Here, There, and Now: Deictics and the Transposition of Orality to Image in Colonial Imagery

Abstract

The conquest of the New World required the translation of its many languages into Spanish, as was foreseen by the fifteenth-century Spanish intellectual Antonio de Nebrija in terms of an Imperial linguistic project. In Mexico, this process of translation, as well as the many new contexts in which speech and image were submitted, meant that the pre-Hispanic relationship between oral discourse and pictorial codices was disrupted. This study looks at how Aztec song/poetry insinuated the pre-Hispanic speaker and listener into the codex through spatiotemporal references (deixis) such that the pictorial narrative became a phenomenological experience, created thorough a specific cultural synesthesia. This unity of experience was destroyed within a campaign of evangelical fervor. It is argued here that what was lost through this process of cultural and linguistic conquest was, at times, reconstituted by a number of innovative figures and compositions in colonial Mexican manuscripts that have a semantic rather than a narrative role.