University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository Spanish and Portuguese ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations 6-26-2015 The orW d and The lesh:F The rT ansformation of Female Slave Subject to Mystic Agent through Performance in the Texts of Úrsula de Jesus, Theresa (Chicaba) de Santo Domingo and Rosa Maria Egipcíaca Rachel Spaulding Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/span_etds Part of the European Languages and Societies Commons, and the Latin American Languages and Societies Commons Recommended Citation Spaulding, Rachel. "The orW d and The Flesh: The rT ansformation of Female Slave Subject to Mystic Agent through Performance in the Texts of Úrsula de Jesus, Theresa (Chicaba) de Santo Domingo and Rosa Maria Egipcíaca." (2015). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/span_etds/32 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Spanish and Portuguese ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Rachel E. Spaulding Candidate Spanish and Portuguese Department This dissertation is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the Dissertation Committee: Kathryn McKnight, Chairperson Leila Lehnen Margo Milleret Judy Bieber i THE WORD AND THE FLESH: THE TRANSFORMATION FROM FEMALE SLAVE SUBJECT TO MYSTIC AGENT THROUGH PERFORMANCE IN THE TEXTS OF ÚRSULA DE JESÚS (1604-1666), TERESA (CHICABA) DE SANTO DOMINGO (1676-1748) AND ROSA MARIA EGIPCÍACA (1719CA-1771) BY RACHEL E. SPAULDING B.S., Sociology, Shepherd University, 2003 M.S., Curriculum and Instruction, Hood College, 2007 M.A., Humanities: Latin American Studies, Hood College, 2008 DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Spanish and Portuguese The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico May, 2015 ii DEDICATION This dissertation is for my grandmommie and grandaddy, Olive and Bill, whose love empowered me. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, my deepest appreciation and "heart-full" sentiments are for my mentor, advisor and chair, Kathryn McKnight. Simply, without her guidance, instruction and inspiration, I would not have encountered my vocation as an early modern scholar nor would I have "met" the three most amazing and resilient women whose words have allowed me to re-envision and restructure how my own faith and relationship to God, the subjects of my dissertation, Úrsula, Chicaba and Rosa. The first class I took with Kathy, Mujeres y negros en la colonia, was my first real academic paradigm shift. The way in which Kathy framed the readings made the antiquated texts accessible and relevant. She is an impressive educator and her dedication to her students' learning is unrivaled. She is my Academic Role Icon. For me, reaching that caliber of performance is still years away, however, I have seen how under her guidance I have been able to develop my own ways of approaching early modern texts from a uniquely holistic perspective, informed by interdisciplinary methods. She is an authentic modern day exemplar for academic women's writing. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Judy Bieber, my outside reader, and historian extraordinaire. I am in awe of her abilities to distill hundreds of years of historical details and scholarship into one or two pithy and enlightened critical phases that reframe and situate broad historical trends and movements without "grossly oversimplifying". Her self-confidence as a superior teacher scholar is unparalleled. She invites rigorous criticism and healthy debate. It has been a true privilege to learn from her iv and observe how she advocates for the marriage of literary scholarship to historical analyses and methodologies. I would also like to thank my committee members, Leila Lehnen, whose advise about professionalization and scholarly development has helped me navigate the perilous waters of academia, and Margo Milleret, whose counsel has been invaluable in discerning the effective and prudent ways in which my work can contribute to the fields of Spanish, Portuguese and Performance studies. Additionally, I would like to articulate my sincerest appreciation for the persons working on behalf of the Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Foundation and the Latin American and Iberian Institute at UNM for their dedication and support of my research goals during this writing process. This process would have been interminable without my two helpmates who have been my support and source of encouragement. To my husband, Chamil Fernando, whose love knows no bounds and whose passion for learning and dedication to self-inquiry ground my creative exuberance and to my partner in academic rabblerousing, Lukas Redekopp, whose patience is limitless and whose attention to detail and penchant for proper syntax cannot be surpassed. I appreciate the myriad of ways both of these amazing people sustained me during these last few years. Finally, to my father, Gregory Spaulding, whose caring encouragement and words of love reassured me each and every semester during my fifteen year journey in higher education. Every semester got better, just as Dad promised. v THE WORD AND THE FLESH: THE TRANSFORMATION FROM FEMALE SLAVE SUBJECT TO MYSTIC AGENT THROUGH PERFORMANCE IN THE TEXTS OF ÚRSULA DE JESÚS (1604-1666), TERESA (CHICABA) DE SANTO DOMINGO (1676-1748) AND ROSA MARIA EGIPCÍACA (1719ca-1771) by Rachel E. Spaulding B.S., Sociology, Shepherd University, 2003 M.S., Curriculum and Instruction Secondary Spanish, Hood College, 2007 M.A., Humanities Latin American Studies, Hood College, 2008 Ph.D., Spanish and Portuguese, University of New Mexico, 2015 ABSTRACT Previous research about the African slave experience in the Ibero-Atlantic world has understood slave agency, or more polemically, slave autonomy, through the binary of accommodation versus resistance. However, current African Diaspora scholarship (Schwartz, Thornton, etc.) situates the slave experience within a spectrum of lived experiences. These lived experiences range from accommodation to resistance but often overlap: lived experiences expressed overtly as accommodation reveal covert resistance. My dissertation explores the words of three Afro-women: Úrsula de Jesus (1604-1666), an Afro-Peruvian Mystic, Sister Teresa de Santo Domingo (1676-1748), also known as Sor Chicaba, who lived as a Dominican tertiary in Salamanca, Spain, and Brazil’s lay religious Rosa Maria Egipcíaca (1719 ca.-1771). vi My dissertation explores the lived experiences and the words of these three female slaves, who negotiated their respective realities within the developing orthodox Catholic religious space in the early modern Ibero-Atlantic world. Specifically, my dissertation examines how these early modern Afro-women created agency, which simultaneously accommodated the aims of the Catholic Church and resisted its homogenizing efforts. Their manipulation of Catholic imagery and religious rhetoric permitted these women to construct a critique of the Catholic religious space: these Afro- women employed the tropes of the female mystical tradition to critique their respective societies and testify to their unique experiences as female slaves in the colonial context. My dissertation contextualizes within the early modern Ibero-Atlantic slave experience the ways in which these women’s disparate texts, the spiritual journal, the hagiography and Inquisition testimony, generate an embodied and historicized praxis. My dissertation considers the similarities and the differences in the content and form of these different texts. As such, I apply different methodological approaches to compare and contrast these women’s experiences and their words. First, I compare these women’s visions to Catholic imagery and specifically, those images invoked by female mystics to describe their experience with the divine. Second, I compare these visions to images that carry importance in Afro-religious practice. Third, my dissertation applies performance theoretical frameworks to analyze the ways in which these women gave voice to their colonial slave experience. This methodology fosters a way to read these women’s voices as testimonies of their unique negotiation and critique of their respective slave societies of the early modern Catholic Ibero-Atlantic world. vii Table of Contents INTRODUCTION: THEORIZING THE WORD AND THE FLESH ....................... 1 PRELIMINARY BIOGRAPHIES: ÚRSULA, CHICABA AND ROSA .......................................... 7 BACKGROUND AND SIGNIFICANCE ................................................................................. 12 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS AND METHODOLOGIES .................................................... 16 Colonial Subalterity .................................................................................................. 16 Cultural Agency and Subject Positions ..................................................................... 20 Performance Theoretical Approach ......................................................................... 26 Performance Theoretical Concepts .......................................................................... 27 CHAPTER OUTLINES ....................................................................................................... 46 CHAPTER ONE: THE ROCK AND THE HARD PLACE -- A CIRCUM- ATLANTIC PERSPECTIVE OF ÚRSULA’S, CHICABA’S AND ROSA’S SLAVE EXPERIENCES