Estado de Graça: A Utopia Teológico-Política do Padre António Vieira

This essay discusses Jesuit Priest António Vieira's (1608–1697) Messianic writings, specifically the texts in which he comments on the impending arrival of the Kingdom of Christ, described as a most happy state suffused with divine grace. This Kingdom would be perfect and complete, and it would take place on earth, not in the purely spiritual sphere of heaven. I argue that the earthly dimension of Vieira's conception of the Kingdom of Christ opens his Messianism to a political dimension. It will lead him to consider the coexistence of nations during this Millenarian Kingdom in terms of “perpetual peace,” a notion later secularized by the thinkers of the Enlightenment.     

Ramón y Cajal erroneously identified as Camillo Golgi on a souvenir postage stamp

Focusing on a philatelic oddity that erringly identifies a picture of Santiago Ramón y Cajal as that of Camillo Golgi, this brief article examines official and unofficial stamp issues honoring the two great neuroanatomists, one from Spain and the other from Italy, who were early Nobel Prize winners in Physiology or Medicine.     

La exportación de la Ilustración Peruana. De Alejandro Malaspina a José Ignacio de Lecuanda (1794–1799)

Este artículo analiza la desconocida divulgación de la ilustración peruana en Madrid a partir del discurso que sobre la ‘idea del Perú’ impulsó la Sociedad de Amantes del País en el Mercurio Peruano a fines del siglo XVIII. Este proyecto utilitario de los mercuristas se hizo manifiesto durante tres momentos: primero, en la confección del informe político sobre el Perú que redactó el marino ilustrado Alejandro Malaspina en 1795; segundo, en la divulgación que impulso el ilustrado vasco José Ignacio de Lecuanda en las páginas del periódico titulado Viajero Universal en 1798; tercero, en el diseño que patrocinó el propio Lecuanda en el Cuadro de historia civil, natural y geográfica del Perú pintado por Luis Thiebaut (1799). El estudio discute las razones por las cuales Malaspina y Lecuanda creyeron que la exportación de este proyecto ilustrado iba a convertir al Perú en un reino utilitario para la Monarquía hispánica.     

Politics squeezed through a police state: Policing and vinculación in post-1968 Mexico City

Contemporary political geographers accommodate everyday practice in accounts of state power but arguably tend to retain a bias towards sites easily identified with the state. This bias complements a frequent conflation of policing and the state in recent scholarship on the post-political. This article challenges these assumptions by showing how rituals of anti-stateness may themselves paradoxically give to the senses a partitioned world of state domination and non-state resistance that delimits political possibility. I specifically examine activist participation in such policing through analysis of student-left commemorations of 1968 in Mexico City. My analysis of such activism also reveals tension in processes that consolidate a partitioned state/non-state world. I show that, through vinculación, some activists establish unaccounted-for solidarities that exceed the categories through which state power has in the past been exercised, reconfiguring relations between people whose place vis-à-vis the state would otherwise be predictable. I therefore reveal ongoing interplay between processes of politics and policing, not a “post-political condition” that would demand, as politics, the negation of any social-spatial order.     

Consejero de Felipe III en su Real Consejo de Indias: venalidad y corrupción en el servicio a la Monarquía

During the reign of Philip the III, one of the most famous legal proceedings of the 17th century took place. It was conducted against Pedro Franqueza and Alonso Ramírez de Prado, who were charged for taking advantage of the king's trust to obtain personal benefits and in detriment of the Monarchy. Two of the charges were referred to the case of an adviser from Indias: Lic. Francisco Alonso de Villagrá, who might have obtained the position through fraudulent activities with the all-powerful Pedro Franqueza. Based on the analysis of the documents pertaining to this case, the aim of this research is to unravel the events that took place, understand the causes that led Villagrá to become involved and the consequences of the way in which the position was acquired.     

De Manuel Zeno Gandía a Wilfredo Mattos Cintrón: Exploraciones en torno al género negro en Puerto Rico

This article proposes an analysis of Wilfredo Mattos Cintrón's seventh noir novel (novela negra), Las dos muertes de Catalino Ríos (2012), and a comparison of its poetics with that of Manuel Zeno Gandía's La charca (1894). The article questions the naturalist label often applied to Zeno Gandía's novel and instead views it as a nascent hardcore detective novel (proto novela negra). In comparing the two novels, it validates both Mattos Cintrón and Zeno Gandía as initiators of the noir thriller in Puerto Rico.     

Topoiesis: Procesos de espacialización en la literatura (crítica y metodología)

ABSTRACT

Space in literary texts has been widely studied but poorly systematized. There is no valid method of analysis that gives space a critical meaning. For instance, critics have eluded the fact that time and space cannot be considered separately. On the other hand, they have used concepts or methods from disciplines aside literature such as anthropology, biology, psychology, or geography that do not help clarify the meaning or signification of a literary text. We begin this article by giving a review of the main theoretical and critical positions regarding space in literature from the second half of the twentieth century. We do this in order to evaluate the main results those studies have attained. Later on, we propose a methodology that may clarify the significance of space in a literary text. The concept topoiesis (as far as we know, it has not been used in the humanities) represents for us a key word. It helps us to distinguish one main process where space can turn from a signification practice to the production of meaning in a literary text.     

La destrucción y la creación en Los siameses y Flores de papel

Many Hispanic American plays of the twentieth century, such as Flores de papel and Los siameses, among others, depict the social-economic imbalance visible among the different social classes. This inequality is seen as inevitable, forcing the working class first to destroy elements of the status quo, in order then to construct a new reality. Thus it attempts to produce radical changes, including the alteration or reconstruction of the class system itself, through destruction-construction of the surrounding reality. Hence, the dramatists, considering the role of the theater and of the writer, present these struggles and class discrepancies in an attempt to find a solution to the problems of their characters' social environment.     

Corondó: palaeoenvironmental reconstruction and palaeoethnobotanical considerations in a probable locus of early plant cultivation (south-eastern Brazil)

Abstract

The site of Corondó, situated in Campos Novos, in the São Pedro D'Aldeia municipe (Rio de Janeiro State, Brazil), was dated between c. 4000 and 3000 years BP. The high prevalence of dental caries in its population suggests that it might have been a locus of plant cultivation, a hypothesis supported by the presence of diverse plant remains and by the high frequency of grinding artefacts at this site. Anthracological analysis aimed to identify the environment of the site. The charcoal spectrum suggests that it was situated in a restinga forest, near to the Atlantic forest and with the presence of mangrove and open restinga in the environment. Firewood supply was probably obtained by the random gathering of dead wood. The combination of anthracological results with data provided by archaeological and bioanthropological research indicated that the population which constructed this site (1) had a relatively stable sociocultural system; (2) carried out a range of individual activities that remained constant throughout the occupation period; (3) lived in a relatively stable environment.