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2 books match the query 'Lineage'

cover of All Abraham's Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage

All Abraham's Children

Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage

Armand L. Mauss

University of Illinois Press, 2003

All Abraham’s Children is Armand L. Mauss’s long-awaited magnum opus on the evolution of traditional Mormon beliefs and practices concerning minorities. He examines how members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have defined themselves and others in terms of racial lineages.
 
Mauss describes a complex process of the broadening of these self-defined lineages during the last part of the twentieth century as the modern Mormon church continued its world-wide expansion through massive missionary work.
 
Mauss contends that Mormon constructions of racial identity have not necessarily affected actual behavior negatively and that in some cases Mormons have shown greater tolerance than other groups in the American mainstream.
 
Employing a broad intellectual historical analysis to identify shifts in LDS behavior over time, All Abraham’s Children is an important commentary on current models of Mormon historiography.
 
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cover of Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings

Imagining Identity in New Spain

Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings

By Magali M. Carrera

University of Texas Press, 2003

Using an interdisciplinary approach that also considers legal, literary, and religious documents of the period, Magali Carrera focuses on eighteenth-century portraiture and casta paintings to understand how the people and spaces of New Spain were conceptualized and visualized.

Winner, Book Award, Association of Latin American Art, 2004

Reacting to the rising numbers of mixed-blood (Spanish-Indian-Black African) people in its New Spain colony, the eighteenth-century Bourbon government of Spain attempted to categorize and control its colonial subjects through increasing social regulation of their bodies and the spaces they inhabited. The discourse of calidad (status) and raza (lineage) on which the regulations were based also found expression in the visual culture of New Spain, particularly in the unique genre of casta paintings, which purported to portray discrete categories of mixed-blood plebeians.

Using an interdisciplinary approach that also considers legal, literary, and religious documents of the period, Magali Carrera focuses on eighteenth-century portraiture and casta paintings to understand how the people and spaces of New Spain were conceptualized and visualized. She explains how these visual practices emphasized a seeming realism that constructed colonial bodies—elite and non-elite—as knowable and visible. At the same time, however, she argues that the chaotic specificity of the lives and lived conditions in eighteenth-century New Spain belied the illusion of social orderliness and totality narrated in its visual art. Ultimately, she concludes, the inherent ambiguity of the colonial body and its spaces brought chaos to all dreams of order.

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