Moving Between Worlds: Global Trade, Luxury Culture, and Textiles in Viceregal Peru

Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation

Citations

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/7m01bm21t

Abstract

In Latin America the importation of luxurious and foreign goods from Europe, East Asia, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Ottoman Empire met and merged with existing Andean traditions to form a hybrid visual culture that drew on indigenous, Spanish, European, Asian, and mudéjar elements that held different meanings for different owners and viewers. This thesis contributes to recent global, decolonizing modes of analysis, contributes to critical reevaluation of homogenizing terms such as mudéjar, and demonstrates effective looking strategies in approaching the extraordinarily complicated visual culture of early modern Latin America. Using viceregal textiles and images of textiles as a platform for investigation, this thesis establishes how East Asian, Iberian, and Ottoman visual cultures circulated in global trade networks and were reinscribed with new meanings in the visual culture of the viceregal Andes. Furthermore, this thesis examines how these rearticulated luxury goods were incorporated into a distinct viceregal setting where both visible and invisible characteristics were received and understood in the specifically hybrid colonial culture where continuity and changes of indigenous cultural values led to the construction of new functions and meanings.

Creator