Narrative Circuits of New World Copper

2020 ◽  
pp. 165-196
Author(s):  
Allison Margaret Bigelow

In adapting a variety of printed forms to convey their faith in untried sources of imperial wealth, colonial writers, reformers, and projectors shaped the malleable possibilities of copper into creative narrative mediums. As they told and retold stories, their own and others’, such writers build an iterative archive of maps, reports, and “true relations” that redefined the meaning of experience, eyewitness testimony, and knowledge of metals in the colonial Americas. This chapter opens the section on copper by analyzing Hernando de Soto’s search for copperworks in La Florida, as inspired by Spanish conquistador Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, narrated by Portuguese footsoldier o Fidalgo de Elvas, and translated by English polymath Richard Hakluyt.

Author(s):  
Bianca Batista ◽  
Luiz Montez

This study’s aim is to analyze the discursive construction of Brazil in the chronicle of Pero Gândavo, História da Província Santa Cruz que Vulgarmente Chamamos Brasil (1576) and in the travel collection of Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Trafqques of the English Nation (1589-1600). Printed books played a crucial role during the sixteenth century once the editors built a history of the new-found lands in accordance with their reigns’ economic and ideological interests. For Gândavo, the chronicle assured the Portuguese possession over Brazil whereas for Richard Hakluyt, the travel collection denied Iberians’ kings sovereignty over the New World and extolled the English maritime enterprise in the Americas, especially in the lands not effectively colonized by the Iberians. We suggest that the printed book was a stage in which the European countries struggled for the riches of Americas.


2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 219-247
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Burzyńska

AbstractThe Tempest is the only play in the Shakespearean canon that is open to a purely “Americanist” reading. Although Prospero’s island is located somewhere in the Mediterranean, numerous critics claimed that it deals with the New World (Hulme & Sherman 2000: 171). The paper revisits the existing interpretations, focusing on the turbulent relationship between Prospero and other inhabitants of the island: Caliban, Miranda, and Ariel. In the article I propose a rereading of their relation in the spirit of Friedrich Nietzsche’s perspectivism, utilising Nietzsche’s key philosophical concepts like the Apollonian/Dionysian elements and der Übermensch (the overman). In his vast canon, Nietzsche refers to Native Americans only once and in passing. However, his call for the revaluation of all values seems to be an apt point of departure for a discussion on early colonial relations. Nietzsche’s perspectivism enables to reread both the early colonial encounters and character relations on Shakespeare’s island. Hence, in an attempt at a “combined analysis”, the paper looks at Prospero as the potential overman and also offers a reading of the English source texts that document early encounters between the English and native inhabitants of North America (Walter Raleigh, Richard Hakluyt, Thomas Harriot, Robert Gray).


2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-269
Author(s):  
DAVID W. JOHNSTON

ABSTRACT: Richard Hakluyt in 1582 published the names of certain commodities found in the New World from reports of French sixteenth-century explorers. The commodities included a compiled list of birds, the earliest known from North America.


Author(s):  
María del Carmen Gómez Galisteo

Spanish conquistador Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and British explorer John Smith went to the New World for different reasons but both shared the experience of being a captive to the Native Americans. After their return to Europe, both of them undertook the task of putting pen to paper to describe their New World experiences so as to inform their fellow countrymen. Writing in different countries and separated by a century of colonial discoveries and experiences, nevertheless, they encountered very similar difficulties in being trusted by professional historians. Both had to strive in order to be regarded as authoritative and valid sources of knowledge about a continent where they, contrary to most historians, had actually traveled to and lived in. This essay examines what their problems were and the strategies they made use of in order to persuade their readers of their trustworthiness.


2009 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 809-858 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Boruchoff

AbstractThis essay examines the didactic intent of historical works that modern critics, under the influence of a later, especially Victorian, view of English history, have construed as unalloyed propaganda for Protestant England in the pursuit of empire and in its rivalry with Catholic Spain. Careful analysis of the editorial practices of Richard Hakluyt (ca. 1552–1616) reveals that he and others of his generation instead employed patriotic conceits, such as the claim to God's Providence and protection, in a more complex and circumspect manner: as both encouragement and a corrective to national endeavor and as a yardstick against which to measure what was actually done.


Text Matters ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 320-331
Author(s):  
Zbigniew Maszewski

Published in 1542, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s La relación is a chronicle of the Pánfilo de Narváez’s 1527 expedition to the New World in which Cabeza de Vaca was one of the four survivors. His account has received considerable attention. It has been appreciated and critically examined as a narrative of conquest and colonization, a work of ethnographic interest, and a text of some literary value. Documenting and fictionalizing for the first time in European history the experience of travelling/trekking in the region which now constitutes the Southwest in the United States, Cabeza de Vaca’s story testifies to the sense of disorientation, as well as to the importance of psychological and cultural mechanisms of responsiveness and adaptability to a different environment. What allows the Moroccan-American contemporary writer Laila Lalami to follow that perspective in her book The Moor’s Account (2017) is an imaginative transfer of the burden and satisfaction of narrating the story of the journey to the black Moroccan slave whose presence in the narratives of conquest and exploration was marginal. In Lalami’s book, Estebanico becomes the central character and his role is ultimately identified with that of a writer celebrating the freedom of diversity, one who survives to use the transcultural experience of the past creatively in ways well suited to the needs of the current moment.


2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kinahan Cornwallis
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