Brown Bag Event

The University of Illinois at Chicago Latin American and Latino Studies Program
presents:

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

presented by: Cristian Roa

Wednesday, APRIL 20, 2011
at 12:00 p.m.
University Hall 1550 Conference Room
601 S. Morgan Street


Brown Bag Event Flyer

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.