The
so-called ‘discovery’ of the New World by Christopher Columbus on October 12,
1492 opened the gates to European colonialism of other nations.
Through the
media and history books we are sometimes presented with the point of view of
the ‘brave’ European adventurer who fearlessly sets off for new ‘virgin’
territories, the Americas.
On the
other hand, the ‘natives’ are depicted, especially by many literary texts of
the past, as savage and primitive, like Shakespeare’s Caliban or Defoe’s
Friday.
But if we
reverse the point of view and take up the perspective of the not at all ‘primitive’
cultures who inhabited this continent, history turns out to be far less
romantic. Uruguayan writer and historian Eduardo Galeano has used a very
powerful image to describe the process of the conquest – which implied a
genocide as well as the destruction of the existing cultural, political and
economic systems: when Europeans arrived in the new Continent, the veins of the
Americas were fatally opened.
Source:
Thomson – Maglioni, Literary Links. Literature in time and space, Cideb, an old
Italian book 2000.
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