How Print Culture Came to Be Indigenous
2010; Routledge; Volume: 44; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2691-5529
Autores Tópico(s)Crafts, Textile, and Design
Resumoabstract Western historians working in the first half of the twentieth century established a scheme for writing design history that continues to influence the global histories of today. The historians Douglas McMurtrie, Lucien Febvre, Henri-Jean Martin and Lawrence Wroth believed that the modern history of visual communication began with the advent and spread of typographic printing in fifteenth-century Europe. Within their historical narratives, printing leaves Europe to reappear in other parts of the world as a benign instrument of cultural conversion. These scholars used their histories to assert the privileges of European expansion, and they viewed indigenous design as any form of communication technology practiced outside of Europe after the export of printing. They clung to the notion that American peoples were destined to develop cultural histories that duplicated the European historical trajectory. In their eyes, the history of print culture belonged to Europe, and their histories today read as attempts to silence the strangeness of non-Western cultural difference. In this article, I examine design histories of the Americas from the first three centuries of New World settlement and describe the ways that Western historians have misrepresented indigenous American cultures by suppressing local forms of visual language and communication technology. In opposition to the dominant strand of Western design historiography, I present evidence that local meanings and values migrated with the products that colonial administrators printed overseas for European audiences. I question the degree to which design historians of the Americas have positioned indigenous peoples as subordinate subjects of print culture rather than as agents of cultural difference and productive assimilation. The primary significance of this contribution to this special issue is to contest the worldview of graphic design history as a singular and unified field of representation, and to encourage greater engagement with indigenous design histories in the contemporary movement toward cross-cultural design research and collaboration. bringing knowledge to the natives The Franciscan imperative to Christianize the Nahua people of the Americas inspired Diego Valades to write and illustrate the Rhetorica Christiana, one of the first representations of the Old World establishment's attempts to educate a vastly different New World people. In 1571, forty-three years after the Franciscans established the mission of San Jose de los Naturales within the indigenous city-state of Tenochtitlan, Father Valades ended his many years of service teaching Catholic doctrine to the Nahuas. Valades superiors had requested that he leave San Jose to serve his order in Europe, where he devoted the next eight years to composing the Rhetorica Christiana as an illustrated instruction manual for Franciscans preparing to teach at Tenochtitlan themselves. The text of the Rhetorica Christiana, a blend of European knowledge and Nahua description, details how Valades and his fellow missionaries used classical rhetoric to lessen the Castilian/Nahuatl language barrier while preaching to the natives. Valades believed in the rhetorical power of both text and imagery, and his complex engraving of San Jose's atrio, or open-air church, mixes realism with the spiritual to reveal what the experience of bringing European knowledge to the natives might have been like. At the center of Valades's atrio (figure i), God and two angels watch from the heavens while a procession of Franciscan monks carry a platform cathedral upon their shoulders. Nine scenes of instruction surround them, each with a single Franciscan teacher speaking to an attentive group of natives. Near one end of the courtyard, two teachers stand with pointers in front of illustrated screen-like lienzos. On the left, Valades mentor, Pedro de Gante, directs his students through a sequence of icons depicting Western forms of labor. …
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