For centuries, historians have narrated the arrival of Europeans using terminology (discovery, invasion, conquest, and colonization) that emphasizes their agency and disempowers that of Native Americans. This book explores firsting, a discourse that privileges European and settler-colonial presence, movements, knowledges, and experiences as a technology of colonization in the early modern Atlantic world, 1492-1900. It exposes how textual culture has ensured that Euro-settlers dominate Native Americans, while detailing misrepresentations of Indigenous peoples as unmodern and proposing how the western world can be un-firsted in scholarship on this time and place.

For centuries, historians have narrated the arrival of Europeans using terminology (discovery, invasion, conquest, and colonization) that emphasizes their agency and disempowers that of Native Americans. This book explores firsting, a discourse that privileges European and settler-colonial presence, movements, knowledges, and experiences as a technology of colonization in the early modern Atlantic world, 1492-1900. It exposes how textual culture has ensured that Euro-settlers dominate Native Americans, while detailing misrepresentations of Indigenous peoples as unmodern and proposing how the western world can be un-firsted in scholarship on this time and place.

*Includes rare color images. This book demonstrates the evolution of Spain's conceptualisation of its enemies, from biblical and Roman times to the early modern period, and it also illustrates how this transformative discourse became exercised upon Spain by its own enemies in Europe. Each chapter contributes to the study of multiplicity as both a problem to be studied as well as a scholarly methodology that anticipates the structure of the problem. This book is divided into three thematic sections, the first of which establishes the medieval roots for representing Spain's early modern enemies. The two chapters that compose this section respectively explore the naming and visualization of an enemy that was almost entirely Muslim. The second section of this book contains two chapters that explore the textual and visual references to Islam in the Americas during the conquest and early in the period of colonization. The last section of this book contrasts the quality of information conveyed by archival and mass-produced texts. The first of two chapters notes that Muslims indeed did come to the Spanish Americas in the early modern period. The archival research prepared for this chapter contrasts with the mass-produced images and texts in the last chapter, and it is argued that different qualities of information are communicated by mass-produced, and therefore shaped, discourse, rather than by uncirculated, unarticulated texts. That is, out of the archives, a different picture of Islam in the Americas emerges. The final chapter examines how Spanish-authored chronicles became transformed through translation, and with the attachment of new illustrations, into propagandistic tools designed to undermine Spanish conquest and claims on land. This book identifies and illustrates the discourse imposed upon Spain's enemies, and demonstrates how other Europeans used that same discourse to de-Occidentalize, disparage and criticize Spanish activities in the early modern period. Each chapter explores the implications of textual and visual multiplicity while questioning the impact multiplicity has had on the conceptualization of the conquest in more modern times. Scholars of history and literature will appreciate different aspects of this book's arguments. The former will encounter in-depth and copious archival sources about the conquest and its related themes, whereas the latter will enjoy the text-image and literary analysis of those aforementioned sources.

This volume presents in-depth and contextualized analyses of a wealth of visual materials. These documents provide viewers with a mesmerizing and informative glimpse into how the early modern world was interpreted by image-makers and presented to viewers during a period that spans from manuscript culture to the age of caricature. The premise of this collection responds to a fundamental question: how are early modern texts, objects, and systems of knowledge imaged and consumed through bimodal, hybrid, or intermedial products that rely on both words and pictures to convey meaning? The twelve contributors to this collection go beyond traditional lines of inquiry into word-and-image interaction to deconstruct visual dynamics and politics-to show how images were shaped, manipulated, displayed, and distributed to represent the material world, to propagate official and commercial messages, to support religious practice and ideology, or to embody relations of power. These chapters are anchored in various theoretical and disciplinary points of departure, such as the history of collections and collecting, literary theory and criticism, the histories of science, art history and visual culture, word-and-image studies, as well as print culture and book illustration. Authors draw upon a wide range of visual material hitherto insufficiently explored and placed in context, in some cases hidden in museums and archives, or previously assessed only from a disciplinary standpoint that favored either the image or the text but not both in relation to each other. They include manuscript illuminations representing compilers and collections, frontispieces and other accompanying plates published in catalogues and museographies, astronomical diagrams, mixed pictographic-alphabetic accounting documents, Spanish baroque paintings, illustrative frontispieces or series inspired by or designed for single novels or anthologies, anatomical drawings featured in encyclopedic publications, visual patterns of volcanic formations, engravings representing the New World that accompany non-fictional travelogues, commonplace books that interlace text and images, and graphic satire. Geographically, the collection covers imperial centers (Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Spain), as well as their colonial periphery (New France; Mexico; Central America; South America, in particular Brazil; parts of Africa; and the island of Ceylon). Emblematic and thought-provoking, these images are only fragments of the multifaceted and comprehensive visual mosaic created during the early modern period, but their consideration has far reaching implications.