Intermediality in Seventeenth-Century Baroque Celebrations in Hispanic America: Commissions, Poetry, and Ephemeral Architecture

This chapter is concerned chiefly with a set of early forms of media convergence and intermediality in the Hispanic American context, associated with what is now defined as curation, poetry, and ephemeral architecture. The foregoing is based on the exploration of two cases: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and her work Neptuno Alegórico and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora with Teatro de virtudes políticas. For this, the concepts and perspectives offered by media archeology and intermedial studies are used. As general conclusions of the research, the encounter with early forms of media convergence for the deployment of an articulating symbolic program can be highlighted, as well as the existence of a set of knowledge and formations that prepared the intellectuals of the time to compose various media through the practices of ingenuity and sharpness, for the purpose of celebration or commiseration regarding the central events of the Spanish empire. As a central hypothesis, it is proposed that the intertwined history of America and Spain offers an interesting matrix to understand different modes of encounter between media, thanks to which contemporary ideas of convergence, intermediality, transmediality, and transmediation can be rethought.