Misplaced Objects: Migrating Collections and Recollections in Europe and the Americas (review)

Silvia Spitta’s important new study, Misplaced Objects: Migrating Collections and Recollections in Europe and the Americas, is driven by what the author calls “the paradoxically simple thesis that when things move, things change” (4). Taking literally Foucault’s notion, articulated in The Order of Things, that objects comprise the table on which a culture’s epistemology is ordered, Spitta aims to demonstrate that out-of-place objects have had profound epistemological reverberations for both sides of the European-American encounter since the fifteenth century. Misplaced Objects, it must be stressed at the outset, is a beautifully produced and visually lush object in itself, testament to the care and expense that the University of Texas Press has invested in what is clearly a major publication event.

Spitta’s departure in Misplaced Object from previous studies of the European- American encounter is to move beyond the now familiar focus on the curious, awed, troubled or outraged gaze and subjective positions of the European observers, collectors, recipients, interpreters and cataloguers of objects—“human,” human-made and from the so-called natural world—taken from or circulating in the Americas since 1492. Instead, the author’s critical attention is drawn to the epistemological trouble enacted by migrating objects themselves as they signify anew in misplacement, in profoundly unsettling ways. As Spitta glosses her thesis, “Every new cultural configuration and therefore every subject position depends upon transcultural processes: the uprooting of objects, the loss of place and memory that such uprooting entails, the reconfiguration of objects in foreign spaces, and the concomitant reorganization of the epistemological table of the receptor culture under the impact of those objects” (21). That statement indicates, as well, a direct lineage between Misplaced Objects and Spitta’s previous study of Latin American transcultural discourse, Between Two Waters, which, with Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, has been influential in introducing the critical term transculturation to many fields, including Anglophone postcolonial studies and the new decentered American studies, as an alternative to ethno-racial conceptions of cultural exchange and change.

Travelling objects—and their circulation, reception and re-presentation—from the Americas, Spitta argues, enacted fundamental challenges to European epistemological certainties and birthed new taxonomic conventions. European-origin objects, and not simply the material technologies of conquest, also contributed an equally transformative material basis to transculturation in the Americas, a process that now extends to the inexorable latinization of the USA today. For Spitta, moreover, the history of misplaced American objects demonstrates the impossibility of disaggregating the European invention of the Americas as both an idea and a geocultural space from Enlightenment rational-scientific projects and ordering systems, and from the Euro-project of modernity itself. Misplaced Objects, then, is an extraordinarily ambitious account of the role played by material objects in generating “rifts in understanding,” to pluralize Spitta’s own wording (5). And in order to flesh out the evolution of such rifts, which for Spitta enacted the erasure of the Americas from Eurocentric claims to modernity, she draws on and discusses an exhaustive array of historical accounts, colonial-era archives, correspondence, literature, and visual art, and an astonishing range of material cultural objects and collections, from sixteenth-century Wunderkammern (cabinets of curiosities) and later museums to the work of contemporary Latino and Latin American visual artists.

Misplaced Objects is organized into three core sections, a division that provides a necessary cumulative historical narrative. The first section moves from the breakup of Europe’s cabinets of curiosities, the early venues for chaotic, disordered collections of exotic human-made and natural objects, to the subsequent development of more ordered taxonomic and organizational modes for presenting the material spoils of exploration and conquest. In this section, chapter two stands out for its discussion of the Real Gabinete in Madrid and its as of yet unacknowledged role in reinventing the Americas away from the paradisiacal “Indies” narrated by Columbus to an ethnologized and naturalized space of scientific attention and fascination...