In this fascinating book, Evelina Gužauskytė uses the names Columbus gave to places in the Caribbean Basin as a way to examine the complex encounter between Europeans and the native inhabitants. Gužauskytė challenges the common notion that Columbus’s acts of naming were merely an imperial attempt to impose his will on the terrain. Instead, she argues that they were the result of the collisions between several distinct worlds, including the real and mythical geography of the Old World, Portuguese and Catalan naming traditions, and the knowledge and mapping practices of the Taino inhabitants of the Caribbean. Rather than reflecting the Spanish desire for an orderly empire, Columbus’s collection of place names was fractured and fragmented – the product of the explorer’s dynamic relationship with the inhabitants, nature, and geography of the Caribbean Basin. To complement Gužauskytė’s argument, the book also features the first comprehensive list of the more than two hundred Columbian place names that are documented in his diarios and other contemporary sources.

This volume investigates outstanding figures and configurations of literary and cultural multilingualism on a transcontinental and on a global scale. Its first focus is on the both subcontinental and transcontinental Indies, on the oxymoronic figure of East West India and on the stirring 'relations through words' in Luso-Afro-Indian, Anglo-Indian, and Indo-European areas. The second focus is on the cross-cultural configuration of East and West shaped by some striking Sino-European and Sino-American events in early modern and modern times. A third issue concerns the glocal and globoglot 'people of paper' in a contemporary Californian town, and, lastly, the all-embracing, all-devouring ouroboros and other multi-lingual ophidians. (Series: poethik polyglott, Vol. 4) [Subject: Linguistics, Multilingualism]

Zwei Staaten unterschiedlicher sprachlicher und kultureller Prägung - Haiti und die Dominikanische Republik - teilen sich heute die Karibikinsel Hispaniola. In der Kolonialzeit war sie Schauplatz der ersten Begegnungen zwischen Indigenen und Spaniern und Spielball der Auseinandersetzungen zwischen europäischen Kolonialmächten. Plantagensystem und Sklaverei gelangten hier zu ihrer höchsten Blüte, bis die Haitianische Revolution und die Gründung des ersten unabhängigen Staats in Amerika das Kolonialsystem erschütterten. Die wechselvolle Geschichte der Insel spiegelt sich in vielschichtigen Sprach- und Kulturkontakten wider, die die karibische Sprachenlandschaft bis heute prägen und den Gegenstand des vorliegenden Bandes bilden. Die Beiträge beleuchten die frühesten indianisch-spanischen Sprachkontakte ebenso wie das Phänomen der Kreolisierung in Haiti, historische und aktuelle Austauschprozesse zwischen Spanisch und Kreol und die Weiterentwicklung dieser Sprachen in der Diaspora.

The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Ritual and Religion provides a comprehensive overview by period and region of the relevant archaeological material in relation to theory, methodology, definition, and practice. Although, as the title indicates, the focus is upon archaeological investigations of ritual and religion, by necessity ideas and evidence from other disciplines are also included, among them anthropology, ethnography, religious studies, and history. The Handbook covers a global span - Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, and the Americas - and reaches from the earliest prehistory (the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic) to modern times. In addition, chapters focus upon relevant themes, ranging from landscape to death, from taboo to water, from gender to rites of passage, from ritual to fasting and feasting. Written by over sixty specialists, renowned in their respective fields, the Handbook presents the very best in current scholarship, and will serve both as a comprehensive introduction to its subject and as a stimulus to further research.

Captives of Conquest is one of the first books to examine the earliest indigenous slave trade in the Spanish Caribbean. Erin Woodruff Stone shows how upwards of 250,000 people were removed through slavery, a lucrative business that formed the foundation of economic, legal, and religious policies in the Spanish colonies.

When Columbus arrived in the Americas there were, it is believed, as many as 2,000 distinct, mutually unintelligible tongues spoken in the western hemisphere, encompassing the entire area from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego. This astonishing fact has generally escaped the attention of historians, in part because many of these indigenous languages have since become extinct. And yet the burden of overcoming America's language barriers was perhaps the one problem faced by all peoples of the New World in the early modern era: African slaves and Native Americans in the Lower Mississippi Valley; Jesuit missionaries and Huron-speaking peoples in New France; Spanish conquistadors and the Aztec rulers. All of these groups confronted America's complex linguistic environment, and all of them had to devise ways of transcending that environment - a problem that arose often with life or death implications. For the first time, historians, anthropologists, literature specialists, and linguists have come together to reflect, in the fifteen original essays presented in this volume, on the various modes of contact and communication that took place between the Europeans and the "Natives." A particularly important aspect of this fascinating collection is the way it demonstrates the interactive nature of the encounter and how Native peoples found ways to shape and adapt imported systems of spoken and written communication to their own spiritual and material needs.

This first full-length study in English on seventeenth-century Italian travel writing enriches our understanding of an unusually fertile period for Italian contributions to the genre. The intrinsic qualities of this literature can now be grasped in terms of the larger question of cultural identity in Italy. For Hester, the specifically literary characteristics of Italian travel writing”including its humanism or Petrarchism”highlight the classic eminence throughout Europe of a prestigious tradition inherent to Italy, one compensating then for the peninsula's lack of a national political identity. Appeals to the cultural authority of that tradition represent a means of addressing and overcoming anxieties about the Italian subject's diasporic status during the "Golden Age" of European global colonial expansion. Self-funded travelers Francesco Carletti, Pietro Della Valle, Francesco Belli, Francesco Negri, and Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri are the major authors studied who journeyed through Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and America.