Description:

Power in colonial Spanish America was situated around the altar. Silver altarware tells this new materialist story that places Christ incarnate and the silver altarware that his body has touched as a vitalist force at the center of flows of colonial power. In New Spain (Mexico) at the end of the eighteenth century, the Eucharist was a shape-shifting central force in this very hierarchical colonial society that not only shaped the nature of contestation among competing sovereignties, but it also opened possibilities for those occupying a lower status to grab a piece of this sacramental power. This dynamic situation follows a sacramental logics, a concept that names the way that incarnational theology both girds the scaffolding and propels the flow of power among competing colonial sovereignties.

Lunch will be provided.