Event: Friday Seminar: "Comanche Visual Culture and the Theater of War"

Speaker:

Severin Fowles, Barnard College, Columbia

The colonial history of the American Southwest looks quite a bit dierent today than it did only a decade ago. We used to know who the empires were: the Spanish imperial project began in the sixteenth century, held back the advance of the French imperial project for the better part of a century, before both succumbed to the American imperial project. We used to know who the barbarians were as well: as the Germanic hordes were to Rome, so the bellicose equestrian tribes of the Plains were to European and Euro-American civilizations. But now these story lines come undone. Now we are told that, for much of the colonial era, some of the most ambitious imperial actors were Native American—and that the Comanche in particular were involved in a strange form of reversed colonialism, startling the European colonizers by beginning to colonize them in return. Are there archaeological remains that speak to the new, more complicated colonial dynamics recently identied by revisionist historians?