About

Daniel Nemser is an Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, obtained in 2011. His research focuses on colonial Latin America, with particular interests in questions of race, materiality, political economy, and indigenous studies, specifically Nahuatl. Nemser's first book, Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico (2017), traces the genealogy of spatial concentration as a colonial governance technique, examining how sites where bodies and objects are brought together contribute to the emergence of racial categories and racialized subjectivities. Currently, he is working on a book project about the rise of racial slavery and the development of circulatory infrastructures, primarily roads, in colonial Mexico.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Computer Science
• Computer Security
• Gender studies
• Telecommunications
• History

Selected publications

• : <i>Taxing Difference in Peru and New Spain (16th–19th Century): Negotiating Social Differences and Belonging</i>

  Renaissance Quarterly · 2025-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Taxing Difference in Peru and New Spain (16th–19th Century): Negotiating Social Differences and Belonging. Sarah Albiez-Wieck. European Expansion and Indigenous Response 40. Leiden: Brill, 2022. xv + 382 pp. $148. - Volume 78 Issue 2

  PublisherDOI

• Acknowledgments

  University of Texas Press eBooks · 2022

  • Political Science
  • Political Science

  T his book had many previous lives, all of them traversed by the vibrant conversations and exchanges I had with colleagues and friends during the time it took to get to this, now published, version.Although it would be impossible to include in these acknowledgments everyone who played a role in this journey, I still would like to recognize some of those who did.The fi rst seeds of this project lay in the years I spent as a graduate student at Princeton University.I'm grateful to Gabriela Nouzeilles

  DOI

• Introduction

  Social Text · 2022 · 7 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Abstract This essay introduces the special issue “Reading for Infrastructure: Worlds Made and Broken.” It offers an account of the “infrastructural turn” in the humanities and explains how the assembled essays frame infrastructures as making worlds with dispositions that facilitate certain “forms of life,” even as they break and dismantle others. These essays cluster around three key themes that open onto the imbrication of “modern” infrastructures and racial capitalism: slavery, borders, and energy. The introduction also outlines the various conjugations of reading and infrastructure suggested by the essays: practices of reading new things as infrastructure, reading infrastructures themselves, and engaging with readings of infrastructure.

  PublisherDOI

• Race and domination in colonial Latin American studies

  Routledge eBooks · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Gender studies

  In the last two decades, race has emerged as a major topic in the field of colonial Latin American studies, but this predominantly historical scholarship has engaged in only limited ways with contemporary race theory. This chapter argues that more theoretical engagement would help to address a series of conceptual problems with how the field has understood race. After discussing three of these problems in relation to the concepts of periodization, domination, and mestizaje, the chapter models a theoretically informed analysis by considering the racialization of the “Indian” in the Jesuit José de Acosta’s influential missionary treatise De procuranda indorum salute (1588). Finally, it suggests that theoretical work on race could also benefit from recent scholarship on colonial Latin America.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: Iberian Empire and the History of Capitalism

  Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies · 2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Introduction:Iberian Empire and the History of Capitalism Daniel Nemser (bio) Keywords Iberian Empire, history of capitalism, possessive individualism, primitive accumulation, property, Jesuits, slave trade, scholastic, supply chain This special issue aims to reinsert the concept of capitalism within the field of colonial Latin American studies. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, a critical interest in capitalism has begun to return to humanities departments across the United States, from literary/cultural studies to history. However, with a handful of exceptions, this general trend has had little impact on the study of early modern Iberian empire. This introduction explores the conceptual impasse in colonial studies by tracing two parallel genealogies in the humanities—one centered in the field of Latin American studies, especially literary/cultural studies, the other in the field of U.S. history. Brief sketches cannot do justice to these complex fields, of course, but my hope is that bringing them together in this way will highlight the stakes of the special issue and frame the debates in which the essays that compose it intervene. The first genealogy takes as its point of departure the long-standing marginalization of Iberian empire and especially of colonial Latin America in the historiography of capitalism and political economy. In Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America (2011)—one of the few exceptions to the general tendency noted above—the historian John Tutino frames his study of the central role of Spanish North America in the rise of global capitalism against the standard history that roots capitalism's origins in northern Europe. "Most of us have been taught to believe," he writes in the prologue, "that capitalism … was a western invention, that is, a European, mostly British, primarily Protestant invention" (8).1 As the reference to Protestantism indicates, Tutino is identifying the long shadow cast by the sociologist Max Weber. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [End Page 1] (1904), Weber famously argued that Catholicism was too deeply affiliated with economic "traditionalism" and spiritual transcendence to give rise to a properly capitalist subject. Such a subject would emerge not under Catholic doctrine for which profit-driven activity was "ethically unjustifiable, or at best to be tolerated," but only with the consolidation of a Protestant ethic that saw work as a worldly "calling" or ethical obligation (36). Later, in his posthumous General Economic History (1923), Weber read this Protestant ethic into the history of European colonialism. Noting that the process of colonization from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries "led to a gigantic acquisition of wealth in Europe," he distinguished between two different models or strategies of colonial accumulation: "the feudal type in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, the capitalistic in the Dutch and English" (298). For Weber, "such men as Cortez and Pizarro" appear as the "strongest embodiment" of irrational economic interest, in contrast to the "rational institutions of the character of capitalistic enterprise" (356); thus the use of encomienda, "a feudal grant with the right of imposing on the Indians compulsory services, payments, or labor dues," which endured, he asserted, into the nineteenth century (61). The Protestant ethic thus provided a typology with which to make sense of the history of Europe's colonies in the Americas and beyond. Of course, Weber was by no means the first to relegate Iberian empire, tethered to "traditionalist" Catholic doctrines and "feudal" institutions, to the spatial and temporal "outside" of capitalism and modernity. As early as the sixteenth century and more broadly during the Enlightenment, Spain's northern European rivals began to construct and popularize a narrative of Iberian empire as superstitious, backward, greedy, and cruel in order to justify their resistance to Iberian domination and to promote their own imperial projects. This so-called Black Legend continues to shape how Spain, Portugal, and Latin America are taken up (or not) in scholarship to this day. As a consequence, writes the historian Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra in a critical evaluation of the historiography of the scientific revolution, "Iberians have come to represent the antithesis of modernity" (24). The thesis of Iberian "backwardness" and colonial Latin American "feudalism" provide the context for a series...

  PublisherDOI

• Possessive Individualism and the Spirit of Capitalism in the Iberian Slave Trade

  Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies · 2019-01-01 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Although Marx and Weber are traditionally read as offering opposing narratives of the transition to capitalism, Weber's notion of the Protestant ethic can clarify the subjective dimensions of the process Marx calls primitive accumulation, which set the capital-relation in motion. By rooting these cultural values in northern Europe, however, Weber cannot account for the foundational role of the Iberian empire in this process. Rather than the Protestant ethic, this essay takes up the concept of possessive individualism to consider the spirit of capitalism that emerged in the context of the initial, Iberian-led phase of the transatlantic slave trade. Iberian scholastics, especially Jesuits, used the concept of <i>dominium</i>, or property rights, to develop a theory of the individual as the owner of the self and of freedom as a possession that could be freely sold on the market. Voluntary enslavement and freedom of exchange were thus mobilized to justify a relatively autonomous sphere of economic activity in which the transatlantic slave trade could develop. In formulating these arguments, Jesuit authors drew on interviews with slave merchants that reflect a subjective orientation toward profit over morality. The Jesuits' ambivalent response both highlights and attempts to rationalize the contradictions of an emerging economic order based on the global circulation of commodities and racialized bodies.

  PublisherDOI

• Orlando Bentancor. The Matter of Empire: Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru.

  The American Historical Review · 2018-05-30 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Orlando Bentancor’s The Matter of Empire: Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru is a groundbreaking study of the ideological foundations of the Spanish Empire. Scholars have long understood the importance of the political debates about the conquest of the Americas, but Bentancor takes up these debates in a radically new way, situating them within a common ideological matrix that linked Spanish political theory to economic thought and imperial science. This ideology, which he calls “metaphysical instrumentalism,” treated the world as composed of raw, passive matter that had to be dominated and guided, through technique, toward a transcendent end. Building on Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, this scholastic frame took as its basic principle the natural subordination of imperfect matter to perfect form and of means to end, which transforms the world into what Martin Heidegger called a “standing reserve” of manipulable stock. It makes sense that this “metaphysics of handiwork” (18) would apply to practices like silver mining, where raw matter is pulled from the ground and purified through technical means. But Bentancor convincingly demonstrates that the same ideology also structured debates about the conquest, state power, and the racialized nature of the Amerindian people.

  PublisherDOI

• The Iberian Slave Trade and the Racialization of Freedom

  History of the Present · 2018-10-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Research Article| October 01 2018 The Iberian Slave Trade and the Racialization of Freedom Daniel Nemser Daniel Nemser Daniel Nemser is associate professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2017), which won the Latin American Studies Association’s Mexico Humanities Book Award in 2018. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of the Present (2018) 8 (2): 117–139. https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.8.2.0117 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Daniel Nemser; The Iberian Slave Trade and the Racialization of Freedom. History of the Present 1 October 2018; 8 (2): 117–139. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.8.2.0117 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsHistory of the Present Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2018 University of Illinois Press2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

  PublisherDOI

• The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico by Kelly S. McDonough

  Hispanófila/Hispanófila · 2017-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico by Kelly S. McDonough Daniel Nemser McDonough, Kelly S. The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2014. 280 pp. ISBN: 978-08-1653-421-0. If Ángel Rama's La ciudad letrada (1984) secured the place of the intellectual in the field of Latin American literary and cultural studies, until recently indigenous intellectuals have been largely overlooked. This is partly a consequence of the enduring conceptual association of indigeneity with orality and in opposition to the written word. Yet the proliferation of Nahuatl texts in colonial Mexico indicates that this assumption could not be further from the truth. This is the point of departure for Kelly S. McDonough's fascinating study, which traces the political and cultural significance of Nahua intellectualism from the colonial period to the present day. The Learned Ones is divided into five main chapters, chronologically organized and each focused on the life and work of a different figure. Chapter 1 considers the Jesuit Antonio del Rincón, one of the few non-European priests to be ordained in sixteenth-century New Spain. Comparing Rincón's Nahuatl grammar to others written [End Page 211] by Spanish friars, McDonough foregrounds this native speaker's unique contribution to a categorical description of the language and, consequently, to the colonial project of evangelization. His grammar was the first to include phonological aspects like contrastive vowel length which, though nearly imperceptible to non-native speakers, could radically alter the meaning of phrases – an indigenous man might be told, for example, "to cut off his hands and drink, as opposed to washing his hands and bowing his head" before sitting down to a meal (54). Another colonial writer, the Tlaxcalan noble Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza, is the focus of chapter 2. His annals history recorded important events in the polity, above all the activities of the indigenous municipal council. By the seventeenth century, when Zapata wrote, the political and economic privileges that had been awarded to Tlaxcala for its early alliance with Cortés were coming under increasing pressure. Zapata's manuscript captures this context of crisis and the authorities' ultimately unsuccessful struggles to defend these special rights through public spectacles emphasizing their pre-Hispanic noble lineage, loyalty to the crown, and true conversion to Christianity. In chapter 3, McDonough transitions to the period following political independence in the nineteenth century. As an attorney and administrator versed in both colonial and national law, Faustino Galicia Chimalpopoca worked to defend indigenous lands from expropriation at a time when colonial protections had been dismantled under the formal equality of "citizenship." He also collected, transcribed, and translated numerous Nahuatl texts from the colonial period, from ecclesiastical manuals to historical annals. Although his political affiliation with the Second Empire made him controversial, McDonough insists on the importance of these curatorial efforts, without which many Nahuatl sources available today would have been lost. Chapter 4 considers one of the few published female Nahua writers, Luz Jiménez. Most famous for her work as a model for Diego Rivera, Jiménez also collaborated with anthropologists like Fernando Horcasitas, narrating traditional Nahua folktales as well as her testimonio of growing up in Milpa Alta during the Mexican Revolution. Importantly, McDonough centers Jiménez as an active participant and knowledge producer in her own right, rather than a "ready-to-order source for extraction" (133). Finally, in chapter 5, McDonough turns to the playwright and artist Ildefonso Maya Hernández, with whom she conducted a series of interviews before his death in 2011. His play Ixtlamatinij ("the learned ones," from which McDonough draws her title) stages the intimate conflicts wrought by cultural assimilation as well as the multiple forms of discrimination that Nahuatl-speakers have continued to face into the twenty-first century. Breaking up these main chapters are short personal narratives written in Nahuatl by some of the indigenous scholars with whom McDonough collaborated, including Refugio Nava Nava, Victoriano de la Cruz Cruz, and Sabina Cruz de la Cruz. The inclusion of these pieces is one example of the "decolonizing methodologies" that are at the heart of the project. Another is...

  PublisherDOI

• Triangulating Blackness

  Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos · 2017-01-01 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  On May 2, 1612, Mexico City’s authorities executed thirty-five Black people who had allegedly “conspired” against the colonial order. This article compares two accounts of the supposed plot, one written in Spanish by an anonymous member of the Audiencia, the other in Nahuatl by the indigenous historian Domingo de Chimalpahin. The former narrates the “conspiracy” by representing the Black body as incapable of self-mastery and thus predisposed to raping Spanish women. In contrast, the latter proceeds through triangulation, offering a critical reflection on the Spanish account and the racialization process. This analysis highlights the limits of existing translations of the original Nahuatl text, which unintentionally reproduce the colonial myth of the Black rapist. El 2 de mayo de 1612 las autoridades de la ciudad de México ejecutaron a 35 negros que supuestamente habían “conspirado” contra el orden colonial. Este ensayo compara dos relaciones del supuesto complot, una escrita en español por un miembro anónimo de la Audiencia, y la otra en náhuatl por el historiador indígena Domingo de Chimalpahin. La primera narra la “conspiración” representando al cuerpo negro como incapaz de autocontrol y, por lo tanto, predispuesto a violar a las mujeres españolas. En contraste, la segunda se vale a la triangulación, proponiendo una reflexión crítica sobre la narrativa española y el proceso de la racialización. Este análisis subraya los límites de las traducciones existentes del náhuatl original, que sin querer reproducen el mito colonial del violador negro.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Larry Lafontaine-Stokes

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  4 shared

• Ana León

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  4 shared

• Enrique García

  National University of the Northeast

  4 shared

• Victoria Langland

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  4 shared

• Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel

  4 shared

• Gustavo Verdesio

  4 shared

• Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola

  Emory University

  4 shared

• Giulia Riccò

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  4 shared