Description
Book SynopsisIn 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. This book examines how textual and nontextual literatures interacted in colonial North and South America.
Trade Review“
Colonial Mediascapes offers compelling insights from a veritable Who’s Who of early American literacy studies. The range of topics, the geographical diversity, and the thoughtfully developed connections between these essays makes this a particularly welcome project. This is a timely collection that will without a doubt have a major impact on a number of intersecting fields—book history, Native studies, early American studies, literacy studies.”—Hilary E. Wyss, Hargis Professor of American Literature at Auburn University and author of
English Letters and Indian Literacies: Reading, Writing, and New England Missionary Schools, 1750–1830Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Foreword
Paul Chaat Smith
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Matt Cohen and Jeffrey Glover
Part I. Beyond Textual Media
1. Dead Metaphor or Working Model? “The Book” in Native America
Germaine Warkentin
2. Early Americanist Grammatology: Definitions of Writing and Literacy
Andrew Newman
3. Indigenous Histories and Archival Media in the Early Modern Great Lakes
Heidi Bohaker
Part II. Multimedia Texts
4. The Manuscript, the
Quipu, and the Early American Book: Don Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s
Nueva Corónica y Buen GobiernoBirgit Brander Rasmussen
5. Semiotics, Aesthetics, and the Quechua Concept of
QuilcaGalen Brokaw
6. “Take My Scalp, Please!”: Colonial Mimesis and the French Origins of the Mississippi Tall Tale
Gordon M. Sayre
Part III. Sensory New Worlds
7. Brave New Worlds: The First Century of Indian-English Encounters
Peter Charles Hoffer
8. Howls, Snarls, and Musket Shots: Saying “This Is Mine” in Colonial New England
Jon Coleman
9. Hearing Wampum: The Senses, Mediation, and the Limits of Analogy
Richard Cullen Rath
Part IV: Transatlantic Mediascapes
10. Writing as “Khipu”: Titu Cusi Yupanqui’s Account of the Conquest of Peru
Ralph Bauer
11. Christian Indians at War: Evangelism and Military Communication in the Anglo-French-Native Borderlands
Jeffrey Glover
12. The Algonquian Word and the Spirit of Divine Truth: John Eliot’s Indian Library and the Atlantic Quest for a Universal Language
Sarah Rivett
Contributors
Index
