Acceso usuarios
Lisa Voigt
Public festivals in early modern Portugal, such as the royal entry of Philip III into Lisbon in 1619, were one way in which the global geography of Portuguese imperial expansion was communicated to a wide audience at home. This article examines the representation of non-European peoples in the Real tragicomedia del descubrimiento y conquista del Oriente, a play performed for Philip III's entry at the Jesuit college in Lisbon. A published account of this theatrical performance, João Sardinha Mimoso's Relación de la real tragicomedia (1620), offers a glimpse of not only the play's exoticized representations of "the Orient" and Brazil, but also of a dark-skinned student-actor who infuses his performance of a "Brazilian King" with his own African-derived cultural knowledge and traditions. By focusing on Mimoso's references to the actor and his performance rather than on the foreign land he is supposed to represent, we can consider the participation of non-European subjects in the production and circulation of global knowledge.
