Angela Herren Rajagopalan is an associate professor of art history at the University of North Carolina.
Beyond offering insights into the authorship, contents, and
intended audience of the three codices, we are made to appreciate
the evolving indigenous response to outsider influences as well as
the interethnic jockeying evident as they protected their
prerogatives and legacies within a new colonial order. It is this
broader window onto the cultural context that makes [Portraying the
Aztec Past] a valuable resource for both lay readers and scholars
interested in Latin American studies, including anthropologists,
historians, and art historians, as well as students of manuscript
and book cultures.
*H-Net Reviews, Latin America*
Portraying the Aztec Past is an important work about the production
of history. Rajagopalan shows how the dynamics of identity, both
individual and corporate, shaped that production in the context of
the formation of not one but two imperial worlds and their
artistic, literary, historical, and cosmological frameworks.
*History: Reviews of New Books*
[Portraying the Aztec Past exemplifies] the kind of rigorous
scholarship that is driving the study of colonial indigenous
documents toward a wider synthesis...[A] marvelous study, which
should well serve as a model for much-needed comparative
scholarship of Mesoamerican codices.
*Colonial Latin American Review*
[Portraying the Aztec Past] provides a very clear and convincing
interpretation of three very closely connected pictorial
manuscripts and presents an outstanding contribution to the study
of indigenous pictorial manuscripts of colonial Mexico.
*The Historian*
Rajagopalan’s book is an excellent contribution to Mesoamerican
manuscript studies and a compelling read for specialists and a more
general audience alike. It is particularly notable for the focus on
the materiality of the manuscripts, the artist and intended
audience, and the social and political machinations that prompted
their creation.
*Ethnohistory*
Rajagopalan has written a work full of telling examples, helping
the specialist or the student with abundant information that could
easily escape even the trained eye.
*Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture*
The value of this work, especially to historians working on the
Spanish colonial Southwest, is in its understanding of the
production and function of manuscripts.
*SMRC Revista*
[Portraying the Aztec Past] is built on extensive and
well-established scholarship. [Rajagopalan] carefully examines the
intertextuality or possible dependencies between the three
pictorial manuscripts—each created in different moments of
time—exploring when their narratives converge, how and why they
diverge, as well as the ways in which their stories intersect with
purely textual historical accounts. Her book also sheds light on
the material aspects of these manuscripts, the identity of their
Native authors, and their strategies or motivations.
*Latin American Research Review*
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