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  • Tell Me the Story of How I Conquered You: Elsewheres and Ethnosuicide in the Colonial Mesoamerican World by José Rabasa
  • Martín Vega
Rabasa, José. 2012. Tell Me the Story of How I Conquered You: Elsewheres and Ethnosuicide in the Colonial Mesoamerican World. Austin: University of Texas Press. ISBN 978-0-292-74761-6. Pp. 278. $25.

Tell Me the Story of How I Conquered You undertakes a rich theoretical meditation on the textual performance of the Mesoamerican colonial scribe, or tlacuilo. Rabasa’s analysis revolves around charta 46r of the 16th-century Codex Telleriano-Remensis (Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds mexicain 385). Produced by indigenous scribes at the behest of Catholic missionaries, the codex combines pre-Columbian and European forms of writing and illustration. Rabasa argues that c.46r exemplifies modes of montage and juxtaposition that defy the will to dominate and master subaltern cultural expressions.

The first chapter lays out the vocabulary that Rabasa deploys in his study. Particularly important is the concept of habitus as utilized in medieval Scholasticism and, more recently, in Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory. While scholastics used the term to outline techniques of Christian indoctrination, Bourdieu’s definition deals with the influence of the community on the individual’s creative work. As Rabasa puts it, Bourdieu’s definition of habitus helps him to understand “the different backgrounds from which and against which the tlacuilo, the missionaries, and scholars today make and unmake worlds” (9). Rabasa argues that when missionaries requested the tlacuilo’s help in producing Telleriano-Remensis, they effectively asked her to unmake the Mesoamerican world and thus commit ethnosuicide. (Since it is not known who created c. 46r, Rabasa’s use of the feminine pronoun reminds readers that, especially in the pre-Columbian setting, a woman could in fact be a tlacuilo.) Yet, the Mesoamerican world would re-emerge in the tlacuilo’s habitus as an intransigent elsewhere to Christian modernity. For Rabasa, this elsewhere opens up the possibility for ethnogenesis, the creation of “‘new’ objects that elude the mastery of both missionary and tlacuilo” (13). An example of ethnogenesis is the tlacuilo’s use of three-dimensional perspective as a form of “wild literacy” (36).

Chapters 2 and 3 contain more detailed analyses of c. 46r. Along with Chapter 1, they form the heart of Tell Me the Story of How I Conquered [End Page 117] You. Chapter 2 begins with an anecdote that places the reader with Rabasa in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, where an ultra-vigilant librarian mistakenly reprimands Rabasa for his handling of the Telleriano-Remensis. Aside from highlighting the intense surveillance over the codex and its handlers, especially those deemed suspect, this anecdote serves as a basis for considering the production and history of the document. Rabasa goes on to provide compelling readings of the scenes and figures depicted therein, including the Mixtón War, the baptism of an indigenous person, and Dominican and Franciscan friars in their characteristic habits. Chapter 3 in particular deals with the tlacuilo’s use of perspective in depicting the friars. Crucially, Rabasa argues that these depictions return the gaze of the missionaries, thus threatening their evangelical project.

The remaining chapters (4–9) explore a number of philosophical issues spawned by Rabasa’s analysis of the preceding chapters. Rabasa draws on theological treatises, legal petitions, and other texts that resonate with the concerns and contents of the Telleriano-Remensis. Chapter 6, for example, contains a particularly illuminating discussion of Book XII of the Florentine Codex. In contrast to the Telleriano-Remensis, the indigenous authors of Book XII utilized not only pictorial writing but also alphabetic script to tell the story of their conquest. Book XII’s portrayal of the defeated Mexica leader Moteuczuma leads Rabasa to a fascinating reassessment of the Freudian concepts of melancholy and mania. This reassessment is part of Rabasa’s larger political and philosophical project of subverting the supposed universality of Western epistemology.

Tell Me the Story of How I Conquered You thus invites readers to step outside disciplinary conventions and invent new vocabularies in considering non-Western forms of expression. A key component of this challenge is...

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