Dystopias of Infamy

JAVIER IRIGOYEN-GARCÍA is a professor of Spanish at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of The Spanish Arcadia: Sheep Herding, Pastoral Discourse, and Ethnicity in Early Modern Spain and "Moors Dressed as Moors": Clothing, Social Distinction, and Ethnicity in Early Modern Iberia.

• Introduction: "Names full of vituperations"1. Insulting as a Social Speech Act: Communities of Affronters2. Self-deprecation and Social Existence3. Dystopias of Infamy4. Fancy sambenitos: The Ethnicization of Infamy5. "They did not bray in vain": History, Insult, and Collective IdentityEpilogue: Spanish History as sambenitoAcknowledgmentsBibliographyIndex

"Dystopias of Infamy shows convincingly how the discourse and practices of insult shaped the cultural imagination, anxieties, and fantasies of early modern Iberia. The significance of Irigoyen-García's study lies in an innovative approach that reveals infamy's resilience as much as its liabilities, its foreseeable victims as much as its unexpected mutations. Through the recuperation of little-known historical documents and incisive interpretation of well-established texts, this book provides fresh, nuanced insights into the social workings of both the dominant and marginalized in pre-modern Spain."— Paul Michael Johnson, author of Affective Geographies: Cervantes, Emotion, and the Literary Mediterranean"Extremely well-researched and well-written, Dystopias of Infamy is bound to be of interest not just to Hispanists, but also to cultural anthropologists and scholars interested in issues of identity formation among both dominant and marginalized groups."— Anthony J. Cascardi, author of Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics