Awards
2010 Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Michael Schreffler, “‘Their Cortés and Our Cortés’: Spanish Colonialism and Aztec Representation” (December 2009)
Michael Schreffler
In his methodologically sophisticated and skillfully argued article, Michael Schreffler examines a key moment of cultural exchange and the misunderstandings to which it gave rise. Bravely departing from the consensus that Spanish conquistadors’ accounts of Aztec painting they saw at Antigua in 1519 constitute objective, primary evidence about Aztec art, he offers instead a complex, nuanced, yet always clear explanation of what the accounts reveal about the colonizers and their subjective attitudes toward Aztec culture. Schreffler’s deft reconceptualization of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish reports is a testament to the importance of understanding that the archive is never “a transparent window onto the past,” but that it is always inscribed by biases, anxieties, and difference. By treating his often-intractable sources critically, the author reminds us that documentation—both visual and textual—is the product of cultural traditions which the responsible historian must carefully parse as evidence that is as much about the makers as it is the subjects that they construct.
Jury: Marni Kessler, University of Kansas, chair; Catherine Asher, University of Minnesota; and Jack Greenstein, University of California, San Diego.
