Performances of entangled emotions and beliefs: French and Spanish cultural transformations on the sixteenth-century Florida peninsula

This essay explores how interpretations and practices of entangled emotions and beliefs were critical to European engagement with Florida during the mid-sixteenth century. It analyses emotional performances of religious, racial and cultural beliefs that lay at the heart of colonising activities of both the French and Spanish, articulated in affective forms such as facial expression, gestures, sexual practices and violent acts, and rhetorically in verbal encounters and textual presentations. It contends that these performances occurred both as practices in the Florida region and Europe, and through rhetorical and visual forms in contemporary epistolary, manuscript and printed texts. The study argues that conflicting European activities with indigenous peoples and lands in Florida produced complex emotional and affective labour among European and indigenous agents — rulers, captains, crews, spiritual envoys and diplomatic personnel. This essay suggests new insights into colonial power relations may be suggested by consideration of emotions in cross-cultural performances, in securing diplomatic relations, or as an unexpected, disruptive force to other behaviours within official negotiations. In the eyes of participants, through these entangled belief and emotional performances about Florida, indigenous, French and Spanish peoples were themselves all culturally transformed.