Constitutive Visions: Indigeneity and Commonplaces of National Identity in Republican Ecuador by Christa J. Olson (review)

Constitutive Visions brings readers a graphic-rich rhetorical history of nationalisms in Ecuador. Christa Olson makes a compelling argument showing how Ecuadorian national identity formations are a particularly valuable example for drawing out broader claims about the visual rhetoricity of nationalism.

The core theoretical concept in this work is topoi, described by Olson to function as “nodes of social value and common sense” (7). To be sure, this is a concept that has been refigured throughout the history of rhetorical theorizing to account for varied dimensions of commonly accepted ideas or commonplaces. Olson’s uses of topoi, more specifically, highlight the tensions between a topos’ mutability and its stability. Instead of tethering the concept of topoi to accepted traditions, she envisions them as malleable sites of return for rhetorical invention and innovation.

Through the identification of four major topoi and aided by 42 illustrations, Olson demonstrates how this theoretical approach can generate a nuanced account of nationalism’s graphic and textual trans-historicality. The structure of Constitutive Visions is driven by these four major topoi—land, labor, othering, and embodiment—each of which is the topic of a separate chapter. In examining each topos, Olson traces a complex inclusion-exclusion dialectic operating in visual and textual culture constituting the distinctions between indigenous Ecuadorians and their white-mestizo counterparts. Chapter 2 shows how land and landscape were leveraged into a topos that articulated a mythical pre-Columbian past and located indigenous Ecuadorians as a passive part of the landscape that awaited economic and agricultural cultivation. In chapter 3, discussed in more detail below, Olson focuses on how the topos of indigenous labor functioned in national identity formation through scenes showing the importance of indigenous labor. However, this topos also framed the laborers themselves as blocks to the modernization of Ecuador. Chapter 4 articulates a topos of the indigenous other as represented in texts, organizing, and images produced by urban elites in Quito. Chapter 5 draws out the tensions, complexities, and rhetorical affordances created in embodied white-mestizo practices of adopting indigenous styling.

The main finding of these analyses is that dominant visual and textual discourses generated by elite white-mestizo Ecuadorians forms reiterations of an identity formation for indigenous Ecuadorians, describing them as impoverished, uneducated, primitive, and derailing Ecuador’s progress to modernity. At the same time, this vision of indigenous Ecuadorians locates them as core to the articulation of the nation’s legitimacy, uniqueness, and history. Olson’s analyses also show how these topoi, developed for use in elite discourses, were appropriated and recreated by indigenous Ecuadorian rhetors. In their hands, these topoi were leveraged to argue for access to the resources and protection of the government as well as their independence from mestizo visions of what Ecuadorian modernism should look like. The variations and circulations of these topoi are identified through diverse visual artifacts including paintings, drawings, watercolors, and prints but also in textual sources from governmental documents, organizational materials, and periodicals. Olson notes that identifying specific accounts of circulation is not possible, but she makes the argument for circulation instead based on the proliferation of these topoi across media, artists, authors, and time periods.

For the purposes of this review, chapter 3 is a useful example for showing how this argument about the inclusion/exclusion dialectic works and how Olson develops her analysis. The artifacts in chapter 3 comprise what McKerrow (1989) might consider a textual composite since Olson layers letters, reports, books, watercolors, paintings, song lyrics, prints, and periodicals to expose how the topos of labor has been used across the Ecuadorian political spectrum and across time. The topos’ articulation is constructed from three main perspectives: the white-mestizo mainstream, indigenous, and leftist white-mestizo artists. The topos of labor was used by white mestizos in a way that extended colonial relations that assumed that they had legitimate claim to indigenous labor. This was enacted...