Temporalities, anachronism and politics in stories of the Conquest of the Americas

Abstract

ABSTRACT Focusing on humorous cartoons about the Conquest published between 1945 and 1970 in an Argentinian popular comic magazine and on a Colombian educational and politically militant comic-book narrative history of the same events, published in 1978, I analyse how the publications used mixed temporalities when relating historical events. I challenge the common idea that disrupting linear timelines by mixing temporalities necessarily has politically progressive effects. The humorous cartoons typically portray Indigenous Americans from the fifteenth century as ‘primitives’ who nevertheless behaved in ‘modern’ ways, but this temporal disruption in fact works to erase the responsibility of dominant classes for Indigenous disadvantage. In contrast, the educational comic-book brings Indigenous people from the conquest into the present, talking directly to the readers and interpellating them as comrades in the struggle. Yet this comic-book also portrays Indigenous people in generic stereotyped ways, illustrating the difficulty of shaking off these colonial ‘recursions’ (Ann Stoler).