{"id":11,"date":"2017-09-19T21:19:42","date_gmt":"2017-09-20T04:19:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/antoninlast100\/?p=11"},"modified":"2017-09-19T21:19:42","modified_gmt":"2017-09-20T04:19:42","slug":"week-3-the-colonial-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/antoninlast100\/2017\/09\/19\/week-3-the-colonial-experience\/","title":{"rendered":"Week 3 – The Colonial Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"

The excerpt of the memoir of\u00a0la Monja Alferez<\/em>, titled “The Lieutenant Nun”<\/em>, was really fascinating because it offered such a hollywood-esque\u00a0take on an aspect of this era of colonialism. Being a big fan of movies myself, learning about this story of a woman who cut her hair and pretended to be a man, becoming not just a soldier but a conquistador, was unbelievably enthralling. Nonetheless, on the matter of whether Catalina was a rebel or not, I would say that she was in fact not a rebel per say. This is because she was rebelling strictly in the sense that she defied convention by doing something that no other woman would dare to do at that time, yet she did not rebel against the whole system of society or hierarchy entirely due to her stepping into a new hierarchical role. Moreover, the matter in which she was also forgiven and implicitly ignored by the top brass of Spain at that time when she came out, also implies that this was not seen as a hugely momentous act of rebellion that altered anything significantly.<\/p>\n

When observing the casta paintings, the first thing that came to me was the idealized way in which they portray Spanish colonial society. It’s almost explicit that they are advertising themselves to those on the outside of their society and colonial culture. More particularly, they are advertising the harmonious restructured society in which the people live, contrary to what someone may have perceived as pure slavery. Yet, importantly, it is nonetheless apparent that the paintings spread a message of harmony in cohesion with hierarchy. Looking at these paintings and reading about them gives us some indication as to the thinking at that time of the people within the Spanish Empire. Personally, I believe some paintings are better than others simply due to the way in which they portray the relationship between the pureblood Spaniards and the mixed-race “others”. To conclude on this topic, I would make the final observation that the casta paintings are another piece of evidence for the argument that art is powerful enough to extend beyond boundaries and can affect people in all sorts of ways both politically and in social-commentary.<\/p>\n

My question for this week is related to the story of Catalina de Erauso, and even though it is hard to find out personal motivations for such a story, I would still ask the question of what is exactly was her motivations for carrying out such a defiant act? I think that this question is particularly important because it would help to identify and analyze with increased thoroughness the extent to which Catalina was a rebel or not.<\/p>\n

Thanks for reading,<\/p>\n

Antonin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The excerpt of the memoir of\u00a0la Monja Alferez, titled “The Lieutenant Nun”, was really fascinating because it offered such a hollywood-esque\u00a0take on an aspect of this era of colonialism. Being a big fan of movies myself, learning about this story of a woman who cut her hair and pretended to be a man, becoming not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35853,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[269582],"tags":[284557,2596368,83372,2595648,2595998,404],"class_list":["post-11","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-three","tag-convention","tag-defiant","tag-hollywood","tag-mixed-race","tag-power-of-art","tag-rebel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/antoninlast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/antoninlast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/antoninlast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/antoninlast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35853"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/antoninlast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/antoninlast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/antoninlast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions\/12"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/antoninlast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/antoninlast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/antoninlast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}