Colonial Mediascapes: Sensory Worlds of the Early Americas

Description

In colonial North and South America, print was only one way of communicating. Information in various forms flowed across the boundaries between indigenous groups and early imperial settlements. Natives and newcomers made speeches, exchanged gifts, invented gestures, and inscribed their intentions on paper, bark, skins, and many other kinds of surfaces. No one method of conveying meaning was privileged, and written texts often relied on nonwritten modes of communication.   Colonial Mediascapes examines how textual and nontextual literatures interacted in colonial North and South America. Extending the textual foundations of early American literary history, the editors bring a wide range of media to the attention of scholars and show how struggles over modes of communication intersected with conflicts over religion, politics, race, and gender. This collection of essays by major historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars demonstrates that the European settlement of the Americas and European interaction with Native peoples were shaped just as much by communication challenges as by traditional concerns such as religion, economics, and resources.    Cover Title Page Copyright Page Contents List of Illustrations Foreword Acknowledgments Introduction Part I. Beyond Textual Media 1. Dead Metaphor or WorkingModel? “The Book” in Native America 2. Early Americanist Grammatology 3. Indigenous Histories and ArchivalMedia in the Early Modern Great Lakes 4. The Manuscript, the Quipu, and the Early American Book 5. Semiotics, Aesthetics, and the Quechua Concept of Quilca 6. “Take My Scalp, Please!” Part III. Sensory New Worlds 7. Brave New Worlds 8. Howls, Snarls, and Musket Shots 9. Hearing Wampum: The Senses,Mediation, and the Limits of Analogy Part IV: Transatlantic Mediascapes 10. Writing as “Khipu” 11. Christian Indians at War 12. The Algonquian Word and the Spiritof Divine Truth Contributors Index