Race, caste, and indigeneity in medieval Spanish travel literature
By: Michael Harney
Edition: First edition.
Series: The new Middle Ages; New Middle Ages (Palgrave (Firm))
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 244
ISBN-13: 9781137381378
Subjects: Spanish American prose literature; History and criticism; Race in literature; Travelers' writings, Spanish; Indigenous peoples in literature
Description: "The origins of present-day Ibero-American racialization, and of associated caste hierarchies in various Latin American regions and societies, are in many ways traceable to the medieval Iberian Peninsula during the era of the so-called Reconquest (eleventh through fifteenth centuries). Focusing on themes of race, caste, and indigeneity during a period straddling the boundary between the Middle Ages and the era of New World exploration, conquest, and colonization (early-thirteenth through mid-sixteenth centuries), this study explores the already highly internationalized world of late-medieval and early-modern Europe as revealed in various kinds of travel narrative. The works surveyed include conquest narratives, touristic and diplomatic diaries, gazetteers, chivalric romances and biographies, pilgrimage accounts, and political essays. Despite their stylistic and thematic variety, the works are linked by a shared compulsion to go forth among alien folk, and by a Eurocentric obsession with ethnicity, status, native identity, and what we would call globalization"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 209-221) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: 1. Concepts of Race, Caste, and Indigeneity in Medieval Iberia; title: 2. Race; title: 3. Caste; title: 4. Indigeneity; title: Conclusion: The Tourist in the Text.