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

Genocide Though the concept of genocide was initiated in the mid-20th

century by Raphael Lemkin, acts of genocidal violence against indigenous groups frequently occurred in the Americas, Australia, Africa and Asia with the expansion of various European colonial powers such as the Spanish and British empires, and the subsequent establishment of nation states on indigenous territory.

According to Lemkin, colonization was in itself “intrinsically genocidal.”

Genocide, according to Lemkin, is a two-stage process. In the first stage the indigenous population’s way of life is destroyed. In the second stage, the newcomers impose their way of life on the minority group.

Imperial and colonial forms of genocide are enacted in two main ways, either through the deliberate clearing of territories of their original inhabitants in order to make them exploitable for purposes of resource extraction or colonial settlements, or through enlisting indigenous peoples as forced laborers in colonial or imperialist projects of resource extraction.

Genocide The UN definition, which is used in international law, is

narrower than Lemkin's, and states that genocide is “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members

of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions

of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

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.