Post/Colonial Toponymy: Writing Forward ‘in Reverse’

Abstract

Maya toponymy manifests throughout the sixteenth-century books of the Chilam Balams, but is especially evident in the migration stories. In seeking to reverse a writing that conquers there is recourse again to a history that colonizes the agency, speech/'voice' and participation of the 'subaltern'. The topographic order is inscribed in the colonial historiography and then re-inscribed again in the postcolonial text, however, with a lamentation of the voracious power of the European weapons of meaning and their colonizing effects. The double mise-en-scene of the naming of the toponym clears the space for the European writing of the Maya and incorporation of this other within the text of European writing. A certain trajectory within postcolonial discourse/studies begins with a consideration of travel and travelogues in the Americas and reaches an apogee with the multitude of studies questioning aspects of the 1492–1992 and Latin American Eurocentricities/postcolonialism.