From a historian’s perspective, this is a disappointing and somewhat confusing book. For one thing, despite the book’s grandiose title, the author actually offers very little about the development and evolution of Spanish historiography pertaining to the Americas. Nor is the topic of Eurocentrism—defined somewhat abstractly as “a pervasive condition of thought” (p. 4)—elaborated in any systematic fashion. The author fails to distinguish his particular view of the intellectual “invention” of America from that of other scholars who have addressed this important subject. O’Gorman appears briefly in the introduction, where his use of the term invention is faulted as being both too narrow and static; but virtually nothing is said about the work of either Elliott or Pagden, let alone David Brading’s First America (1991).
On the other hand, Inventing America does offer something approaching what might be described as a postmodern literary critic’s reading of sixteenth-century “colonial discourse.” Inspired in part by the usual crowd (Barthes, de Man, Derrida, Foucalt, Said, et al.), José Rabasa, who teaches literature at the University of Maryland, College Park, “deconstructs” various works that attempted to represent the American reality to a European audience. The book opens with a provocative and, at moments, quite lucid analysis of van der Straet’s engraving America, which depicts Vespucci (= Europe) awakening a naked woman in a hammock (= America) from her sloth. It then proceeds to engage Columbus, Cortés, González de Oviedo, Las Casas, and a number of the other writers. A final chapter deals somewhat confusingly with Mercator, the Relaciones geográficas, and various other cartographic representations of the New World. The only discernable thematic link between these essays is the notion of colonization as palimpsest; namely, the superimposition of a new reality on a preexisting indigenous structure. To quote the author: “Colonization may be linked to palimpsest in the mode of an icon superimposed on a parchment bearing no textual connection with the image” (p. 97).
The utility of the palimpsest metaphor as a guide to European thinking about America remains open to question, but this particular quotation at least affords a glimpse of the way Rabasa thinks and writes. As a literary critic, he principally concerns himself with extracting from his texts certain meanings that support his particular point of view. At the same time, he has little to say about the social realities in which these texts were originally produced and read. Making matters worse is his reliance on “lit-crit” jargon of the most impenetrable kind, together with a rambling, discursive style that frequently makes it impossible to follow the logic (such as it is) of his arguments. In this respect the book is self-indulgent to the extreme, and in the end I am not sure that I learned anything from having read it.
