Drawing on literary texts, conversion manuals, and colonial
correspondence from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and Peru,
Forms of Relation focuses on nonprocreative and nonbiological kinship
ties, revealing the importance of these relationships to debates and
struggles over colonial governance and identities.
Goldmark begins with one Dominican friars polemic against Spanish
abuses of Indigenous womens reproductive labor, which threatened to
lead to maternal infanticide, the death of the Indies populations, and the
failure of evangelization. He consults texts from sixteenth-century Peru
describing how Inca authorities thwarted marriages between nonelite
Inca women and Spanish men in an attempt to preserve Inca political
power. He uncovers Spanish and Criollo teachers petitions, submitted in
the early seventeenth century to the Archbishoprics Archive of Lima, that
hoped to convince authorities that by following these petition authors
"good examples," an Indigenous person could claim Christian rights.
Forms of Relation illustrates why we must and how we can interrogate the
dominant paradigms of mestizaje, heterosexuality, and biology that are
too often left unchallenged in studies of Spanish colonialism,
demonstrating how nonprocreative kinships proved critical to the creation
of that regime.
A thoroughly documented and theorized book, of the highest intellectual
and interpretative caliber. Goldmark's authoritative rapport with current
as well as more historical publications in the field is stunning. A firstorder contribution to colonial studies. Eduardo González, Johns
Hopkins University, Author of Cuba and the Fall: Christian Text
and Queer Narrative in the Fiction of José Lezama Lima and
Reinaldo Arenas
In a rich and wide-ranging study that sheds fresh light on texts by
Bartolomé de Las Casas, Titu Cusi Yupanqui, José de Acosta, Felipe
Guaman Poma de Ayala and other important writers, Matthew Goldmark
shows how colonial textual forms produce, rather than merely document,
colonial kinship relations in the early Americas. Ralph Bauer, University
of Maryland, author of The Alchemy of Conquest: Science,
Religion, and the Secrets of the New World
