The Body of the Conquistador

Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492 1700
Erscheinungsjahr 2013
ISBN: 978-1-107-00342-2
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 278 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 606 g

Reihe: Critical Perspectives on Empire

This fascinating history explores the dynamic relationship between overseas colonisation and the bodily experience of eating. It reveals the importance of food to the colonial project in Spanish America and reconceptualises the role of European colonial expansion in shaping the emergence of ideas of race during the Age of Discovery. Rebecca Earle shows that anxieties about food were fundamental to Spanish understandings of the new environment they inhabited and their interactions with the native populations of the New World. Settlers wondered whether Europeans could eat New World food, whether Indians could eat European food and what would happen to each if they did. By taking seriously their ideas about food we gain a richer understanding of how settlers understood the physical experience of colonialism and of how they thought about one of the central features of the colonial project. The result is simultaneously a history of food, colonialism and race.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Earle, Rebecca

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kolonialgeschichte, Geschichte des Imperialismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Internationale Beziehungen Kolonialismus, Imperialismus

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: Food and the colonial experience; 1. Humoralism and the colonial body; 2. Protecting the European body; 3. Providential fertility; 4. Maize, which is their wheat; 5. You will become the same if you eat their food; 6. Mutable bodies in Spain and the Indies; Epilogue; Bibliography.

Über Autor(innen)

Earle, Rebecca
Rebecca Earle is Professor of History at the University of Warwick. Her previous publications include The Return of the Native: Indians and Mythmaking in Spanish America, 1810–1930 (2008).