Birdman Of Assisi

This volume examines images and beliefs related to birdmen among Incas and other peoples of South America, and the transformation of that phenomena in the colonial era by Christian missionaries. The author brings to light previously-unknown images of Saint Francis of Assisi with wings, flying through the air as a militant angel of the Apocalypse. Although commissioned by the Franciscan friars, these works of painting and sculpture were executed by native artists with native sensibilities. They reveal a social critique of colonial society, an expectation of an approaching end of the world, and a controversial role for Francis of Assisi at a final cosmic battle. Natural catastrophes, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, combined with mythology, prophecy, piety and public performance, assert a "Franciscan exceptionalism" at a crucial time in Latin American history. A side trip to colonial Mexico reveals that similar dynamics were occurring there, but with different artistic solutions. Birdman of Assisi documents how a beloved medieval saint gained new life among Incas and other native civilizations of the Americas, and continues to fascinate their descendants today.

A journalist's first book of collected poems written over four decades.

This volume offers a dialogue with and through the medieval informed by cultural categories of performativity and simultaneity in on-line media, architecture, film, poetry, and social formations. The articles depart from Medievalism Studies and attempt to answer questions such as: How do medievalists, artists, writers, and entertainment industries communicate, replicate, and evoke medieval formations? How do national and transnational discursive fields relate to understandings of the medieval in its many unstable states? Where are the communal memory sites and what functions do they serve for those who are associated with them? Where are the medieval disjunctions and conjunctions of race, ethnicity and time in a settler society? And what do place, nature, and landscape have to do with it?

Detailed comparison of Aztec and Spanish religious devotion, examining the melding of practices during the first century of contact 1519-1600.

Tradition and Transformation in Christian Art approaches tradition and transculturality in religious art from an Orthodox perspective that defines tradition as a dynamic field of exchanges and synergies between iconographic types and their variants. Relying on a new ontology of iconographic types, it explores one of the most significant ascetical and eschatological Christian images, the King of Glory (Man of Sorrows). This icon of the dead-living Christ originated in Byzantium, migrated west, and was promoted in the New World by Franciscan and Dominican missions. Themes include tensions between Byzantine and Latin spiritualities of penance and salvation, the participation of the body and gender in deification, and the theological plasticity of the Christian imaginary. Primitivist tendencies in Christian eschatology and modernism place avant-garde interest in New Mexican santos and Greek icons in tradition.

Dominick LaCapra's History and Its Limits articulates the relations among intellectual history, cultural history, and critical theory, examining the recent rise of "Practice Theory" and probing the limitations of prevalent forms of humanism. LaCapra focuses on the problem of understanding extreme cases, specifically events and experiences involving violence and victimization. He asks how historians treat and are simultaneously implicated in the traumatic processes they attempt to represent. In addressing these questions, he also investigates violence's impact on various types of writing and establishes a distinctive role for critical theory in the face of an insufficiently discriminating aesthetic of the sublime (often unreflectively amalgamated with the uncanny). In History and Its Limits, LaCapra inquires into the related phenomenon of a turn to the "postsecular," even the messianic or the miraculous, in recent theoretical discussions of extreme events by such prominent figures as Giorgio Agamben, Eric L. Santner, and Slavoj Zizek. In a related vein, he discusses Martin Heidegger's evocative, if not enchanting, understanding of "The Origin of the Work of Art." LaCapra subjects to critical scrutiny the sometimes internally divided way in which violence has been valorized in sacrificial, regenerative, or redemptive terms by a series of important modern intellectuals on both the far right and the far left, including Georges Sorel, the early Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, Frantz Fanon, and Ernst Jünger. Violence and victimization are prominent in the relation between the human and the animal. LaCapra questions prevalent anthropocentrism (evident even in theorists of the "posthuman") and the long-standing quest for a decisive criterion separating or dividing the human from the animal. LaCapra regards this attempt to fix the difference as misguided and potentially dangerous because it renders insufficiently problematic the manner in which humans treat other animals and interact with the environment. In raising the issue of desirable transformations in modernity, History and Its Limits examines the legitimacy of normative limits necessary for life in common and explores the disconcerting role of transgressive initiatives beyond limits (including limits blocking the recognition that humans are themselves animals).

This book examines the reception in Latin America of prints designed by the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, showing how colonial artists used such designs to create all manner of artworks and, in the process, forged new frameworks for artistic creativity. Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) never crossed the Atlantic himself, but his impact in colonial Latin America was profound. Prints made after the Flemish artist’s designs were routinely sent from Europe to the Spanish Americas, where artists used them to make all manner of objects. Rubens in Repeat is the first comprehensive study of this transatlantic phenomenon, despite broad recognition that it was one of the most important forces to shape the artistic landscapes of the region. Copying, particularly in colonial contexts, has traditionally held negative implications that have discouraged its serious exploration. Yet analyzing the interpretation of printed sources and recontextualizing the resulting works within period discourse and their original spaces of display allow a new critical reassessment of this broad category of art produced in colonial Latin America—art that has all too easily been dismissed as derivative and thus unworthy of sustained interest and investigation. This book takes a new approach to the paradigms of artistic authorship that emerged alongside these complex creative responses, focusing on the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that the use of European prints was an essential component of the very framework in which colonial artists forged ideas about what it meant to be a creator.