Breslauer Lecture: Indigenous Knowledge and the Limits of Translation: Mexican Manuscripts in Early Modern Collections

Abstract:

This talk discusses the circulation and reception of Indigenous manuscripts in Mexico and Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Indigenous authors in pre-contact and early colonial Mexico created pictorial manuscripts that record Native knowledge in image and word. Collectively, these documents constitute an incomparable Indigenous archive. They entered private and institutional collections on both sides of the Atlantic, provoking a great deal of interest. However, their reception in early modern Europe almost without exception reached interpretive dead ends. Poised at the intersection of Indigenous studies, the history of books and libraries, and the history of knowledge production, this talk discusses the trajectories of several Mexican manuscripts to address questions of materiality, mobility, and the possibilities and limits of translation and interpretation. It follows Indigenous manuscripts in movement and stasis, as knowledge inscriptions and as potential sources for knowledge production, to consider the flow and friction of Mesoamerican Indigenous objects and practices in the early modern world.

Speaker: Daniela Bleichmar

Professor of Art History and History; Founding Director, Levan Institute for the Humanities; Director, USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities; University of Southern California

Speaker Bio:

Daniela Bleichmar is Professor of Art History and History at the University of Southern California. Her research and teaching address the history of images, objects, and texts in colonial Latin America and early modern Europe, focusing on the histories of visual and material culture; science and knowledge production; circulation, encounters, and exchanges; collections; and books. Her publications include the books Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (2012) and Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin (2017).