Misplaced Objects: Migrating Collections and Recollections in Europe and the Americas

Latin American and Latino Art and Culture

by Silvia Spitta

"When things move, things change." Starting from this deceptively simple premise, Silvia Spitta opens a fascinating window onto the profound displacements and transformations that have occurred over the six centuries since material objects and human subjects began circulating between Europe and the Americas. This extended reflection on the dynamics of misplacement starts with the European practice of collecting objects from the Americas into Wunderkammern , literally "cabinets of wonders." Stripped of all identifying contexts, these exuberant collections, including the famous Real Gabinete de Historia Natural de Madrid, upset European certainties, forcing a reorganization of knowledge that gave rise to scientific inquiry and to the epistemological shift we call modernity. In contrast, cults such as that of the Virgin of Guadalupe arose out of the reverse migration from Europe to the Americas. The ultimate marker of mestizo identity in Mexico, the Virgin of Guadalupe is now fast crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, and miracles are increasingly being reported. Misplaced Objects then concludes with the more intimate and familial collections and recollections of Cuban and Mexican American artists and writers that are contributing to the Latinization of the United States. Beautifully illustrated and radically interdisciplinary, Misplaced Objects clearly demonstrates that it is not the awed viewer, but rather the misplaced object itself that unsettles our certainties, allowing new meanings to emerge.

294 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Frederic · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review from Amazon: The first thing one notices with this book is the object itself: It's a beautiful book, high-quality paper and printing, LOTS of color illustrations, fine design - evidently produced with big subventions, as it seems to far exceed the price in value. Then flipping through the images and text, one is struck by the carefully and impressively chosen range of materials, from 16th- to 21st-century, natural history, fine art, and popular culture, private and public collections. Then reading the text, one finds that the histories and arguments are equally high in quality.

The text may not be for everyone; despite its sheer beauty this is a scholarly book, and readers are well served to already understand something of the interpretation of material culture, and the histories of interactions between Old and New Worlds, particularly Spain and Latin America (emphatically including US Latino cultures). Within the first three pages one moves from Borges to García Márquez to Foucault, Kubler, Descartes and Greenblatt. How do the meanings of things change, particularly when moved from one place, or time, to another? Misplaced Objects brilliantly balances the material and theory in exploring these questions, refusing to be constrained. And at the core, even while seeming to focus on material objects, is a subtext in which the actual objects being explored are the people who make, use, place and misplace the material objects, and particularly those who are themselves objectified.

Spitta is Professor of Spanish and Comparative literature at Dartmouth. As an anthropologist, curator, and collector myself, and someone who has been often critical of what some deride as the postmodern pastiche, of "cultural studies" as anthropology-lite, of literary criticism that moves too readily to other realms without adequately considering socio-hostorical-cultural contexts, I started out ready to be disappointed as I am by most books on collecting. But this book does not disappoint. I have long argued that some of the most interesting (and under-appreciated) work in several fields is coming from scholarship in the Spanish-speaking world, and this book exemplifies that. A fabulous contribution that deserves being widely read.