<bkr>Silvia Spitta, Misplaced Objects: Migrating Collections and Recollections in
Europe and the Americas</>
<bkf>Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009, 280 pp.</>
Silvia Spitta’s important new study, Misplaced Objects: Migrating Collections and
Recollections in Europe and the Americas, is driven by what the author calls “the
paradoxically simple thesis that when things move, things change” (4). Taking literally
Foucault’s notion, articulated in The Order of Things, that objects comprise the table on
which a culture’s epistemology is ordered, Spitta aims to demonstrate that out-of-place
objects have had profound epistemological reverberations for both sides of the EuropeanAmerican encounter since the fifteenth century. Misplaced Objects, it must be stressed at
the outset, is a beautifully produced and visually lush object in itself, testament to the
care and expense that the University of Texas Press has invested in what is clearly a
major publication event.
Spitta’s departure in Misplaced Object from previous studies of the EuropeanAmerican encounter is to move beyond the now familiar focus on the curious, awed,
troubled or outraged gaze and subjective positions of the European observers, collectors,
recipients, interpreters and cataloguers of objects—“human,” human-made and from the
so-called natural world—taken from or circulating in the Americas since 1492. Instead,
the author’s critical attention is drawn to the epistemological trouble enacted by
migrating objects themselves as they signify anew in misplacement, in profoundly
unsettling ways. As Spitta glosses her thesis, “Every new cultural configuration and
therefore every subject position depends upon transcultural processes: the uprooting of
objects, the loss of place and memory that such uprooting entails, the reconfiguration of
objects in foreign spaces, and the concomitant reorganization of the epistemological table
of the receptor culture under the impact of those objects” (21). That statement indicates,
as well, a direct lineage between Misplaced Objects and Spitta’s previous study of Latin
American transcultural discourse, Between Two Waters, which, with Mary Louise Pratt’s
Imperial Eyes, has been influential in introducing the critical term transculturation to
many fields, including Anglophone postcolonial studies and the new decentered
American studies, as an alternative to ethno-racial conceptions of cultural exchange and
change.
Travelling objects—and their circulation, reception and re-presentation—from the
Americas, Spitta argues, enacted fundamental challenges to European epistemological
certainties and birthed new taxonomic conventions. European-origin objects, and not
simply the material technologies of conquest, also contributed an equally transformative
material basis to transculturation in the Americas, a process that now extends to the
inexorable latinization of the USA today. For Spitta, moreover, the history of misplaced
American objects demonstrates the impossibility of disaggregating the European
invention of the Americas as both an idea and a geo-cultural space from Enlightenment
rational-scientific projects and ordering systems, and from the Euro-project of modernity
itself. Misplaced Objects, then, is an extraordinarily ambitious account of the role played
by material objects in generating “rifts in understanding,” to pluralize Spitta’s own
wording (5). And in order to flesh out the evolution of such rifts, which for Spitta enacted
the erasure of the Americas from Eurocentric claims to modernity, she draws on and
discusses an exhaustive array of historical accounts, colonial-era archives,
correspondence, literature, and visual art, and an astonishing range of material cultural
objects and collections, from sixteenth-century Wunderkammern (cabinets of curiosities)
and later museums to the work of contemporary Latino and Latin American visual artists.
Misplaced Objects is organized into three core sections, a division that provides a
necessary cumulative historical narrative. The first section moves from the breakup of
Europe’s cabinets of curiosities, the early venues for chaotic, disordered collections of
exotic human-made and natural objects, to the subsequent development of more ordered
taxonomic and organizational modes for presenting the material spoils of exploration and
conquest. In this section, chapter two stands out for its discussion of the Real Gabinete in
Madrid and its as of yet unacknowledged role in reinventing the Americas away from the
paradisiacal “Indies” narrated by Columbus to an ethnologized and naturalized space of
scientific attention and fascination. Spitta’s analysis of the role played by President
Thomas Jefferson in facilitating dialogue with the director of the Real Gabinete is
fascinating as a chronicle of the USA’s emergence as a scientific power in its own right.
The historical treatment continues in the third chapter, which focuses on the popular
collections of American objects amassed by P. T. Barnum, for Spitta the prototype for
contemporary presentations of science as spectacle. Spitta ends the section with a
discussion of contemporary critical curators and artworkers whose alternative cabinets of
curiosities and museum displays signal yet another epistemological shift, by which postEnlightenment taxonomic systems are being questioned, in ways that self-consciously
hark back to and visually cite the disorderly, arbitrary displays of the Wunderkammern.
The second section inverts the cultural table, so to speak, to focus on how
European-origin objects that travelled under the banner of conquest and colonization also
enacted fundamental epistemological rifts on the part of the indigenous and mixed-race
peoples of the continent. This section of Misplaced Objects is a considerable
achievement. It forcefully demonstrates a core critical message of Spitta’s study that
ethno-racial models of cultural mixture (mestizaje, creolization, hybridity, and so on) are
at once burdened by an essentialized conception of identity, and partial, as they deflect
attention from what Spitta calls “the crucial role played by objects in delimiting” ethnoracial identities during the colonial epoch, and in the postcolonial era of nation building
(9). Spitta accordingly revisits the rise of the cult centered on the Virgen de Guadalupe,
the dark or indigenous virgin. Within the Catholic Church, she is officially the patroness
of Mexico (since 1737) and of the Americas as a whole (since 1754), she is also the de
facto patron saint of Chicanos in the USA. While the transformation of the Virgen de
Guadalupe from her medieval origins in Extremadura, Spain, to Mexican national, and
arguably transnational American cult status across the Atlantic has been elaborated by
numerous historians. Spitta extends the historical record, however, by tracking the cult’s
transformation through the objects that bear her image. An icon of Mexican mestizaje, of
Aztec and Catholic syncretism, and of a Mexican national project since independence, the
Virgen de Guadalupe has also become a complex, and decidedly heterogeneous, material
sign of the latinization of the USA, and of the transnationalization of latinidades. The
latter is attested by her ubiquity across the USA today, and not simply among MexicanAmericans, and by her increasingly familiar presence in Canada as well. The third
chapter in this section challenges contemporary understandings of latinization with its
focus on New Mexico as a formative transitional zone of transculturation whose Spanishimperial and indigenous legacies have been erased from traditional accounts of the US
national imaginary. Spitta here analyzes New Mexico’s appeal as a US-bound exotic
“other” resource in the twentieth century for a range of Anglo-American artists and
writers. She counterpoints their romanticized vision with the folkloric traditions and
artifacts collected in museums, which indicate how the Southwest has been assimilated
into the USA as an idyllic, pre-lapsarian (read pre-conquest) paradise at odds with the
historical record of violence, mistreatment and marginalization of the region’s indigenous
and Spanish-speaking inhabitants.
The third section of Misplaced Objects again attends to the material contours of
latinidades and translatinidades by discussing the work of artists who have utilized
objects in order to concretize memory and construct neocultural identifications in the
context of migratory misplacement. The discussion builds implicitly from the beautiful
meditation in the book’s introduction on the Latino home altar tradition, as translated into
memento mori. The section’s two chapters—one dealing with the collaborative
autobiography, Imaginary Parents (1996), by the Mexican-American sisters Sheila and
Sandra Ortiz Taylor, the second with the responses to mass emigration from Cuba by the
island-based artist Sandra Ramos—also mark a more personal, intimate and affective
shift in Spitta’s study. Both chapters invert the discussion of the power hierarchies
undergirding the development of New World collections in Europe and later in the USA
by recognizing that collection is also a “private practice” (164), a means of amassing
memories and thus making tangible their makers’ sense of migration. The collaboration
between the writer Sheila Ortiz Taylor and her artist sister Sandra, for example, involves
text, family snap shots, and miniature installations comprising the objects of
displacement, and allows both creators to provide a multivalent material, visual and
textual retort to the occlusion from the US historical record of what Spitta calls “the
Hispanic heritage of the country” (164). Chapter eight’s discussion of Ramos is
particularly interesting. It provides an alternative vision to US-based constructions of
Cubanidad as an exilic phenomenon. Ramos’s evocative responses to the mass exodus of
Cubans since 1959 comprise a visual catalogue of suitcase-lead and raft-born absence,
which thus challenges a Cuban-exile orthodoxy that has rarely acknowledged, as Ramos
does so mournfully, that exile has profoundly transformed the national imaginary of those
left behind.
That said, the opening statement of chapter eight marked a point in Spitta’s study
where certain misgivings were concretized for me: “Given that the United States is the
only country in the world to be and to conceive of itself as a nation of immigrants, one
would expect the national discourse surrounding immigration to be layered, multifaceted,
and richly diverse” (italics mine, 181). The US-centricism here is, I have to confess,
dismaying. Indeed, I read it as a critical provocation given my location in Sydney, in a
country—one among many—that has long conceived of itself as a nation of immigrants,
and whose colonial and postcolonial histories of misplaced peoples and objects are
imbricated inevitably in the globally resonant and affective transcultural dislocations that
Spitta chronicles so ably in her study. Antipodean locales are often absented from
northern discussions over the formation of a modern world system and its cultural tables.
But such locales were not insignificant, as Darwin’s voyage of collection across the
Pacific and subsequent contributions to a seismic scientific “rift in understanding” were
to demonstrate. My unease extends further to the idea promulgated at times in Misplaced
Objects that modernity was inaugurated with, and by, the first voyage of Columbus. This
is a powerful discourse, and it has had sophisticated proponents in Latin America,
including the Argentine philosopher of liberation theology, Enrique Dussel, whom Spitta
cites when discussing the marginalization of both imperial Spain and the Americas from
Eurocentric accounts of modernity. But this purview is inevitably haunted by the
implication that everything outside the Euro-American axis is somehow derivative, a
mere simulative postscript to a more important history. The Euro-American axis,
moreover, only makes conceptual sense by glossing over the geo-historical fact that the
Americas also have a western shoreline, ergo, a Pacific presence.
However nuanced the approach regarding modernity as a process made possible
and meaningful by the European-American encounter may be, italso potentially occludes
the debates in many parts of the world that have shifted their concerns not simply to the
plural term modernities, but to such conceptual options as ancient, postcolonial,
alternative and indigenous modernities. Spitta’s brief discussion of Mexico’s “peripheric
modernity” (103), in asymmetric contradistinction to the European scientific-rationalist
take on modernity, is thus most welcome in this global discussion. As Spitta perceptively
argues, in Europe and in the USA the desacralized word came to denote and articulate an
epistemological regime based on reason and science. However, in Mexico and in other
parts of the world with significant indigenous populations, a visual economy of affective
imagery survived conquest, and subsequent secularization, as an index of presence
despite the absence of all that conquest and colonization had destroyed and/or irrevocably
transformed. Spitta’s insights here provide what I regard as a necessary qualification to
her earlier claim that “the objects that arrived in Europe from the Americas led to the
enormous sea change we call modernity, even as the impact of the Americas, constitutive
of modernity, was erased” (9). The assertion is made despite the fact, as Spitta notes
continually throughout her study, that objects and objectified people, and their preserved
remains, from non-American worlds—Asia, Africa, the Pacific, Australia—also found
their way into Europe’s chaotic Wunderkammern and their more taxonomically familiar
successor institutions of royal collections, museums, botanical and zoological gardens,
and art galleries.
One of Spitta’s aims in Misplaced Objects is to recuperate from the trans-Atlantic
history of migrating objects a complex, heterogeneous “America” as a geo-cultural space
that profoundly influenced the course of European scientific-rationalism. It is a testament
to the author’s grasp of the historical record that she succeeds in that ambition. Moreover,
her discussion of the object-driven transculturation of “America” generates profound new
insights into the evolution of indigenous epistemologies in the wake of conquest, and into
the immigrant-lead latinization of the USA as well. Spitta’s study nonetheless also
gestures toward the need for further scrutiny of the purported centrality of the EuropeanAmerican encounter, and its object exchanges, in the multivalent evolution of
modernities. A sense of this imperative is provided, interestingly enough, by Stradano’s
famous 1589 engraving, “Vespucci Discovering America,” reproduced in Spitta’s
introduction. Here, the explorer holds an astrolabe in one hand, a naked America gazes at
him in thrall from her hammock, and behind that tableau are visible images of
“cannibals.” The image is striking. It confirms the rapid assimilation after 1492 of the
New World “cannibal” trope into European consciousness, and it demonstrates that for
many at-home-Europeans the astrolabe was an instrument of conquest and a material
signifier of a broad “civilizing” enterprise. Yet Stradano’s vision also reminds us that
other histories are at work in the European-American saga of travelling objects and
epistemic transculturation. An Arab invention, the astrolabe emerged from an
extraordinary epoch of rational investigation and scientific advances in an Islamic world
to which much of the Iberian peninsula once belonged, and offered benefits to the
Spanish and Portuguese in the exploratory and imperial ventures. There is much more to
be said of the place of misplaced objects in the rise of modernities, it seems, when
material traces from outside the European-American axis are misplaced in it.
Misplaced Objects is an erudite, elegantly narrated, historically wide-ranging, and
genuinely transdisciplinary exploration that should transform contemporary
understandings of the Americas in numerous fields: literature, history, material and
popular culture, fine art, memory work, postcolonial discourse, trans-American studies,
and Latino studies. Precisely because of its innovative focus on the surprisingly
overlooked fate of objects when they travel beyond their home locations, Misplaced
Objects merits serious critical attention and a wide readership. Spitta’s study should
inaugurate and inform renewed discussion regarding the epistemological centrality of
misplaced objects in the formation of multiple, overlapping modernities, and thus further
our understanding of the affective patterns of transculturation that have linked Europe,
the Americas and other worlds for centuries.
<rau>Paul Allatson <#> University of Technology Sydney</rau>
<bmh>Works Cited</>
<bib>Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.
New York: Vintage, 1973.</bib>
<bib>Ortiz Taylor, Sheila and Sandra. Imaginary Parents: A Family Autobiography.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. </bib>
<bib>Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New
York: Routledge, 1992. </bib>
<bib>Spitta, Silvia. Between Two Waters: Narratives of Transculturation in Latin
America. Houston: Rice University Press, 1995.</bib>