Walter Mignolo, "The Materiality of Reading and Writing Cultures: The Chain of Sounds, Graphic Signs, and Sign Carriers"
In The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization, literary theorist Walter Mignolo offers a provocative analysis of the role of Western books, alphabetic literacy, and early modern conceptions of language and writing in the colonization of the New World. In the first two chapters, Mignolo situates early modern European conceptions of the book in light of Renaissance philosophies of language and writing, which privileged European forms of recording (paper, book, writing instruments) as “exclusive” vehicles for knowledge, effectively excluding Amerindian ways of recording and knowing. In chapter two, “The Materiality of Reading and Writing Cultures: The Chain of Sounds, Graphic Signs, and Sign Carriers” which is the focus of this summary, Mignolo examines how “speaking, writing, and sign carriers, as well as their conceptualization, was one set of relations in which colonization took place”(121).
Mignolo begins this chapter by describing the efforts of sixteenth century scholar Alejo Venegas, whose understanding of the word book as “an ark of deposit,” presented a complication in interpreting conceptions of Amerindian writing practices. The model of writing and the book embedded in the European Renaissance, and generally defined by Venegas, erased many of the possibilities for different writing systems and sign carriers. Mignolo’s argument hinges on conflicting understandings of writing, reading, and oral versus textual transmission of knowledge between Western and Amerindian societies. The ways of knowing these cultures involved different ways of reading words and worlds. For instance, the Spaniards and the Mexicas not only had different material ways of encoding and transmitting knowledge, but also different concepts of the activities of reading and writing. As Mignolo succinctly states, “Mexicas put the accent on the act of observing and telling out loud the stories of what they were looking at while Spaniards stressed reading the word rather than reading the world, and made the letter the anchor of knowledge and understanding”(105).
The spread of Western literacy in the New world was a “massive operation in which the materiality and the ideology of Amerindian semiotic interactions were intermingled with or replaced by the materiality and ideology of Western reading and writing cultures”(76). Because reading and writing practices were increasingly conceived in terms of the sign carrier—i.e. the book— reading the word became more and more removed from Amerindian conceptions of reading the world through other communication mediums in sixteenth century colonial Spanish America.
Mignolo’s study of pre-Hispanic and post-contact Amerindian texts and symbolic practices provides invaluable insights into the tensions and intersections of print and nonprint forms of communication between Spaniards and Amerindians during the sixteenth century. For Mignolo, “colonial semiosis implies constant interactions where relations of domination cannot be avoided, adaptation by members of cultures in conflict take place, and opposition (from “inside”) and resistance (from “outside”) the official power is enacted in various forms. Speaking, writing, and sign carriers, as well as their conceptualization, was one set of relations in which colonization took place. Thus, the spread of Western literacy linked to the idea of the book was also linked to the appropriation and defense of cultural territories, of a physical space loaded with meaning.”(121) Mignolo’s work has helped to promulgate a wave of theoretical critique of traditional methods and concerns of book history that have not accounted for the complex political and material realities of symbolic exchange in the colonial world.
