Colonial Mediascapes: Sensory Worlds of the Early Americas ed. by Matt Cohen and Jeffrey Glover (review)

What did it mean to communicate in early America? Through what kinds of media did Indians and Europeans speak to each other? How can we characterize the communication practices that took place in colonial spaces when alphabetic writing was practiced by only some of the people under consideration? These are some of the questions raised by the essays in Matt Cohen and Jeffrey Glover’s edited collection Colonial Mediascapes. Rejecting both the “oral-literate explanatory structure” of Walter Ong and “technological determinism,” Cohen and Glover argue in their introduction that the moment is ripe “to try out media as an organizing frame” through which to understand “communication in colonial America, broadly conceived” (2, 4). Cohen and Glover cite two scholarly conversations that invite this media-centered approach. First, they identify a “friction” between Latin American studies, “which has embraced indigenous communication practices,” and scholarship centered on North America, primarily New England, “where the focus has remained on the traditional objects of the history of the book” (3). Second, they contend that the recent rise of hemispheric studies provides new opportunities for putting “indigenous systems and intercultural colonial communications episodes into the same critical space” (3). To organize their approach, Cohen and Glover draw on Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996), from which they borrow the term mediascape. It is one of five “scapes” (alongside “ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes”) that Appadurai offers to describe culture in a period when nation-states will soon, he claims, cease to exist (5). Acknowledging that mediascape is an anachronistic term that does not completely suit the colonial period, Cohen and Glover nevertheless argue that the term can move “us beyond the paradigm of writing into an analytic that encourages us to consider colonial relations as they are constituted across media” (5). Moreover, it can help us understand how “media become in themselves contests for power in the hands of subalterns” (6).

The volume’s essays are structured around four groupings, the first of which is titled “Beyond Textual Media.” Germaine Warkentin’s essay begins this part with the story of Yucatán bishop Diego de Landa ordering Franciscan friars to burn “Mayan ‘idols,’ calendar scrolls (katuns),” and manuscript “‘libros’” in 1562 (47). “Despite the physical differences between the familiar European codex and the novel Mayan artifacts, between the European alphabet and the Mayan glyphs,” writes Warkentin, “Landa clearly had no difficulty identifying the manuscripts he was burning as powerful objects of knowledge transfer” (48). The phrase “objects of knowledge transfer,” which Warkentin acknowledges as clunky, gets at the question that motivates nearly every essay in this volume: how can we describe the things in which ideas were recorded but that by traditional Western historiography generally have not been considered evidentiary texts? Warkentin’s answer is to turn to the physicality of such items, ultimately asking readers to see how objects like the ones Landa burned “radically disrupt the narrative that the European codex historically represents, challenging us … to entertain the possibility that the European codex … is an exception to the norm rather than the norm itself” (50).

Although Warkentin does not frame her argument in these terms, Catholic mendicant book burning had something of a moment in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Sixty-five years before Landa’s order, Dominican priest Girolamo Savonarola torched mirrors, furs, musical instruments, and books in Florence in his Bonfire of the Vanities. Both Landa and Savonarola burned objects that to them communicated immorality and sin. These two incidents, separated by the Atlantic Ocean and over half a century, reveal how the communications practices of colonial encounters in the Americas have much to teach us about media in all contexts. Even though many colonial Europeans argued that their use of alphabetic writing was proof of what they deemed their more advanced culture, this argument was deployed primarily within moments of conquest since even...