Abstract
Here we examine texts written by and about women of African descent in the Americas during the seventeenth century. That we know about their lives indicates that they were exceptional; that they were black, enslaved for the first parts of their lives, and located in the Americas makes them, by some standards, marginal as well. Over one hundred years before Phillis Wheatley gained recognition as “Phillis, a Negro girl, in Boston,” the lives of the women we examine—an African Carmelite in Mexico, a black Franciscan lay sister in Peru, and a Mexican-Jewish mulatta born in Spain—exhibited similar tensions between how their status as exceptions was constructed and deployed by Euro-Americans as a reflection of the virtues of a specific city or region and how they negotiated these characterizations by also navigating a range of transatlantic discourses. For Euro-American creole elites, discourses surrounding “exceptional” black women could help resituate their endeavors with respect to cosmopolitan centers—black women were useful significo in ongoing debates about what counted as the periphery within empire.1 The women whom we study were intensely aware of the marginality that comes with low social status, but they were also aware of the marginalization that worried Euro-American creoles. We examine their positions between local and global spaces and examine how they described the world, criollismo, domestic space, and local politics. The bodies of black women, especially those who were enslaved, were often overdetermined as cultural and economic objects, a dynamic evidenced by the ways they were exceptionalizcd by creole elites (and modern scholars). At times the women we study explicitly resisted objectification of their bodies. We are more interested, however, in how they challenged and participated in imperial discourses while looking beyond figurations of their bodies.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Works Cited
Archival Sources
Abecedario de los Relaxados Reconsiliados y Penitenciados en la Nueva España, Huntington Museum manuscript collection 35096, 60v. Manuscript.
Proceso y causa criminal contra Esperanza Rodriguez mutata natural de Sevilla viuda de Juan Baptista del Bosque de nación aleman por observante de la ley de Moysen. Archivo General de la Nación, México. Inquisición 408.2. Manuscript.
Published Sources
Aeree, William G., Jr. “Jacinto Ventura de Molina: A Black Letrado in a White World of Letters, 1766–1841.” Latin American Research Review 44.2 (2009): 37–58. Print.
Bauer, Ralph, and José Antonio Mazzetti, eds. Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P/Omohundro, 2009. Print.
Bristol, Joan Cameron. Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2007. Print.
Brooks, Joanna. “Our Phillis, Ourselves.” American Literature 82.1 (2010): 1–28. Print.
Gómez de la Parra, José. Fundación y Primera Siglo: Crónica del primer convento de carmelitas descalzas en Puebla, 1604–1704. Intro. Manuel Ramos Medina. México: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1992. Print.
Jesús, Ursula de. The Souls of Purgatory: The Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Afro-Peruvian Mystic, Ursula de Jesús. Ed. Nancy van Deuscn. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2004. Print.
Liebman, Seymour B. The Jews in New Spain: Faith, Flame, and the Inquisition. Coral Gables: U of Miami P, 1970. Print.
Myers, Kathleen Ann. Neither Saints Nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. Print.
Schorsch, Jonathan. Swimming the Christian Atlantic: Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians in the Seventeenth Century. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Print.
Weyler, Karen. Empowering Words: Outsiders and Authorship in Early America. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2013. Print.
Wheatley, Phillis. Complete Writings. Ed. Vincent Carretta. London: Penguin, 2001. Print.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2016 Joan Bristol and Tamara Harvey
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bristol, J., Harvey, T. (2016). Creole Civic Pride and Positioning “Exceptional” Black Women. In: Balkun, M.M., Imbarrato, S.C. (eds) Women’s Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543233_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543233_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-58102-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-54323-3
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)