A Contested Dichotomy: Orality and Literacy in Colonial Latin America
Prof Rodrigo Cacho
One of the touchstones of the scholarship concerned with Latin American Colonial culture is the contraposition of orality and literacy. The first has been generally associated with pre-Columbian communities and their traditions, while the second has often been described as one of the privileged tools of European colonialism in the Americas. Yet recent scholarship has contested this sharp, and at times simplistic, divide, focusing on non-verbal methods of record-keeping among native societies as well as Indigenous literacies and the way in which “indios ladinos” (Indigenous or Mestizo individuals who are able to read and write in Spanish) navigated European codes in order to “write back” and consolidate their position and that of their communities within the colonial system of the Americas. This seminar will question the literacy-orality binary offering a re-evaluation of the way in which they have shaped early modern Latin American Studies.
Required Readings
• Ángel Rama, La ciudad letrada (Hanover: Ediciones del Norte, 1984). [Chapter 2: “La ciudad letrada”, pp. 23-39]
• Antonio Cornejo Polar, Escribir en el aire. Ensayo sobre la heterogeneidad socio-cultural en las literaturas andinas (Lima/Berkeley: Centro de Estudios Literarios “Antonio Cornejo Polar” / Latinoamericana Editores, 2011). [Chapter 1: “El comienzo de la heterogeneidad en las literaturas andinas: voz y letra en el ‘Diálogo’ de Cajamarca”, pp. 17-74]
• Joanne Rappaport and Tom Cummins, Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2012). [Chapter 3: “The Indigenous Lettered City”, pp. 113-151]
Further Readings
• Caroline Egan, Words Made Flesh: Language, Body, and Conversion in Colonial Latin America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026)
• Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2012).
• Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo (editors). Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1994).
• Andrew Laird, Aztec Latin: Renaissance Learning and Nahuatl Traditions in Early Colonial Mexico (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024).
• Walter Mingolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003).
• Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London/New York: Routledge, 2012).
• Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis (editors), Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2014).
• Alessandra Russo, The Untranslatable Image: A Mestizo History of the Arts in New Spain, 1500-1600 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014).