Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
after Magellan's trip, globes made their appearance, devices crucial to the
implementation of agreements such as the papal Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494
(Brotton 1999).
The European discovery of the Americas, likewise, initiated a momentous
material and discursive transformation. Queen Isabel, whose advisors were
well aware of the earth's spherical shape, initially feared Columbus had mis-
calculated its circumference; indeed, by relying upon Ptolemaic accounts, he
estimated the world to be one-third smaller than it actually was. Columbus's
narratives of the Discovery were drenched in medieval cosmological mean-
ings, including claims that the New World represented Paradise, or heaven on
earth, the site in which saved Christians would enter as promised by Genesis,
or, equivalently, a newfound Jerusalem (Zamora 1993). In one of history's
most colossal misunderstandings, Columbus remained convinced to his dying
day that he had found the Indies, and that Cuba was Cipangu (Japan).
Ensuing colonial discursive geographies projected the European experience
of time and space upon a global stage. Spanish imaginary geographies, for
example, portrayed the Atlantic as an extension of the Mediterranean, and
the conquest of the New World—the decisive spatial
fix of the sixteenth
century—as an extension of the
reconquista
long after the Moors had been
expelled from Iberia. Such analogies are understandable as a means to com-
prehend the in
fi
nitely expanded domains that came to be enclosed within the
European worldview. Moreover, these observations underscore how the dis-
courses used to make sense of time-space compression are inevitably palimp-
sests that intertwine the contemporary and the past, folding them into each
other in complex, contingent, and often unpredictable ways.
The ideological impacts of the discovery of the New World as its implica-
tions reverberated across Europe are di
fi
cult to exaggerate. The so-called
“shock of the primitive” not only fueled notions of racial hierarchy and
European superiority, but prompted heated debates as to what constituted a
human being, as exempli
ed in the attempts by Bartolomé de las Casas to get
the Spanish court to recognize the humanity of Native Americans. O'Gorman
(1961) suggests that the discovery of the New World accelerated the incipient
secularization of Western society; in his account, the Americas were not sim-
ply discovered but discursively invented, a process that obliterated the medi-
eval Christian worldview of a planet with three, and only three, continents
and accentuated the division between humans and nature (cf. Mignolo 1995).
Old habits die hard, however, and it took centuries for the tenacious earlier
mythology to let go: only when Bering's expedition in 1741 con
fi
rmed that
North America was indeed distinct from Eurasia did the medieval worldview
fi
fi
finally succumb. Cosgrove (2001:135) maintains that “As the true dimensions
of the globe, America's continental size, and oceanic space became recog-
nized, Europe's spatiotemporal centrality . . .
figured Asia in term of an
exotic past and the transoceanic West as an unformed future.” Kirby (1996:42)
takes this line of thought even farther, arguing “The reconception of the
world that allowed the newfound America to be conceived as a separate
fi
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