Please join the Affect and the Emotions Workshop on
Monday, February 20th, on Zoom, 4:30-6:00pm CT
when
Yunning Zhang
presents:
“The Passion According to La China Poblana: Martyrdom and Distress in Catarina de San Juan’s Vida (1689-1692) by Alonso Ramos”
Discussant: J. Michelle Molina, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Northwestern University
Description: This paper examines distressful martyrdoms in the three-volume hagiography of Catarina de San Juan (ca.1607-1688) who, born to the royal family of the Mughal Empire, disembarked in New Spain via the Manila Galleon as a domestic slave, before dying a venerated mystic in Puebla de los Ángeles. Catarina, popularly known as la china poblana, has long been an object of curiosity for scholars of Colonial Latin American studies and has been established as an emblem for the multicultural, multiracial baroque society of New Spain. This paper, however, reads her as a body in distress that was afflicted with two opposing sides of violence: the persecution of Jesuit missionaries in her visions, and the martyrizing violence with which her sexualized and racialized body suffered in her pilgrimage to the Americas. Contrary to the European /Novohispanic martyrs globally celebrated for their glorious sacrifice for faith in the “Far East”, Catarina’s “martyrdoms” shed light on the ways in which the gruesome sufferings of the other ethnicity and the other sex had been reappropriated for the writing of an early modern trans-Pacific account of felicitous encounters and salvation.
