Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade Runner (1492-2019)

Abstract

Serge Gruzinski’s La guerre des images de Christophe Colomb à “Blade Runner” (1492– 2019) first appeared in 1990. Heather MacLean’s translation of this work into English is especially welcome, given the influence of Gruzinski’s work in Mexico and France during the previous decade. This is an imaginative, highly original, and ultimately path-breaking work. Though at times it is quite speculative and marked by contradictions and unexplored nuances, these point more toward areas to be filled in by future research than to flaws in methodology or argument. By combining archival materials with intriguing readings of a variety of images and contexts, Gruzinski demonstrates the centrality of the “war of images” from the sixteenth century until the very recent past, through several major historical shifts and social transformations. As he provocatively states, “[T]he war over images is as important as the ones over oil” (p. 3). Certainly, he establishes that efforts to control, contain, subvert, resist, and redefine images are central to processes of conquest, colonization, and the recreation of power in Mexico over time.The book is complex and difficult, but also fun. How one responds to comparisons of baroque Mexico with Peter Greenaway films (p. 151) is in part a matter of taste. (For me, having to tell my students who Peter Greenaway is intensified a certain nostalgia for the 1980s.) Nevertheless, more conventionally minded historians are well advised to take the time to sift through this work for the occasional jewels that are to be found amidst its many twists, turns, and occasionally strange detours. Who could not marvel at the production in Tlaxcala of the play The Conquest of Jerusalem less than 20 years after the conquest? As Gruzinski notes, the spectacle of indigenous Tlaxcalans playing the roles of Pope, cardinals, bishops, and soldiers from many European countries and provinces, as well as the “Sultan and the Moors,” was a “form of exoticism squared—the Orient according to the Spanish as revisited by the Indians—where the native imaginaire clung to the memory of the West and Iberian fantasies” (p. 89). Although it is clear that this and similar events constructed and displayed many meanings, one can only wonder at precisely how they were received.Indeed, this is arguably one of the shortcomings of the book. While Gruzinski devotes chapter 5 to “Image Consumers,” this comes late in the text and is devoted only to the consumption of images from the baroque era (approximately the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries). Up until this point, the book combines interesting interpretations with a somewhat standard chronology: an era of disorientation and redefinition as Columbus and Fray Ramón Pané grapple with indigenous symbolic and religious practices in the Caribbean, followed by the invasion and colonization of Mexico by Hernán Cortés and his Franciscan accomplices, succeeded by a more mature colony and more sophisticated attempts to win “hearts and minds,” culminating in a new and culturally complex colonial society marked by a proliferation of images, most especially the Virgin of Guadalupe. Gruzinski is a clever writer, and his defenses are built into the text. For example, he readily admits to the “inevitable pointillism of our approach” as he strives “to seize an object that by its very nature goes beyond the boundaries of discursive analysis and leaves few traces in the archives” (p. 104). Nevertheless, at times his effort to trace and recover the dynamic imaginaries that preceded, created, and evaluated images appears to be unjustifiably totalizing. Can one really speak of “the Western gaze” (p. 28), rather than multiple colonial, indigenous, and newly created mestizo gazes? Gruzinski correctly notes that the “Spanish invasion … unleashed a flood of Western images onto the American continents” (p. 34). However, doesn’t beginning with Columbus prefigure to some extent our understanding of how profound and extensive this flood was? Who consumed which images, and when, during the confusion of the initial encounters? How did the history of the image prior to European contact influence indigenous responses? Gruzinski’s discussion of the indigenous concept of the ixiptla, and how it was not compatible with the Spanish notion of the saint’s image, provides a partial answer, but I found myself wanting more depth and detail (p. 50). One of the strengths of Gruzinski’s work is that it brings us to the point where we can ask these questions.In the conclusion, Gruzinski traces the history of the image in Mexico from the rise of the Enlightenment through the emergence of the Televisa network. Intriguingly, he notes that nineteenth-century independence and the twentieth-century rise of a “revolutionary” national culture did not entirely erode baroque influences in Mexico. Gruzinski defines the late twentieth century as a “neo-baroque” era (pp. 225–26), comparing the current proliferation of images via the electronic media to processes of image production and reception in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He thus makes a significant contribution merely by indicating that many features of the “postmodern era,” while distinctive, are not utterly new or unprecedented. The book begins and ends with a discussion of the future imagined by Ridley Scott in the 1982 science fiction film Blade Runner. Set in Los Angeles in 2019, in a world dominated by the great corporations, diverse peoples and cultures clash and share space. They intermingle, contaminate, and destroy each other while creating new, hybrid forms of existence that—among other things—call into question rigid notions of authenticity. For Gruzinski, this imagined future bears some resemblance to the lived past of colonial Mexico, an analogy that is persuasive to this reader as well.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.