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Urban Space as Heritage in Late Colonial Cuba: Classicism and Dissonance on the Plaza de Armas of Havana, 1754-1828 considers the commemoration of Havana’s foundational site in the late colonial period as a heritage process. According to national legend, Havana, Cuba, was founded under the shade of a ceiba tree whose branches sheltered the island’s first Catholic mass and meeting of the town council (cabildo) in 1519. The founding site was first memorialized in 1754 by the erection of a baroque monument in Havana’s central Plaza de Armas, which was reconfigured in 1828 by the addition of a neoclassical work, El Templete. Viewing the transformation of the Plaza de Armas from the new perspective of heritage studies, this book investigates how late colonial Cuban society narrated Havana’s founding to valorize Spanish imperial power and used the monuments to underpin a local sense of place and cultural authenticity, civic achievement, and social order.
Niell addresses the fascinating topic of Cuban heritage and urban change in Havana in the period of political upheaval in the Spanish empire between 1754 and 1828. While the stated objective of the book is to analyse the transformations in the monument of El Templete and Havana’s Plaza de Armas, it encompasses a much wider range of topics and processes. Th theoretical framework draws strongly on critical heritage studies, using a broad – although elusive – defiition of heritage as the uses of the past in the present, and in particular the author builds on the idea of dissonant heritage elaborated by Tunbridge and Ashworth (1996). Th book develops the argument that the Bourbons used urban transformations in Havana – particularly in the Plaza the Armas – to impose their reformist agenda together with a more rigorously colonial society. Heritage was fundamental in the negotiation of these transformations, and Greco-Roman neoclassicism became the authorised language of what Niell defies as ‘cultural modernity’. As conveyed in heritage discourse and practice this allowed both Spanish authorities and local Creole elites to negotiate their interests and identities, while disinheriting Afro-Cubans from the national narrative and excluding them in practice from Havana’s political community.
2020
Laura Fernández-González, « Guadalupe Garcia, Beyond the Walled City: Colonial Exclusion in Havana », ABE Journal [En ligne], 16 | 2019, mis en ligne le 24 mars 2020, consulté le 09 avril 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/abe/6966
2008
UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses. Learn more... ProQuest, 'Bajo su sombra': The narration and reception of colonial urban space in early nineteenth-century Havana, Cuba. ...
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