ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book 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. Not only did the Baroque establish itself as a hegemonic culture in the early modern Hispanic Atlantic, two main factors ensured its transfer into the twentieth and twenty-first century world. First, the vitality of the Baroque cultural system and the malleability of its technologies; and secondly, a certain overlap in the characteristic features of the international situation, which led to a cultural evolution some authors have defined as the emergence of postmodernity. The book engages with a number of conflicting and competing vantage points on the transfer of the Baroque into the twenty-first century.
