Pictorial Histories and Myth-Histories: "Graphic Novels" of the Mixtecs and Aztecs

FAIN: EH-50356-13

Community College Humanities Association (Baltimore, MD 21237-3899)
George L. Scheper (Project Director: March 2013 to May 2015)
Laraine Anne Fletcher (Co Project Director: August 2013 to May 2015)

A four-week institute for twenty-four college and university faculty to study Pre-Columbian and Early Colonial pictorial manuscripts authored by indigenous peoples of central Mexico and Puebla between 1100 and 1600 C.E.

This Institute focuses on the reading and interpretation of Pre-Columbian and Early Colonial pictorial historical and genealogical manuscripts of Mixtec and Aztec authorship. These documents are crucial to the study of ancient American history, but not well known or even known at all, to most teachers of American history, art history, Native American studies, or cultural anthropology. These pictorial histories and myth-narratives, written between c. 1100 and 1600 CE, utilize an ideographic writing system not dependent on speech or language, thus facilitating ritual, trade, and diplomacy across the multiple linguistic boundaries of Postclassic Mesoamerica. They offer an unprecedented view of Native American self-representation and collective indigenous memories. The Institute will meet from June 29-July 6 in Oaxaca, Puebla, and Mexico City, in the territory where the manuscripts were written, and amid the identifiable sites and landscapes that are the settings for these myth-histories.