Sinking Columbus. Contested History, Cultural Politics, and Mythmaking during the Quincentenary (review)

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 249 Sinking Columbus. Contested History, Cultural Politics, andMythmaking during the Quincentenary University Press of Florida, 2000 By Stephen J. Summerhill and John Alexander Williams On or around October, 12, 1947—fitst grade, P.S. 230, Brooklyn, NY.—I acquired rwo mythic verities that in some fashion accompany me inro the third millenium. First, Columbus discovered America. Second—and this was brought home to us by our Principal, JosephineT. Grilli,— Columbus Day was an Italian holiday. I bring this up as an example of schoolings efficacy in both the configutation and the erasure of historical memory, and because it is precisely this marshy terrain of contested history and ethnic particularism rhat Sinking Columbus traverses. What and how we remember or are taught to remember, and what we do about it once we have learned rhe lesson, are matrers fraught with complexity. Les lieux de mémoire, to invoke Pierre Noras felicitous exptession, are many and diverse and how they are constituted concerns not only historians but all scholars and critics who aspire to histoticize. Consciously or not, every polity portrays itself both in its monumentalized places of memory and in more alearory commemorations. Republican France, in imitation of Rome, created a Pantheon, sacralizing its great men in the crypt of the superb mid-eighteenth-century neo-classic temple, Sullerot s Ste. Geneviève, where, biological realities of farherhood aside, a plaque proclaims rhe Revolutions right to choose its forbearers. Byway of contrast, in the Valle de los CaÃ-dos the Franco regime could manage norhing better than a Counter-Reformation theme park. For Americans these things ate nearly always difficult, complicated , buffeted by contention, but occasionally we get it exacdy right, as in Maya Linh s wall where a generation is entombed. Sometimes, however, we are unable to get it at all, and that is the story that Summerhill and Williams tell. Although there is a chaptet on Spain's 1992 commemorarion, as well as one on Iraly and Latin America (5 and 6 respectively), the chief focus is the United States, beginning with the Quincentenary Jubilee Commission engendered by Congress and signed into existence by Mr. Reagan in 1982. Virtually from the outset the Commission foundered on rhe shoals of contested history and ethnic particularism. In late twentieth-century America the notion of discoverywas far from universally accepted, and both Latinos and Native Americans make it clear that Columbus and the myths attached to him were no longer rhe sole purview of Italian-Americans. The authors, one of whom, John Williams, served briefly as direcror of rhe Commission, have some inreresting insights on the ways historical meanings become matters of contention, as well as on ethnicity and its political and ideological ramifications. Their intimation that "the contested history upon which the official commemorations foundered are whar gave the Quincentenary its enduring positive value" (A) is echoed thtoughout the book, as is the idea that: [...] the 1992 Quincentenary succeeded because it failed. Planners set out to celebtate an imperial past but found themselves confronting difficult questions about the rise of colonialism , the destruction of native American societies, and the disruption of biological habitats throughout the globe. (5) Summeihill and Williams make some important observations on rival ethnicities, the different paradigms of ethnicity in contemporary America and their consequences for the celebration of the vittual non-celebration of the Quincentenary (108/^). The authots also have some interesting things to say about the notion of Columbus's voyages and the colonization of the Americas as a series of encounters, the buzz wotd that stood in for discovery (1 \6seq). It would be reasonable to conclude from the evidence the authots furnish that by the last two decades of the twentieth century we had outgrown the hoary official myths of my childhood, but we had not gotten beyond our contestatory zeal and our particularisms to the political and ideological tasks of replacing them with a consistent historical vi- 250 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies sion. Summerhill and Williams argue in Chapter 7, theit "Conclusion," that the events and nonevents of 1992 mark a paradigmatic shift, "our postmodern shift from personality to process" (193) and, further, drat " [p...