The Legacy of Christopher Columbus in the Americas: New Nations and a Transatlantic Discourse of Empire by Elise Bartosik-Vélez

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Legacy of Christopher Columbus in the Americas: New Nations and a Transatlantic Discourse of Empire by Elise Bartosik-Vélez John C. Havard (bio) Bartosik-Vélez, Elise. The Legacy of Christopher Columbus in the Americas: New Nations and a Transatlantic Discourse of Empire. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2014. In her insightful comparative study The Legacy of Christopher Columbus in the Americas: New Nations and a Transatlantic Discourse of Empire, Elise Bartosik-Vélez addresses a set of seemingly confounding questions: “Why is the District of Columbia, the capital of the United States, named after Christopher Columbus, a Genoese explorer commissioned by Spain who never set foot on the future US mainland? Why did Spanish Americans in 1819 name the newly independent republic ‘Colombia’ after Columbus, the first representative of the Spanish Empire from which political independence was recently declared?” (1). The answers to these questions lie, she contends, in Columbus’s longstanding association with empire, a connection Bartosik-Vélez establishes by examining several literary traditions. This relationship also explains contemporary antipathy towards Columbus amongst progressives, who naturally view the explorer with suspicion given their opposition to new forms of empire such as the globalization of capital. The association between Columbus and empire amongst British and Spanish American patriots, Bartosik-Vélez argues, is not independent of earlier understandings of the explorer. In fact, as she explains in Chapter One, “Columbus’s Appropriation of Imperial Discourse,” Columbus himself is largely responsible for the articulation. Intuitively perceiving the appeal to Ferdinand and Isabella of what in early modern Spain were the related concepts of universal Christian dominion and the translatio imperii et studii (the western transmission of empire and culture), Columbus sold his enterprise to Spanish powerbrokers as a way to expand the nation’s Christian empire. These imperial concepts had a long history in the rhetoric of the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula, being observable, for instance, in the writings of Alfonso X. The draw held by promotion of Spanish ascendance had become especially potent within the court of the Catholic Monarchs during the heady days of the siege of Granada. As Bartosik-Vélez illustrates through readings of, on the one hand, Columbus’s writings and, on the other, official court documents pertaining to his voyages, the crown did not accept the explorer’s self-representation until it became politically expedient to do so. As such, it makes sense to think of Columbus as the progenitor of the Columbus-empire concept. After his fall from grace, Columbus persisted in this self-construction but also [End Page 81] appropriated prophetic and apocalyptic traditions in fashioning himself a martyr whose dutiful efforts establishing Spanish power went unappreciated by the crown. Columbus was an autodidact who based this self-portrayal on popular religious perceptions of Spain’s role in world affairs. Later literati would follow his lead by developing a more nuanced connection between the explorer and the literary canon pertaining to translatio imperii et studii. These propagation efforts are the subject of Chapter Two, “The Incorporation of Columbus into the Story of Western Empire.” In particular, in the earliest portions of his De orbe novo, Peter Martyr portrayed Columbus as a new Aeneas, another traveler from the East who would establish a glorious empire in the West. While Martyr later distanced himself from this characterization after Columbus lost favor with the court, Martyr’s account compelled later writers who looked to classical antiquity and early modernity for illustrations of the necessity of spreading empire and culture in the New World. The Columbus story would offer especially fertile soil for writers of epic, the paradigmatic form for elevated stories of imperial origins. In particular, Bartosik-Vélez argues, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Anglo- and Spanish American revolutionary leaders and post-revolutionary architects of national identity would take up this association between Columbus and empire. Bartosik-Vélez examines these contexts in Chapters Three and Four, respectively titled “Columbus and the Republican Empire of the United States” and “Colombia: Discourses of Empire in Spanish America.” These chapters are the book’s centerpiece. Here, Columbus provides a lens through which Bartosik-Vélez examines “how American representations...