The Legacy of Christopher Columbus in the Americas: New Nations and a Transatlantic Discourse of Empire by Elise Bartosik-Vélez (review)

Elise Bartosik-Vélez opens The Legacy of Christopher Columbus in the Americas: New Nations and a Transatlantic Discourse of Empire with an intriguing question that several professors of U.S. literature and U.S. history have posed to their students: “Why is the District of Columbia, the capital of the United States, named after Christopher Columbus, a Genoese explorer commissioned by Spain who never set foot on the future US mainland?” (1). Rather than providing an immediate answer, Bartosik-Vélez asks a second question: “Why did Spanish Americans in 1819 name the newly independent republic ‘Colombia’ after Columbus, the first representative of the Spanish Empire from which political independence was recently declared?” (1). This pair of questions foreshadows the comparative model that Bartosik-Vélez follows throughout this book and highlights, from the outset, both the significance of this approach and the importance of examining difference rather than similarity in this comparative study on Columbus’s New World legacy and its connections to empire

In her introduction, Bartosik-Vélez gives a nod to recent studies of empire in the Americas and acknowledges how “‘new imperial’ and ‘New Americanist’ scholarship has created a better understanding of the US nation as an empire” (7), but she notes that studies on Columbus are still “impeded by nation-centric methodologies” which she hopes to avoid by examining “the supranational contexts in which the meanings of Columbus have been constructed” (8). She accomplishes this goal in four ways: (1) by offering a detailed reading of Columbus’s career and his own “appropriation of imperial discourse” (15); (2) by exploring the ways in which European writers and historians wrote Columbus into “the narrative of translatio imperii et studii” or the accepted story of empire’s and civilization’s movement westward (45); (3) by juxtaposing Columbus’s legacy in the United States with his legacy in Spanish America; and (4) by showing how certain figures—particularly some of the founders of Spanish American independence—grew up with a specific image of Columbus but also learned, while they traveled to the United States and Europe, how other nations employed a different Columbus myth. Bartosik-Vélez argues that “[t]he embrace of Columbus” by young nation-states in both North and South America reveals their distinct “ideological imperial underpinnings” (2). In what becomes the United States, empire meant territorial expansion, while in la Gran Colombia (primarily modern-day Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador), empire functioned as rhetoric that described this region’s future in terms of the grandeur linked to Rome and other empires of the past. Columbus functioned as a powerful symbol for both of these understandings of empire.

The book’s first two chapters provide the historical scaffolding surrounding Columbus himself that becomes necessary for the arguments Bartosik-Vélez makes about his legacy in the Americas in her lengthier third and fourth chapters. In Chapter 1, she convincingly argues that Columbus was the first person to describe his enterprise as a part of the Spanish Crown’s broader strategy of creating a Christian empire, and she demonstrates how the Crown initially ignored but then adopted these descriptions of Columbus’s voyages. Bartosik-Vélez suggests that Columbus was savvy enough to read himself into Spain’s particular imperial discourse even though it appears that he was unaware of the translatio imperii tradition. In Chapter 2, Bartosik-Vélez shows how both Columbus’s contemporaries and later European writers brought him into the translatio imperii narrative as a real-life Aeneas who accomplished for Spain the same type of westward transplanting of empire that Virgil ascribes to Aeneas in the Aeneid. She emphasizes how two of the earliest interpretations of Columbus as Aeneas—the reappearance of the woodcuts of Columbus’s ships, which had originally appeared on the 1493 edition of...