In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.

"Europe and the World Beyond" focuses geographically on peoples of South America and the Mediterranean as well as Africa but conceptually it emphasizes the many ways that visual constructions of blacks mediated between Europe and a faraway African continent that was impinging ever more closely on daily life, especially in cities and ports engaged in slave trade.

"The Eighteenth Century "features a particularly rich collection of images of Africans representing slavery s apogee and the beginnings of abolition. Old visual tropes of a master with adoring black slave gave way to depictions of Africans as victims and individuals, while at the same time the intellectual foundations of scientific racism were established.

In "Beyond the Lettered City," the anthropologist Joanne Rappaport and the art historian Thomas Cummins examine the colonial imposition of alphabetic and visual literacy on indigenous groups in the northern Andes. They consider how the Andean peoples received, maintained, and subverted the conventions of Spanish literacy, often combining them with their own traditions. Indigenous Andean communities neither used narrative pictorial representation nor had alphabetic or hieroglyphic literacy before the arrival of the Spaniards. To absorb the conventions of Spanish literacy, they had to engage with European symbolic systems. Doing so altered their worldviews and everyday lives, making alphabetic and visual literacy prime tools of colonial domination. Rappaport and Cummins advocate a broad understanding of literacy, including not only reading and writing, but also interpretations of the spoken word, paintings, wax seals, gestures, and urban design. By analyzing secular and religious notarial manuals and dictionaries, urban architecture, religious images, catechisms and sermons, and the vast corpus of administrative documents produced by the colonial authorities and indigenous scribes, they expand angel Rama's concept of the lettered city to encompass many of those who previously would have been considered the least literate.

Important anthology marking, but not celebrating, the Columbian Quincentenary, directing attention to indigenous cultural responses to the Spanish intrusion in Mexico and Peru, utilizing as much as possible native documents and sources, and exploring mentalities. While we can benefit from the analysis and methodology in all contributions to this volume, items certain to interest Mesoamericanists include: Hill Boone, 'Introduction,' for the volume's orientation; Laiou, 'The Many Faces of Medieval Colonization,' for background, analysis of colonization as process, and its multiple forms; Lockhart, 'Three Experiences of Culture Contact: Nahua, Maya, and Quechua,' for special attention to language change as a reflection of broader cultural evolution in key areas; Hill Boone, 'Pictorial Documents and Visual Thinking in Postconquest Mexico,' for an examination of the endurance of these forms in 16th-century Nahua culture; Wood, 'The Social vs. Legal Context of Nahuatl Tâitulos,' for an examination of community self-representation in native manuscripts and pictorials in the eighteenth century; Gillespie, 'The Triple Alliance: A Postconquest Tradition,' for an explanation of the colonial manipulation of the symbolic triadic organization for a new historical tradition; Burkhart, 'Pious Performances: Christian Pageantry and Native Identity in Early Colonial Mexico,' for a study of the Nahuas' reshaping of Christian ritual; Karttunen, 'Indigenous Writing as a Vehicle of Postconquest Continuity and Change in Mesoamerica,' for an examination of Nahua and Maya writing traditions into the present, including evidence of women's lesser but possibly significant role; and, Cummins, 'Native Traditions in the Postconquest World: Commentary,' for concluding reflections on the interrelated elements of text (written, performative, visual, auratic, and so on), image, discourse, language, traditions, identity, and colonialism"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.