Week 2: Representation and Misinterpretation

In regards to this week’s topic, I stand with a strong negative opinion on Christopher Columbus and his effects on the Americas. I have been educated, and personally believe, that Columbus’s colonial ‘conquest’ and ‘claim’ over the Americas is un-doubtfully wrong, regardless of whether his voyage to the Americas was a mistake. 

However, after watching Week Two’s video, my perspective on Columbus’s story has been muddled due to his personal recounts. As Jon outlined, Columbus wasn’t a colonizer but an explorer, and was unaware of the effects his voyage would have on the world after his death. His intentions were never to conquer but to map, not to claim but to explore. Furthermore, the colonizers came after Columbus left but he was the one that paved the way. Thus, the context of Columbus’s personal history renders the content of the colonial aftermath more complex. It makes one wonder; Does unawareness always grant innocence?

Yet, I find it impossible to state that Columbus had no hand in the complication of the Latin American narrative. In a sense, Columbus began Latin America’s colonial story with his explorer logs. I have a firm belief that the structure and function of the explorer or sailor’s log has always directly attributed to colonialism, whether the author meant their accounts to cater to that or not. Jon mentions in his final paragraph that, “Columbus’s text battles with a fundamental gap between the thing itself and the means he has to represent it” (Beasley-Murray). As I explored briefly in my last post, I believe a large part of history is the exchange of information between different parties, or in other words, storytelling. Furthermore, an influential aspect that affects our world’s ongoing history is the representation and misinterpretation of information in stories or recounts. In Columbus’s records, he took on the gruelling task of representing a drastically different culture with his own language and logic. Since his audience was his own culture, he attempted to describe a new world in relation to what he already understood. Through this process of the explorer’s log, without knowing it, Columbus’s words set a president understanding of a foreign culture in relation to a colonized state; Thus ’Other’ing the Americas. His original efforts to bridge worlds, ultimately caused a communicative divide due to the use and understanding of language.

Jon’s closing lines, “Latin America induces in a particular way an anxiety about our inability to communicate, even to say what things are” (Beasley-Murray), poses an array of questions surrounding the representation of cultures; What is a truly respectful representation of a different culture and people? Is it in the author’s language or the cultures’? Does it matter? Should representation even be considered? Or should we only learn to understand a culture through translation? 

With the lecture concluded and my mind wandering, my thoughts on Christopher Columbus have been uprooted in some senses and burrowed deeper in others. Although Columbus may not have meant to colonize the Americas with his exploration voyage, I believe he was ignorant to have not foreseen such a future.