Images, Words, and Cross-Cultural Knowledge between the New World and the Old: The Case of Mexican Codices

12:15 – 14:00 Daniela Bleichmar, University of Southern California, Los Angeles This lecture considers the travels of the Codex Mendoza, a pictorial manuscript about Aztec history, culture, religion, and tributary practices created in Mexico City circa 1541. Drawing from both Mesoamerican and European bookmaking traditions, the Mendoza was a new type of colonial object created through various types of translations. It involved movements from image into word, from Nahuatl into Spanish, from oral narrative into written language, and from indigenous traditions into colonial interpretations. It was set in motion immediately after its creation and continued to move in various ways for centuries. It moved physically, going from Mexico to Paris, London, and Oxford. It later moved across media, from manuscript to print, as authors selected portions to include in their publications. And it moved interpretively, since printed renditions created different versions of the codex based on their selection of pages to reproduce, the varying relations they articulated between images and text, and the conclusions they drew about Amerindian culture. Mobility, this essay argues, was not a physical accident that befell an object that existed as a stable and immutable entity despite its travels, but rather a series of constitutive acts of translation, selection, and interpretation that produced multiple versions of the object itself. This lecture is part of a series organized by the ProDoc «Sites of Mediation».