Early modern Spain was a global empire in which a startling variety of medical cultures came into contact, and occasionally conflict, with one another. Spanish soldiers, ambassadors, missionaries, sailors, and emigrants of all sorts carried with them to the farthest reaches of the monarchy their own ideas about sickness and health. These ideas were, in turn, influenced by local cultures. This volume tells the story of encounters among medical cultures in the early modern Spanish empire. The twelve chapters draw upon a wide variety of sources, ranging from drama, poetry, and sermons to broadsheets, travel accounts, chronicles, and Inquisitorial documents; and it surveys a tremendous regional scope, from Mexico, to the Canary Islands, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, and Germany. Together, these essays propose a new interpretation of the circulation, reception, appropriation, and elaboration of ideas and practices related to sickness and health, sex, monstrosity, and death, in a historical moment marked by continuous cross-pollination among institutions and populations with a decided stake in the functioning and control of the human body. Ultimately, the volume discloses how medical cultures provided demographic, analytical, and even geographic tools that constituted a particular kind of map of knowledge and practice, upon which were plotted: the local utilities of pharmacological discoveries; cures for social unrest or decline; spaces for political and institutional struggle; and evolving understandings of monstrousness and normativity. Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire puts the history of early modern Spanish medicine on a new footing in the English-speaking world.

This collection of essays offers a comprehensive overview of colonial legacies of racial and social inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean. Rich in theoretical framework and close textual analysis, these essays offer new paradigms and approaches to both reading and resolving the opposing forces of race, class, and the power of states. The contributors are drawn from a variety of fields, including literary criticism, anthropology, politics, and sociology. The contributors to this book abandon the traditional approaches that study racialized oppression in Latin America only from the standpoint of its impact on either Indians or people of African descent. Instead they examine colonialism's domination and legacy in terms of both the political power it wielded and the symbolic instruments of that oppression. The volume's scope extends from the Southern Cone to the Andean region, Mexico, and the Hispanophone and Francophone Caribbean. It contests many of the traditional givens about Latin America, including governance and the nation state, the effects of globalization, the legacy of the region's criollo philosophers and men of letters, and postulations of harmonious race relations. As dictatorships give way to democracies in a variety of unprecedented ways, this book offers a necessary and needed examination of the social transformations in the region.

This book provides rich and detailed insights into the lesser-known worlds of anarchist geography. It explores the historical geography of anarchism by examining its expression in a series of distinct geographical contexts and its development over time. The book explores the changes that the anarchist movement(s) sought to bring out in their spa

Operating within the framework of postcolonial studies and decolonial theory, this important work starts from the assumption that the violence exercised by European colonialism was not only physical and economic, but also ‘epistemic’. Santiago Castro-Gómez argues that toward the end of the eighteenth century, this epistemic violence of the Spanish Empire assumed a specific form: zero-point hubris. The ‘many forms of knowing’ were integrated into a chronological hierarchy in which scientific-enlightened knowledge appears at the highest point on the cognitive scale, while all other epistemes are seen as constituting its past. Enlightened criollo thinkers did not hesitate to situate the Black, Indigenous, and mestizo peoples of New Granada in the lowest position on this cognitive scale. Castro-Gómez argues that in the colonial periphery of the Spanish Americas, Enlightenment constituted not only the position of epistemic distance separating science from all other knowledges, but also the position of ethnic distance separating the criollos from the ‘castes’. Epistemic violence—and not only physical violence—is thereby found at the very origin of Colombian nationality.