Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns
Lisa Voigt
Bridging print culture and performance, Spectacular Wealth draws on eighteenth-century festival accounts to explore how colonial residents of the silver-mining town of Potosí, in the viceroyalty of Peru, and the gold-mining region of Minas Gerais, in Brazil, created rich festive cultures that refuted European allegations of barbarism and greed. In her examination of the festive participation of the towns’ diverse inhabitants, including those whose forced or slave labor produced the colonies’ mineral wealth, Lisa Voigt shows how Amerindians, Afro-descendants, Europeans, and creoles displayed their social capital and cultural practices in spectacular performances.
Tracing the multiple meanings and messages of civic festivals and religious feast days alike, Spectacular Wealth highlights the conflicting agendas at work in the organization, performance, and publication of festivals. Celebrants and writers in mining boomtowns presented themselves as far more than tributaries yielding mineral wealth to the Spanish and Portuguese empires, using festivals to redefine their reputations and to celebrate their cultural, spiritual, and intellectual wealth.
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About Lisa Voigt
Reviews for Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns
Bulletin of the Comediantes
"[A] richly researched, methodologically original, and lucidly-written study of eighteenth-century Baroque festival culture in South America."
Bulletin of Spanish Studies
"Spectacular Wealth is an exceptionally well-documented and beautifully written book. In sum: a model of critical clarity."
Renaissance Quarterly
"Spectacular Wealth challenges us to analyze the multiplicity of the interventions and interpretations enacted in these festivals and to transcend the borders of any one empire on our scholarship."
Hispanic American Historical Review
"A well-constructed and complex narrative...Voigt has succeeded in bringing together first-hand eighteenth-century festival accounts with secondary sources and theories on diverse aspects of culture in colonial South America into a seamless narrative."
Portuguese Studies
"An important contribution to the discussion of race, religion, and wealth in colonial Latin America seen through festive cultural celebrations…Voigt does an outstanding job of truly integrating colonial Brazil in the examination of Spanish American colonial texts by looking at the important interconnections that exist among both."
Revista de Estudios Hispánicos