Nineteenth-Century Spanish America: A Cultural History by Christopher Conway (review)

In Nineteenth-Century Spanish America: A Cultural History, Christopher Conway, in a broad view of nineteenth-century culture not bound by the limits of national identities, unites spaces and practices often divided by class and privilege. As Conway notes, the book is an introduction to the cultural complexities of the region. Thus, the informed reader will be familiar with Conway's central premise: to productively study culture, we must abandon binaries (the "high" and "low") and instead focus on sites of fluidity. Moreover, for Conway, we must base our study of culture in the understanding that Spanish America was the testing ground for successful and failed encounters between tradition and modernity. The value of Conway's work lies in his ability to transport the reader to specific moments in which barriers between different cultural groups are blurred. Conway draws from a vast archive and an extensive knowledge of multiple national cultural traditions in order to demonstrate how new sensibilities emerged from the rejection, integration, or refashioning of multiple cultural practices in the Americas.

Conway has organized the book into five chapters (cities, print, theatricality, image, and musicality) and in each, he explores many of the most common topics in nineteenth-century studies: print and orality, civilization and barbarism, conservatism and liberalism, nationalism and nation-building, and urban culture. Conway writes with a refreshingly accessible prose, devoid of specialized academic language, and each section includes an extensive suggested reading list. Given its scope and accessibility, the book is both a useful resource for the nineteenth-century scholar and an excellent initiation for someone beginning to study the region. Accordingly, the book will appeal to graduate and undergraduate students, as well as non-academic readers.

In the first chapter, Conway highlights how each individual sector and material manifestation of the urban space together lend themselves to a broader understanding of Spanish-American culture. Consistent with his goal of blurring the lines between elite and popular culture, Conway moves from an analysis of lettered culture, intent on organization and modernity (politics, architecture, urban planning, engineering), to the complexities of classifying the agents of disorganization (the poor, violence, prostitution, disease). In this way, he shows that Spanish-American cities were spaces propitious to the simultaneous and contradictory task of making peace with the past while paving the way forward. At the same time, however, they were also the repositories for what impeded a seamless path to modernity.

In his study of print, Conway underlines the disparity between how print was used to create or document culture and the fact that many illiterate citizens were unable to access texts. In spite of that contradiction, print culture was a point of contact that united different social groups. Conway does an excellent job of demonstrating the broad scope of print culture, from the different types of nineteenth-century texts (newspapers, Christian print, cuadros de costumbres, novels, literary magazines, pamphlets) to the manner in which texts circulated (tinterillos, letter writers, journalists), to the spaces, both literal and figurative, occupied by the literate (literary salons, literary associations, reading rooms), and those occupied by the illiterate (pulquerias, tavernas), as well as the role of orality during the influx of print culture (texts that imitated colloquial speech, and those who read out loud to the illiterate).

Conway broadly defines theatricality as spectacle that included both stage and street performances, as well as the conditioning of appropriate corporal movement in public. Conway investigates military and political processions, fireworks spectacles, the allegorical staging of national scenes, to name only a few. Especially useful is Conway's ability to link state power and theatricality. Once example he cites is the performance of the state official who marches into a church. Another fascinating part of this section is the performance of refined manners that included good hygiene, proper attire and the social norms that dictated the correct way to circulate in public. He examines in turn how these specific cultural practices contrasted with other public events that liberated people...