Transnational Translations: Five Poems from Tonalamatl, dream notes

Year 2015, Issue: 42, 135 - 148, 01.10.2015

Steven Alvarez

Abstract

In The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization, Walter D. Mignolo argues that European forms of literacy subordinated Amerindian epistemologies and were at the heart of the “invention” of the New World and its conquest. For Mignolo, the coloniality of literacies resulted in geopolitical difference through the exercise of European colonial power. Mignolo’s interdisciplinary study of decoloniality draws from sources ranging from historiography, cartography, semiotics, literature, and history. This transnational hemispheric approach to decolonizing literacies influenced Damian Baca’s and Victor Villanueva’s groundbreaking edited collection Rhetorics of the Americas. Baca and Villanueva’s text demonstrates the contributions of hemispheric writing studies broadly conceived and offers multidisciplinary work in transnational Latin@ Studies across fields. Though Baca’s and Villanueva’s collection rightfully deserves credit for advancing Mignolo’s groundbreaking hemispheric studies of transnational literacy practices, more cross-field collaboration is necessary between the larger Latin@ Studies in transnational contexts project at the intersections of writing systems, literacies, languages, and rhetorics of the Americas. Transnational Latin@ lives encounter diverse contexts of border crossing, evading discipline and opening guerrilla spaces of dissent, or loci of enunciation. Transnational Latin@ Studies is always historical insofar as accounting for narratives of movement, directionalities, positions, social fields, or networks.