Misplaced Objects

"This book will make a significant contribution to more than one field. Conceptually, Spitta's model is an innovative one-she presents fresh historical perspectives on colonial phenomena and institutions ... while interweaving this material with contemporary institutional or cultural echoes. The result is that we not only learn more about the 'old' New World, but the 'new' New World as well... The scholarship underlying this project is wide-reaching and impressive." -- R. Tripp Evans, Associate Professor of American Art, Wheaton College, and author of Romancing the Maya: Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination, 1820-1915

From sixteenth-century European Wunderkammern to the veneration of the Virgin of Guadalupe to the Latinization of the United States, this dynamic and innovative book explores how the circulation of objects between Europe and the Americas has profoundly re

"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.