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Colonial Mediascapes: Sensory Worlds of the Early Americas Edited by matt cohen and jeffrey glover Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014 438 pp.
What did it mean to communicate in early America? Through what kinds of media did Indians and Europeans speak to each other? How can we characterize the communication practices that took place in colonial spaces when alphabetic writing was practiced by only some of the people under consideration? These are some of the questions raised by the essays in Matt Cohen and Jeffrey Glover's edited collection Colonial Mediascapes. Rejecting both the "oral-l iterate explanatory structure" of Walter Ong and "technological determinism," Cohen and Glover argue in their introduction that the moment is ripe "to try out media as an orga- nizing frame" through which to understand "communication in colonial America, broadly conceived" (2, 4). Cohen and Glover cite two scholarly conversations that invite this media-centered approach. First, they identify a "friction" between Latin American studies, "which has embraced indigenous communication practices," and scholarship centered on North America, primarily New England, "where the focus has remained on the traditional objects of the history of the book" (3). Second, they contend that the recent rise of hemispheric studies provides new opportunities for putting "indigenous systems and intercultural colonial communications episodes into the same critical space" (3). To organize their approach, Cohen and Glover draw on Arjun Appadurai's Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996), from which they borrow the term mediascape. It is one of five "scapes" (alongside "ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes") that Appadurai offers to describe culture in a period when nation-states will soon, he claims, cease to exist (5). Acknowledging that mediascape is an anachronistic term that does not completely suit the colonial period, Cohen and Glover nevertheless argue that the term can move "us beyond the paradigm of writing into an analytic that encourages us to consider colonial relations as they are constituted across media" (5). Moreover, it can help us understand how "media become in themselves contests for power in the hands of subalterns" (6).
The volume's essays are structured around four groupings, the first of which is titled "Beyond Textual Media." Germaine Warkentin's essay begins this part with the story of Yucatán bishop Diego de Landa ordering...