Images at War

"If colonial America was the melting pot of modernity, it was because it was also a fabulous laboratory of images...Just as much as speech and writing, the image can be a vehicle for all sorts of power and resistance." So writes Serge Gruzinski in the introduction to Images at War, his striking reinterpretation of the Spanish colonisation of Mexico. Concentrating on the political meaning of an image and its function within a multicultural society, Gruzinski compares the ubiquity of the baroque image in Mexico to our more modern fascination with images and their meaning. Although it played a decisive role in many arenas, especially that of conquest and New World colonisation, the baroque image on which Gruzinski concentrates resonates most powerfully in the sphere of religion. Discussing how images conveyed meaning across linguistic barriers, Gruzinski uncovers recurring themes of false images, less-than-perfect-replicas, the uprooting of peoples and cultural memories, and the violence of iconoclastic destruction. He shows how various ethnicities - Indians, blacks, Europeans - each left their own mark on images of colonialism and religion, co-opting them into expressions of identity or instruments of rebellion. In the process, he tells of Aztec idols, the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe, conquistadors, Franciscans, and neo-classical attempts to repress the baroque. In the final portion of the book, Gruzinski discusses the political and religious implications of contemporary imagery - such as that of Mexican soap operas - and speculates about the future of images in Latin America. Originally written in French, this work makes available to an English audience a seminal study of Mexico and the role of the image in the New World.