La Noche Buena: Christmas Music of Colonial Latin America

La Noche Buena: Christmas Music of Colonial Latin America Review

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SAVAE's "La Noche Buena" recording takes listeners on a delightful, and often unexpected, musical journey into the colonial cathedrals of the Spanish frontier. Adventuresome 16th & 17th-century composers blended the melodies, rhythms and dialects of indigenous Aztecs, Maya, and Incas- with those of Spanish Catholic missionaries and West African laborers to create unique Christmas music for The New World. The Nativity story is told here through music that captures the lively cultural exchange of an unprecedented era when the voices of Native Americans, African Slaves, and Spanish Conquerors were raised together in celebration of the birth of Jesus.

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Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil (Cambridge Latin American Studies)

Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil (Cambridge Latin American Studies) Review

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This book provides a general history of Latin America in the period between the European conquest and the gaining of independence by the Spanish American countries and Brazil (approximately 1492-1825). It is both an introduction for the student at the college level and a provisionally updated synthesis of the quickly changing field for the more experienced reader. The authors' aim is not only to treat colonial Brazil and colonial Spanish America in a single volume, something rarely done, but also to view early Latin America as one unit with a centre and peripheries, all parts of which were characterized by variants of the same kinds of change, regardless of national and imperial borders. The authors integrate both the older and the newer historical literature, seeing legal, institutional, and political phenomena within a social, economic, and cultural context. They incorporate insights from other disciplines and newer techniques of historical research, but eschew jargon or technical concepts. The approach of the book, with its emphasis on broad social and economic trends across large areas and long time periods, does much to throw light on Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well.

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Pastoral Quechua: The History of Christian Translation in Colonial Peru, 1550-1650 (History, Languages, and Cultures of the Spanish and Portuguese Worlds)

Pastoral Quechua: The History of Christian Translation in Colonial Peru, 1550-1650 (History, Languages, and Cultures of the Spanish and Portuguese Worlds) Review

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Pastoral Quechua explores the story of how the Spanish priests and missionaries of the Catholic church in post-conquest Peru systematically attempted to “incarnate” Christianity in Quechua, a large family of languages and dialects spoken by the dense Andes populations once united under the Inca empire. By codifying (and imposing) a single written standard, based on a variety of Quechua spoken in the former Inca capital of Cuzco, and through their translations of devotional, catechetical, and liturgical texts for everyday use in parishes, the missionary translators were on the front lines of Spanish colonialism in the Andes.

The Christian pastoral texts in Quechua are important witnesses to colonial interactions and power relations. Durston examines the broad historical contexts of Christian writing in Quechua; the role that Andean religious images and motifs were given by the Spanish translators in creating a syncretic Christian-Andean iconography of God, Christ, and Mary; the colonial linguistic ideologies and policies in play; and the mechanisms of control of the subjugated population that can be found in the performance practices of Christian liturgy, the organization of the texts, and even in certain aspects of grammar.

 

"Pastoral Quechua is an entryway into the world of colonial Quechua culture through language, showing how Spanish missionaries did not merely translate Christianity into the Inka language, but built up new and complex syntheses of inka and Spanish worlds. A foundational work, it opens up new and untouched ways of understanding the impact of European colonialism in the Americas, making a singular contribution to colonial history, to historical linguistics, and to the anthropology of colonialism.” —Bruce Mannheim, University of Michigan, author of The Language of the Inka since the European Invasion

 

“Pastoral Quechua is a wonderful volume that will be of interest to a broad range of scholars including historians, linguists, anthropologists, as well as scholars in all fields interested in Peru. The study focuses on the practice of translation, as the author states, but it is much more than that. It is a meticulously researched work that provides careful linguistic analysis conceptualized within an historical study of Catholic evangelization in colonial Peru.” —Thomas B. F. Cummins, Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Pre-Columbian and Colonial Art, Harvard University

 

 

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