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Podcast: New Books in African American Studies
Episode: Shawn Michael Austin, "Colonial Kinship: GuaranĂ, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay" (U New Mexico Press, 2020)
Description: In Colonial Kinship: GuaranĂ, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay (U New Mexico Press, 2020), historian Shawn Michael Austin traces the history of conquest and colonization in Paraguay during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Emphasizing the social and cultural agency of GuaranĂ--one of the primary indigenous peoples of Paraguay--not only in Jesuit missions but also in colonial settlements and Indian pueblos scattered in and around the Spanish city of AsunciĂ³n, Austin argues that interethnic relations and cultural change in Paraguay can only be properly understood through the GuaranĂ logic of kinship. In the colonial backwater of Paraguay, conquistadors were forced to mar...