Port cities as sites of spatial knowledge in eighteenth-century Spanish America

This chapter focuses on ports as sites of local and global contact where the circulation of information, policies, material goods and people emerged as a constant reality. The discussion centers on how, through the written and visual representation of ports as mobile and fluid spaces, coloniality was shaped and sustained on the basis of racial, social, and economic interactions. This chapter will enable readers to understand how space works as a critical tool to underline the ways in which Spanish America was viewed, understood, and discursively produced to the rest of the world in the late eighteenth century.