Technology

Navigation and the written can be seen as two integral tools belonging to the colonial regime. Referring to the "new continent", Angel Rama in The Lettered City (1996) states that "Writing, urbanism, and the State have had a special relationship in Latin America. To impose order on vast empires, the Iberian monarchs created precocious urban networks, carefully planned with pen and paper […] New cities housed both the institutions of state power and the writers who dealt in edicts, memoranda, reports, and all the official correspondence that held the empire together." (vii)
As Jacques Derrida puts it in "Signature Event Context", following Condillac, the written as trace entails a "homogeneous modification of presence in representation." That is, the written in the colonial world ensured the continual re-iteration of the authorities' word.

Drawing from a performance studies approach Diana Taylor joins the discussion positing the importance of the performatic (alongside the written) in pre-conquest indigenous cultures. "Although the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas practiced writing before the Conquest [...] it never replaced the performed utterance.[...] The space of written culture then, as now, seemed easier to control than embodied culture. But writing was far more dependent on embodied culture for transmission than the other way around." (17) Attention to the embodied helps us to better understand the many ways in which domination and resistance functioned in the colonial world thorugh key concepts such as syncretism.

References:
Derrida, Jacques. (1982) "Signature Event Context" in Margins of Philosophy . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rama, Angel (1996) The Lettered City . Durham; London: Duke University Press.
Taylor, Diana. (2003) The Archive and the Repertoire. Durham; London: Duke University Press.