Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis
Nine short essays exploring the K’iche’ Maya story of creation, the Popol Vuh.
 
Written during the lockdown in Chicago in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, these essays consider the Popol Vuh as a work that was also written during a time of feverish social, political, and epidemiological crisis as Spanish missionaries and colonial military deepened their conquest of indigenous peoples and cultures in Mesoamerica. What separates the Popol Vuh from many other creation texts is the disposition of the gods engaged in creation. Whereas the book of Genesis is declarative in telling the story of the world’s creation, the Popol Vuh is interrogative and analytical: the gods, for example, question whether people actually need to be created, given the many perfect animals they have already placed on earth.
 
Emergency uses the historical emergency of the Popol Vuh to frame the ongoing emergencies of colonialism that have surfaced all too clearly in the global health crisis of COVID-19. In doing so, these essays reveal how the authors of the Popol Vuh—while implicated in deep social crisis—nonetheless insisted on transforming emergency into scenes of social, political, and intellectual emergence, translating crisis into creativity and world creation.
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Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis
Nine short essays exploring the K’iche’ Maya story of creation, the Popol Vuh.
 
Written during the lockdown in Chicago in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, these essays consider the Popol Vuh as a work that was also written during a time of feverish social, political, and epidemiological crisis as Spanish missionaries and colonial military deepened their conquest of indigenous peoples and cultures in Mesoamerica. What separates the Popol Vuh from many other creation texts is the disposition of the gods engaged in creation. Whereas the book of Genesis is declarative in telling the story of the world’s creation, the Popol Vuh is interrogative and analytical: the gods, for example, question whether people actually need to be created, given the many perfect animals they have already placed on earth.
 
Emergency uses the historical emergency of the Popol Vuh to frame the ongoing emergencies of colonialism that have surfaced all too clearly in the global health crisis of COVID-19. In doing so, these essays reveal how the authors of the Popol Vuh—while implicated in deep social crisis—nonetheless insisted on transforming emergency into scenes of social, political, and intellectual emergence, translating crisis into creativity and world creation.
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Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis

Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis

by Edgar Garcia
Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis

Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis

by Edgar Garcia

eBook

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Overview

Nine short essays exploring the K’iche’ Maya story of creation, the Popol Vuh.
 
Written during the lockdown in Chicago in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, these essays consider the Popol Vuh as a work that was also written during a time of feverish social, political, and epidemiological crisis as Spanish missionaries and colonial military deepened their conquest of indigenous peoples and cultures in Mesoamerica. What separates the Popol Vuh from many other creation texts is the disposition of the gods engaged in creation. Whereas the book of Genesis is declarative in telling the story of the world’s creation, the Popol Vuh is interrogative and analytical: the gods, for example, question whether people actually need to be created, given the many perfect animals they have already placed on earth.
 
Emergency uses the historical emergency of the Popol Vuh to frame the ongoing emergencies of colonialism that have surfaced all too clearly in the global health crisis of COVID-19. In doing so, these essays reveal how the authors of the Popol Vuh—while implicated in deep social crisis—nonetheless insisted on transforming emergency into scenes of social, political, and intellectual emergence, translating crisis into creativity and world creation.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780226818610
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication date: 04/21/2022
Series: Critical Antiquities
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 144
File size: 681 KB

About the Author

Edgar Garcia is the Neubauer Family Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography and Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.

 

Table of Contents

Birds

Wealth

Caves

Television

Demons

Migrations

Love

The Sun

Mormons

Afterword

References

Index

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