Image from inside San José Church, Puerto Rico [Image courtesy of the author].
Image from inside San José Church, Puerto Rico [Image courtesy of the author].
To say the least, these Caribbean versions of Constantine and Justinian turned Puerto Rico into one of the outermost and unlikeliest of territories of a Transatlantic Roman Empire, an eruption of late antiquity into the so-called American Century.
Read More"One of Berzon’s constant reminders is that powerful ideologies and strategies of representation often strive to hide their own seams and points of tension, but that it is in the process of highlighting these very points of tension that they find themselves at their most reproducible but also at their most frail. The late ancient heresiologists cultivated strong rhetorics of exceptionality and mastery—the heresy hunter excelled at making discoveries and at flaunting erudition—but also rehearsed a discourse of fear of contagion, vulnerability, and epistemic overload."
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