Edgar Garcia – författare

Indigenous sign-systems, such as pictographs, petroglyphs, hieroglyphs, and khipu, are usually understood as relics from an inaccessible past. That is far from the truth, however, as Edgar Garcia makes clear in Signs of the Americas. Rather than being dead languages, these sign-systems have always been living, evolving signifiers, responsive to their circumstances and able to continuously redefine themselves and the nature of the world. Garcia tells the story of the present life of these sign-systems, examining the contemporary impact they have had on poetry, prose, visual art, legal philosophy, political activism, and environmental thinking. In doing so, he brings together a wide range of indigenous and non-indigenous authors and artists of the Americas, from Aztec priests and Amazonian shamans to Simon Ortiz, Gerald Vizenor, Jaime de Angulo, Charles Olson, Cy Twombly, Gloria Anzald a, William Burroughs, Louise Erdrich, Cecilia Vicu a, and many others. From these sources, Garcia depicts the culture of a modern, interconnected hemisphere, revealing that while these "signs of the Americas" have suffered expropriation, misuse, and mistranslation, they have also created their own systems of knowing and being. These indigenous systems help us to rethink categories of race, gender, nationalism, and history. Producing a new way of thinking about our interconnected hemisphere, this ambitious, energizing book redefines what constitutes a "world" in world literature.

Indigenous sign-systems, such as pictographs, petroglyphs, hieroglyphs, and khipu, are usually understood as relics from an inaccessible past. That is far from the truth, however, as Edgar Garcia makes clear in Signs of the Americas. Rather than being dead languages, these sign-systems have always been living, evolving signifiers, responsive to their circumstances and able to continuously redefine themselves and the nature of the world.   Garcia tells the story of the present life of these sign-systems, examining the contemporary impact they have had on poetry, prose, visual art, legal philosophy, political activism, and environmental thinking. In doing so, he brings together a wide range of indigenous and non-indigenous authors and artists of the Americas, from Aztec priests and Amazonian shamans to Simon Ortiz, Gerald Vizenor, Jaime de Angulo, Charles Olson, Cy Twombly, Gloria Anzaldúa, William Burroughs, Louise Erdrich, Cecilia Vicuña, and many others. From these sources, Garcia depicts the culture of a modern, interconnected hemisphere, revealing that while these “signs of the Americas” have suffered expropriation, misuse, and mistranslation, they have also created their own systems of knowing and being. These indigenous systems help us to rethink categories of race, gender, nationalism, and history. Producing a new way of thinking about our interconnected hemisphere, this ambitious, energizing book redefines what constitutes a “world” in world literature.  

Nine short essays exploring the K’iche’ Maya story of creation, the Popol Vuh.  Written during the lockdown in Chicago in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, these essays consider the Popol Vuh as a work that was also written during a time of feverish social, political, and epidemiological crisis as Spanish missionaries and colonial military deepened their conquest of indigenous peoples and cultures in Mesoamerica. What separates the Popol Vuh from many other creation texts is the disposition of the gods engaged in creation. Whereas the book of Genesis is declarative in telling the story of the world’s creation, the Popol Vuh is interrogative and analytical: the gods, for example, question whether people actually need to be created, given the many perfect animals they have already placed on earth.  Emergency uses the historical emergency of the Popol Vuh to frame the ongoing emergencies of colonialism that have surfaced all too clearly in the global health crisis of COVID-19. In doing so, these essays reveal how the authors of the Popol Vuh—while implicated in deep social crisis—nonetheless insisted on transforming emergency into scenes of social, political, and intellectual emergence, translating crisis into creativity and world creation.

Nine short essays exploring the K’iche’ Maya story of creation, the Popol Vuh.  Written during the lockdown in Chicago in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, these essays consider the Popol Vuh as a work that was also written during a time of feverish social, political, and epidemiological crisis as Spanish missionaries and colonial military deepened their conquest of indigenous peoples and cultures in Mesoamerica. What separates the Popol Vuh from many other creation texts is the disposition of the gods engaged in creation. Whereas the book of Genesis is declarative in telling the story of the world’s creation, the Popol Vuh is interrogative and analytical: the gods, for example, question whether people actually need to be created, given the many perfect animals they have already placed on earth.  Emergency uses the historical emergency of the Popol Vuh to frame the ongoing emergencies of colonialism that have surfaced all too clearly in the global health crisis of COVID-19. In doing so, these essays reveal how the authors of the Popol Vuh—while implicated in deep social crisis—nonetheless insisted on transforming emergency into scenes of social, political, and intellectual emergence, translating crisis into creativity and world creation.

Poems and micro-essays intertwine in this poetically attuned adaptation of the mid-sixteenth century Nahuatl-language Cantares MexicanosCantares is a multipart engagement with the poetics and history of the colonial and Indigenous Americas, oscillating between poetry and essay in a structure of repetitions derived from Mesoamerican poetics. Edgar Garcia reimagines the Cantares Mexicanos, a sixteenth-century anthology of Nahuatl songs from Central Mexico, and brings these songs to life not just as historical documents, but as music, to give presence of thought to their historical layers and complexities. His adaptations evoke the sound and texture of the sixteenth century, blending Indigenous and Baroque traditions, exploring themes of translation, adaptation, race, and historical memory. The collection moves between poetry and scholarship—between poems and micro-essays. The essays provide commentary and historical context about the colonial soundscape of Central Mexico. At the same time, the poems emphasize the songs' sonic, spiritual, and poetic dimensions. The Cantares emerge from a time of cultural collision—after the arrival of the Castilians but still rooted in older, Indigenous worldviews. These songs are not nostalgic or idealized; they reflect crisis, survival, and creativity. Garcia's work draws inspiration from the Popol Vuh, the K'iche' Maya creation story, which begins in colonial darkness and still insists on the possibility of light. Through these adaptations, Cantares becomes a meditation on history, imagination, and the power of art to endure and create in the face of loss.[sample poem, includes poem and mini essay]CRISISIs there dragon fruitor humming jadefor little birdsin shady colonnades?Is there any multitudefor the displaced and dead retinues?Subdued, like mountain ruinsin diamond lakes, they say:"It sort of hurts to speak.I think I have a sore throat.You're probably sick.Mask up if you go out."I see them thus in masks:prattling hummingbirds, barking geese,quetzals in the guise of old lords,whippoorwills in white sheets.They cover the cityin search of things to eat.Ancient landscapes hardly exist any longer. They've retreated to a future time. History comes at you that way in a world made by the hands and minds of countless bodies now dead. Ghostly heralds, and it's not only humans. Our sidewalks are made of mineralized animal bone; the air is the sighed carbon dioxide of trees long gone. When the Cantares were put to paper in the mid-sixteenth century in colonial New Spain their world—the world of the Mexicas, Texcocans, Tlaxcalans, Huexotzincos, Azcapotzalcans, Tarascans, and others, many dead who took with them the knowledge of their world—must have felt absent from their cities, whose streets were then an emotional compression of memory, forgetting, imagination, and wish. Some called to the old gods, others to the new, or even both at once, while still others addressed the crisis directly with acts of magic. The songs themselves, the Cantares, were understood in this spectrum of liability. Those who helped to circulate them, singers and the patrons of singers, could be imprisoned or killed for promulgating the wrong gods and wrong magic. The songs were as potent with the touch of these gods and this magic as an idol, ceremonial bundle, or ritual act. They were like ghosts uprooted waiting to be planted again.