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Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism
... An indigenous person in Mexico. The concept was invented when Christopher Columbus discovered America since he thought he had reached the Far East, the West Indies (Rabasa, 1993). The term was a racial category during the colonial period in Mexico. ...
... For example, one of the precursors of magical realism, Alejo Carpentier coined the expression "marvelous reality" 24 to refer to what he believed were the incredible things found in the continent in terms of "luxuriant vegetation, imposing geography, ethnic diversity, the mixture of architectural styles"-whereas Gabriel García Márquez, another member of the literary movement, claimed (in the words of Chanady) that the "Latin American continent is more marvelous than any fiction" (Chanady, 2008: 429, 433). These descriptions to justify magical realism end up being a mirror of the myths surrounding the "invention of America" (O'Gorman, 1995;Rabasa, 1993). According to O'Gorman (1995) and Rabasa (1993), America was not discov-ered but invented. ...
... These descriptions to justify magical realism end up being a mirror of the myths surrounding the "invention of America" (O'Gorman, 1995;Rabasa, 1993). According to O'Gorman (1995) and Rabasa (1993), America was not discov-ered but invented. America came into existence by the grace of European eyes when Christopher Columbus stumbled upon the continent in 1492 thinking he had reached the West Indies. ...
The land of the Magical Maya is a mythical region in the south of Mexico where there are enigmatic creatures such as cosmic Indios, vultures, ghosts, white elephants, pineapples, swallows, and flamingos; and wondrous places like cenotes, pyramids, blue moons, old frontiers, new frontiers, and paradise-Zones. In the 1980s, henequen, the agro-based industry that had sustained Yucatán since the 19th century, was close to collapsing. With a sense of urgency, the state government looked for alternatives to diversify the economy in an attempt to prevent the effects of mass unemployment. Almost by chance, but with the help of state intervention, the maquiladora industry filled the gap left by the old system and boomed between 1990 and 2001, followed by a bust, and then a decline. Drawing on fieldwork, and with an analysis that starts with abstractions and zooms in to the level of the everyday, this thesis tells a tale at different scales. This is the story of how people in the city of Motul experienced the rise and decline of Montgomery Industries, the most important maquiladora in the state. There are glimpses into how people’s lives changed and how their city transformed; how the state built infrastructural veins to support the maquiladora industry; and how the government attempted to sell the idea of Yucatán as an exotic, maquiladora paradise where Magical Mayas await. This is also a bigger tale about the relationship between colonial legacies, urbanization, and global capitalism. Through instances of magic, capitalism exists in tension between its tendency to homogenize and its propensity to thrive in differentiation. Capitalism in Yucatán is articulated via the Imperial South through processes of racialization and colonization. Urbanization unfolds in tension between invisibility and visibility. This work contributes to the third wave of Lefebvrian thought, offers insights to the continuous debate of the urban question, advances the project of postcolonial urban studies, and adds to the body of maquiladora studies.
... Maps can simplify, obscure and sometimes distort reality (Monmonier, 2018: 1). One common example is the Mercator projection of the world atlas that feeds into a Eurocentric organisation of geographical space (Huggan, 1989;Rabasa, 1993). Maps have been crucial instruments of empire-making (D'Souza, 2003;Rose-Redwood et al, 2020) and often serve the interests of nationalist projects and war propaganda (Backhaus and Murungi, 2005). ...
Recently, we have seen a proliferation of maps visualising the global state of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, plus (LGBTQI+) rights. While they represent a productive advocacy tool for activists, we critically examine the politics embedded and reinforced by the way maps and indices are constructed and represented. By exploring the discrepancies between ILGA-Europe’s rainbow maps and the lived experiences of LGBTQI+ people within Europe, we argue that these maps reproduce hierarchies often mediated by Eurocentric understandings of linear progress while discounting the importance that an interpenetration of legal and social aspects has in evaluating national contexts in which LGBTQI+ persons live. The emphasis on legislative frameworks, thus, in part displaces lived experiences of LGBTQI+ people in Europe, projecting both queer utopias and dystopias onto different geographical localities and feeding into existing homonationalist discourses. With such findings, we argue against the fetishisation of legislation within LGBTQI+ activism and academia.
... It has since been catering to the desire of broadening audiences for geographic and cultural knowledge of unfamiliar places and peoples, for economic, socio-political, or strategic information, as well as for entertainment through captivating stories (Blanton 2002, 7-29). Increasingly diverse, though predominantly Eurocentric for most of its history, the genre has contributed to formulating and circulating hegemonic concepts and "imagined geographies" (Said 1995, 55, 71) of "America" (Rabasa 1993;Mignolo 2005) that inform public discourses, knowledge, and power relations to this day (→ America, I/2). ...
The article provides a definition of the text genre of travel writing as well as a historical overview of major types of journey accounts produced about the Americas. Since the European colonization of the Americas, various types of travel reports have been catering to the desire of broadening audiences for geographic and cultural knowledge of unfamiliar places and peoples, for economic, socio-political, or strategic information, as well as for entertainment through captivating stories. As such, the genre has contributed to formulating and circulating hegemonic concepts of the region that inform public discourses, knowledge, and power relations to this day. | Due to copyright laws, I cannot make a public copy available here or link to a repository holding my article. Please request a private copy if you are interested in my work.
... Numerous scholars have challenged maps as authoritative representations of reality (Knowles 2008:5,19; see also Black 1997;Clayton 2015;Gilbert 2004;Given 2002;Goeman 2013;Harley 1989;Huggan 1989;Hunt and Stevenson 2017;Laxton 2001;McClintock 1995;Perkins 2003;Rabasa 1993;Schmidt 1997;Sparke 1995Sparke ,1998Stone 1988;Wood 2010). Geographer J.B. Harley, for example, points to the ways in which maps were made to be instruments of the nation and empire (Laxton 2001:99). ...
Using ArcGIS, I map the ways in which primary and secondary sources describing an 1850s cholera epidemic in the Caribbean spatialize the epidemic. More specifically, I probe the scale at which varying narratives report the epidemic to consider whether it was understood as a broad, regional event, or at the level of specific colonies or islands. I draw upon post colonial and feminist critiques of the map, and keeping in view the situated nature of knowledge, create alternative maps of the epidemic. I approach the epidemic’s archival traces through the lens of archaeological theory, discussing them in relation to scale and movement.
... A second strand focused on the experience of expeditions in the field. This entailed a critique of the imaginative construction of distant lands as inherently alien and savage (Rabasa, 1993), a characterization that enabled imperial powers to advocate a civilizing mission that was, in Simon Ryan's words, 'an anchorage for a mythological justification of possession ' (1996: 208). Yet later studies highlighted a different historiography of experience which provided a more granular, at times even intimate, understanding of the expedition as a space mired with uncertainty rather than stoic resolve; immensely dependent on indigenous labour and knowledge; reliant to a greater extent on the benevolence of rulers in Cairo and benefactors in Adelaide than on the expertise of civil servants in Whitehall (Kennedy, 2013; see also Rockel, 2006;Fabian, 2000;Thomas, 2014). ...
The expedition’s complicity in the imperial project of conquest, extraction and settlement has placed it as an object of critique, but largely discredited its significance as a valid research method in the critical social sciences. Yet dismissing the expedition merely as an imperial remnant risks ignoring more nuanced histories that bear no resemblance to myths of conquest and masculine heroics. Instead, this paper considers the expedition as a malleable practice that can be critically appropriated and manipulated in ways that retain and further the critique of violence and knowledge production, while also experimenting with creative alternatives to some of its conventions.
... Neste quadro os discursos dividem-se. Cf. , ARAÚ-JO (2010, BARBOSA (2004), BERNARDES (2010), BEVERLEY/ARONNA/ OVIEDO (1995), BLAUT (1992BLAUT ( , 1993BLAUT ( , 2000, BORTOLUCI (2009), BRYDON (2000), CABA/GARCIA (2014), CORONIL ( , 2000, DIRLIK (2002), DROIT (2008), DUSSEL (1993DUSSEL ( , 1995DUSSEL ( , 2000, DUSSEL (2000), ESCOBAR (2005), LANDER (2000,2004,2006), LANDER (2001LANDER ( , 2005, LANDER (2005), MAIA (2017), MIGNOLO (1998), NAVARRO (1982), NIETO OARTE (2009), QUIJANO (1993QUIJANO ( , 2000, RABASA (1993), SAYYID (1993SAYYID ( , 2003SAYYID ( , 2004, SHOHAT (1994), SOTO (2007), WALLERSTEIN (2007). ...
Há um debate no meio académico latino-americano sobre o que realmente aconteceu no mundo a partir do século XV com o processo dito de descobrimentos e expansão europeia.
Há questões que, desde a década de noventa do século XX, incendeiam o debate e procuram respostas.
Teremos entrado no caminho da globalização ou da ocidentalização /europeização do mundo? Será este discurso unilateral, eurocêntrico a primeira etapa da globalização? A evocação dos 600 anos da globalização será o retomar de velhas questões que marcaram, a partir de meados do século XX, o debate académico, a reação violenta do mundo latino-americano, ou teremos o salto em frente no caminho da post-modernidade, da decolonialidade?
Em torno deste debate académico, perfilharam-se teorias, enriqueceu-se o vocabulário científico com novos e inusuais conceitos, ideias e discursos.
Ao longo das últimas décadas, o debate em torno do tema da globalização ganhou múltiplas dimensões e aproximou diversas áreas do conhecimento. Gerou ruturas, mas abriu novas vias para uma diferente forma e expressão dos olhares dos conhecimentos e das escritas. Enriqueceu o vocabulário da ciência, tornando familiares termos como globalidade, diversalidade, de(s)colonialidade, transmodernidade. A expressão epistemologias do sul, sistematizada em 1995 por Boaventura Sousa SANTOS (2000) teve grande repercussão junto da comunidade científica, tendo-se generalizado. Foi, de uma forma violenta que o mundo latino-americano enfrentou este paradigma cognitivo afirmando claramente a sua oposição a este processo de globalização, que considera ocidental e eurocêntrico e uma estratégia de afirmação colonial dos europeus. Desta forma, as chamadas epistemologias do sul são a denúncia da soberania epistémica da ciência moderna e o princípio para a busca de um novo padrão do conhecimento científico.
Na atualidade, o debate já não é a questão da globalização e o momento da sua afirmação. Ninguém parece querer saber quando e como começou este processo histórico, mas quando dará lugar a um novo momento de mudança, com aquilo que alguns definem como a definitiva globalização que culminará com um ideal de uma nova aldeia global, porque, como afirma Boaventura Sousa Santos a “diversidade epistemológica do mundo continua por construir”.
Partimos, assim, de questões e, ao longo da nossa exposição, pretendemos reunir as peças do puzzle que permitirão a cada um de nós encontrar a resposta. Intencionalmente não daremos as soluções, pois não queremos substituir o discurso do eurocentrismo pelo do ilhocentrismo ou madeirensecentrismo. Não queremos fazer do mundo uma madeirolândia. As nove razões que apresentamos abaixo são a fonte e justificação da nossa opção em prol da afirmação da Madeira como uma etapa fundamental deste processo de globalização de que agora se evocam os seiscentos anos.
A partir de meados do século XV, o mundo da ilha entrelaça-se com outros mundos onde se projeta e afirma. O sangue, o suor e o sémen do madeirense derramam-se, por todo o lado, em momentos de glória e tristeza, em vitórias e fracassos, fazendo . parte da nossa alma e da nossa força de viver e vencer os desafios, tanto de ontem como de hoje.
Que desafio ainda resta a quem soube construir a sua morada à beira do abismo, foi capaz de vencer a floresta e as ravinas tão adversas, traçar os poios para repouso e descanso das searas, vinhedos e canaviais, venceu os desafios do mar alteroso, para reconstruir a sua ilha paradisíaca, plena de riqueza e flores? Não terá, então, o madeirense direito à fruição do Éden dos deuses da Antiguidade ou do paraíso que todos os caminhos espirituais procuram oferecer a todos os seus adeptos e crentes?
As ilhas são um espaço aberto, sem fronteiras, que captam tudo à sua volta e que servem de trampolim para outros rumos e paradeiros. As ilhas tanto são encruzilhadas como pontes.
Há uma força telúrica insular que imprime este movimento de abertura, acionando essa força centrífuga. Queremos partir da dicotomia discursiva das epistemologias do norte e do sul e partir na busca de um território abissal, um território de fronteira que tenha as condições para esse encontro e partilha.
É esse lugar de fortuna atlântica, de que as ilhas são os pilares fundamentais, que importa construir. Daí que ocorra perguntar se não haverá espaço para uma terceira via, a das epistemologias do centro, insular, de fronteira, capaz de suplantar a ambivalência e oposição de saberes?
Perante a dominação das epistemologias do norte e o discurso de rutura e afrontamento das epistemologias do sul, é necessário abrir essa terceira via do discurso da multiculturalidade, de abertura múltiplas às frontes do conhecimento, sem dominação, que poderá ser o outro paradigma de que fala MIGNOLO (2010).
As ilhas atlânticas são um espaço de fronteira, de mediação e de interculturalidade, abraçando, sem conflito, os múltiplos caminhos da globalização. E isso não se pode esquecer, porque, na verdade, o Atlântico é um arco-íris de culturas e a atlanticidade a sua expressão.
... The 15 th century technics of perspective and cartography (Alberti's De Pictura appeared in 1432; the Fra Mauro Map in 1450) shared a fundamentally temporal structure: one voyaged across or into their products, and in their development they became integral to the colonial project as itself a mastery not only of space but of the future (Rabasa 1993, Mitchell 2002. ...
The question of uncertainty raised in this special issue raises issues for the image as truthful, the truth that viewers can claim to find in images and the ethical dimensions of truth. By tracing some key changes in the history of photography, this paper demonstrates that the mass production and especially mass storage and distribution of images create a new condition for the image. This condition asserts that the purpose of the totality of the mass image as it now exists in databases is a mode of truth which alters earlier ontological, epistemological and ethical claims for certainty. Rather than propose a return to the humanistic privilege of the individual image, the paper suggests that a new politics of truth is demanded by the new condition of the mass image.
O processo epistêmico e social que se conveio a chamar de Renascimento implicou uma série de inquietações sobre a imagem, a forma e o funcionamento do mundo ocidental. O pensamento cósmico foi substancialmente transformado, não somente pelos atritos e intercâmbios herdados da Guerra Santa, que entre suas contradições promoveram um circuito de difusão de obras e tratados clássicos entre a cristandade, o islã e os grupos judaicos, mas também pelos anseios que marcaram a expansão colonial ultramarina. Ao longo desses movimentos, o ecúmeno aristotélico-ptolomaico seria constantemente remodelado, tanto pelo paradigma tripartite e hagiológico dos mappaemundi medievais, como pelos motos imperiais - e igualmente divinos - dos descobrimentos modernos. É comum uma síntese dessas revoluções geográficas na ideia da compartimentação do Novo Mundo ou da América como Pars Quarta, um espaço totalmente inédito que foi adicionado a uma ordem global já existente. Mas ao contrário da relação de anterioridade que a terminologia nos persuade a assumir, a geografia renascentista se pautou na produção simultânea e simbiótica de mundos espelhados.
Este capítulo se volta, portanto, ao processo de separação entre o Velho e o Novo Mundo nas geografias medievais-renascentistas, tomando como plano de análise a instância em que essa cisão foi propriamente concebida: o espaço cosmográfico e cartográfico. Através das conflitantes imagens de mundo propostas pelas epistemologias ocidentais no contexto do albor moderno, a intenção é demonstrar a permanência de modelos de mundialidade continuados das tradições antigas e medievais, e também as metamorfoses espaciais que foram próprias das relações da colonialidade moderna. Sem desconsiderar as nítidas diacronias, procura-se construir uma perspectiva transversal daquilo que se pode compreender como um constante exercício de autoimagem geográfica no pensamento ocidental.
La experiencia tropical que comunican los textos de los jesuitas en los espacios misioneros se resuelve en el campo de lo que es posible normar, describir y expresar mediante diversos lenguajes. La emoción ante los paisajes tropicales también se contiene en texto esos, y se coloca a camino entre la retórica y la percepción del primer encuentro en los espacios interiores. Estas experiencias del viaje al interior del Continente instituyen un imaginario geográfico de América, donde la naturaleza y el paisaje comportan un lugar central en la espacialización de los saberes durante la segunda expansión de la racionalidad occidental en el siglo XVIII. En tal sentido, esta investigación se propone examinar en algunos textos, los discursos y la coexistencia de acercamiento estético y pragmático que suponen formas de valoración del paisaje americano, cuyos registros, permiten comprender la construcción de las imágenes y las diversas formas de valoración paratáctica y liminar de los paisajes interiores indianos
En este artículo planteo que en De Thesauris (1563) Bartolomé de Las Casas rastrea el saqueo de metales y piedras preciosas de entierros indígenas a lo largo del continente americano, mostrando cómo una conquista en su calidad de empresa financió la siguiente. De este modo, Las Casas relata la historia de la Conquista en De Thesauris como una acumulación de endeudamiento material y moral contraída por los conquistadores y, por ende, la Corona y la Iglesia. Propongo que al reiterar la imposibilidad de remedar los daños sufridos en su presente y pasado inmediatos en De Thesauris, Las Casas abordó la coherencia de los pueblos originarios de América, especialmente de Perú, como sujetos políticos reales dentro y fuera de los flujos de capital que sustentaron la expansión del imperio por medio de sociedades en comandita que se beneficiaron de los saqueos de entierros nativos (huaqueo). Las implicaciones del tratado lascasiano se hacen patentes mediante su aparición fantasmagórica en De procuranda indorum salute apud barbaros (1589) de José de Acosta. Me detengo en una sección donde, por medio de sus referencias al Libro de Josué, el autor jesuita defiende el poder del soberano de despojar y distribuir terrenos para la sepultura de forasteros y, por lo tanto, de constituir un nuevo arraigo a lugares conquistados por medio del entierro. Sostengo que esta preocupación de Acosta por los entierros revela su mayor ansiedad respecto del tratado de Las Casas, el cual logró demostrar el engarzamiento de la soberanía, el dominio y la posesión en las Indias en función del despojo de los muertos indígenas y sus pertenencias.
In this timely book Nino Vallen tells the story of New Spain's gradual integration into the Pacific Basin and challenges established views about identity formation among the elites of colonial Mexico. It examines how discussions about the establishment and desirability of transpacific connections interacted with more general debates over why some people deserved certain benefits over others. As part of these struggles, New Spain's changing place at the crossroads of transatlantic and transpacific routes became a subject of contention between actors moved by competing notions of a deserving self: the learned councillor, the veteran, the discoverer, the meritorious, the creole and the merchant. Reassessing current historiographical narratives on creole identities and worldviews, Being the Heart of the World contributes to a broader understanding of the early modern self and the ways in which it was shaped by the mobilities of an increasingly globalized world.
Originating in South America, the pineapple –Ananas comosus (L.) Merr.– underwent a lengthy domestication process. Since ancient times, the Native Americans had taken it with them on their migrations and valued the sweetness of its pulp, its medicinal properties, and the quality of its fibre. Much later it was described by Spanish chronicles in Central America and observed by European travellers and missionaries along the Brazilian coast. From the 1560s, the fruit was transported by the Portuguese from Brazil to East Africa and the West coast of India, and from here it was later transferred to other parts of Asia. In the 1580s, the Spanish introduced the species into the Philippines from the New World. This work focuses on the importance that pineapple cultivation has attained in the tropics, especially in the Philippines; it highlights the success that fabrics and embroidery made from fibres extracted from the pineapple achieved in the late sixteenth century; it demonstrates how the introduction of a foreign vegetable species into the Philippines has today resulted in an industry that supports local farmers in the sustainable production of raw materials, providing a means of production for artisans in the region and contributing to the success of a circular economy on a global scale.
In the seventeenth century, Veracruz was the busiest port in the wealthiest colony in the Americas. People and goods from five continents converged in the city, inserting it firmly into the early modern world's largest global networks. Nevertheless, Veracruz never attained the fame or status of other Atlantic ports. Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century is the first English-language, book-length study of early modern Veracruz. Weaving elements of environmental, social, and cultural history, it examines both Veracruz's internal dynamics and its external relationships. Chief among Veracruz's relationships were its close ties within the Caribbean. Emphasizing relationships of small-scale trade and migration between Veracruz and Caribbean cities like Havana, Santo Domingo, and Cartagena, Veracruz and the Caribbean shows how the city's residents – especially its large African and Afro-descended communities – were able to form communities and define identities separate from those available in the Mexican mainland.
Foregrounding the close relationship between peasants and colonized people, this article proposes that the progressive disavowal of peasant ways of knowing and being from the early nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries constitutes a significantly undertheorized dimension of coloniality in the region of Southeastern Europe. With a focus on interwar Croatia, this article sheds light on how we can begin to reevaluate the epistemological, political, and cultural significance of the village, which has largely been captured by folklore, dismissed as “superstition,” or appropriated by nationalists. Anchored in discourses on the relationship between culture and decolonization authored by scholars and activists in Indigenous studies in North America and anti-colonial thinkers and organizers in Africa, the present article contributes a case study example of an agrarian communist program of cultural decolonization and anti-fascist national liberation from the interwar period in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The analysis begins by sketching out the anti-imperial agenda for decolonizing Yugoslav culture that was spearheaded by Miroslav Krleža and Krsto Hegedušić between the two World Wars. This is followed by a reconstruction of the art collective Zemlja’s collaborative program with peasant artists from rural Croatia and their significance to the grassroots communist national liberation movement. Finally, the article discusses how communist peasant aesthetics were situated as an authentic anti-imperial national culture during Yugoslav socialism in conversation with international decolonial discourses on national culture and revolution.
This dissertation uncovers underlying arguments in Argentine and Brazilian media from 1971-2017 about why (and how) humans consume energy to the detriment of the planet. I identify films and novels that challenge colonial “male energy narratives” (Nye 1993) through re-writing canonical texts about “civilization” in the Southern Cone such as Martín Fierro (José Hernández) and the “Manifesto Antropófago [Cannibalist Manifesto]” (Oswald de Andrade). What I term “radical energy narratives” craft ethical and ecological responses to the present climate crisis through prioritizing energy transfers over accumulation, return on investment, or extraction. This flips the perspective from how humans use energy to how energy uses us, reframing life as a series of relationships born out of energy moving through and then moving on. “Radical energy narratives” frame non-teleological energy expenditure as joyful, creative, connected, and ephemeral. Authors and film directors include César Aira, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Lucrecia Martel, Marcelo Gomes, Karim Aïnouz, and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara. This project is in dialogue with Georges Bataille, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Donna Haraway, Dominic Boyer, Jane Bennett, Gilbert Simondon, and Gilles Deleuze, among others.
Los metadatos informan de nuestra interacción con los objetos visuales (imágenes) que se encuentran en contextos digitales (sitios web) y tienen un impacto perdurable y transhistórico en la forma en que entendemos el mundo que nos rodea, pero se han realizado pocos intentos de estudiar críticamente los impactos de los metadatos, en particular con respecto a las formas en que pueden género y racializar al sujeto representado. Este artículo trata de explorar el funcionamiento de los metadatos y su relación con las imágenes de la Edad Moderna que han sido digitalizadas y para las que se han generado metadatos. Utilizando el ejemplo de la cultura visual asociada a Bartolomé de Las Casas, este artículo rastrea el modo en que los metadatos dan forma a la representación de los nativos americanos en los entornos en línea, al tiempo que reflexiona críticamente sobre las consecuencias de los metadatos existentes y las plataformas que permiten a los usuarios encontrar información en línea.
Resumen
En la conquista de México, las escenas que dan cuenta de la caída de Tenochtitlan constituyen un topos que organiza buena parte de las crónicas del siglo XVI. En la representación de la ciudad arrasada y de sus habitantes, retórica de la violencia y retórica de las emociones se articulan para configurar el entramado a través del cual el acontecimiento es narrado y la experiencia aprehendida. Este ensayo analiza, desde la perspectiva de los estudios literarios y con una metodología comparada, tres crónicas de la conquista de México: las cartas de Cortés, la historia de Bernal Díaz del Castillo, los testimonios tlatelolcas reunidos en el Libro XII del Códice Florentino. Entre el ethos y el pathos que cada crónica despliega, se configura una retórica afectiva de la violencia por medio de la cual se inscriben nuevas subjetividades en el discurso colonial americano.
Palabras clave: afectos-violencia-retórica-discurso bélico
Abstract: In the conquest of Mexico, the scenes that account the fall of Tenochtitlan, constitute a topos that organizes a great part of the 16th-century chronicles. The rhetoric of emotions, entangled with the rhetoric of the violence at war, provides a central contribution to the representation of the devastated city and its inhabitants, the very scheme through which the event is narrated, and the experience is seized. These essays analyse, from a literary perspective and through a comparative perspective, three chronicles of the conquest of México: Cortes’ letters, Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s history, and the tlatelolcan testimonies gathered together in Book XII of the Florentine Codex. Between the ethos and the pathos that each text deploys, an affective rhetoric of the violence is organized, and new subjectivities are inscribed in Latin American colonial discourse.
The concept of writing violence points to the ways in which violence is written about and the ways writing itself exerts violence in colonial and postcolonial texts. In its most benign form, the consequences of writing violence institute developmentalist tropes that place Christianity and its institutions as historical necessities within spiritual and material teleology. Laws and the definition of religious motivations can obviously be unmasked as offering ideological alibis, but the question of ideology can also be pursued in the examination of the categories used in recording information. Writing the discovery entails a systematic ordering of the world on a blank page. It is a textual production that intends to locate the new lands within a new picture of the world. The reproduction of phonetic sound has defined the criteria for tracing the evolution of forms of inscriptions from pictography to alphabetical writing; only alphabetical writing constitutes true writing.
Historians and literary critics have described the Argentinean Pampa as a space predominantly connected to the foundational acts and discourses of the Argentinean nation. At the same time at which Argentina emerged as a nation, foundational discourses modeled the sparsely populated region lying beyond the capital Buenos Aires as a flat, unstructured landscape, as the allegedly empty space of a “desert”. The article analyzes how these geopolitical discourses are rewritten in two Argentinean novels from the last decade of the 20th century, César Aira’s La liebre (The Hare, 1991) and Juan José Saer’s Las nubes (The Clouds, 1997), which both perform an act of un-founding by creating alternative literary environments. In doing so, both novels also enact a narrative transculturation of spatial concepts drawn from European cultural theory by reterritorializing them on the territory of the Pampa.
The Church-State statutory institutional relationship is particularly significant apropos the debate of cultural tolerance. Here, I review the mechanisms by which this relation circumscribes to an ethno-centric pattern in the reading of Mexican history, and examine the discursive atmosphere the Church and the State institutional struggle to master the symbols of nationhood, and account for the ethnic images ratified by institutional narratives with liberal pragmatic postulates. In particular, I focus on the complex netting of political demarcations between religious and civil institutions, and its distinctive tone they acquired under Hispanic Patronage; all of which set the background upon which the Church’s antagonism to official lay discourses on Mexican identity appears futile.
The thesis explores different versions of Peruvian, Andean, historiography from the 16th century (Garcilaso de la Vega) to the 18th century (Pedro Peralta Barnuevo) and the 19th century (several authors) in relation with their ideas of the Peruvian nation
Based on the understanding of postcolonial memory as multidirectional, disjunctive, and combinatorial (Michael Rothberg) and the postmodern concept of the ‘simulated indian’ (Gerald Vizenor), this article investigates how Native Americans and First Nations have been visualised in selected picturebooks written and illustrated by Indigenous and German artists. Drawing special attention to the works of the Austrian writer Käthe Recheis, the article illustrates how stereotypical images of the Savage, Noble, or Vanishing Indian have been negotiated within multi-layered transnational processes of media transfer (including references to the famous ostensibly ethnographic photographs by Edward Curtis). By conceptualising the images under scrutiny as ‘simulated memories’ that often elude a dichotomous opposition of canonical memory and counter-memory, this article reveals disruptions within the contested power structures of cultural memory, questions the claims of authenticity and documentation placed on some of the images, and examines subversive practices of remembrance and historiographic storytelling.
Lange Zeit galten Reiseberichte als Wegbegleiter des Kolonialismus. Dies ändert sich im Lateinamerika der 1920er Jahre, wovon die in Vergessenheit geratenen Feuilletonartikel, Tagebücher und Aufzeichnungen der chilenischen Nobelpreisträgerin Gabriela Mistral, des »Papstes des brasilianischen Modernismus« Mário de Andrade und des belgisch-französischen Avantgardisten Henri Michaux zeugen. Marília Jöhnk geht dem wissensgeschichtlichen Interesse der drei Reisenden am Kontinent und ihrem Spiel mit etablierten Formen literarischer Wahrnehmung nach. Mit dem tief in der aztekischen Mythologie verankerten Kolibri eint deren kleine Reiseprosa nicht nur die kompakte Größe, sondern auch die Mobilität und Geschwindigkeit.
Der erste Kriminalfall der Neuen Welt, der die Maschinerie kolonialen Schreibens in Gang setzte: Philipp von Hutten, ein Mitglied des berühmten fränkischen Rittergeschlechts, wird im Jahr 1546 in der Provinz Venezuela von seinem Rivalen Juan de Carvajal enthauptet. Susanne Andrea Gujer-Bertschingers Studie stellt erstmals alle Dokumente im Zusammenhang mit dem »Fall Hutten« in einen Kontext: Briefe des Opfers - sie gelten als die ältesten Briefe in deutscher Sprache, die aus Amerika geschrieben wurden -, Prozessakten und Reiseberichte. Die Analyse der deutschen, spanischen und italienischen Texte liefert einen genuinen Beitrag zur Forschungsdebatte über (post-)koloniale Studien.
Der erste Kriminalfall der Neuen Welt, der die Maschinerie kolonialen Schreibens in Gang setzte: Philipp von Hutten, ein Mitglied des berühmten fränkischen Rittergeschlechts, wird im Jahr 1546 in der Provinz Venezuela von seinem Rivalen Juan de Carvajal enthauptet. Susanne Andrea Gujer-Bertschingers Studie stellt erstmals alle Dokumente im Zusammenhang mit dem »Fall Hutten« in einen Kontext: Briefe des Opfers - sie gelten als die ältesten Briefe in deutscher Sprache, die aus Amerika geschrieben wurden -, Prozessakten und Reiseberichte. Die Analyse der deutschen, spanischen und italienischen Texte liefert einen genuinen Beitrag zur Forschungsdebatte über (post-)koloniale Studien.
This chapter examines the relationship between the artist's mark and the surface by focusing on works in which the drawn mark is a direct response to features of the surface. The examples I discuss include Dorothea Rockburne's Drawing Which Makes Itself series, Louise Hopkins's series of drawings on crumpled paper, and Lai Chih‐Sheng's Drawing Paper series. I frame my discussion within psychoanalytic conceptions of drawing, particularly Serge Tisseron's texts, which propose an almost antithetical mark/surface relationship. I then examine the challenges that the works of Rockburne, Hopkins, and Lai pose to such conceptualizations. Throughout, while considering the interrelations between mark and surface, I address the issues of subjectivization and signification by drawing on Tisseron's and Bracha L. Ettinger's texts. That is, what kinds of relationships between self and other do these drawings enact? And how do these relationships affect our understanding of mark and surface in drawing as a practice?
The great oceanic voyages had unexpected consequences on the pace with which plants moved between the most far-removed corners of the globe. From the mid-sixteenth century onwards, the huge distances covered led to an unprecedented change in the distribution of vegetable species. Settlers and voyagers took European plants with them and introduced them into the Americas, Africa, and Asia. African plants were transferred to America and Asia, and Asian species were dispersed across all continents. These biological transferences led to global changes in people’s dietary habits and therapeutic practices, as well as giving rise to new business opportunities and previously untested ways of exploiting the land. Originally from Brazil, the pineapple—Ananas comosus—made a great impression on those who came across it. Refusing to take root in the cold European latitudes, the fruit crossed the Atlantic Ocean aboard Portuguese ships in search of other territories with an adequate climate. In this essay, I will analyze the references to pineapple in the chronicles, botanical texts, and missionaries’ letters in circulation in the 1500s. I will examine the cultural context that permitted the diffusion of this botanical species and follow the oceanic routes traced by this exotic plant that allowed the wide dissemination of the fruit throughout the Portuguese empire.
Este ensayo explora las nociones de lírica, modernidad y América. Argumenta que la idea de América es inextricable a la emergencia de la poesía lírica moderna. Cuestiona el entendimiento según el cual el valor de la poesía latino americana se circunscribe al espíritu de la historia “universal”, que marca el inicio de la poesía en América latina solo a finales del siglo 19, después de su nacimiento en Europa y Estados Unidos. Analiza la imagen de América y el desarrollo de la poesía lírica en relación con la constitución heterogénea de la modernidad y de la subjetividad moderna. Sugiere que los dualismos cartesiano carecen de sentido sin la paralela conceptualización y conquista de América. En última instancia, lo queel ensayo propone es que la “tardanza” poética de América latina debe ser abandonada en beneficio de una apuesta poética que se inscriba y verifique sin las constricciones teleológicas de la Historia.
Exploring the culture and media of the Americas, this handbook places particular emphasis
on collective and intertwined experiences and focuses on the transnational or hemispheric
dimensions of cultural flows and geocultural imaginaries that shape the literature, arts, media
and other cultural expressions in the Americas.
The Routledge Handbook to the Culture and Media of the Americas charts the pervasive, asymmetrical flows of cultural products and capital and their importance in the development of the Americas.The volume offers a comprehensive understanding of how Inter-American communication is constituted, framed and structured and covers the artistic and political dimensions that have shaped literature, art and popular culture in the region. Forty-six chapters cover a range of inter-American key concepts and dynamics, divided into two parts:
• Literature and Music deals with inter-American entanglements of artistic expressions in
the Western Hemisphere, including music, dance, literary genres and developments.
• Media and Visual Cultures explores the inter-American dimension of media production
in the hemisphere, including cinema and television, photography and art, journalism,
radio, digital culture and issues such as freedom of expression and intellectual property.
This multidisciplinary approach will be of interest to a broad array of academic scholars
and students in history, sociology, political science; and cultural, postcolonial, gender, literary,globalization and media studies.
Much of Mexico’s national historiography has been constructed around the assumption that the capture of Tenochtitlan and the subsequent subjugation of the Aztec “empire” constituted, at one and at the same time, the objective and culmination of Hernán Cortés’ ambitions in New Spain. But this is simply a historiographic construction; indeed, one that deviates markedly from how the conquerors themselves conceived those events. This article explains why, despite the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci and the appearance of Martin de Waldseemüller’s Cosmographiae Introductio, which still depicted the “New World” as a land “separated” from Asia, in reality the conquerors and explorers of the first three decades of the 16th century always considered those lands as being geographically proximate to the Asian continent. As a result, neither Cortés nor his followers ever perceived the taking of the Aztec capital as the pinnacle of their wars of conquest. For them it was but one phase of a greater enterprise, one that they believed would take them much farther afield, as far as the so-called “Southern Sea” (mar del Sur) -the Indian Ocean- and from there to the rich islands of Asia and the China described by Marco Polo.
The Zodíaco mariano is a well-known colonial text from New Spain, originally penned by Francisco de Florencia in the 1690s but later modified, amplified, and published by Juan Antonio de Oviedo in 1755. This essay concentrates on Florencia's contributions to this compendium of Marian images, specifically the symbolism of the four Marian bastions in the section on the Archbishopric of Mexico. It argues that Florencia invented a Marian cartography of Mexico City by drawing upon early modern Marian atlases, Marian chorography, and quadripartite descriptions of Mexico Tenochtitlan and Mexico City in colonial chronicles. The Marian bastions he imagines for the viceregal capital—the Virgins of Guadalupe, Remedies, Bala, and Piety—were shaped by both Christian astrology and cosmological visions of urban space shared by both the Mexica and Spaniards.
Wie wird koloniale Gewalt historisch thematisiert? Wie gehen dokumentarische Filme und geschichtspolitische Diskurse mit ihr um? Robert Stock nähert sich diesen Fragen mit kritischem Blick auf den Kolonialkrieg Portugals in Afrika und den nationalen Befreiungskampf Mosambiks. Dabei fokussiert er seine Untersuchung auf die Gestaltung, Funktion und Reflexion historischer Zeugenschaft. Am Material von bislang wenig beachteten Filmproduktionen über die Dekolonisierungsprozesse zwischen Mosambik und Portugal seit den 1970er Jahren analysiert er die sich verändernden Deutungsweisen der kolonialen Vergangenheit.
En la última década del siglo XX, las teorías poscoloniales se han
puesto de moda. Como la –hasta ahora– última novedad en el
campo “post” de la posmodernidad se han desarrollado de un campo relativamente estrecho de intereses (se hablaba en un primer momento exclusivamente de la situación particular de las ex colonias británicas en África y Asia) hacia una teoría que después de liberarse del logocentrismo y del falogocentrismo (con los posestructuralistas y los gender studies) llegaría a liberarse del “euro-falogocentrismo” para abrirse a una visión policéntrica (o a una que por lo menos toma en cuenta la relación centro-periferia en sus reflexiones) de la cultura.
En el campo de la literatura, se trata por supuesto en primer lugar de
relaciones de comunicación –y con esto también de poder.
Me permitiré sintetizar en pocas palabras lo que me parece importante
de esta escuela para desarrollar después los pros y contras
de la aplicación de algunos conceptos a la cultura latinoamericana
y, basado en esta experiencia, a posibilidades de transferencia de tal
perspectiva a la cultura centroeuropea
This article addresses the participation of Indians in cultural genocide or ethnocide. We call the participation in the destruction of one's culture ethnosuicide. This article pays particular attention to the contradictions “salvage anthropology” incurs in its aim to write histories of the vanishing while training research collaborators to objectify their own culture, thereby capturing them (not necessarily successfully) in forms of thought that lead to ethnosuicide. Whereas the intent of the evangelical practices such as the confession clearly calls forth the annihilation of one's culture, the practice of science might have unintended destructive effects. We imagine a hypothetical graduate seminar in which an indigenous student would face the requirement to make sense of his or her world according to categories and forms of interpretation and explanation favored by anthropology. The readings range from Malinowski's initial definition of anthropological salvaging to Vivieros de Castro recent call for an ontological turn. We close with a reading of the Huarochiri manuscript (Peru 1609) that exemplifies the use of native collaborators to produce knowledge for extirpation campaigns in the colonial Andes.
The article discusses the manner in which the story of the international system and the relationship between violence and civilisation that Andrew Linklater tells in Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems remains on the visible side of the absyssal line. Absyssal thinking refers to the distinctions created between visible and invisible realms and it is Eurocentrism as a system of knowledge that sustains and reproduces this abyssal line. The article will focus on two instances of reproducing this abyssal line. The first will be with respect to the way in which histories of Europe and colonialism are detached from each other. The second will be on where political and moral ‘progress’ is being located within the development of the ‘global civilizing process’.
The large corpus of empirical data and available tools for data collection and analysis are changing the ways knowledge is produced. For the humanities, this transformation requires not only that we must critically inquire into how technology affects our understanding of knowledge and how it alters our epistemic processes, but that we also need to employ the new data resources and technologies in new ways of scholarly investigation.
The Datafied Society: Studying Culture Through Data thinks through the opportunities and pitfalls of doing research with data provides within the humanities (and media studies in particular). It covers different research methods, considers how researchers can engage with the datafied society, and reflects on moral and discrimination issues that need to be tackled when embarking on research. Through a series of four short interviews with leading scholars it furthermore pinpoints the key ideas in big data research.
This book is a collection of scholarly investigations into computer-aided methods and practices. While several contributors offer essays representing their skills, methods and exemplary research projects, others reflect on the sensibilities and competencies that scholars need to develop in order to study contemporary culture through data. Together they make a volume that will stimulate and engage humanities scholars via their perspectives on debates and reflections on the theory and practices of digital data research.
Based on Cabeza de Vaca’s La Relación 1542 manuscript, this paper analyzes how, during his castaway period, his discourse constructs the nature of his captivity in contrast to that of the African slave. By utilizing Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the superaddressee—who in a dialogue subordinates all to its contextual definition—this paper reveals how Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative interprets his slave category in contrast to that of Africans.
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