When the Untheorizable Sustains a Poetry of the Unthinkable, or Theorizing Hemispheric Poetics

Abstract

he more academe repositions itself through input from people who live out the negotiation of constant positional entanglements, the more we will see scholarship that seizes on scenarios of power. Potentially even taking up decolonization as strategies that blur institutionalsocial lines of labor and circulation. There will undoubtedly be unresolved matters, terms, and feelings. Each step toward decolonial strategy will clumsily and beautifully touch upon ongoing traumas. Boundaries between deeply personal experiences not historically considered with philosophical rigor, academic discourses, and what, collectively, we define as “study” will have to be figured out. I say all of this upfront because I want to be sure that I openly and sincerely admit to not having a better way of entering into hemispheric poetics than Edgar Garcia’s Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu. Particularly not one that encompasses his historical or archival scope. Not one that addresses, as directly as Garcia does, colonial contact, translation, curation, and appropriation (though he does not exactly use the word appropriation). Signs of the Americas is a sixchapter work made up of three prominent parts: pictography, the glyph, and khipu. Each part accomplishes something tangible in Garcia’s bigger objective of shifting our scene of reading to “a Mesoamerican poetics of dialectical J O S É F E L I P E A L V E R G U E