Dancing the New World: Aztecs, Spaniards, and the by Paul A. Scolieri

From Christopher Columbus to “first anthropologist” Friar Bernardino de Sahagún, 15th- and sixteenth-century explorers, conquistadors, clerics, scientists, and tourists wrote concerning the “Indian” dances they encountered during the New international. This was once very true of Spanish missionaries who intensively studied and documented local dances in an try to determine and get rid of the “idolatrous” behaviors of the Aztec, the biggest indigenous empire in Mesoamerica on the time of its eu discovery.

Dancing the recent World lines the transformation of the Aztec empire right into a Spanish colony via written and visible representations of dance in colonial discourse—the significant constellation of chronicles, histories, letters, and go back and forth books by way of Europeans in and in regards to the New global. Scolieri analyzes how the chroniclers used the Indian dancing physique to symbolize their very own studies of ask yourself and terror within the New international, in addition to to justify, lament, and/or deny their function in its political, non secular, and actual conquest. He additionally unearths that Spaniards and Aztecs shared an realizing that dance performed an immense position within the formation, upkeep, and illustration of imperial energy, and describes how Spaniards forced Indians to accomplish dances that dramatized their very own conquest, thereby reworking them into colonial matters. Scolieri’s pathfinding research of the enormous colonial “dance archive” conclusively demonstrates that dance performed a vital position in a single of the defining moments in sleek history—the eu colonization of the Americas.