Colonization memory in translation and performance

Abstract

The article aims to analyze the inaugural scene of the conquest of America as a “reiterative act” and its intersemiotic translations as conformers of an archive that restores and repeats it in an ever renewed present, constituting the translations as performances of this inaugural
scene and of its deployments. By observing the movements that accompany the inaugural moment of territorial conquest, the condemnation of embodied practices of indigenous people (spoken language and rites, in particular) and the attempt to erase them for the purpose of domination comes up. The work of transcription and translation of part of the repertoire of Amerindian cultures, carried out by missionaries such as Diego de Landa and Bernardino de Sahagún, is discussed as a double movement where memory and erasure are confronted. If, on the one hand, they leave a record of archival memory that allows the recognition of indigenous performances banished by the colonial power, on the other hand, the monological conception of translation makes the objective of the conversion of the starting culture prevail resulting in a form of erasure by its subjugation to the paradigms of the arrival culture.