Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism (Volume 11) (Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory

by José Rabasa

In Inventing America, José Rabasa presents the view that Columbus’s historic act was not a discovery, and still less an encounter. Rather, he considers it the beginning of a process of inventing a New World in the sixteenth century European consciousness. The notion of America as a European invention challenges the popular conception of the New World as a natural entity to be discovered or understood, however imperfectly. This book aims to debunk complacency with the historic, geographic, and cartographic rudiments underlying our present picture of the world.

Genres: History

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Jose Rabasa teaches in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. His publications include: Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism (1993); Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest (2000); and Without History: Subaltern Studies, the Zapatista Insurgency, and the Specter of History (2010).