Authority and Identity in Colonial Ibero-America Focus of LAII Symposium

April 5, 2013

The UNM Latin American and Iberian Institute announces "A Richard E. Greenleaf Symposium on Latin America: Authority and Identity in Colonial Ibero-America," a two-day, interdisciplinary symposium which will be held April 10-11, 2013, in the UNM Student Union Building, Lobo A & B. The event is free and open to the public. More information is available on the symposium website.

This symposium brings to UNM eight prominent colonial scholars from History, Art History, and Literary and Cultural Studies for an interdisciplinary dialogue. Their talks examine the meanings that indigenous, European, and Creole peoples produced in their festivals, rituals, codices and chronicles, legal dictates and practices, their bodies, and the very space they built and inhabited. With a constant focus on authority, presenters will discuss the complexity of colonial subjects' interactions with each other and the particularly colonial identities that emerged from these interactions. Panel titles are "Documenting & Structuring Knowledge outside of European Forms," "Contesting and Redefining Imperial Subjectivities," "Disciplining and Reinscribing the Body," and "Shaping and Performing Urban Space." Afternoon sessions will be followed by an opportunity for extended dialogue with the panelists.

This event is made possible in large part due to Dr. Richard E. Greenleaf (1930-2012), distinguished scholar of colonial Latin America. Greenleaf had an extensive career in teaching, research, and service. His legacy will continue to make a difference and inform Latin American Studies, in part through an endowment which guarantees the LAII the ability to hold an annual conference on Latin America. This the second Richard E. Greenleaf Symposium on Latin America. The first was held in 2011 and addressed "Africans and Their Descendants in the Early Modern Ibero-American World."