ABSTRACT
Colonial semiosis (Mignolo), the interaction of “Western” alphabetic writing and indigenous sign systems, implies a process of epistemic subjugation. In colonial Latin America it was framed as a confrontation between the supposedly bodily sign systems of indigenous people and the immaterial, alphabetic writing of the colonizers. I argue that colonial semiosis must be seen in the light of the correspondence between alphabetic writing and tattooing established by Ulrike Landfester and the marking of bodies in an eschatological perspective. The example of Diego de Landa’s infamous auto-da-fé in sixteenth-century Yucatán illustrates that colonial semiosis and epidermal writing (in its two aspects of alphabetic writing and writing on bodies) are emplotted into the grandest of grand narratives: the Apocalypse.
