Language, Hegemony, and Early Modern Archives: A Reassessment

Despite a well-known characterization by Spanish lexicographer Antonio de Nebrija, language was not merely a companion to imperial domination, but also empire's mirror, stratagem, and foil. Early modern missionary projects in the Americas and Asia privileged a "catechistic trilogy" of dictionaries, grammars, and Christian devotional works (Thomas Smith-Stark, "La trilogía catequística," Colegio de México, 2010). The study of these sources and of Indigenous mundane records emphasized by the New Philology (for instance, James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest, Stanford, 1992; Susan Schroeder et al. Chimalpahin's Conquest, Stanford, 2010; or Camilla Townsend, Annals of Native America, Oxford, 2016) have led to important research on Indigenous societies in New Spain. Moreover, interactions between local inhabitants and Europeans generated translation strategies and attempts at lexicographic hegemony that upended language hierarchies and propagated creative (mis)understandings in colonial possessions such as Central Mexico (Berenice Alcántara et al., Vestigios manuscritos de una nueva cristiandad, UNAM, 2022; David Tavárez, Rethinking Zapotec Time, Texas, 2022), Peru (Alan Durston, Pastoral Quechua, Notre Dame, 2007), or in regions where European missionaries circulated, including China (Ronnie Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City, Oxford, 2010), and South Asia (Ines Županov, Missionary Tropics, Michigan, 2005).

However, the transcontinental frameworks within which these actors operated are part of a globally interconnected history (Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Faut-il universaliser l’histoire?, CNRS Editions, 2020) that should not be relegated to narrow domains like "missionary linguistics," or drift towards compartmentalization into regional histories. To advance a geographically broad but highly precise conversation, this roundtable offers a reassessment of methods, frameworks, and historiographic traditions for the study of sources in non-European languages dating to, or deriving from, early modern colonial contexts. Roundtable participants have published extensively on the history of East Africa, China, East Asia, or Latin America, and conducted historical and linguistic research on textual and oral sources generated under Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and British rule. Participants will focus on sources compiled in languages of North and Central America (Nahuatl, Zapotec, K'iche', Kaqchikel), East Africa (Greater Luhyia languages), and East Asia (Chinese, and Visayan languages). Each participant will briefly address common areas of interest, including methodological concerns, challenges relating to archival work, and conceptual issues. The approaches under review include a reassessment of New Philology approaches and lexicographic hegemony (Tavárez, Romero, Sanchez), longue-durée research based on oral histories (Stephens), and work on early modern state archives in Asia (Hsia).

This roundtable is convened in preparation for a History Lab submission to the American Historical Review, which accounts for the number of participants and the session's geographical and historiographic diversity. We will follow a hybrid roundtable/experimental session format: after brief roundtable interventions, the session will turn to an open dialogue lasting at least 30 minutes among historians, graduate students, and history teachers in attendance. To ensure that AHA recommendations regarding diversity are enacted, this session includes Asian-American (Hsia) and Latinx (Romero, Tavárez) scholars, female historians (Ehlers, Stephens), and faculty members from research universities and liberal arts colleges in the US or France.