Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492-1637 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492–1637 Gordon M. Sayre (bio) Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492–1637. Gesa Mackenthun. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. 370 pp. Mackenthun offers a provocative reading of early episodes of Spanish and English colonization in the Americas. The book acknowledges its models with frequent quotations from Tzvetan Todorov's The Conquest of America, Stephen Greenblatt's Marvelous Possessions, and Peter Hulme's Colonial Encounters, and its analysis of the metaphors of dispossession parallels in some ways Eric Cheyfitz's The Poetics of Imperialism. Happily, the book deserves the attention that those scholars have received. Metaphors of Dispossession includes three chapters on English colonial literature, focusing on the Hakluyts' editions of sixteenth-century conquest narratives, on Harriot's and Raleigh's writings about Roanoke and Guiana, on John Smith and Jamestown, and finally on the Pequot War. But it also features a fine chapter about the conquest of Mexico. Mackenthun reminds us that "the early colonial history of England in North America cannot be understood in its historical complexity without consideration of its discursive indebtedness to the colonial history of Spain in the Caribbean and Mexico" (71). After all, in the 1580s as the English colonized Roanoke, the resupply of that colony was fatally interrupted by the battle with the Spanish Armada. Mackenthun argues that English imperial theory did not simply cast the Spanish conquest as a negative model. Notwithstanding the 1583 translation of Las Casas's Brevissima Relacion, "the leyenda negra was publicly exploited in England hardly at all in the sixteenth century" (66). The foremost "metaphor of dispossession" in Mackenthun's eyes is not the Black Legend, but the stories of Europeans voyaging to America before Columbus, myths that had the effect of "turning the indigeous 'prehistory' into a prophetic anticipation of the arrival of the Europeans. The power of this prophetic narrative, which denies the existence of any history beside itself, extends into scholarly texts of our day and therefore calls for painstaking analysis and critique" (4). Mackenthun accordingly sets out to restore Native American historical agency. Yet the book's methodology remains skeptical about the recovery of such an indigenous voice [End Page 137] and the authenticity of the many speeches by Native leaders that appear in colonial texts. Mackenthun does not read these texts as sources for an ethnohistory of Native people's customs or legends. Instead, the book seeks to critique the ideological projections found in all accounts of Native beliefs: "The native mythologies they claim to describe, though certainly not consciously invented, are still to a large degree the product of European myths" (78–79). Richard Hakluyt promoted the legend that the Welsh Prince Madoc had sailed to America in the twelfth century. His sources, M. David Powel and George Peckham, both relied on the story of the migration of the Aztecs out of mythical Aztlan, as told by Cortes and Gomara, to support their claim that Madoc had traveled to America in 1170. In its Welsh folkloric sources, Mackenthun shows, there was no mention of the land that Madoc arrived in. Imperialist fantasy adopted the story to support an English desire to absorb America as it had annexed Wales in 1536. Having established this common source in Cortes's second letter to King Charles V, chapter 2 turns to the Spanish version of this imperial myth, the story of Quetzalcoatl's return. The Aztec culture hero, associated with the classical culture of the Toltecs and the city of Tula, had departed toward an exile in the east centuries before. Mackenthun argues that Cortes, looking to justify his rebellion from Velasquez and buttress his king's consolidation of church and state rule, concocted the tale that he was an emissary from the departed god and that Montezuma freely transferred his rule. The myth of Quetzalcoatl holds a fundamental place in Mexican national historiography, as significant as Malinche and Guadalupe. Mackenthun is certainly not the first to question it (Jacques Lafaye and Louise Burkhart have also done so), but she may be the first scholar to carry the controversy outside of Mexican scholarship and compare it...