The Discursive
Construction of Women in Las Amricas:
An Analysis of
Sixteenth-Century Print Culture
There is a lack of consensus on
what terms are best to use when speaking historically about the racialization
of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, particularly in light of the long career
of pan-American terms: Indian, American Indian, Native American, Red,
Aboriginal, First Nation, Indigenous, Amerindians, or any of their counterparts
in Spanish, French and Portuguese, (etc.), languages. Each emerged in a specific context and each has a particular
meaning associated with it, so its very difficult to use one of them at all
times in all contexts. As a result
a term may be more accurate or relevant depending on whats being discussed,
but for the purposes of this dossier I will use Amerindian to emphasize the
artificial, discursive construction of people in the Americas as one homogenous
group. Ill use Amerindian
to help lessen the confusion around the more historically accurate term
Indian, as that term was also used to describe people from India and even
Africa in the early sixteenth-century.
When I use Indigenous, it
is to signal the critical interventions people have made in claiming a
pan-Americas identity as a political strategy.
Also, when I use terms like the
New World, or Europe theyre always meant in scare quotes so as to destabilize
the way these terms have become naturalized as if true. It is important to remember, for
example, that these lands were only new to some people, certainly not the
people who lived here, and not even to those who had crossed the Atlantic
before 1492.
This article is, on a
broad level, about language, meaning and how we interpret the world we live in.
It is to understand how language
and actions come together to produce and define the objects of our knowledge
(such as Anthropological understandings of the human), and the exercise of
power in categorizing certain persons as particular 'types. But more
specifically, it is an analysis of early sixteenth-century representations of
women in the Americas, and how they were used to form the misguided understanding
of ontological, stratified, differences between Europeans, Amerindians,
Africans and Asians.
A central premise of this article
is that meaning is relational.
What this means in this context, is that narratives regarding Amerindians were constituted in relation with
other narratives, not only ones about Europeans, but also about Africans
and East Indians.
Let us be clear that this is a
moment in history where the idea of continents did not yet exist in the way
they do now. There was an ongoing
debate about land and water masses between different classical theories, but
none specified the continental scheme we now often take for granted.[1] There were a variety of world maps at
the time, but the one you see below seems to have had a special role in the
early rejection of Christopher Columbuss proposal to sail across the Atlantic.[2] It was a time when Europe was on the
economic periphery of Muslim Kingdoms and Chinese Empires.[3] In fact, it was only the wealth reaped
from the colonization of the Americas and the Atlantic slave trade that
facilitated Europes ascension in the global economy.
Engraving of the spheres of the earth and the water before
and after the congregatio acquae on
the Third Day of Creation, according to
Paul de Burgos who was influenced by Aristotle, Additiones (written in 1429), in Nicolai de Lyra,Postillae
Nicolai de Lyra super totam Bibliam cum additionabus, Nuremberg, 1481.
What is the
relationship between individual perceptions, such as those held by Spanish
colonists about the gender and sexuality of the peoples they encountered in the
Americas and Africa, and a representational system of contemporary
stereotypes? How did the notions
about cannibals, Amazons and sexual licentiousness that were so prevalent
at the time become an integrated part of European cultural perspectives of the
new world?
It so happens that the
book, as it emerged as a collection of bound papers mechanically reproduced
with words printed in ink, shares a historical temporality with
colonization. When
Portuguese explorers were embarking on the first voyages to southern Africa in
the early 1440s, Johann Gutenberg, a German goldsmith, among others were
busily working to perfect the reproduction of printed matter by mechanical
means.[4]
The first book to be
mechanically reproduced, the famous Gutenberg Bible, was published in
1452, eleven years
after the first voyage by Antam Gonalves to Western Africa with the direct
purpose of engaging in a slave raid.[5] News from
returning slave raiders, and the imaginations it sparked made for fascinating
storytelling. The print machine
would facilitate both the production of Eurocentric imaginings of the Americas,
Africa and the Orient, feeding colonists with myths of monsters and cannibals
where there were none, but also be used to print the religious texts needed for
converting the peoples of the Americas to Christianity.[6]
The emergence of the book and the
publication of popular texts such as the one focused on in this article, Paesi
Nouamente Retrovati, thus aided I argue, in the creation of an imagined community of
civilized, light-skinned, sexually chaste, Christians long before the
nationalisms of later centuries that Benedict Anderson discusses in his book Imagined
Communities.[7]