time for blog being sucked away by school

dear blog,
this week i have been nothing but an article-reader. i guess i've gone to yoga several times, kept up on my personal affairs :) but, i have not been able to blog much at all. this is because i now have these other writing projects. for my historical travel writing class, i have to have a bibliography of the supposed scholarly article that i'm going to write by monday. i've not quite chosen a topic. here is the email correspondence between me and my professor as i try to narrow this down... what a fun weekend of reading and deciding i'm going to have. it is in fact hot in my apartment, kind of like a sauna. do i have a fever along with a kidney infection or do i usually not notice these things? if you visit me, feel free to control the climate or make suggestions:

Hi, Julia,
I have a few ideas for my paper, and I wanted to run them by you so I can possibly narrow this down. I got the New World Encounters, and it has a lot of interesting articles, one of which is about how Aztec poetry changed after Cortes' invasion... I would be interested in writing about how art/world perspective changes after new cultural contact.

Another cultural contact I'm interested is in Guyana... When the British brought over Indians (from India), I wonder how that changed Guyanese culture...

Most of all, though, I'm kind of a yoga freak, and I wonder if I can find stories about how people encountered yoga practitioners, and their lives were changed... maybe this is more of a modern phenomenon?

Any scholarly direction you could help guide me toward would be appreciated.

Cheers,
Heather


I won't be able to be much help on the latter two projects, as English travel to India is just barely beginning in this period. I can however point you to the early sources on European/Indian contact in the Renaissance, including English narratives if you wish to investigate this topic. There is much written on it; you can begin with the article by Jyotsna Singh in our Persia & India week. A more generic search on her name and Ania Loomba's will also turn up a lot of good articles to begin your bibliography. I think the Western fascinating with yoga is a phenomenon of the 60s, but there will certainly be descriptions of India cultural, religious and medical practices in the European travel narratives from the period.

If you are interested in the Aztec/Spanish contact, there are tons of sources. A recent source that presents an interesting reading of the impact of Aztec pictographs had on Spanish culture as recording in a Cervantes romance has been printed in PMLA by Elizabeth Bearden. The essay in New World Encounters will also be a good place to begin.

Hope that's helpful-- let me know if I didn't answer your questions, or if you develop a more specific focus that I might be able to point you to more directly.

Best,
Julia

we'll see where this goes... i'll try to update the blog. also have more personal writing for the literary non-fiction class i may post in bits and pieces...