Heinrich Heine on the Slave Trade: Cultural Repression and the Persistence of History

Abstract

by making its theme European-American relations.1 When, a little over two months later, Columbus set foot on an island in the Bahamas, probably San Salvador or Watlings, he inaugurated a connection between Europe and the so-called that would have profound effects on world history. In the Western World, particularly in the United States, the import of Columbus and his voyages has usually been reduced and subjected to a somewhat racist and certainly Eurocentric ideological hegemony. What most of us learned in school-both Europeans and Americans--and what was still considered the official position in celebrations in October of 1992 in the United States, is that Columbus was a valiant explorer who discovered a largely uninhabited hemisphere of the earth and opened it up to colonization and civilization from Europe. That Columbus was a greedy adventurer who bargained for ten percent of the proceeds from all future voyages along his route to India, that he was primarily interested therefore in enriching himself with gold and other treasures that would be stolen from the lands he reached, and that he was decisively wrong about so many geographical facts that even in his own day were widely known and scientifically confirmed-these features of his personality and beliefs have usually been neglected in his Eurocentric reception.2 The other great area that has been ignored in our haste to celebrate the connection between Europe and the New World is the import for non-Europeans of the socalled discovery. While Columbus's voyages opened up two continents for settlement, exploration, and raw materials for Europeans, and while the wealth found in the New