Conflicting Identities
The Conflicting Identities research group is a section of the larger project The Hispanic Baroque: Complexity in the First Atlantic Culture, a Major Collaborative Research Initiative (MCRI) funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).
Objectives
Is the process
of permanent, and sometimes
violent, negotiation among groups, so characteristic of the Baroque,
the result
of the existence of many conflicting identities across the Hispanic
Monarchy?
Is this conflict of identities produced by the continuous redrawing of
the
lines that separate social and religious groups, or by the interactions
among
groups that try to keep their identity in spite of mixing and
criollization?
What role do artistic expressions play in the configuration of these
identities, and in the very process of negotiation through the creation
of new
ways of representing different groups? The Conflicting Identities
Research Group
will deal with this and other questions from a literary, cultural,
anthropological, and political perspective. It will pay special
attention to
identity processes involving indigenous communities and Afro-American
groups,
the role of the Catholic Church, and the changing identity models of
peninsular
and Creole elites throughout the Baroque and independence periods. It
will also
look into how the encounter between Europeans and Amerindians initiated
a
process of blending and hybridization which lead to the development of
the
multicultural and multiracial communities typical of many Latin
American
societies.
Time periods
In temporal
terms, this line of research will
focus on the period from 1600 to 1825. That is, from the birth of the
most representative
baroque dramatist, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and the establishment of
the new
baroque drama in Spanish theaters, to the end of the wars of the
independence
in most Latin American countries, the end of the “long 18th Century”,
and the
dismantling of the political system of the Hispanic Monarchy. In this
sense,
work on the historical baroque will take into consideration that, in
the
Iberoamerican world, baroque phenomena closely coexists with phenomena
that
derives from the Enlightenment. This coexistence creates a unique
cultural
space in which new layers of culture are added to previous ones in a
process
that adds complexity to the cultural spectrum. The main question that
we will
ask is, to what degree is the baroque system able, through its special
characteristics, to accommodate pre-European phenomena, European
cultural
transfers, and criollo experience? Is the Latin-American Baroque a
means by
which the different levels of historic reality are articulated through
a
process of negotiation and continuous adjustment?
Geographic areas
In geographic
terms, the project will focus
specifically on the Viceroyalty of New Spain or
