Europe and its encounter with the Amerindians: An introduction (original) (raw)
Related papers
Western thought from a transcultural perspective: Decolonizing Latin America
2007
In "Questions of Conquest, What Columbus wrought and what he did not," the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa called the chroniclers "the first magical realists " (1990: 45-53). Consider, for instance, the narrative of Antonio Pigafetta, the Florentine navigator who accompanied Magellan on his first voyage around the world and kept a "rigorous account" of his journey through the South American continent that anticipates the literature of Gabriel García Márquez. Predictably, García Márquez quoted the following passage from Pigafetta in the lecture preceding his acceptance of the 1982 Nobel prize in literature:
Caribbean EmaNation(s): The Question of History in Alejo Carpentier's El Siglo de las luces i
Central to the Latin American novel is the question of history as both a thematic concern and a structural principle. At the heart of this fictional interest is the question of the cultural and historical identity of Latin America and its place in world history. The Discovery of America, or rather its appearance on the world stage, was both a revelation and a revolution, for, as O'Gorman's The Invention of America demonstrates, not only did it reveal the real picture of a/the world up to then conceived of as a relatively small " dwelling " place but, in so doing, also created a challenge to the dominant orthodoxies and ideologies. In other words, having made its appearance within a Western intellectual environment dominated by a Christian world view, America had to be represented and its existence accounted for in terms of the Biblical master narrative of the Creation and Redemption. Thus, because of the challenge they represented to such established truths as Adam's ancestry and the universal diffusion of Christ's teachings 1 , the Amerindians not only had, but were from the start called upon, to conform to a prescribed 2 type. The ideological stance which marks this first confrontation was crucial and determining in later " encounters " between Europe and what has come to be called the New World. Undertaken within a colonial enterprise, these encounters were essentially " monologic " (Hulme, 9) and, as such, they not only suppressed the native voice but also produced−or, to use O'Gorman's term, " invented " −an America commensurate with the expansionist needs of the growing European capitalist states. Hence the succession of conquests was accompanied and reinforced by an arsenal of historical pretexts and justifications legitimizing supposedly " Civilizing Missions. " These pretexts testify to the " competition among warring versions of 1 O'Gorman offers a detailed discussion of the relationship between the circumstances of the " Discovery, " the intellectual background of the period, and the evolution of the geographical conceptions of the world (esp. Chapter 2 " The Cultural Horizon " : 49-69). The main thrust of the discussion here is that Columbus' project was undertaken within and governed by an essentially Biblical conception which limited the world to the Orbis Terrarum (the Island of the Earth) precluding thus the possibility of any orbis alterius (antipodal lands) and, by extension, of the existence of other species of human beings, a view which represented a challenge to the Christian belief in the unique ancestry of Adam and Eve and in the extension of the Gospel " to the very ends of the earth. " This exclusion of the possibility of " new worlds " goes hand in hand with the idea of the world as both a dwelling place and a jail; as a " New World, " America held the possibility (until then denied by Christian dogma) of liberation and of conquest and mastery of the universe. In sofaras all scientific or religious institutions centered around, and were were invested in the church (of Rome), the latter constituted the main authority to which all accounts−of Columbus, the Spanish Monarchy, and the scholars supporting or challenging his claims−had to be made. 2 Because the Amerindians " lacked " alphabetic writing, not only were they written out of history (because they supposedly lacked " written " records) but, by the same token, their role was already written for them as pre-historical, implying a sort of pre-Beginning (Beginning being obviously synonymous with Western or/and Christian historiography). For a discussion of this and related issues, see Jara & Spadaccini's introduction to Amerindian Images, Peter Hulme's chapter on " Caribs and Arawaks, " Brotherston's " Towards a Grammatology of America, " and Mignolo's cited articles. A similar comment is made by Edward Glissant on the Hegelian hierarchy (ahistory, prehistory, History) whereby " literature attains a metaexistence, the all-powerfulness of a sacred sign, which will allow people with writing to think it justifiable to dominate and rule people with an oral civilization " (76).
Syllabus, 2013
What does literature do? How does it move the mind? Incite the imagination? In “The Mirror and the Mask,” Borges writes about a storyteller who tells three tales in three different literary modes. It is the argument of this course that form invites a certain manner of thinking. What does each form do? To contemplate this question further we will engage the historical, in particular the historical social circumstances that enable different forms. We will explore the transnational connections amongst different literatures, regions, and languages of the Americas, imagined collectively as the “New World.” We will study a range of fiction and nonfiction texts that explore issues of power, identity and history in colonial times and their effects in the postcolonial period. The comparatist perspective of the course invites attention to the historical contexts for the emergence of (trans)national New World identities and discussions of literary exchange and influence across the Americas. We will raise such questions as: How does literature play a role in constructing people’s visions of the world? In what traditions do the texts we read participate? How do those traditions overlap and differ? We will address these questions by reading several texts from the “New World,” situating the texts with respect to one another, as well as texts from the “Old World.” Our readings will explore themes such as discovery and conquest, “the discovery self makes of the other,” romance, revolution, slavery and dictatorships (Todorov 3). We will examine how particular literary texts and genres are shaped by and intervene in these histories.
Call for Papers – SYNCRONIZING HISTORY. The Transplantation of European Ideas in the Americas – International Conference: Palermo, 18-21 September 2024, 2023
In recent years, historians and translation scholars have progressively refined and intertwined their respective methods and approaches. The linguistic relationships that Europeans established with indigenous people in America cannot be compared with the translations between European languages; in the former case there were asymmetrical relations with people who did not possess a common conceptual framework such as that which had formed in Europe. As a consequence, European people believed that their duty was to explain rather than translate their ideas to local populations, and in some cases the transfer of ideas became an instrument for the colonization of indigenous people. But this is only one aspect of the transfer of European ideas in America. In general, Europeans had to adapt their ideas in the new context in which they lived, independently of their relationships with local populations. Just as the plants that the Europeans brought in America had to adapt to the new climates found there, so too were their ideas transplanted into the new American cultural climate, transforming themselves and taking new shapes. Though translations are our central concern, we also call attention to the importance of the transplantation of ideas and institutions between Old and New World via the same language. For example, an economic instrument such as the censo consignativo, which was widely used in Renaissance Europe, was transplanted in the Mexican economic environment and conditioned its development. Concepts and abstract ideas were transplanted from the Old to the New World in French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, and other languages, tracing cultural paths which deserve to be examined in their specificity. As the heterogeneous populations that had moved to America acquired new identities, the displacement of concepts, as it has been described, became ever more articulated. From the Eighteenth century onwards, the stabilization of European languages in the Americas opened up a new phase, thanks also to the work done by European exiles and scholars who moved to the New World. One need only think of the role German scholars played in the university culture of the United States between Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries. The general process of transplantation of European Ideas in the Americas has led to a synchronization of the history of the Old and New Continents and to the creation of what we call Western history. We invite proposals for papers which can help to shed light on the vast transplantation of European ideas in the Americas, paying particular attention to the methodological and theoretical aspects inherent in any analysis of this complex cultural movement. The members of the Scientific Committee and the organizers of the Conference to be held in Palermo in September 2024 aspire to create a space in which historians and translation scholars can meet themselves in fruitful ways; the conference will be the place for the creation of new approaches to history and translation or even, as recently argued, to history as translation. Indeed, historians and translators are invited to refine their methods and to intertwine their respective approaches, with the aim of reaching a new and more comprehensive knowledge of the process which led to the formation of Western history. Please, send all proposals to: Europe.Americas2024@gmail.com For further information: Europe.Americasinfo2024@gmail.com
Review of Cañizares-Esguerra's How to Write the History of the New World.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Translating Events, Glossing Experience: European Texts and American Encounters
Medievalia
References to the romancero and other literary texts stemming from the medieval tradition in early Spanish American historical documents have been interpreted in two principal ways: one linguistic, the other socio-juridical. On the one hand, they are seen as evidence that the romancero was fi rmly rooted in popular language and culture, specifi cally in the colloquial usage of the sixteenth century. On the other hand, that allusions to ballads and other belletristic references in these works, which belong primarily to the textual universe of the relaciones de méritos y servicios (often composed as self-serving justifi cations for questionable actions), function as a means of self-engrandizement. In this way authors conformed to discursive requirements that compelled them to portray themselves as valiant, when not heroic, subjects of the Crown. Th e current article proposes a third alternative; namely, that the literary references in sixteenth-century chronicles operate at another deeper epistemological level, and constitute hermeneutical strategies rooted in medieval reading and writing practices. Specifi cally, that they operate as glosses which process and organize knowledge in a way that allows for the assimilation of new knowledge-especially knowledge of the unknown-into the broader cultural context of the author and the reader. In them, we are able to discover at the level of language and rhetoric one of the basic gestures of colonialism: the urge to appropriate, inhabit the territory of, and dominate the Other through the Other's transformation into familiar images of the self.