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About the Series
- Duke University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
About the Series Narrating Native Histories aims to foster a rethinking of the ethical, methodological, and conceptual frameworks within which we locate our work on Native histories and cultures.We seek to create a space for effective and ongoing conversations between North and South, Natives and nonNatives , academics and activists, throughout the Americas and the Pacific region.We are committed to complicating and transgressing the disciplinary and epistemological boundaries of established academic discourses on Native peoples. This series encourages symmetrical, horizontal, collaborative, and autoethnographies ; work that recognizes Native intellectuals, cultural interpreters , and alternative knowledge producers within broader academic and intellectual worlds; projects that decolonize the relationship between orality and textuality; narratives that productively work the tensions between the norms of Native cultures and the requirements for evidence in academic circles; and analyses that contribute to an understanding of Native peoples’ relationships with nation-states, including histories of expropriation and exclusion as well as projects for autonomy and sovereignty. By critically extending and reconceptualizing the concept of literacy as formulated in Angel Rama’s The Lettered City, Rappaport and Cummins contribute in an absolutely central way to the goals of our series. A historical analysis of literacy as a social process that included interactions between oral and written texts and alphabetic and pictorial forms, their work pays attention to indigenous agency even as it highlights the inevitable embeddedness of literacy in a system of colonial domination. Focusing on the Northern x • • • aBout the SerieS Andes, Rappaport and Cummins trace the emergence of a stratum of literate indigenous people and mestizos who, in effect, created an alternative indigenous lettered city. Composed of alphabetic and visual renditions, paintings, and legal documents and petitions, this indigenous lettered city forces us to rethink the notion of literacy as exclusively alphabetic, while also questioning it as simply a technology of production and reception of meanings. Instead , the authors demonstrate, literacy was a technology that, by framing the world ideologically from the perspective of the colonizer and encouraging the participation of literate and non-literate alike, ultimately helped consolidate and reproduce European hegemony in the Americas. ...