Post/Colonial Toponymy: Writing Forward 'in Reverse'

Abstract

Amerigo Vespucci the voyager arrives from the sea. A crusader standing erect, his body in armor, he bears the European weapons of meaning … . Before him is the Indian ‘America,’ a nude woman … an unnamed presence of difference … the conqueror will write the body of the other and trace there his own history … . She will be ‘Latin’ America … initiated here is a colonization of the body by the discourse of power. This is writing that conquers. It will use the New World as if it were a blank, ‘savage’ page on which Western desire will be written. It will transform the space of the other into a eeld of expansion for a system of production. (Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History)