Amerindian Images and the Legacy of Columbus

“...offers a well-informed and academically creative reading of texts which foster the so-called colonial imaginary in relation to Spanish and Portuguese colonial enterprises in the Americas.” Guido A. Podesta

University of Wisconsin-Madison

The legacy of Columbus’s discovery of the New World and its subsequent colonization is a current focus of much historical investigation. Columbus himself continues to be a cipher like the signature he crafted for himself, a signature no one has been able to decode. What is certain, however, is that this signature symbolized the construction of a colonial imagery that is still operative and that the consequences of the violent encounter between the European and Amerindian civilizations are now being debated and reinterpreted.

Amerindian Images and the Legacy of Columbus examines the constitution of an Amerindian world of resistance against European cultural imperialism. The essays in this volume by literary critics, linguists, semioticians, and historians argue that in the long run the images constructed by the Amerindians to confront the consequences of their encounter with European culture will ensure the endurance of their own culture, that they modified rather than renounced their own imaginary to integrate the material ramifications of their conquest and Westernization. Amerindians in effect became their own Others, and in that process came to understand and accept the substantial alternity of the Other, ultimately realizing the impossibility of absolute assimilation.