The conquest of Mesoamerica has long been and continues to be an alluring subject of historical and interdisciplinary inquiry. Indeed, much work has emerged in the last few decades that has significantly enhanced—and at times radically transformed—our understanding of this fascinating and foundational episode in transatlantic history. This shift in conquest historiography—often referred to as the New Conquest History—is characterized by, among other things, the revisiting and rereading of long-familiar published primary sources, the recentering of native peoples and their perspectives and interpretations in our historical narratives, and a disregard for traditional disciplinary boundaries. Paul Scolieri's Dancing the New World accomplishes all these objectives and is an excellent addition both to conquest scholarship and to the cultural history of colonial Mexico.Scolieri's aim is to use dance as a “lens into the broader ‘encounter’ between Europeans and Indians in the New World,” specifically sixteenth-century central Mexico (p. 1). Through writings about dance, Scolieri sees an opportunity not only to enrich our understanding of Nahua performance but also to explore the “political unconscious” of sixteenth-century Iberia (p. 2). Scolieri demonstrates that texts about dance reflect important political, theological, and epistemological debates among Spaniards (whether native peoples are noble or savage, what the best methods of conversion were, and what happened in the past and how one knows it) in addition to elusive ethnographic information on pre-Hispanic and colonial-era dance in the Americas. This is a book that blurs the line between conventional definitions of history and performance and challenges us to answer one of Scolieri's central questions: “When does choreography (the writing of dance) become historiography (the writing of history), and vice versa?” (p. 151).The work is divided into five chapters, which proceed chronologically. Scolieri begins in the Caribbean with Europeans' first encounters with the peoples of Hispaniola and Europeans' descriptions of native dances. The “song-dances” of Hispaniola achieved some fame in sixteenth-century Europe through the writings of explorers such as Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, who called them areítos. The explorers' writings about the areítos—which tended, in general, to create what Scolieri calls a “discourse of wonder” around native peoples—serve as a benchmark against which to measure later accounts of dance in central Mexico (p. 27).The book then moves the reader to central Mexico to examine writings on dance by two famed missionary ethnographers of the Nahuas, Motolinia (Fray Toribio de Benavente) and Fray Bernardino de Sahagún. Scolieri argues that Motolinia rejected the Caribbean discourse of wonder and instead used descriptions of Nahua dancers to portray them as penitent Christian native commoners, ready to be received into the Catholic Church and the Spanish empire. Sahagún and his Nahua collaborators, meanwhile, were understandably less concerned with either wonder or penitence and instead attempted an exhaustive description of the intricacies of Nahua dance in the context of the feasts of the pre-Hispanic solar calendar. Scolieri's treatment of Sahagún's work deserves special comment, as it is both masterful and enthralling. And this has to be one of the most enlightening and satisfying discussions of Nahua human sacrifice currently in print.The book then takes on—through the lens of dance—one of the more controversial episodes in the conquest narrative: the Toxcatl massacre. While Scolieri gets us no closer to the truth of what happened that night, he has nonetheless produced a very patient analysis of dance and dancers in the various and often contradictory sources for this episode to reveal “the range of competing and complementary meanings that conquistadors, chroniclers, missionaries, and natives brought to and drew from the massacre” (p. 122). The book concludes with a look at the colonial period. Drawing on the colonial-era writings of Diego Durán, José de Acosta, and Andrés Pérez de Ribas, Scolieri explores the degree to which native peoples retained control of their dancing in the context of forced Christianization.This is a clearly written work that will appeal to a variety of readers, from the sixteenth-century Mexicanist to the upper-level undergraduate student. A great strength of this book is Scolieri's primary source analysis. While he does not make much use of the kind of mundane archival material that many historians so esteem, he reevaluates the canon of published sources—by conquistadores and chroniclers, missionaries and missionized—to great effect. Happily, excerpts of many of these accounts are included in translation in a series of ten appendixes. Scolieri also draws on an abundance of pictorial sources produced by both Europeans and natives, and the University of Texas Press's characteristic care and attention to publishing copious and high-quality images of these sources is gratifying. Indeed, Scolieri's interdisciplinarity is another of the book's strengths; the fields of dance and performance studies, art history, ethnography, and history come together seamlessly in this very fine contribution to conquest historiography.
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Dec 12, 2019
Hui Jiang + 7
