the Subaltern Speak?” (1988). I have developed these ideas on writing violence in Inventing America (Rabasa, 1993) and Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier (Rabasa, 2000).2 2 I derive the concept of “echography” from Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television (2002). This book is the full and literal transcript of a recorded conversation filmed by Jean Joseph Rosé under the auspices of the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, on December 22, 1993. This conversation reflects on the nature of television as a medium that captures and transmits live events. The transmission of the live event is never as direct nor as unmediated as the concept would suggest, but the effect, the capacity to reproduce the immediacy of an event suggests a most accomplished technology for producing mimetic artifacts. The reproduction of reality, however, is implicit to the inscription and reception of images. As Roland Barthes has argued, it is particular to the analog image of photography to have first made possible the preservation of reality as “this was” (1981), but as Derrida and Stiegler argue, the pursuit of the effect of the real antedates the invention of photography. Within the West, written letters have a privileged place in the history of recording the real, which would be followed by analog and, more recently, by digital reproducibility. I further elaborate the concept of echography in “Eco- grafía de la voz en la historiografía nahua” (Rabasa, forthcoming).
3 3 The title of Vera Cruz’s lectures was Relectio edit a per Reverendum Patrem Alfonsum a Vera Cruce, Sacrae theologiae magistratum, Augustinianae familiae priorem, et cathedra primariae eiusdem facultatis in Academia Mexicam regentem (A discussion by the Reverend Father Alonso de la Vera Cruz, master of Sacred theology, prior of the Augustinian order, and head professor of the same subject in the University of Mexico). He referred to this treatise as Relectio de dominio infidelium & justo bello (A discussion on the dominion of unbelievers and just war) in the first edition of his Speculum coniugiorum (Mirror of the married, 1556) (Vera Cruz, 1968: 53).
References and Further Reading
References
1 Anderson, Arthur J. O., and Schroeder, Susan (1997). Codex Chimalpahin. Society and Politics in Mexico Tenochtitlan, Tlatelolco, Texcoco, Culhua- can, and Other Nahua Altepetl in Central Mexico. The Nahuatl and Spanish annals and accounts collected and recorded by don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin. 2 vols. Trans. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Susan Schroeder. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. (Original manuscripts ca. 1593—mid- 1620s.) (This book contains transcriptions of a selection of Chimalpahin’s Nahuatl and Spanish texts with an English translation; it also includes a transcription and translation of Fernando Alvarado Tezozómoc’s Crónica Mexicayotl).
2 Barthes, Roland (1981). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang. (This text offers a theory for understanding the experience of photography).
3 Berdan, Francis F., and Anawalt, Patricia Rieff (1992). The Codex Mendoza. 4 vols. Facsimile edition. Berkeley: University of California Press. (This facsimile of the Codex Mendoza is accompanied by studies of the pictorial forms, contents, and materiality of the manuscript).
4 Columbus, Christopher (1989). The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America 1492—1493. Abstracted by Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas. Trans. Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley, Jr. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. (Original manuscript ca. 1530.) (This edition offers a rigorous transcription and translation of Columbus’s journal of his first voyage to America).
5 Cortés, Hernán (1986). Letters from Mexico. Trans. Anthony Pagden. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Original manuscripts 1519—26.) (Pagden’s is arguably the best translation of Cortés five letters to Charles V).
6 Derrida, Jacques, and Stiegler, Bernard (2002). Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews. Trans. Jennifer Bajorek. Cambridge: Polity Press. (In their conversation, Derrida and Stiegler reflect on television as a most accomplished form of reproducing the real).
7 Durán, Diego (1994). The History of the Indies of New Spain. Trans. Doris Hayden. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. (Original manuscript ca. 1580). (This offers a complete translation of Diego Durán’s historical section of the Historia de las Indias de Nueva España e islas de Tierra Firme).
8 Gruzinski, Serge (1993). The Conquest of Mexico: The Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World, I6th—18th Centuries. Trans. Eileen Corrigan. Cambridge: Polity Press. (This book, which was first published in French in 1988 with the title La Colonisation de l’imaginaire, traces in indigenous pictorial texts colonizing processes in which Indians were, to borrow Gruzinski’s term, “occidentalized.”)
9 Hulme, Peter (1986). “Columbus and the cannibals.” In Colonial Encounters, pp. 14—43. London: Methuen. (This chapter examines the ideological determinants in the discursive production of the cannibal in Columbus’s journal of his first voyage to America).
10 Mignolo, Walter (1989). “Literacy and colonization: The New World experience.” In René Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini (eds), 1492-1992: Rediscovering Colonial Writing, pp. 51—96. Hispanic Studies 4. Minneapolis: Prisma Institute. (This chapter examines the ways literacy constituted a form of conquest.) Mignolo, Walter (1995). The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. (Mignolo draws an exhaustive inventory of the ways the Western book, literacy, and mapping colonized the world in the sixteenth century).
11 Molina, Alonso (1984). Confesionario mayor en lengua mexicana y castellana (1569) [Major con- fessionary in the Mexican and Castilian language]. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. (Roberto Moreno provides a facsimile edition of Molina’s manual for confession).
12 Mundy, Barbara (1996). The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográfi cas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (This book examines the methods, questionnaires, and failings of the imperial project of mapping the totality of Spain’s possessions).
13 O’Gorman, Edmundo (1942). Fundamentos de la historia de Améric [Foundations of the history of America]. Mexico City: Imprenta Universitaria. (O’Gorman lays out the ground for reflecting on the philosophical conquest of America.)
14 Quinones Keber, Eloise (1995). Codex Telleriano- Remensis: Ritual Divination, and History in a Pictorial Aztec Manuscript. Austin: University of Texas Press. (In this facsimile edition, Quiñones Keber offers an exhaustive study of the contents, style, and history of this major pictorial colonial codex).
15 Rabasa, José (1993). Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. (This book traces four moments in the semiotic invention of America).
16 Rabasa, José (1996). “Pre-Columbian pasts and Indian presents in Mexican history,” Dispositio/n 46: 245—70. (This essay examines the Codex Mendoza and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s Rabasa, José Alboroto y motín de los indios de México [Uprising and riot of the Indians of Mexico] as two modalities of constituting Indians as subalterns).
17 Rabasa, José (1998). “Franciscans and Dominicans under the gaze of a tlacuilo: plural-world dwelling in an Indian Pictorial Codex,” Morrison Library Inaugural Lecture Series 14. Berkeley: Doe Library, University of California. (A page from the Codex Telleriano-Remensis provides an entry point for reflecting on native critical thought).
18 Rabasa, José (2000). Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (This book analyzes forms of writing violence in aesthetic, legal, descriptive, and historical colonial texts).
19 Sahagún,
