Overview

Drawing on literary texts, conversion manuals, and colonial correspondence from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and Peru, Forms of Relation focuses on nonprocreative and nonbiological kinship ties, revealing the importance of these relationships to debates and struggles over colonial governance and identities.Goldmark begins with one Dominican friar’s polemic against Spanish abuses of Indigenous women’s reproductive labor, which threatened to lead to maternal infanticide, the death of the Indies’ populations, and the failure of evangelization. He consults texts from sixteenth-century Peru describing how Inca authorities thwarted marriages between nonelite Inca women and Spanish men in an attempt to preserve Inca political power. He uncovers Spanish and Criollo teachers’ petitions, submitted in the early seventeenth century to the Archbishopric’s Archive of Lima, that hoped to convince authorities that by following these petition authors’ ""good examples,"" an Indigenous person could claim Christian rights. Forms of Relation illustrates why we must and how we can interrogate the dominant paradigms of mestizaje, heterosexuality, and biology that are too often left unchallenged in studies of Spanish colonialism, demonstrating how nonprocreative kinships proved critical to the creation of that regime.

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9780813949376

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Reviews

A thoroughly documented and theorized book, of the highest intellectual and interpretative caliber. Goldmark's authoritative rapport with current as well as more historical publications in the field is stunning. A first-order contribution to colonial studies. --Eduardo González, Johns Hopkins University, Author of Cuba and the Fall: Christian Text and Queer Narrative in the Fiction of José Lezama Lima and Reinaldo Arenas In a rich and wide-ranging study that sheds fresh light on texts by Bartolomé de Las Casas, Titu Cusi Yupanqui, José de Acosta, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala and other important writers, Matthew Goldmark shows how colonial textual forms produce, rather than merely document, colonial kinship relations in the early Americas. --Ralph Bauer, University of Maryland, author of The Alchemy of Conquest: Science, Religion, and the Secrets of the New World

Author Information

Matthew Goldmark is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Florida State University.

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