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Essential Vocabulary and Concepts
Battista Agnese, World Map (1544)
The Americas, or “The New World”
Pictorial Map of the Americas (c. 1930)
After visiting the Canary Islands and the Bahamas, during his first voyage in 1492 Christopher Columbus landed at Hispaniola. He mistakenly believed he’d discovered the subcontinent of India, and proceeded to establish the first European colonies in the New
World. Contrary to popular myth, Columbus never made it to the shores of the United States, though he did explore much of the Caribbean.
Map of Hispaniola, 1565
Hispaniola is now two different countries, Haiti and Dominican Republic. Spaniards brought African slaves to the island as early as 1501. The island was also colonized by the French. The island still – these many hundred of years later – bears the history of colonization
in its language, culture, food, and traditions.
Columbus’s interaction with the Taino-Arawak peoples was fraught. He kidnapped several native peoples, and returned to Spain with them. Europeans brought diseases with them, which were responsible for
decimating native populations. Colonizers subjected native peoples in the New World to conditions no better than slavery, and did not recognize that
the land was already occupied.
Colonization
Colonization
Indigenous Peoples
Contact Zones: social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are
lived out in many parts of the world today.
Cultural Exchange & Hybridity: the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone
produced by colonization.
Oral Tradition
What problems might occur in transferring the oral to the written?
• Performative aspects, such as gestures, vocal inflections, and group-response, are lost
• Transferring sounds to symbols• Things are always “lost in
translation”• The translator’s biases might get in
the way• How should the story look on the
page? As prose? Or as a poem?
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