 | Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns Subjects: Festivals -- Social aspects -- South America; South America -- History -- To 1806; South America -- Social life and customs; South America -- Ethnic identity; Mining districts -- South America; Bridging print culture and performance, Spectacular Wealth draws on eighteenth-century festival accounts to explore how colonial residents of the silver-mining town of Potosí, in the viceroyalty of Peru, and the gold-mining region of Minas Gerais, in Brazil, created rich festive cultures that refuted European allegations of barbarism and greed. In her examination of the festive participation of the towns' diverse inhabitants, including those whose forced or slave labor produced the colonies' mineral wealth, Lisa Voigt shows how Amerindians, Afro-descendants, Europeans, and creoles displayed their social capital and cultural practices in spectacular performances. Tracing the multiple meanings and messages of civic festivals and religious feast days alike, Spectacular Wealth highlights the conflicting agendas at work in the organization, performance, and publication of festivals. Celebrants and writers in mining boomtowns presented themselves as far more than tributaries yielding mineral wealth to the Spanish and Portuguese empires, using festivals to redefine their reputations and to celebrate their cultural, spiritual, and intellectual wealth. Lisa Voigt is an associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the Ohio State University in Columbus. She is the author of Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds , which received the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize from the Modern Language Association. |
