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A disturbing picture of the new world (’I is seen’): tupinamba cannibalism, sixteenth century printed representation and the martyr

University of British Columbia

This is my body; this is my blood. The ritualistic words spoken by the absent body of Christ mark a sacrifice and crisis in the Christian comrnunity of meaning, and come to inflect another point of crisis, the West's historical encounter with the New World's indigenous body. My study intervenes in that encounter through a set of exceptional images which mediated the violent engagement of Amerindian alterity with occidental subjectivity. These first appeared in the third volume (1592) of the de Bry family's monumental publishing project that brought together previously published New World travel accounts with large-scale copper-plate coloured engravings. The incommensurability of New World cultural difference had confounded European modes of visual representation throughout the sixteenth century, leaving a pronounced lack of representation in its wake, within which were scattered relatively few schematically-conceived woodcut prints by various authors. And indeed, the rich and fantastic prints, images produced by the de Brys and thoroughly disseminated amongst the European populace, marked a significant turn in the graphic inscription of Amerindian alterity in the west. These prints, which for the first time in New World representation gain a prominence in relation to the accompanying text, are remarkable: within them, a technical apparatus and a theoretical operator seem to inscribe themselves in a confusion of mapped spaces, a congregation of murderous and cannibalistic bodies marked by difference, and within violent and sexual narratives of the demonic. The images emanate from a line of martyred bodies which attempt to transform Amerindian incommensurability, through the perceptory mechanism of vision and the practice of graphic inscription, into something meaningful to a European 'order'. Yet the other eludes the incorporative grasp of the occidental subject and manifests itself as a perturbation within the syntax of the very visual discourse which tried to circumscribe it. My objectives are primarily, then, a matter of locating difference within identity, identifying a disturbance in the locus of enunciation, and, perhaps, delineating the resonance to this unsettling.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-01-30

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/4014

Fine Arts

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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