BAROQUE UTOPIAS: COLONIALITY AND GLOBALIZATION IN THE EARLY SPANISH EMPIRE

Baroque utopias are physical, textual, or visual spaces that
accumulate objects over
time,
such as libraries,
marketplaces, maps, chronicles, and planned settlements.
These spaces expand continually in an effort to incorporate the entire globe into their collections. The Baroque utopia also generates an associated but separate space for "waste".
This talk will examine a few such utopias, including judge Vasco de Quiroga's 1535 plan to "civilize" the Purépecha people of Michoacán, and some contemporary examples of resistance, such as historiographer Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala's anticolonial map of the Andes. I hope to show that Baroque cultural production is intimately connected both to coloniality -the European conviction that knowledge produced through reason is universally applicable, rather than regionally specific-and to the globalizing agenda that the Spanish Crown advanced through Christianity,capitalism, and universal monarchy.