Explores the myth of Christopher Columbus in the US across poetry, popular culture (TV, music), and material culture (statues, monuments), with a focus on Columbus as a key site of ethnic and racial identity formation in the US. Black diasporic and Indigenous perspectives are placed in conversation with those of Italian Americans--a group that has historically been a limit-case for the equation of Europeanness with whiteness. Students will deepen their understandings of the multiplicity and contested nature of ethnic and racial identities, as they emerge from and contribute to foundational myths and their meanings over time.

During the summer of 2020, public confrontations over the memory of Christopher Columbus re-emerged, as they have ever since his earliest public commemorations in the US began in 1792. Like confederate monuments, during the mass uprisings of 2020, Columbus statues became sites of fierce local contestations across this country. To name just two of several: in Philadelphia, PA, some Italian American ‘defenders’ of Columbus squared off with protestors marching in solidarity with BLM and the Indigenous communities that were decimated as a direct result of what Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot has called Columbus’ fateful ‘stumb[ling] on the Bahamas’ in 1492. In Richmond, VA, once capital of the Confederacy, protestors toppled a statue of Columbus into a lake in Byrd Park. While these events may appear to observers as yet another instance of two competing visions of American history (one ‘top-down,’ white and Eurocentric, another ‘bottom-up,’ non-white and inclusive), the figure of Columbus in the US contains a much more layered and ambivalent history, which serves as an excellent case study in how the past is a concept that is inseparable from the present. This course thus takes up the figure of Columbus in order to explore to what degree what we consider past (as individuals, as collectivities) is by no means an inert set of ‘facts’ located ‘out there’ waiting to be ‘discovered.’ As the most recent round of monument debates attest, despite his never having set foot here, the myth of Columbus is alive and well in the US. This course considers Columbus less as an historical personage (be he genocidal villain or heroic explorer) than as a multiple and contradictory site of meaning that is deeply entangled with histories of ethnic and racial identity formation in the US (and beyond). Rather than a comprehensive history of the man and his deeds, we will take up a selection of the many powerful myths and contestations over meaning he has generated. To name just a few such myths and contestations: the idea of the ‘discovery’ of a ‘New World,’ Columbus as a symbol of Italian American and/or Catholic identity, and/or Columbus as a perpetrator of indigenous genocide, or his arrival in the Caribbean as a key turning point in the development of transatlantic slavery. As historian Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor recently put it, “You don’t get to 1619 without 1492.” Taking our cue from Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s incisive claim that ‘history’ is produced more often outside of academia than within it, we will explore several of “the overlapping sites where history is produced”—from the literary, musical, and cinematic imaginations to history books, public expositions, fairs, and monuments; from the national calendar to the elementary school classroom. (19) Columbus will be studied as text—as a web of words and meanings at once imaginary and real, fantasy and fact, literary and historical; as event—the significance of 1492 as a world-historical turning point that brought previously disconnected parts of the globe together within the same orbit of imperial power; as material object—as a monument to one collective identity (Italian American) at the expense of another (the Taíno and other Indigenous peoples); and as symbol—as dispersed but very local struggles over monuments, murals, and the names of local, state and national holidays. Because of the vastness of the impact of 1492 on world history, we will limit our attention to the figure of Columbus’ significance for identity formation in the United States, as considered from Caribbean, Indigenous, and European perspectives.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills