Modeling social interaction: Marital miscegenation in colonial Spanish America

Abstract

In this article, the author constructs new life tables for the white population of the United States in each decade between 1790 and 1900. Drawing from several recent studies, he suggests best estimates of life expectancy at age 20 for each decade. These estimates are fitted to new standards derived from the 1900–1902 rural and 1900–1902 overall death registration area life tables using a two-parameter logit model with fixed slope. The resulting decennial life tables more accurately represent sex- and age-specific mortality rates while capturing known mortality trends.     

The construction of gender in colonial Latin America

When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846. By RAMÓN GUTIÉRREZ. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. Pp. xxx + 424.

Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America. Edited by ASUNCIÓN LAVRÍN. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Pp. v + 349.

Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville. By MARY ELIZABETH PERRY. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Pp. 206.

To Love, Honor and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts Over Marriage Choice, 1574–1821. By PATRICIA SEED. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. Pp. 322

História e Sexualidade no Brasil. Edited by RONALDO VAINFAS. Rio de Janeiro: Edicões Graal Ltda., 1986. Pp. 212.     

Instagram abroad: performance,consumption and colonial narrative in tourism

As a form of travel writing and a highly favoured marketing tool, Instagram provides a blueprint of the ideologies underpinning contemporary tourism. This article argues that consistent visual motifs on Instagram echo a colonial iconography that sees tourist destinations as available for possession and consumption, effacing local place and identity. The reproduction of three motifs – the tropical exotic, the promontory gaze and fantasised assimilation – mediatises ideations that, rather than depicting these destinations as contemporaneous spaces in which a tourist is a guest, depict them as ‘other’ realms for the tourist’s taking. Local residents, when pictured, are configured as genericised icons of exoticism that serve to imbue the tourist’s experience with authenticity. These visual tropes, paired with textual captions and hashtags, present tourists as the rightful occupants and users of local spaces in a way that echoes the colonial seizure of foreign lands, an action that is imaginatively performed as tourists enact these three motifs in Instagram posts. Taken together, the visual regime witnessed and performed on Instagram contributes to the imagined and real perpetuation of unequal power relations in global tourism, which continue to privilege wealthy tourists over local residents.     

Description,appropriation, transformation: Fascist rhetoric and colonial nature

During the period of Fascism, a variety of discourses and representations were attached to colonial landscapes and to their uses. African nature was the subject of diverse rhetorical strategies, which ranged from the persistence of visions of wilderness as the locus of adventure to the domesticating manipulations of an incipient tourist industry aiming to familiarise the Italian public with relatively tame forms of the exotic. Contrasting images of bareness and productivity, primitivism and modernisation, resistance to change and dramatic transformation found their way into accounts of colonial territories ranging from scientific and pseudo-scientific reports to children's literature, from guidebooks to travel accounts, all of which were sustained not just by written texts but also by iconographic representations. This article will look at the specific example of accounts of Italian Somalia in order to explore Fascist discourses regarding colonial nature and its appropriation. Documents examined will include early guidebooks to the colonies, a small selection of travel accounts aimed at the general public, as well as the works of a number of geographers and geologists who were among the most active polygraphs of the period, and whose writings addressed a wide range of Italian readers.