Welch, Kayla Aletha
(2024)
Invented Indians:
White Delusion, Make-Believe, and Native Mobilization of the Colonial Imaginary in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Mexico.
Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh.
(Unpublished)
Abstract
Studies of European colonialism and its legacies often center on power as the relentlessly pervasive, even inescapable, subordination of an Indigenous population through totalizing control of life. In Latin American critical thought, this tendency has led many academics to reduce colonial dynamics to a framework of an invincible Spanish colonizer working against an Indigenous population who either becomes assimilated into the colonizer’s ways of being or maintains a covert, and usually ineffective, adherence to the pre-Columbian past. My research seeks to complicate these binaries by examining chronicles, letters, and legal texts from sixteenth and seventeenth-century Mexico through a lens of critical race theory. I aim to understand how Natives mobilized what I call invented Indians, or cultural and political representations of Native peoples fabricated by colonizers as a base for the foundational, and often overlooked, logic of Spanish colonialism: White supremacy. Through microhistories, I explore how Nahua, Maya, and Zapotec individuals leveraged invented Indians to shore up the colonial imaginary and, in the very same act, disarticulate it.
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| Item Type: |
University of Pittsburgh ETD
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| Status: |
Unpublished |
| Creators/Authors: |
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| ETD Committee: |
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| Date: |
21 February 2024 |
| Date Type: |
Publication |
| Defense Date: |
10 December 2021 |
| Approval Date: |
21 February 2024 |
| Submission Date: |
9 December 2021 |
| Access Restriction: |
No restriction; Release the ETD for access worldwide immediately. |
| Number of Pages: |
215 |
| Institution: |
University of Pittsburgh |
| Schools and Programs: |
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences > Hispanic Languages and Literatures |
| Degree: |
PhD - Doctor of Philosophy |
| Thesis Type: |
Doctoral Dissertation |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: |
coloniality, colonial, postcolonial, decolonial, critical race theory, colonial Mexico, sixteenth century, Indigenous studies, Native studies, Native, White supremacy, Nahua, Maya, Zapotec, hegemony of power, white fragility, invented Indians, postindian, representation, identity |
| Date Deposited: |
21 Feb 2024 20:39 |
| Last Modified: |
21 Feb 2024 20:39 |
| URI: |
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/42058 |
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