Introduction Harald E. Braun and Jestis Pérez-Magallén Our volume investigates the Hispanic Baroque, the first transatlantic cultural formation, through the prism of identity. Contributors examine complex processes of identity formation in the Hispanic world during the early modern period, and, in some instances, relate these earlier processes and formations to Neo-Baroque and postmodern conceptualizations of identity. It would require several volumes to cover the many attempts to synthesize an understanding, interpretation, and definition of the Baroque. We have opted for a pragmatic and operational notion of the Baroque. For the purpose of this volume, the Hispanic Baroque extends from the beginning of the seventeenth century until the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Contrary to José Antonio Maravall’s view, however, we do not view this cultural formation as simply monolithic and hermetic or propagandistic and manipulative—although we readily acknowledge that these features can be used to describe its hegemonic expressions. Instead, we understand the Baroque as a formation that features breaks, interstices, and cracks through which—alongside hegemonic politics, ideologies and aesthetics—other alternatives constantly emerge, develop, and reach a highly prominent position within the overall formation. The Hispanic Baroque, moreover, is characterized by the development and increase of specific cultural technologies which originated in humanism and became fundamental parts of this complex and enduring cultural formation. The Hispanic Baroque, consequently, shows an unrivaled capacity to adapt and reproduce—a capacity illustrated, for instance, by the “unfinished series of aesthetic accounts” defining Latin American Baroque and Neo- Baroque culture today (Morajia, “Baroque/Neobaroque/Ultrabaroque” 251), This Baroque capacity to adapt, reproduce, and transform is reflected in the failure of many and varied scholarly attempts to provide a stringent definition, The majority of “defining” approaches chose to employ and contain the Baroque within aesthetic, identitarian, or cultural paradigms of interpretation, and chose to rootit firmly in the early modern period. When discussing the Baroque in terms of an aesthetic (or stylistic/artistic) paradigm inspired by the history of art, for instance, many critics (Wélfflin, D’ Ors, Weisbach; also Hatzfeld, Orozco, Rousset) have been caught up in classifications and points that are clearly insufficient in order to understand the Baroque as a whole. Both Wélfflin and D’Ors allude to supra-temporal notions, transcendent criteria that do not grasp the historical contexts and conditioning of each concrete cultural formation. Weisbach, on the other hand, links the Baroque to a specific cultural product, the Counter-Reformation. He thus closes the doors to a wider understanding and invites narrow confessional interpretation and propaganda. Without a doubt the most productive contribution in terms of cultural paradigms of interpretation is Maravall’s. Within the framework of an early modern social, economic, and political crisis, he views the Baroque as a cultural instrument of aristocratic elites and a mouthpiece for hegemonic values. His Baroque comprises the entire “mobilization of technical resources” (124) that elites in power will use, along with physical repression, in order to define the terms and strengthen the means of social integration. In other words—and closer to Maravall’s own words—the Baroque is a directed, mass, urban and conservative culture. Though Maravall may explain Baroque hegemonic discourse, he does not cover the concurrent multitude of Baroque political, cultural, and social discourses (following Marc Angenot)—since he rigidly elides and invalidates contradictions and ambiguities. Critics of Maravall’s rigid interpretation have pointed out the limitations of his research. Fernando R. de la Flor recently suggested that we re- introduce an “openness to represent a death impulse and a principle to go beyond all determinations, including those of the very reason, call it practical reason, experimental reason or even reason of state” (19) into Baroque research. The editors and authors contributing to this volume go even further than de la Flor in highlighting the plurality of Baroque discourses—which Maravall and others only read and interpret unequivocally, mono-logically and mono- discursively—as the only way to explore the genesis of modernity in the Hispanic Baroque. The contributions to this volume also recognize the reality of the Hispanic Baroque as transatlantic reality—existing within contexts discussed and established by David Armitage, Bernard Bailyn, Jorge Cafizares-Esguerra, and José C. Moya, among others. Though we may still want to discuss manifestations of the Renaissance or the Baroque within the confines of a specific European territory, therefore, this is simply not possible in the case of Spain. Juan Luis Suarez has pointed out that part of the difficulty of theorizing about the Hispanic Baroque stems from this transatlantic aspect and the factthat it makes the Hispanic Baroque the first global cultural formation (35). As noted by Carlos Fuentes long ago, the Atlantic Ocean did not act as a separation, barrier or border between Europe and the Americas, or between Spain and its Latin American viceroyalties, but rather as a bridge, a metaphoric highway, on which goods, people, ideas and cultural objects circulated in both directions. Julio Ortega, too, quite rightly emphasized the Atlantic’s unifying aspect with regard to the institutional and political reality as well as the economic and cultural reality of the Spanish Monarchy and Hispanic Empire, The imposition of chronological boundaries on the Baroque raises obvious questions—whether it be placed within the parentheses of one century (1580-1680) as Fernando R. de la Flor suggests, or extending it from the sixteenth century to the period of the novatores and the beginning of the Spanish Enlightenment as Jestis Pérez-Magallén proposes. Here, the contribution of Claude- Gilbert Dubois is helpful and illustrative. According to Dubois, the historic and political Baroque began as a reaction to sixteenth- century reforms that lasted until the end of the eighteenth century. What characterizes the Baroque age, then, at the political level, is the tension between the theory and propaganda of absolute or divine right monarchy, on the one hand, and its actual reality and practice on the other, Enlightened despotism is only one actualization of an invented tradition and imagination of power that was constantly forced to steep low and adapt to varying circumstances in distant and culturally and geographically diverse regions. The observations of Dubois and others concerning the constant tension in the political sphere are of wider significance for our understanding of the Hispanic Baroque. This Hispanic Baroque is defined by—and its cultural dynamic and longevity rooted in—contradictory aspects that have been marginalized or considered mutually exclusive in previous attempts at periodization and chronology. A willingness to accept the impossibility of resolving contradictions and courage to turn complexity into a dynamic of interpretation and cultural practice characterizes the Hispanic Baroque In contrast to Renaissance ideals of harmony, the Hispanic Baroque often consciously synergizes and disperses the flow of imagination. Ultimately, it could be defined as a utopia of impossible diversity and unity—unitary and binary, authoritarian and schizoid at the same time. For the purposes of this volume, then, the Hispanic Baroque is defined, following Juan Luis Suarez, as a cultural system characterized by forms of expression that are extremely charged with meaning, whose interactions follow a certain model through the effective and technically oriented combination of a variety of information codes (visual, linguistic and imaginative) coalescing in the same individual representation—the same cultural object—