Imagining the Americas in Print Books Maps and Encounters in the Atlantic by MICHIEL VAN GROESEN (original) (raw)
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From 13 to 15 December 2012 the fourth bien-nial conference of the European Early Ameri-can Studies Association (EEASA) was held at Bayreuth University, Germany, under the title " Empire and Imagination in Early Ameri-ca and the Atlantic World (15th – 19th centuries) ". The EEASA aims to foster international collaboration between Early America-nists throughout Europe and the US. As such, it provides a multilateral European alternative for the practice of early American history an increasingly international field-different from normal bilateral relationships between individual Europeanists and scholars and institutions in North America. In continuation of this goal the EEASA board invited historians and specialists of art history, literature, music and theater to Bayreuth for a trans-disciplinary reconsideration of " empire " in early North America, but also in the Caribbean, by bringing together the terms of " empire " and " imagination ". Key...
Papers of The Bibliographical Society of Canada, 2001
Books in Review / Comptes rendus the book or manuscript) and one or two are so small that the writing is legible only with a magnifying glass. The General Index also needs attention. Taking a few pages of the text at random, on page 87, we find the names of Geerte Groote and Johan Scutken, neither of whom is included in the index, to say nothing of the Devotio moderna, and Richard Rolle, whose name appears on this page as well as on pages 84-86. On page III we find the Madrid bookseller Alonso G6mez, who does appear in the index, cheek by jowl with Francisco L6pez the Elder, who does not. And where are Francisco de Cormellas, Pedro de Robles, Juan de Villanueva, Juan de Escobedo, and so on? The compilation of an index is undoubtedly an affair of dull diligence, but it remains essential, and it is even more essential for a collection of papers as rich and varied as we have here. May we hope that the index to the third volume will be more detailed and more comprehensive? But all in all, this is a splendid compilation: erudite, well written, well researched, well annotated, and well presented. For those interested in the early history of the printed Bible it is an essential reference book, full of fascinating information, and a credit both to its learned contributors and its meticulous editors.
Utopian Canvas: Visionary Aspects of Early English-American Literature, 1497-1705
2005
On October 11, 1492, after more than a month at sea, a sailor on the Spanish ship Pinta spotted land, much to the relief of all aboard. Before the day was over, Admiral Christopher Columbus' s boat would leave the fleet for the island of Guanahani, known today as Watling Island/San Salvador in the Bahamas. In editing Columbus's journal entry from that day, Bartolome de Las Casas wrote, "Immediately some naked people appeared and the Admiral went ashore in the armed boat" (Columbus 53). On the island, Columbus reportedly saw lush surroundings, with a large lake in the center, and wrote that all was "delightfully green." He noted that none of the island's inhabitants were over thirty years old, and all were "very well built with fine bodies and handsome faces." The text tells us they were a friendly, innocent people, and that some wore a piece of gold in their pierced noses. Columbus and his party remained with them until the afternoon of the next day. Within that interval of time, or shortly afterward, Columbus composed the document that Las Casas would eventually edit, allowing us, centuries later, to apprehend Columbus's experience on Guanahani. 1 Through this composition, and the countless written representations of the New World that would follow it, sixteenth-century Europeans would begin to create their "America." The written representation is a powerful force. It can dictate a reader's perception. The words an eyewitness uses to record people, places, or events can determine how non-eyewitnesses understand and treat those things in physical space and
The Historian, 2008
The author of this study has written a fascinating book that examines two centuries of African American journeys to Africa. Using representative individuals for successive generations, James T. Campbell explains Africa's persistent hold on African Americans. The cast of characters includes the famous Langston Hughes and W. E. B. DuBois and the less known Ayuba Suleiman Diallo and William Henry Sheppard. Suspended between two continents and cultures, such men harbored ambivalence toward America, where they faced slavery, racism, discrimination, and lack of economic opportunity. At the same time, cultural echoes of Africa reverberated through their subconscious and the continent of their forefathers exerted a powerful and mysterious pull. The result was an amalgam of unrealistic expectations and journeys to Africa that rarely exceeded expectations. The long shadow of colonization and its tragic consequences stalk the book's pages. Liberia and, to some extent, Sierra Leone show there was a uniquely American quality about returning to Africa. Emigrants did not want to become Africans but wanted to create a society where they were free to enjoy the privileges denied them in North America. As Campbell archly observes, "early proponents of African emigration revealed just how profoundly American they were" (30). Even though Liberia was an obvious failure, colonization was fairly popular in the 1850s and it experienced resurgence thirty years later. That repatriation to a fetid and dangerous nation could hold such sway is testimony to the bleak prospects that African Americans faced in the United States. African American missionaries regarded Africa as particularly fertile ground for the spread of the Gospel. They were, perhaps, too successful, and pressure from European colonial officials forced American churches to limit the number of black missionaries. Campbell ironically notes that during the nadir of race relations in the United States, a movement emerged where African Americans tried to spread the blessings of Christianity and American civilization. Intellectuals and journalists went to Africa with high hopes of finding paradise or being automatically accepted in society. Langston Hughes, for instance, famously threw his books overboard as a symbolic jettisoning of European culture. Ironically, Africans assumed the light-skinned Hughes was a white man. The indifference of Africans was a startling eye-opener.
2009
Until the 1980s, the countless reports, logs, narratives, letters, classical odes, directions to travellers, instructions for colonists, guidebooks, sermons and autobiographical pot-boilers produced by mariners and merchants, adventurers and ambassadors, gentlemen rakes down on their luck, Puritans seeking the promised land, aristocrats seeking fool’s gold, paid hacks, penniless humanists, disgruntled settlers, tavern bores and oddballs with itchy feet between, say, 1500 and 1650 were textual regions that barely existed on the map of the literary canon and remained largely untrodden except by colonial or maritime historians and amateur antiquarians. But since the 1980s, “[s]tudies of travel writing, colonialism, and post-colonialism have moved from a virtually invisible periphery to the very centre of the humanities” (Hadfield 2001: ix). This sea change is due to a combination of factors: the postmodern expansion of the academic discipline of English Literature into Cultural Studies...
Culture & History Digital Journal
This article analyzes the links between the first travel accounts of the New World and the production of cartographic images of America in Guillaume Le Testu’s Cosmographie Universelle (1556). Produced in 1556 and dedicated to Admiral of France Gaspard de Coligny, the Norman pilot’s manuscript atlas was created in the context of growing French colonial interest in Terra Brasilis. The transposition of America’s founding narratives into cartographic images as presented in Le Testu’s Cosmographie is interpreted here as an act of translation lato sensu. The translation of the continent’s travel accounts in the strictest sense of the word, and the adaptation of New World information to new audiences and political contexts are also examined in the analysis of this manuscript nautical atlas.