Tlacuilolli

Tlacuilolli
Author: Karl Anton Nowotny
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780806136530

Appearing for the first time in English, Karl Anton Nowotny’s Tlacuilolli is a classic work of Mesoamerican scholarship. A concise analysis of the pre-Columbian Borgia Group of manuscripts, it is the only synthetic interpretation of divinatory and ritual codices from Mexico. Originally published in German and unavailable to any but the most determined scholars, Tlacuilolli has nevertheless formed the foundation for subsequent scholarly works on the codices. Its importance extends beyond the study of Mexican codices: Nowotny’s sophisticated reading of these manuscripts informs our understanding of Mesoamerican culture. Of particular importance are Nowotny’s corrections of errors in fact and interpretation in the Spanish edition of Eduard Seler’s commentary on the Borgia Group. George A. Everett and Edward B. Sisson have translated Nowotny’s masterwork into English while maintaining the flavor of the original German edition. To the core text they have added an extensive bibliography and constructed a framework of annotation that relates the principles in Tlacuilolli to current research. This edition includes a selection of eleven stunning full-color images chosen from the original catalog.

Queer Ancient Ways

Queer Ancient Ways
Author: Zairong Xiang
Publisher: punctum books
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2018
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1947447939

Queer Ancient Ways advocates a profound unlearning of colonial/modern categories as a pathway to the discovery of new forms and theories of queerness in the most ancient of sources. In this radically unconventional work, Zairong Xiang investigates scholarly receptions of mythological figures in Babylonian and Nahua creation myths, exposing the ways they have consistently been gendered as feminine in a manner that is not supported, and in some cases actively discouraged, by the texts themselves. An exercise in decolonial learning-to-learn from non-Western and non-modern cosmologies, Xiang's work uncovers a rich queer imaginary that had been all-but-lost to modern thought, in the process critically revealing the operations of modern/colonial systems of gender/sexuality and knowledge-formation that have functioned, from the Conquista de America in the sixteenth century to the present, to keep these systems in obscurity. At the heart of Xiang's argument is an account of the way the unfounded feminization of figures such as the Babylonian (co)creatrix Tiamat, and the Nahua creator-figures Tlaltecuhtli and Coatlicue, is complicit with their monstrification. This complicity tells us less about the mythologies themselves than about the dualistic system of gender and sexuality within which they have been studied, underpinned by a consistent tendency in modern/colonial thought to insist on unbridgeable categorical differences. By contextualizing these deities in their respective mythological, linguistic, and cultural environments, through a unique combination of methodologies and critical traditions in English, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Nahuatl, Xiang departs from the over-reliance of much contemporary queer theory on European (post)modern thought. Much more than a queering of the non-Western and non-modern, Queer Ancient Ways thus constitutes a decolonial and transdisciplinary engagement with ancient cosmologies and ways of thought which are in the process themselves revealed as theoretical sources of and for the queer imagination.

The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Author: Roland Greene
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 1678
Release: 2012-08-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0691154910

Rev. ed. of: The Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics / Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, co-editors; Frank J. Warnke, O.B. Hardison, Jr., and Earl Miner, associate editors. 1993.

Images of Power

Images of Power
Author: Jens Andermann
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2004-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 178238863X

In Latin America, where even today writing has remained a restricted form of expression, the task of generating consent and imposing the emergent nation-state as the exclusive form of the political, was largely conferred to the image. Furthermore, at the moment of its historical demise, the new, 'postmodern' forms of sovereignty appear to rely even more heavily on visual discourses of power. However, a critique of the iconography of the modern state-form has been missing. This volume is the first concerted attempt by cultural, historical and visual scholars to address the political dimension of visual culture in Latin America, in a comparative perspective spanning various regions and historical stages. The case studies are divided into four sections, analysing the formation of a public sphere, the visual politics of avant-garde art, the impact of mass society on political iconography, and the consolidation and crisis of territory as a key icon of the state.

Coloniality at Large

Coloniality at Large
Author: Mabel Moraña
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 642
Release: 2008
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780822341697

A state-of-the-art anthology of postcolonial theory and practice in the Latin American context.

Visible Writings

Visible Writings
Author: Marija Dalbello
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2011-03-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0813554551

Exploring the concept and history of visual and graphic epistemologies, this engrossing collection of essays by artists, curators, and scholars provides keen insights into the many forms of connection between visibility and legibility. With more than 130 color and black-and-white photographs, Visible Writings sheds new light on the visual dimensions of writing as well as writing's interaction with images in ways that affect our experiences of reading and seeing. Multicultural in character and historical in range, essays discuss pre-Colombian Mesoamerican scripts, inscriptions on ancient Greek vases, medieval illuminations, Renaissance prints, Enlightenment concepts of the legible, and the Western "reading" of Chinese ideograms. A rich array of modern forms, including comics, poster art, typographic signs, scribblings in writers' manuscripts, anthropomorphic statistical pictograms, the street writings of 9/11, intersections between poetry and painting, the use of color in literary texts, and the use of writing in visual art are also addressed. Visible Writings reaches outside the traditional venues of literature and art history into topics that consider design, history of writing, philosophy of language, and the emerging area of visual studies. Marija Dalbello, Mary Shaw, and the other contributors offer both scholars and those with a more casual interest in literature and art the opportunity, simply stated, to see the writing on the wall.

Crosscultural Transgressions

Crosscultural Transgressions
Author: Theo Hermans
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2014-07-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1317640691

Crosscultural Transgressions offers explorations and critical assessments of research methods and models in translation studies, and points up new questions and directions. Ranging from epistemological questions of description and historiography to the politics of language, including the language of translation research, the book tackles issues of research design and methodology, and goes on to examine the kind of disciplinary knowledge produced in translation studies, who produces it, and whose interests the dominant paradigms serve. The focus is on historical and ideological problems, but the crisis of representation that has affected all the human sciences in recent decades has left its mark. As the essays in this collection explore the transgressive nature of crosscultural representation, whether in translations or in the study of translation, they remain attentive to institutional contexts and develop a self-reflexive stance. They also chart new territory, taking their cue from ethnography, semiotics, sociology and cultural studies, and tackling Meso-American iconic scripts, Bourdieu's constructivism, translation between philosophical paradigms, and the complexities of translation concepts in multicultural societies.

Feather Crown

Feather Crown
Author: Gordon Brotherston
Publisher: British Museum Press
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN:

The Eighteen Feasts of the Mexica Year takes as its first authority the corpus of texts written by the Mexica (or Aztecs) themselves, in the script which in their language (Nahuatl) is known by the term tlacuilolli. Texts in this script are preferred to alphabetic transcriptions and other derivative sources, in the attempt to establish the paradigms of the Mexica calendar year. These are shown coherently to govern the regulation of such social practices as tribute, agriculture and ritual performance, as well as to impinge on more philosophical concerns with the articulation of time as such, especially in the interface with imported western conventions and the Christian ecclesiastical year. -- Amazon.com.

The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero

The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero
Author: Gordon M. Sayre
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2006-05-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807877018

The leaders of anticolonial wars of resistance--Metacom, Pontiac, Tecumseh, and Cuauhtemoc--spread fear across the frontiers of North America. Yet once defeated, these men became iconic martyrs for postcolonial national identity in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. By the early 1800s a craze arose for Indian tragedy on the U.S. stage, such as John Augustus Stone's Metamora, and for Indian biographies as national historiography, such as the writings of Benjamin Drake, Francis Parkman, and William Apess. With chapters on seven major resistance struggles, including the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and the Natchez Massacre of 1729, The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero offers an analysis of not only the tragedies and epics written about these leaders, but also their own speeches and strategies, as recorded in archival sources and narratives by adversaries including Hernan Cortes, Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, Joseph Doddridge, Robert Rogers, and William Henry Harrison. Sayre concludes that these tragedies and epics about Native resistance laid the foundation for revolutionary culture and historiography in the three modern nations of North America, and that, at odds with the trope of the complaisant "vanishing Indian," these leaders presented colonizers with a cathartic reproof of past injustices.

Aztec Philosophy

Aztec Philosophy
Author: James Maffie
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 609
Release: 2014-03-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1607322234

In Aztec Philosophy, James Maffie shows the Aztecs advanced a highly sophisticated and internally coherent systematic philosophy worthy of consideration alongside other philosophies from around the world. Bringing together the fields of comparative world philosophy and Mesoamerican studies, Maffie excavates the distinctly philosophical aspects of Aztec thought. Aztec Philosophy focuses on the ways Aztec metaphysics—the Aztecs’ understanding of the nature, structure and constitution of reality—underpinned Aztec thinking about wisdom, ethics, politics,\ and aesthetics, and served as a backdrop for Aztec religious practices as well as everyday activities such as weaving, farming, and warfare. Aztec metaphysicians conceived reality and cosmos as a grand, ongoing process of weaving—theirs was a world in motion. Drawing upon linguistic, ethnohistorical, archaeological, historical, and contemporary ethnographic evidence, Maffie argues that Aztec metaphysics maintained a processive, transformational, and non-hierarchical view of reality, time, and existence along with a pantheistic theology. Aztec Philosophy will be of great interest to Mesoamericanists, philosophers, religionists, folklorists, and Latin Americanists as well as students of indigenous philosophy, religion, and art of the Americas.