Signs of the Americas

A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu

Paper $30.00 ISBN: 9780226659022 Published January 2020

Cloth $90.00 ISBN: 9780226658971 Published January 2020

E-book $10.00 to $30.00 About E-books ISBN: 9780226659169 Published January 2020

Indigenous sign-systems, such as pictographs, petroglyphs, hieroglyphs, and khipu, are usually understood as relics from an inaccessible past. That is far from the truth, however, as Edgar Garcia makes clear in Signs of the Americas. Rather than being dead languages, these sign-systems have always been living, evolving signifiers, responsive to their circumstances and able to continuously redefine themselves and the nature of the world.

Garcia tells the story of the present life of these sign-systems, examining the contemporary impact they have had on poetry, prose, visual art, legal philosophy, political activism, and environmental thinking. In doing so, he brings together a wide range of indigenous and non-indigenous authors and artists of the Americas, from Aztec priests and Amazonian shamans to Simon Ortiz, Gerald Vizenor, Jaime de Angulo, Charles Olson, Cy Twombly, Gloria Anzaldúa, William Burroughs, Louise Erdrich, Cecilia Vicuña, and many others. From these sources, Garcia depicts the culture of a modern, interconnected hemisphere, revealing that while these “signs of the Americas” have suffered expropriation, misuse, and mistranslation, they have also created their own systems of knowing and being. These indigenous systems help us to rethink categories of race, gender, nationalism, and history. Producing a new way of thinking about our interconnected hemisphere, this ambitious, energizing book redefines what constitutes a “world” in world literature.

Table of Contents

Contents
Review Quotes

Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface: Threshold Magic
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Unnatural Signs

Chapter 1: World Poetry and Its Disavowals: A Poetics of Subsumption from the Aztec Priests to Ed Dorn

Part I: Pictographic Metonyms

Chapter 2: Pictographic Kinships: Simon Ortiz’s Spiral Lands and Jaime de Angulo’s Old Time Stories
Chapter 3: Pictography, Law, and Earth: Gerald Vizenor, John Borrows, and Louise Erdrich

Part II: Metalepsis and Hieroglyphs

Chapter 4: Hieroglyphic Parallelism: Mayan Metalepsis in Charles Olson’s Mayan Letters, Cy Twombly’s Poems to the Sea, and Alurista’s Spik in Glyph?

Part III: Khipu and Other Analeptic Signs

Chapter 5: Death Spaces: Shamanic Signifiers in Gloria Anzaldúa and William Burroughs
Chapter 6: Khipu, Analepsis, and Other Natural Signs: Cecilia Vicuña’s Poetics of Weaving and Joaquín Torres-García’s La Ciudad sin Nombre

Afterword: Anthropological Poetics

Notes
References
Index

Review Quotes

Carlos Alonso Nugent | ASAP/Journal

"Signs of the Americas pierces through five centuries of prejudice to show how indigenous sign systems have wielded worldmaking powers. . . . Signs of the Americas paves new paths for many academic fields. Of course, the book gives Latinx studies, Latin American studies, and Native studies new ways of narrating the history of the western hemisphere. In turn, the book offers anthropology and literary studies sophisticated techniques for theorizing collective creativity. Most importantly, the book raises questions that cut across disciplinary formations. Now that we know how indigenous sign systems have influenced poetry, can we see how they have shaped other genres?"

David Gutherz | New Books Network

"In Signs of the Americas, Garcia sets sparks flying by inviting us to explore the literature and theory created by 20th and 21st century writers who deploy sign systems that, according to the creation myth of European hegemony, alphabetized thought supposedly superseded and destroyed. . . . Signs of the Americas not only pries open a fascinating archive but also forces us to question the organizational principles that govern intellectual history and cultural criticism in this hemisphere."

Len Gutkin | The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Edgar Garcia’s Signs of the Americas ranges across disciplines in pursuit of a startling thesis: Nonalphabetic sign systems, such as petroglyphs, hieroglyphs, and even the still-undecoded Incan knot-writing known as khipu, have exerted a decisive influence on the Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Indigenous literature of the Americas. In substantiating this claim, Garcia synthesizes research in an unusually broad range of fields, including literary theory, Indigenous and ethnic studies, anthropology and ethnography, and the history of ideas."

Diana Taylor, New York University

“Garcia’s excellent book demonstrates how indigenous sign systems such as pictographs, petroglyphs, hieroglyphs, and khipu continue to communicate to all who know how to activate and interpret them . . . These signs continue to make meaning in that dynamic area between the ‘archive’ and the ‘repertoire,’ animated through use and practice. Signs of the Americas, drawing on contemporary art, activism, and legal practice, makes a compelling argument about why we all need to understand these highly expressive and powerful sign systems.”

Roberto Tejada, University of Houston

“Signs of the Americas reconceptualizes literary studies by foregrounding objects often subsumed or overlooked in modern and contemporary inter-American literary texts. Garcia rehearses a complex of ideas and forms—signs and situations, structures and events—in his proliferating arguments. Each chapter is a dynamic case study, producing startling combinations of poetic figures, geographic locations, and methodological frames. Signs of theAmericas is an ambitious, energizing, and original contribution to various fields of cultural scholarship.”

Doris Sommer, Harvard University

“In Signs of the Americas, Garcia pries us away from received notions. He reveals that pictographs say more than we have previously thought. Bold and conceptually beautiful . . . Garcia’s poetics of anthropology and ethnography pay off very well here, especially his agility in framing figures to argue for creativity and agency.”

For more information, or to order this book, please visit https://press.uchicago.edu

Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology

Culture Studies

Latin American Studies

Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature | General Criticism and Critical Theory

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