3/20/11 Join us for a brown bag presentation!

LALS Brown Bag:

Representing Human Sacrifice in Colonial Mexico: The Spanish Conquest and
Cultural Interpretation



Presented by: Cristian Roa

Wednesday,

April 20th, 2011

12:00 p.m.

University Hall 1550



This talk explores the complexities of representing human sacrifice in
sixteenth-century Spanish colonial writing. The fluid and contradictory
responses of   conquistadors, theologians and missionaries to human
sacrifice reveal that, more than a limit for cultural interpretation, it
became a malleable and effective means of inscribing desire in various
colonial  endeavors. Looking at the links among sacrificial  performativity,
ethnographic discourse and legality, we can better understand how affect and
its rhetorical expression became essential condition for European observers
and their audiences to cognitively assimilate Mesoamerican cultural
difference.


Cristian Roa is Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at
UIC. He is the author of Histories of Infamy: Francisco López de Gómara and
the Ethics of Spanish Imperialism and co-author of Chimalpahin's  Conquest:
A Nahua Historian's Rewriting of Francisco Lopez de Gomara's La conquista de
Mexico.

Bring your brown bag lunch and  we will provide refreshments.  This event is
free and  open  to the general public. For more information call LALS at
312-996-2445.



Marta Elena Ayala
Community Affairs Specialist
University of Illinois at Chicago
Latin American and Latino Studies Program
(MC 219)
601 S. Morgan Street -   UH 1525
Chicago, IL  60607
(312) 996-2445   (312) 996-1796