Abstract
In this article, I consider competing notions of “alphabetic authenticity” and indigenous authorship among Mexican indigenous authors and activists. Orthographies form a special focus, as choices about them entail envisioning particular kinds of texts and, hence, types of readers. I focus on the divergent strategies – all fundamentally semiotic – that people advocate in developing “authentic indigenous writing” and in using various meta-semiotic processes to harness competing authenticities to language revitalization initiatives. I suggest that the friction between these conflicting models is both contentious and generative, producing new possibilities for engagement even as the interstices between them may hide possibilities not yet explored.
About the author
Paja Faudree (b. 1977) is an assistant professor at Brown University 〈paja_faudree@brown.edu〉. Her research interests include language and politics, indigenous literary and social movements, the interface between music and language, and the ethnohistory of New World colonization. Her publications include “How to say things with wars: Performativity and the temporal pragmatics of power in the Requerimiento of the Spanish Conquest” (2012); Singing for the dead: The politics of indigenous revival in Mexico (2013); “The annual Day of the Dead song contest: Musical-linguistic ideologies, piratability, and the challenge of scale” (2014); and “Tales from the land of magic plants: Textual ideologies and fetishes of indigeneity in Mexico's Sierra Mazateca” (2015).
©2015 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Munich/Boston
