As a result of Portuguese navigation and imperial expansion beginning in the fifteenth century, the city of Lisbon became a center of global commerce of both goods and peoples, the latter generating a large African presence frequently noted by foreign visitors. Lisbon’s role in intercontinental trade and its mixed population are some of the features it shares with modern-day “global cities.” This paper focuses on that mixed population and its impact on what some scholars have identified as another essential feature of global cities, a “global consciousness.” I focus in particular on descriptions of public performances (music, dance, theater) of non-elite, non-white subjects in both state-sponsored festivals and daily life. Certainly the political and religious elite sought to use such performances to shape a narrative about Lisbon’s colonial dominance over other lands and peoples—through, for example, the “Oriental provinces’” rendering of “tribute” to Lisbon in a play entitled the “Royal Tragicomedy of the Discovery and Conquest of the Orient,” which was performed at a Jesuit College during the royal entry of King Philip III into Lisbon in 1619. Nevertheless, the account describing this play, which I study in this essay and contextualize in relation to other visual and textual depictions of performances, reveals other ways of interpreting the festive participation of non-Europeans, beyond their contribution to the celebration of Portuguese imperial power.
My interest in this participation is twofold. On one hand, I explore the broader public’s reaction to Portuguese expansion and the peoples and cultures with whom it brought them into contact. When non-Europeans paraded in costumes, played instruments, or performed dances from their homelands, they made distant, overseas cultures visible, audible, and sensible to a domestic audience. To what extent did these performances contribute to a “global consciousness”—an understanding of global space and its vast diversity of cultures among those who did not travel abroad? On the other hand, I am interested in the agendas of the participants, beyond those which most authors and authorities attributed to them—political subjection and religious devotion, or alternatively, subversion and idolatry. What other meanings and motives for their participation can festival accounts reveal? And how was ethnographic knowledge shaped not just by the colonizer’s gaze, but also by the individuals who traversed—whether forcibly or willingly—the global circuits of the Portuguese empire?
PROFESSOR LISA VOIGT
Ohio State University
Lisa Voigt is Professor at Ohio State University. Her areas of research include Colonial Latin American Literature/Culture, Comparative Luso-Hispanic Studies, and Transatlantic Studies, with a focus on captivity and shipwreck narratives in the Spanish and Portuguese empires, mestizo historiography in New Spain, and Baroque festivals and festival accounts in the Andes, Brazil, and Portugal. She is the author of Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press 2009) and Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns (University of Texas Press 2016). The first manuscript was awarded the Modern Language Association's Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for an outstanding book published in the field of Latin American and Spanish literature and cultures. Dr. Voigt has been also awarded an ACLS Collaborative Fellowship (for 2019-21) for another book project provisionally entitled "The Epistemology of the Copy in Early Modern Travel Narratives," which focuses on recycled and copied illustrations of the non-European world in European travel accounts.
