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ABOUT THE SERIES Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations is a critical series. It aims to explore the emergence and consequences of concepts used to define ‘‘Latin America’’ while at the same time exploring the broad interplay of political, economic , and cultural practices that have shaped Latin American worlds. Latin America, at the crossroads of competing imperial designs and local responses, has been construed as a geocultural and geopolitical entity since the nineteenth century. This series provides a starting point to redefine Latin America as a configuration of political, linguistic, cultural, and economic intersections that demands a continuous reappraisal of the role of the Americas in history, and of the ongoing process of globalization and the relocation of people and cultures that have characterized Latin America’s experience. Latin America Otherwise : Languages, Empires, Nations is a forum that confronts established geocultural constructions, rethinks area studies and disciplinary boundaries, assesses convictions of the academy and of public policy, and correspondingly demands that the practices through which we produce knowledge and understanding about and from Latin America be subject to rigorous and critical scrutiny. Focusing on sexuality in early Nahuatl culture, Pete Sigal’s exploration goes beyond the time and place of his inquiry and x ≤ ABOUT THE SERIES argument. The most striking aspect of the book is the philosophy that underlies his research and argumentation. Poring over the many Spanishlanguage reports that distorted the meaning of sexuality in early Nahuatl culture and digging into Aztec codices and other documents in the Nahuatl language, Sigal engages in a necessary and brutal work of restoration —not necessarily the restoration of the original meaning, but of the ‘‘difference ’’ that Spaniards never understood, blinded as they were by Christian cosmological principles. Unveiling the colonial difference that made of Nahua sexuality a depository of devilish amoralities, Sigal’s book alerts us to what happened in subsequent centuries when British, French, and later U.S. Americans took over the control of knowledge to report on the sexuality, cosmology, habitus, and way of life of non-Western civilizations . This book is important not only for its content but for its method— the method, indeed, is its content. ...

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