no Brasil colonial: a contribuição dos carmelitas calçados da Bahia e Pernambuco (1580-1800)

This study investigates the religious group named 'shoe wearing carmelites' (or Calced Carmelites) from Brazil´s Order of Carmo, from 1580 until 1800, in the Capitaincy of Bahia de Todos os Santos (Recôncavo, city of Salvador and Sergipe) and in the Capitaincy of Pernambuco (Alagoas, Pernambuco and Itamaracá). The study does not include the religious group known as the 'Reformed' Carmelites from Goiana, Recife and Paraíba convents. The Order of Carmo is a religious order from the Roman Catholic Church, founded in the 12th century. By the 16th century they were split into 'Calced' and 'Discalced'. In 1580 the Calced ones came from Portugal to Brazil, built convents in urban areas and were able to acquire slaves, farms and other assets. As any other religious order, the Carmelites had their modus operandi. This work emphasizes the way they operated or acted in the city, either individually or in association with other Carmelite religious foundations elsewhere (networking). Their action affected, although indirectly, the building of some specific aspects of the architecture, the city and the territory in colonial Brazil. The main objective of this study is to demonstrate the impact of the Calced Carmelites from Bahia and Pernambuco upon the territory of colonial Brazil, which is analyzed according to three scales: 1) the region or interurban; 2) the city or intraurban; 3) the building or the architecture. The research employs the comparative method of analysis, especially for the architectural scale. The work demonstrates that although not acting as architects or urbanists, the Carmelites contributed to the formation of the colonial territory of Brazil, behaving as a well-articulated and hierarchized religious network, from an economic and social perspective. Moreover, they influenced the emergence and growth of several colonial urban nuclei, from Bahia to Pernambuco, mainly in the surroundings of their religious buildings. Finally, it is very clear this religious order’s contribution to colonial architecture, as it can be seen by the architectural characteristics of the convents and churches which have been analyzed, many of which still stand in a good state of conservation nowadays.

A ribeira da discórdia: terras, homens e relações de poder na territorialização do Assu colonial (1680-1720)

The internalization process of the Portuguese possession in Northern Captaincies - after the Dutch eviction and the development of activities related to livestock in the backlands (Sertão) – expanded the Portuguese territory in America. This process resulted in the advancement of Portuguese conquest over the region and conflicts involving agents of colonization and indigenous groups who inhabited that space, as well as conflicts of interest of captaincy’s major social groups and the defense policies of the Portuguese territory possession. Among the rivers which run through Rio Grande captaincy’s territory, the Açu was the one that aroused conquerors and colonizers of the back lands interest, making that spatiality an area where interest and power exercises converged and generated discord. This research aims to analyze the territorial process of Assu backlands, from the pioneers, conquerors and colonizers action over the space studied, during the event known as the War of the Barbarians in Assu, conflict that ensured the integration of the area the territory and the wishes of the Portuguese crown. Thus, it will be taken as objects of study social phenomena that characterized Assu’s riverside - at the turn of the 17th to the 18th century, in a cutout that extends from 1680 to 1720 - as an area of conflicts of interest, noticeable for analysis from period documents such as records of land grants concessions, correspondence between colonial and kingdom authorities, documents from the exercise of administration of Portuguese America and legislation.

A ribeira da discórdia: terras, homens e relações de poder na territorialização do Assu colonial (1680-1720)

The internalization process of the Portuguese possession in Northern Captaincies - after the Dutch eviction and the development of activities related to livestock in the backlands (Sertão) – expanded the Portuguese territory in America. This process resulted in the advancement of Portuguese conquest over the region and conflicts involving agents of colonization and indigenous groups who inhabited that space, as well as conflicts of interest of captaincy’s major social groups and the defense policies of the Portuguese territory possession. Among the rivers which run through Rio Grande captaincy’s territory, the Açu was the one that aroused conquerors and colonizers of the back lands interest, making that spatiality an area where interest and power exercises converged and generated discord. This research aims to analyze the territorial process of Assu backlands, from the pioneers, conquerors and colonizers action over the space studied, during the event known as the War of the Barbarians in Assu, conflict that ensured the integration of the area the territory and the wishes of the Portuguese crown. Thus, it will be taken as objects of study social phenomena that characterized Assu’s riverside - at the turn of the 17th to the 18th century, in a cutout that extends from 1680 to 1720 - as an area of conflicts of interest, noticeable for analysis from period documents such as records of land grants concessions, correspondence between colonial and kingdom authorities, documents from the exercise of administration of Portuguese America and legislation.

From Mare Nostrum to Insula Nostra : British Colonial Cyprus and the Italian Imperial Threat

Peer reviewed

El papel de los carteles de la División de Gráfica y Cine de Parques y Recreo Público en la redefinición colonial del Puerto Rico de mediados del siglo XX

El cartel serigráfico del proyecto de carteles del Taller de Cinema y Gráfica de Parques y Recreo Público se utilizó como medio para educar e insertar a las grandes masas dentro de las reformas coloniales ocurridas como consecuencia de la entrada de Estados Unidos a la Segunda Guerra Mundial y readiestrar a la población puertorriqueña, entonces compuesta por campesinos, para servir como mano de obra barata y dócil al proyecto colonial y a los beneficiarios del proyecto de industrialización de la posguerra. Se ha dicho en innumerables ocasiones que el camino al infierno está repleto de buenas intenciones; este es el relato de un viaje de ida. Los carteles de la División de Cinema y Gráfica de Parques y Recreo Público mantienen desde el origen varios elementos inquietantes de lo que se podría denominar como la política de reconstrucción de una colonia, de un territorio objeto de la sujeción/subyugación por parte de otro país, y presentarlo como un objetivo plausible, de consideración y cumplimiento con los derechos humanos fundamentales...

Spaces of Order: An African Poetics of Space

“Spaces of Order” argues that the African novel should be studied as a revolutionary form characterized by aesthetic innovations that are not comprehensible in terms of the novel’s European archive of forms. It does this by mapping an African spatial order that undermines the spatial problematic at the formal and ideological core of the novel—the split between a private, subjective interior, and an abstract, impersonal outside. The project opens with an examination of spatial fragmentation as figured in the “endless forest” of Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard (1952). The second chapter studies Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) as a fictional world built around a peculiar category of space, the “evil forest,” which constitutes an African principle of order and modality of power. Chapter three returns to Tutuola via Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) and shows how the dispersal of fragmentary spaces of exclusion and terror within the colonial African city helps us conceive of political imaginaries outside the nation and other forms of liberal political communities. The fourth chapter shows Nnedi Okorafor—in her 2014 science-fiction novel Lagoon—rewriting Things Fall Apart as an alien-encounter narrative in which Africa is center-stage of a planetary, multi-species drama. Spaces of Order is a study of the African novel as a new logic of world making altogether.

Frederick Douglass and Ireland, 1845: The "Vertiginous Twist[s]" of an Irish Encounter

Frederick Douglas was a reader of and writer on the nineteenth-century political and social texts and contexts of oppression, which he experienced at home and witnesed while in Ireland and Britain, 1845-47. This thesis is unique in its identification of several surprising lacunae in the research and critical evaluation of Frederick Douglass’ activities of reading and writing and the texts and contexts that supported these activities. This thesis takes Douglass’ relationship with Ireland and the Irish as its starting point, and offers several moments in the transnational space engendered by Douglass’ readerly and writerly experience of the transatlantic axes of Ireland, Britain and America. This thesis draws upon archival research to recover information regarding Douglass’ trip and subjects his reading and writing on Ireland and the Irish to the critical rigours of narratolgical, cultural and discourse analysis. One lacuna is Douglass’ favourite and neglected school primer, the Columbian Orator, which Douglass signified upon across his autobiographical project. The speech by the Irish patriot and exile, Arthur O’Connor, included in the Orator, is crucial to Douglass’ understanding and expression of justice and equality. Genette’s narratological analysis gives theoretical traction to the ways in which, in his autobiographical representations of his British trip, Douglass recalibrates his autobiographies to reflect his changing perspectives on his life and work. Contrary to popular assumptions, Douglass did, in two letters to Garrison address and comment on Irish poverty. This thesis interrogates the strategic anglophilia of these letters. While the World’s Temperance Convention (WTC) refused to discuss African- American slavery, analysis of Douglass’ speech in Covent Garden and of the paratextual apparatus of the published proceedings of the WTC demonstrates the impossibility of separating these closely interrelated reform causes. When a newly discovered poem from Waterford that admonished the city for its disregard for Douglass’ message is juxtaposed with an uncomfortable moment in Cork, we understand that Douglass became a pawn to bolster sectarian rivalries between nationalist and establishment factions. Though Douglass believed imperial politics was the best vehicle for modernity, he recognised that it had failed Ireland: consequently, in Thoughts and Recollections of a Trip to Ireland (1886), he advocates for Home Rule for Ireland.

The geographies of encounter: investigating the spatiality and construction of 'meaningful' encounters with difference through the experiences of international students at University College Cork, Ireland

The purpose of this research is to investigate how international students negotiate encounters with Irish students and construct ‘meaning’ from those encounters in the spaces of the university and city. As cities are increasingly characterised by a multiplexity of diversity, the issue of living with difference is becoming more and more pertinent. In the wake of escalating socio-spatial polarisation, inter-cultural tension, racism, and xenophobia, the geographies of encounter seek to untangle the interactions that occur in the quotidian activities and spaces of everyday life to determine whether such encounters might reduce prejudice, antipathy and indifference and establish common social bonds (Amin 2002; Valentine 2008). Thus far, the literature has investigated a number of sites of encounter; public space, the home, neighbourhoods, schools, sports clubs, public transport, cafes and libraries (Wilson 2011; Schuermans 2013; Hemming 2011; Neal and Vincent 2011; Mayblin, Valentine and Anderrson 2015; Laurier and Philo 2006; Valentine and Sadgrove 2013; Harris, Valentine and Piekut 2014; Fincher and Iveson 2008). While these spaces produce a range of outcomes, the literature remains frustrated by a lack of clarity of what constitutes a ‘meaningful’ encounter and how such encounters might be planned for. Drawing on survey and interview data with full-time international students at University College Cork, Ireland, this study contributes to understanding how encounters are shaped by the construction and reproduction of particular identities in particular spaces, imbuing spaces with uneven power frameworks that produce diverse outcomes. Rather than identifying a singular ‘meaningful’ outcome of encounter as a potential panacea to the issues of exclusion and oppression, the contention here is to recognise a range of outcomes that are created by individuals in a range of ways. To define one outcome of encounter as ‘meaningful’ is to overlook the scale of intensity of diverse interactions and the multiplicity of ways in which people learn to live with difference.

"On our way": identities and representations of African women seeking asylum in Ireland

This thesis provides the first explicit Postcolonial study of asylum in the Irish context that integrates Black Feminist analyses of intersectional identity with Postcolonial Feminist theories of representation. African women seeking asylum in the Republic of Ireland were key political instruments used by the state to re-draw racial lines. The study examines how, for a group of African women “On their Way” through asylum, identity and representation work hand in hand to force identities, subaltern spaces and bodies to occupy them. Rich biographical data is gathered through mixed art and drama methods over two intensive participatory research projects conducted in a small Irish city. Data analysis critically examines the poetics (practices that signify) and politics (the powers that govern these practices) and affective economies of global and local NGO visual representations, exposing how they consume, fragment, and appropriate African women’s identities and bodies. Though hypervisible, the women themselves “cannot speak”. The women in the study reported feeling “tired” and “used”. Asking “What work are they doing as they do asylum?” the study finds that black female identities and bodies are forced to perform political, cultural, emotional and material labour on their way through this context of Irish asylum. The author argues that Postcolonial Asylum is a performative encounter that re-scripts colonial race/class/gender discourse through a humanitarian alibi to naturalize European/white supremacy, reinscribe patriarchal power and justify racialised incarceration of bodies seeking asylum in the North. This study takes an interdisciplinary approach that centralizes Black and Postcolonial Feminist theory and innovates Participatory Art-Based Action methodology. Black and Postcolonial feminisms can recognize, theorize and replenish black female political and intellectual agency. Participatory Action research, if grounded in Black feminist epistemology and ethics, can allow participants to “speak back” to what is already said about them in spaces of convivial self-representation.

En el pasado colonial y en el presente revolucionario : los curas párrocos y las parroquias como soportes del cambio político

El período de descomposición del orden colonial y de trabajosa construcción de otro nuevo en clave republicana reconoce un conjunto de dispositivos y prácticas que posibilitaron el cambio político. Determinadas instituciones y agentes soportaron esta transición que supuso desmontar muchas de las antiguas referencias y modelos de acción política, y orientaron la emergencia de nuevas formas de concebir, percibir y relacionarse con el poder. En la persistencia de algunas de estas figuras clave residió la factibilidad de las nuevas repúblicas. En particular, los agentes y las jurisdicciones eclesiásticos, los ritos y celebraciones religiosas permanecieron ocupando un lugar que no puede ignorarse.

En el pasado colonial y en el presente revolucionario : los curas párrocos y las parroquias como soportes del cambio político

El período de descomposición del orden colonial y de trabajosa construcción de otro nuevo en clave republicana reconoce un conjunto de dispositivos y prácticas que posibilitaron el cambio político. Determinadas instituciones y agentes soportaron esta transición que supuso desmontar muchas de las antiguas referencias y modelos de acción política, y orientaron la emergencia de nuevas formas de concebir, percibir y relacionarse con el poder. En la persistencia de algunas de estas figuras clave residió la factibilidad de las nuevas repúblicas. En particular, los agentes y las jurisdicciones eclesiásticos, los ritos y celebraciones religiosas permanecieron ocupando un lugar que no puede ignorarse.

En el pasado colonial y en el presente revolucionario : los curas párrocos y las parroquias como soportes del cambio político

El período de descomposición del orden colonial y de trabajosa construcción de otro nuevo en clave republicana reconoce un conjunto de dispositivos y prácticas que posibilitaron el cambio político. Determinadas instituciones y agentes soportaron esta transición que supuso desmontar muchas de las antiguas referencias y modelos de acción política, y orientaron la emergencia de nuevas formas de concebir, percibir y relacionarse con el poder. En la persistencia de algunas de estas figuras clave residió la factibilidad de las nuevas repúblicas. En particular, los agentes y las jurisdicciones eclesiásticos, los ritos y celebraciones religiosas permanecieron ocupando un lugar que no puede ignorarse.