Red Ink (2012)

Lopenzina, Drew. Red Ink: Native Americans Picking up the Pen in the Colonial Period. SUNY, 2012. 

Are indigenous peoples, Native Americans included, peoples without literary traditions? This is the drift of the book. And the answer it provides is an exact no.

Not because "in all Mayan languages there is no linguistic or semantic differentiation among the words for painting, drawing, and writing" (p. 43), indicating a history of writing without words; nor because indigenous penmanship is too small to be significant; but because in history colonists often deliberately 'unwitnessed' - "the largely passive decision to maintain a particular narrative structure by keeping undesirable aspects of cultural memory repressed or inactive" (p. 9) - indigenous achievements in order to legitimize conquer and conquest.

"Natives had, in fact, picked up the pen in America for nearly two hundred years" (p. 6).

If 'unscript' is an indigenous way to deconstruct colonialism in Sarah Rivett's Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation (2017), 'unwitness' in Lopenzina's Red Ink (2012) refers to one colonial strategy that contains indigenous presence by

* destroying every aspect of Native civilization that affronted them (Spanish) (p. 39);

* considering Native writing to be grotesque, devilish script (French) (p. 39);

* acknowledging Native inscriptions as the remnant of a loss civilization rooted in Western systems of knowledge (English) (p. 40).

Interracial Marriages in 1650-1661

(Source: Marriage of Aboriginal Natives, Corranderk, by Frederick Grosse (1828-1894))

This wood graving is borrowed to usher us into a similar scenario on Taiwan/Formosa between 1650 and 1661. At this time, the island was under the Dutch East India Company (better known as VOC, Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie), which had been ruling it for entrepot trade since 1624.

The Council of Matrimonial Affairs with four elected commissioners was entrusted regulating marriages between couples on the island. To become officially married, couples must:

(1) apply for 'marriage banns' at the Council with two or more relatives or friends;

(2) pass the interviews/investigations by commissioners to be qualified;

(3) have the banns put up in a church for three consecutive Sundays to see if there was objection;

(4) become officially married.

The Silk Roads (2015)

Frankopan, Peter. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. New York: Vintage, 2017. (Hardcover published by Bloomsbury London in 2015.)

"[Pulling] multiple strands together in a single work", Frankopan's The Silk Roads "spans centuries, continents and cultures" ( "Acknowledgements", pp. 508-509). Indeed, very ambitious.

Very solid too, supported by the sheer range of secondary and primary references listed in "Notes" (pp. 511-625): English, German, Russian, Dutch, Italian, French, Persian, Latin, Spanish, Scandinavian, and some more. Plus memorable historical events delivered in an accessible language; there is little wonder about the numerous praises heaped upon the work, such as

"This is deeply researched popular history at its most invigorating, primed to dislodge routine preconceptions and to pour in other light."- New York Review of Books

Remembering Sapiens (2011) and Homo Deus (2013) published just a few years before by another Oxford trained historian, Yuval Noah Harari, I couldn't help but second Oxford may very well be the best place to study and write history, especially the kind of history that encompasses a whole lot.