"This book will make a significant contribution to more than one field. Conceptually, Spitta's model is an innovative one—she presents fresh historical perspectives on colonial phenomena and institutions . . . while interweaving this material with contemporary institutional or cultural echoes. The result is that we not only learn more about the 'old' New World, but the 'new' New World as well. . . . The scholarship underlying this project is wide-reaching and impressive."
—R. Tripp Evans, Associate Professor of American Art, Wheaton College, and author of Romancing the Maya: Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination, 1820–1915
"Misplaced Objects crosses not only cultural boundaries but generic and disciplinary ones: the author deals with artifacts of popular and elite culture, with art and everyday objects, to create an ontology and an epistemology that will serve as a model for future cultural studies. The opening up of the canon to creative products not usually considered art, and to makers not usually considered artists, is likely to change the ways in which American comparative cultural studies are conceived and executed. And given the ever-increasing global movement of products, people, and their possessions, the theoretical model offered in Misplaced Objects is likely prove useful to an array of cultures and cultural phenomena far exceeding the American parameters of Spitta's discussion."
—Lois Parkinson Zamora, author of The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction
"Silvia Spitta's theoretical study of how spaces are 'enacted' under the impact of the migration of objects and peoples and how memories (both personal and collective) are constructed out of objects will be fundamental to the study of Latin American and U.S. Latino transcultural dynamics. This will be a groundbreaking book."
—Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez author of José, Can You See? : Latinos On and Off Broadway
"When people migrate, things migrate as well, and the saga of this endless migration glitters throughout Misplaced Objects, Silvia Spitta's brilliant study of the intermingling of New and Old World clutter. In her category-bending analysis, Spitta argues that New World exotica upset European certainties and created new rifts in Western classifications. Her marvel-filled book probes the ways in which the loose and unruly objects gathered during conquest and colonization transformed the jigsaw of modernity into curiosity cabinets, nineteenth-century scientific practices, Barnum's sideshows, and the modern museum."
—Patricia Yaeger, editor of PMLA and author of Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930–1990
"When things move, things change." Starting from this deceptively simple premise, Silvia Spitta opens a fascinating window onto the profound displacements and transformations that have occurred over the six centuries since material objects and human subjects began circulating between Europe and the Americas.
This extended reflection on the dynamics of misplacement starts with the European practice of collecting objects from the Americas into Wunderkammern, literally "cabinets of wonders." Stripped of all identifying contexts, these exuberant collections, including the famous Real Gabinete de Historia Natural de Madrid, upset European certainties, forcing a reorganization of knowledge that gave rise to scientific inquiry and to the epistemological shift we call modernity. In contrast, cults such as that of the Virgin of Guadalupe arose out of the reverse migration from Europe to the Americas. The ultimate marker of mestizo identity in Mexico, the Virgin of Guadalupe is now fast crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, and miracles are increasingly being reported. Misplaced Objects then concludes with the more intimate and familial collections and recollections of Cuban and Mexican American artists and writers that are contributing to the Latinization of the United States.
Beautifully illustrated and radically interdisciplinary, Misplaced Objects clearly demonstrates that it is not the awed viewer, but rather the misplaced object itself that unsettles our certainties, allowing new meanings to emerge.
