Beyond the Lettered City

[Dave Monroe]

"On sidewalks and walls the very first printed slogans start to show
up, the first Central Asian fuck you signs, the first
kill-the-police-commissioner signs (and somebody does! this alphabet
is really something!)…" (GR, Pt.  III, p. 355)

http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=N#nta

Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes
Author(s): Joanne Rappaport, Tom Cummins
Published: 2011
Pages: 392
Illustrations: 58 b&w illustrations, 2 charts, 9 color plates
Series: Narrating Native Histories
Series Editor(s): K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Florencia E. Mallon, Alcida
Rita Ramos, Joanne Rappaport

Description

In Beyond the Lettered City, the anthropologist Joanne Rappaport and
the art historian Tom Cummins examine the colonial imposition of
alphabetic and visual literacy on indigenous groups in the northern
Andes. They consider how the Andean peoples received, maintained, and
subverted the conventions of Spanish literacy, often combining them
with their own traditions. Indigenous Andean communities neither used
narrative pictorial representation nor had alphabetic or hieroglyphic
literacy before the arrival of the Spaniards. To absorb the
conventions of Spanish literacy, they had to engage with European
symbolic systems. Doing so altered their worldviews and everyday
lives, making alphabetic and visual literacy prime tools of colonial
domination. Rappaport and Cummins advocate a broad understanding of
literacy, including not only reading and writing, but also
interpretations of the spoken word, paintings, wax seals, gestures,
and urban design. By analyzing secular and religious notarial manuals
and dictionaries, urban architecture, religious images, catechisms and
sermons, and the vast corpus of administrative documents produced by
the colonial authorities and indigenous scribes, they expand Ángel
Rama’s concept of the lettered city to encompass many of those who
previously would have been considered the least literate.

About The Author(s)

 Joanne Rappaport is Professor of Anthropology and of Spanish and
Portuguese at Georgetown University. She is the author of
Intercultural Utopias: Public Intellectuals, Cultural Experimentation,
and Ethnic Pluralism in Colombia, also published by Duke University
Press.

Thomas Cummins is Dumbarton Oaks Professor of the History of
Pre-Columbian and Colonial Latin American Art at Harvard University.
He is the author of Toasts with the Inca: Andean Abstraction and
Colonial Images on Quero Vessels.

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