The Atlantic Return and the Payback of Evangelization

This article explores Catholic, transnational Latin American migration to Rome as a gendered and ethnicized Atlantic Return, which is figured as a source of ‘new blood’ that fortifies the Catholic Church but which also profoundly unsettles it. I analyze this Atlantic Return as an angle on the affect...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Religion & gender
Main Author: Napolitano, Valentina 1964- (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Brill [2013]
In: Religion & gender
Further subjects:B Atlantic Return
B transnational migration
B Rome
B De Certeau
B Catholicism
B Latin America
B Economy of the Gift
Online Access: Presumably Free Access
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Summary:This article explores Catholic, transnational Latin American migration to Rome as a gendered and ethnicized Atlantic Return, which is figured as a source of ‘new blood’ that fortifies the Catholic Church but which also profoundly unsettles it. I analyze this Atlantic Return as an angle on the affective force of history in critical relation to two main sources: Diego Von Vacano’s reading of the work of Bartolomeo de las Casas, a 16th-century Spanish Dominican friar; and to Nelson Maldonado-Torres’ notion of the ‘coloniality of being’ which he suggests has operated in Atlantic relations as enduring and present forms of racial de-humanization. In his view this latter can be counterbalanced by embracing an economy of the gift understood as gendered. However, I argue that in the light of a contemporary payback of evangelization related to the original ‘gift of faith’ to the Americas, this economy of the gift is less liberatory than Maldonado- Torres imagines, and instead part of a polyfaceted reproduction of a postsecular neoliberal affective, and gendered labour regime.
ISSN:1878-5417
Contains:Enthalten in: Religion & gender
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1163/18785417-00302004