In 2003, Nancy Appelbaum, Anne Macpherson and Karin Rosemblatt anthologised contributions to a wave of scholarship that integrated new approaches to nationalism into the long-standing interest in the particularities of Latin American racial ideology. Six years later, Andrew Fisher and Matthew O'Hara have gathered essays about race and Iberian colonialism that are attentive to topical and innovative thinking about empire over the past few years. At first blush the new volume might suggest a companion piece to the earlier work, but Fisher and O'Hara are motivated by slightly different concerns, driven both by recent research and historical context. Because concepts of race and nation were even less congealed during the colonial period than in more recent times, discussions of the sistema de castas, mestizaje, creolisation and the polities in which they emerged require especially nimble analytical language. Indeed, many of the essays in Imperial Subjects are informed by Frederick Cooper and Rogers Brubaker's blistering critique of ‘identity talk’ that calls for better terminology to comprehend categories of social differentiation. Less explicitly, the volume builds on scholarly challenges to the stereotype of the absolutist, centralised early modern Spanish monarchy – an image aiding comparisons to the modern nation-state – that can credit colonial racial ideologies to the heavy hand of the state. The collection as a whole, then, reveals a novel view of the relationships between race and the disaggregated nature of colonial rule.
Fisher and O'Hara frame the collection with a thorough discussion of recent social theory, surveying approaches to race and offering their own concept of ‘contact points’ that perceives identity not through a priori labels but through experiences and practices – specifically, ‘the interactions of colonial subjects around institutions at the moment when social categories are articulated, publicized, internalized, contested, and sometimes altered’ (p. 22). This approach, they show, better addresses the multinodal nature of subjectivity and political authority during the colonial period and makes it possible to move beyond dialectics of structure and agency, domination and resistance, and state and society. Identifying contact points thus avoids ascribing the enduring power of race and ethnicity to the disciplinary machinations of an all-powerful state or to (somehow) autonomous self-understandings of colonial subjects.
Some of the essays embrace the contact point metaphor directly to reveal imperial subjects engaging with key institutions of colonial authority. For the Inquisition, David Tavárez finds that legal abstractions were ill-suited to the complexity of colonial life as the Holy Office adjudicated casta identities to determine jurisdiction. As a result, decisions drew upon visual and contextual public perceptions and confronted the agendas of individuals who strategically sought to inhabit particular identifications. María Elena Díaz, Sergio Serulnikov and Karen Caplan situate municipal government in Cuba, Bolivia and Mexico respectively at the centre of debates about personhood and political representation. Slaves owned by the crown in the Cuban copper-mining community of El Cobre successfully gained status as a pueblo in 1670 based on their claims of nativeness, military service and loyalty, and despite the ‘defect’ of African descent. Through cabildos abiertos and riots, assertive urban residents of La Plata counterposed a Creole identity inclusive of mestizos against the majority indigenous rural population – and against a viceroy wary of new social visions after the Tupac Amaru revolt. And as new national states displaced some colonial institutions, leaving others intact, many Mexicans scrutinised Spanish legal protections granted to Indians. Caplan argues that liberalism in Mexico – as articulated in the 1812 Spanish Constitution and later with independence – transformed ideas about indigenous municipal autonomy. In Oaxaca and Yucatán, indigenous people gave institutional form to local interpretations of liberalism that acknowledged citizenship regardless of ethnicity or older assumptions about indigenous difference. Certainly, glimpsing these popular responses to institutional change through documents generated by the institutions themselves poses a methodological challenge, but as Douglas Cope notes in his conclusion, considering these documents contact points in their own right can reveal how people ‘chose to position themselves socially and culturally, how they strategically used the available racial ideologies and categories to shape the public presentation of their identities’ (pp. 251–2).
Other contributions in the volume locate contact points in conflicts over terminology. Jane Mangan explores how the category of indias del gato developed in the sixteenth-century Andean world to describe the indigenous women of the urban marketplace of Potosí. Terms such as india (and occasionally mestiza) were insufficient for identifying these women, known for their distinctive clothing and economic roles. Their increasingly aggressive marketing techniques inspired yet another new category, regatonas. Cynthia Radding compares the ethnic identities that developed in two frontier regions, north-western New Spain and the eastern lowlands of Charcas; new designations resulting from colonial rule, population decline and migration may have oversimplified the changes and continuities within and between indigenous communities here. And in her study of gracias al sacar whitenings, Ann Twinam shows how arguments that being pardo or mulato was a mutable condition – a ‘defect’ that could be relieved – depended on pliable vocabularies of naturaleza, limpieza, calidad and, only gradually, colour. The idea of the sistema de castas as a logical system of limitless permutations gives way here to an unstable, uneven and highly political process of classifying the colonial population.
The image of race that comes into view in Imperial Subjects is one that does not necessarily equate stratification with unyielding discrimination or mandatory resistance. Jeremy Mumford, for example, argues that despite the exclusion of kurakas and encomenderos from hereditary lordship in sixteenth-century Peru, kurakas fashioned a ‘hybrid aristocracy’ that retained some practices of pre-Hispanic nobility while cultivating the benefits of Spanish royal favour (p. 41). African-descended petitioners in Minas Gerais to the Portuguese monarch, as Mariana Dantas shows, readily embraced the language of subservience, humility and loyalty, not only as racialised subordinates but as vassals of the crown. To understand colonial variants of race, ethnicity or casta as one of many markers of status, as this collection does, is to acknowledge a world in which virtually all inhabitants understood themselves to be subordinate to some entity, including, and above all, Iberian monarchs and God. Subalternity was frequently the subjective prerequisite, rather than a fundamental impediment, to claims-making, and it structured the ideological grid onto which the various contact points discussed in Imperial Subjects can be plotted. Here is a dramatic contrast to scholarship about race during the national period, which often emphasises the egalitarian ideals of liberal and democratic discourse even when they mingled uneasily with colonial notions of inequality by design. In demonstrating the centrality of race to the making of colonial inequalities, Imperial Subjects expands the vocabulary for rethinking questions of social difference and political power throughout Latin American history.
