According to national legend, Havana, Cuba, was founded under the shade of a ceiba tree whose branches sheltered the island's first Catholic mass and meeting of the town council (cabildo) in 1519. The founding site was first memorialized in 1754 by the erection of a baroque monument in Havana's central Plaza de Armas, which was reconfigured in 1828 by the addition of a neoclassical work, El Templete. Viewing the transformation of the Plaza de Armas from the new perspective of heritage studies, this book investigates how late colonial Cuban society narrated Havana's founding to valorize Spanish imperial power and used the monuments to underpin a local sense of place and cultural authenticity, civic achievement, and social order.
Paul Niell analyzes how Cubans produced heritage at the site of the symbolic ceiba tree by endowing the collective urban space of the plaza with a cultural authority that used the past to validate various place identities in the present. Niell's close examination of the extant forms of the 1754 and 1828 civic monuments, which include academic history paintings, neoclassical architecture, and idealized sculpture in tandem with period documents and printed texts, reveals a "dissonance of heritage"in other words, a lack of agreement as to the works' significance and use. He considers the implications of this dissonance with respect to a wide array of interests in late colonial Havana, showing how heritage as a dominant cultural discourse was used to manage and even disinherit certain sectors of the colonial population.
Recenzijas
"[ T]his book offers a sweeping and carefully researched volume that will appear to scholars in art history, Latin American Studies, cultural studies, urban studies and related fields. It reflects the efforts of a determined scholar who aims to link the local, plaza, city, colony, and ultimately (Spanish) empire scales of analysis. This work will force veteran scholars to rethink their assessment of Spanish colonial spaces, and will guide younger scholars too." * European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies *
Papildus informācija
"This is an important book that successfully demonstrates the potential of heritage studies as a critical strategy to understand visual culture in the context of the production of identity, power, and authority in a society." -- Magali Carrera, Chancellor Professor of Art History, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and author of Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings "This [book] is immensely important for the field [of colonial art history]. While sixteenth-century contact-era art and eighteenth-century exceptional works have drawn attention to the field, they also help to keep it marginal to the practice of art history. By engaging the Bourbon reforms, the foundation of academies, and so on, Niell and [others] more amply account for colonial art and help scholars from other genres of the discipline to see similarities, not just differences... The book offers a model case study in the recrafting of historical sites for new purposes, particularly, but not exclusively, in a colonial context. It thus offers a good model for the study of a place in all of its complexities and for all of the constituencies exerting influence on the site." -- Kelly Donahue-Wallace, Professor of Art History, University of North Texas, and author of Art and Architecture in Viceregal Latin America, 1521-1821
Paul Niell is Assistant Professor of Art History at Florida State University. He is the coeditor, with Stacie Widdifield, of Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Visual Cultures of Latin America, 17801910.
