ABSTRACT
Over the last 40 years, the field of colonial “literary” studies has expanded from “literature” to “discourse” to what Walter Mignolo has called “colonial semiosis” which includes not only historiographical texts and archival documents but also indigenous media such as Mesoamerican iconography and the Andean quipu (also spelled khipu). This expansion of the field requires different theoretical models that avoid the binary opposition between orality and literacy. Further building on the dialogic model of literacy proposed by Brokaw (2010b) which resituates orality-literacy studies within media studies, this chapter proposes an integrational approach to communicative media. Integrational linguistics maintains that language, whether oral or written, is less a set of rules or grammatical structures than it is a set of practices. Mexican iconographic texts and the Andean quipu foreground this principle in ways that help reveal the essential nature of all communicative media.
