Books by Paul Worley
Unwriting Maya Literature provides an important decolonial framework for reading Maya texts that ... more Unwriting Maya Literature provides an important decolonial framework for reading Maya texts that builds on the work of Maya authors and intellectuals such as Q’anjob’al Gaspar Pedro González and Kaqchikel Irma Otzoy. Paul M. Worley and Rita M. Palacios privilege the Maya category ts’íib over constructions of the literary in order to reveal how Maya peoples themselves conceive of artistic creation. This offers a decolonial departure from theoretical approaches that remain situated within alphabetic Maya linguistic and literary creation.
As ts’íib refers to a broad range of artistic production from painted codices and textiles to works composed in Latin script, as well as plastic arts, the authors argue that texts by contemporary Maya writers must be read as dialoguing with a multimodal Indigenous understanding of text. In other words, ts’íib is an alternative to understanding “writing” that does not stand in opposition to but rather fully encompasses alphabetic writing, placing it alongside and in dialogue with a number of other forms of recorded knowledge. This shift in focus allows for a critical reexamination of the role that weaving and bodily performance play in these literatures, as well as for a nuanced understanding of how Maya writers articulate decolonial Maya aesthetics in their works.
Unwriting Maya Literature places contemporary Maya literatures within a context that is situated in Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Through ts’íib, the authors propose an alternative to traditional analysis of Maya cultural production that allows critics, students, and admirers to respectfully interact with the texts and their authors. Unwriting Maya Literature offers critical praxis for understanding Mesoamerican works that encompass non-Western ways of reading and creating texts.
Online Project by Paul Worley
Papers by Paul Worley
Indigenous Interfaces, 2019
Presentamos un resumen de las ideas principales tratadas en nuestro libro reciente Unwriting Maya... more Presentamos un resumen de las ideas principales tratadas en nuestro libro reciente Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts'íib as Recorded Knowledge (UAP 2019). Aunque este ensayo es incompleto porque únicamente captura el argumento central del libro, esperamos provea un punto de partida para empezar a pensar la producción literaria y artística maya contemporánea.
Cuadernos de Literatura
Este ensayo examina la obra de los autores-artistas Negma Coy y Edgar Calel, originarios de Chi X... more Este ensayo examina la obra de los autores-artistas Negma Coy y Edgar Calel, originarios de Chi Xot (San Juan Comalapa, Chimaltenango, Guatemala), a través del ts’íib. Irma Otzoy, Gaspar Pedro González y Pedro Uc Be, intelectuales mayas, explican el ts’íib como una producción artística que rebasa los límites de la palabra escrita. El ts’íib revela la palabra escrita, la grafía latina específicamente, como un instrumento más dentro de otras textualidades que participan en la creación de se mismo espacio de deleite y aprendizaje.
A Contracorriente, May 31, 2013
In 2010 the Instituto para el Desarrollo de la Cultura Maya del Estado de Yucatán (INDEMAYA) cond... more In 2010 the Instituto para el Desarrollo de la Cultura Maya del Estado de Yucatán (INDEMAYA) conducted what it called its "Tortipack Campaign." Printed on eco-friendly paper and distributed to tortillerías throughout the state as paper in which to package tortillas or "tortipacks," these bilingual Maya / Spanish documents intervened in regional, national, and international discourses on human rights through their elaboration of seventeen rights possessed by Yucatec Maya women. As opposed to other methods, INDEMAYA deemed the tortipack an effective method of disseminating these rights due to the fact that purchasing tortillas is a daily activity for most Maya women ("Proteger"). Given that tortilla production or acquisition in Yucatán is an almost exclusively female endeavor, it goes without saying that through the tortipacks INDEMAYA sought to place 1 The rights were later reproduced in a brochure and distributed at the Feria del libro maya on December 19, 2012.
Presentamos un resumen de las ideas principales tratadas en nuestro libro reciente Unwriting Maya... more Presentamos un resumen de las ideas principales tratadas en nuestro libro reciente Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts'íib as Recorded Knowledge (Des-escribir la literatura maya: Ts'íib como conocimiento grabado) (2019). Aunque este ensayo es incompleto porque únicamente captura el argumento central del libro, esperamos provea un punto de partida para empezar a pensar la producción literaria y artística maya contemporánea.
This article examines issues of translation in contemporary Yucatec Maya literature, using select... more This article examines issues of translation in contemporary Yucatec Maya literature, using selected poems from Waldemar Noh Tzec’s 1998 Noj Bálam/Large Jaguar as a representative case of how the Mexican state and ideologies of neoliberal multiculturalism may inflect the translation of indigenous text. In arguing for the existence of neoliberal translation, I use DuBois’s notion of double-consciousness and Rivera Cusicanqui’s theory of the ‘indio permitido’ to demonstrate how some bilingual indigenous texts create a space that is simultaneously inclusive and exclusionary, a literary phenomenon I refer to as the ‘máseual excluido/indio permitido’. I suggest that when nationalizing projects reduce indigenous language texts to objects that vouchsafe the ethnic particulars of indigenous authors, they do not so much create an intercultural literature so much as reinforce the linguistic status quo of bilingual indigenous and monolingual non-indigenous subjects. Moreover, the apparent translations of indigenous texts into Spanish must in some sense correspond to the expectations of non-indigenous readers. In cases like that of Noh Tzec’s poetry, this means that indigenous- and Spanish-language texts may convey wildly divergent messages to distinct readerships.
This paper examines the articulation of indigenous historical memory in the play Bix úuchik u bo’... more This paper examines the articulation of indigenous historical memory in the play Bix úuchik u bo’ot ku’si’ip’il ‘Manilo’ob’ tu ja’abil 1562 ‘How it happened that the people of Maní paid for their sins in the year 1562’ (1998) by the Yucatec Maya writer Carlos Armando Dzul Ek. I argue that this work revises the historical, masculine figure of the Chilam Balam as a female sorceress, or Xpul Ya’a, in order to c ontest discourses of Mexican national origin and national identity embodied by figures like La Malinche and the Virgen de Guadalupe. Through the figure of the Xpul Ya’a the play thus draws upon both Yucatec Maya and national precedents to formulate a narrative of contemporary Yucatec Maya origin rooted in Yucatec Maya history as well as that of Mexican nation, not so much breaking from national discourses of identity construction but adapting these to Yucatec ends.
A Contracorriente, 2013
This article examines the theme of Yucatec Maya women’s rights in poet Briceida Cuevas Cob’s Je’ ... more This article examines the theme of Yucatec Maya women’s rights in poet Briceida Cuevas Cob’s Je’ Bix K’in. Situating its discussion within the official elaboration of these rights in INDEMAYA’s tortipack campaign, this article argues that Cuevas Cob’s poetry constitutes a critical intervention into regional, national, and international discourses on human rights and the rights of indigenous women in particular.
Romance Notes, 2011
... These articles seldom mention that many of these vendors are Yukatek Maya from surrounding to... more ... These articles seldom mention that many of these vendors are Yukatek Maya from surrounding towns, descendants of the very people who built this international symbol of Mexican pride in the first place (see Rodríguez Galaz, whose article on the topic is a notable exception). ...
The Latin Americanist, 2010
Book Reviews by Paul Worley
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Books by Paul Worley
As ts’íib refers to a broad range of artistic production from painted codices and textiles to works composed in Latin script, as well as plastic arts, the authors argue that texts by contemporary Maya writers must be read as dialoguing with a multimodal Indigenous understanding of text. In other words, ts’íib is an alternative to understanding “writing” that does not stand in opposition to but rather fully encompasses alphabetic writing, placing it alongside and in dialogue with a number of other forms of recorded knowledge. This shift in focus allows for a critical reexamination of the role that weaving and bodily performance play in these literatures, as well as for a nuanced understanding of how Maya writers articulate decolonial Maya aesthetics in their works.
Unwriting Maya Literature places contemporary Maya literatures within a context that is situated in Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Through ts’íib, the authors propose an alternative to traditional analysis of Maya cultural production that allows critics, students, and admirers to respectfully interact with the texts and their authors. Unwriting Maya Literature offers critical praxis for understanding Mesoamerican works that encompass non-Western ways of reading and creating texts.
Online Project by Paul Worley
Papers by Paul Worley
Book Reviews by Paul Worley
As ts’íib refers to a broad range of artistic production from painted codices and textiles to works composed in Latin script, as well as plastic arts, the authors argue that texts by contemporary Maya writers must be read as dialoguing with a multimodal Indigenous understanding of text. In other words, ts’íib is an alternative to understanding “writing” that does not stand in opposition to but rather fully encompasses alphabetic writing, placing it alongside and in dialogue with a number of other forms of recorded knowledge. This shift in focus allows for a critical reexamination of the role that weaving and bodily performance play in these literatures, as well as for a nuanced understanding of how Maya writers articulate decolonial Maya aesthetics in their works.
Unwriting Maya Literature places contemporary Maya literatures within a context that is situated in Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Through ts’íib, the authors propose an alternative to traditional analysis of Maya cultural production that allows critics, students, and admirers to respectfully interact with the texts and their authors. Unwriting Maya Literature offers critical praxis for understanding Mesoamerican works that encompass non-Western ways of reading and creating texts.