Indigenous Cosmolectics: Kab’awil and the Making of Maya and Zapotec Literatures by Gloria Elizabeth Chacón (review)

the meeting of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) held in Boston in May 2019 was historical for a number of reasons, not the least of which was Gloria Elizabeth Chacón and Luz María Lepe Lira’s establishment of a new track focused on Indigenous languages and literatures within the association itself. These efforts reflect not only the ongoing critical interest in these areas on the part of Latin Americanists in general but also the sustained efforts of literary and cultural critics such as Chacón and Lepe to visibilize Indigenous peoples, languages, and cultures within fora that have traditionally excluded them. The new track not only hosted a panel on the latest publications on Indigenous literatures (and which included myself and my coauthor, Rita M. Palacios, in addition to Chacón and Lepe, Arturo Arias, and discussant Robert Warrior) but also created a space for the first panel given in Nahuatl, as well as other panels dedicated to Indigenous languages whose presenters were members of those same Indigenous communities.

I situate Chacón’s Indigenous Cosmolectics within the context of this other academic work in order to demonstrate how her book’s approach not only is theoretical but also plays an important part in broader interventions within the field. Indeed, drawing on the work of Kamau Brathwaite, Chacón coined the term “cosmolectics” as a way of describing “the fundamental role that the cosmos and history, sacred writing and poetry, nature and spirituality as well as glyphs and memory play in articulating Maya and Zapotec ontologies” (12). She then proposes that we understand kab’awil, a kind of double vision originally associated with planets in retrograde, as a “foundational cosmolectics” that transcends national histories of conquest and colonization and therefore offers a framework from which to better understand the literary production of Maya and Zapotec authors. As she does so, Chacón deftly connects kab’awil to “double-consciousness” while grounding its genealogy and use in documents from the so-called Dresden Codex and the K’iche’ Maya Popol wuj to the production of contemporary Indigenous intellectuals in Mesoamerica.

The book’s five chapters then use cosmolectics and kab’awil as analytical tools to home in on how Zapotec and Maya authors use kab’awilian strategies to negotiate the ever-shifting terrains of power in which they write. The first of these, “Literature and Power in Mesoamerica,” makes use of these terrains to demonstrate how colonial-era texts “originated in a complex grammar dependent on an array of oral performances and language representation” (30). These texts and their use of kab’awil enable contemporary writers “to defy temporality and periodization of Maya and Zapotec literature as new” (44). The following chapter, “The Formation of the Contemporary Mesoamerican Author,” provides a keen analysis of how selected Indigenous authors from the region negotiate a move from an anthropological/ethnographic gaze toward one that asserts a sense of literary creativity on the national and international stages. “Indigenous Women, Poetry, and the Double Gaze” in turn addresses the specific challenges faced by female Zapotec and Maya poets as they assume a “critical posture . . . in relationship to the past and present, tradition and innovation, as well as sexuality and reproduction” (69). “Contemporary Maya Women’s Theater” takes many of the premises of the previous chapter even further to underscore how groups such as Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya (FOMMA) and Ajchowen bring interrogations of gender relations and racist economic structures to the stage, short-circuiting the power of the written word via performance. Chapter 5 focuses on Zapotec and Maya novels, in particular those by Javier Castellanos Martínez and Marisol “Sol” Ceh Moo, and how authors use language’s expansive, heteroglossic potential to create works that critique contemporary national formations.

Chacón’s important work should find ample readership among scholars and critics across multiple fields and disciplines as much for her...