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The talk explores the possible meanings that the visual expression of political dissent could have to a variety of historical actors in the early modern global empires of Spain and Portugal. Iberian colonial societies in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are often described as being harmonious and characterised by acceptance of imperial authority. Yet acts of political iconoclasm were anything but rare. Centred on sculptures, paintings or effigies, they revealed the tensions of empire. My research shows overseas capital cities such as Goa, Lima, Mexico City, and Manila in a radically new light as a space of cross-cultural political participation and conflict in which the power of images was used to challenge the king’s highest representatives and renegotiate political order. The talk particularly focuses on a set of symbolic attacks on viceroys through mock executions and the different ways in which they were performed and understood by city inhabitants.
Giuseppe Marcocci is Professor of Early Modern Global History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow in History at Exeter College, Oxford. His latest book The Globe on Paper: Writing Histories of the World in Renaissance Europe and the Americas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020) traces how overseas exploration transformed historical writing across the Atlantic and beyond during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. More generally, his research considers the early modern global empires of Spain and Portugal in connected and comparative perspectives, with a particular interest in political and religious dynamics.
Pre-Circulated Paper
The pre-circulated paper will be available one-week prior to the workshop. The paper will be available to the Princeton University community via SharePoint. All others should request a copy of the paper by emailing Sunaina Danziger.