Through a sustained emphasis on Maya and Zapotec fiction, poetry, and theater in Mexico and Guatemala in the last five decades, Indigenous Cosmolectics: Kab’awil and the Making of Maya and Zapotec Literatures provides a thoughtful introduction to the vibrant world of Indigenous authorship and cultural activism in Mesoamerican languages. As discussed in its introduction, this volume employs the
... [Show full abstract] term kab’awil and the notion of “kab’awilian strategies” as a shorthand for understanding how contemporary Indigenous authors and artists go beyond the “matrix of coloniality” in their works (18). Even if the attempts to tie this term to a continuum that goes back to Classic Period Maya writing and cosmology are inconclusive, kab’awil, as used in this book, was first defined in Indigenous intellectual history by the K’iche’ Maya writer Adrián Inés Chávez in 1979 as “two visions at the same time . . . a double gaze” (quoted on 15). By challenging non-Mesoamerican ontologies characterized in this work as dualistic, Gloria Elizabeth Chacón argues that such a “double gaze” shares ground with W. E. B. Du Bois’s influential notion of “double consciousness,” and deploys this concept astutely throughout the volume.
