In this work, Jose 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 16th-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 a complacency with the historic, geographic and cartographic rudiments underlying our present picture of the world. Rabasa traces the invention of America through four stages, conceived as a layered and interconnected network of meaning rather than a chronological succession of events. Each stage is centred on a specific text or group of texts: the diary and letters of Columbus; the letters of Cortes; the encyclopaedic taxonomies of Oviedo, Las Casas, and Sahagun, among other Franciscan ethnographers; and the "Atlas" of Mercator. Preceding his discussion of these four "moments" is a penetrating deconstruction of Stradanus's pictorial allegory of America (c.
1578), which weaves together many stock motifs - exotic flora and fauna, cannibalism, the passive, "feminine" Indian and the active, "masculine" European - generated by a century of ideological invention. Confronting the critical theories of Derrida, Foucault and de Certeau, among others, Rabasa locates a critical vantage point from which to view the ways European missionaries and men of letters invented America as "the Other" at the same time that they contributed to defining Europe as "the Self".