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happy conquistador day!
Oct. 12th, 2009 10:47 pmLucia sent me this text today: In 1492, Native Americans discovered Christopher Columbus lost at sea. What a loser!! Send 2 every1 if u dnt believe n Columbus Day!
And if not for that, I wouldn't have known it was Columbus Day. I immediately thought of the first essay I read for Colonial Encounters, "Good Day, Columbus" (from Silencing The Past: Power and the Production of History by Michel-Rolph Trouillot). I kept my course reader for a reason! But after work I had pilates, so I'm only getting around to typing it up now, and watch by the time I finish it won't even be Columbus Day anymore [Update: Yeah, it's not.]:
Prologue: For in the monumental efforts of the Portuguese state to catch up with a history now eclipsed by nostalgia, I saw the nostalgia of the entire West for a history that it never lived, its constant longing for a place that exists only in its mind... The West was America, a dream of conquest and rapture... Except that I was in Belem whence Europe's face looked no clearer than that of the Americas... Belem's steady effort to patch up its own silences did not reflect on Portugal alone. It spoke of the entire West - of Spain, France, and the Netherlands, of Britain, Italy, and the United States - of all those who, like Columbus, had come from behind to displace Portugal in the reshaping of the world. And as much as I did not like it... its spoke also of me, of all the lands disturbed by their cacophony.
( The West does not exist. I know. I've been there. )
And if not for that, I wouldn't have known it was Columbus Day. I immediately thought of the first essay I read for Colonial Encounters, "Good Day, Columbus" (from Silencing The Past: Power and the Production of History by Michel-Rolph Trouillot). I kept my course reader for a reason! But after work I had pilates, so I'm only getting around to typing it up now, and watch by the time I finish it won't even be Columbus Day anymore [Update: Yeah, it's not.]:
Prologue: For in the monumental efforts of the Portuguese state to catch up with a history now eclipsed by nostalgia, I saw the nostalgia of the entire West for a history that it never lived, its constant longing for a place that exists only in its mind... The West was America, a dream of conquest and rapture... Except that I was in Belem whence Europe's face looked no clearer than that of the Americas... Belem's steady effort to patch up its own silences did not reflect on Portugal alone. It spoke of the entire West - of Spain, France, and the Netherlands, of Britain, Italy, and the United States - of all those who, like Columbus, had come from behind to displace Portugal in the reshaping of the world. And as much as I did not like it... its spoke also of me, of all the lands disturbed by their cacophony.
( The West does not exist. I know. I've been there. )
