ABSTRACT
The very name ‘America’ to refer to the regions between the North Pole and Tierra de Fuego is the female version of Italian seafarer Amérigo Vespucci’s (1454-1512) first name, who is supposed to have been the first to circle the Brazilian coast in 1501 and to refer to the conquered spaces as a new continent. 1 This feminization of the name suggests that the colonial project is built upon an implicit gender dimension and the colonial hierarchy justified and made intelligible through racialized gender hierarchies. When speaking about America or the Americas, it is indispensable to take the historical becoming and construction of the region into account, which has from the outset been marked by Eurocentric projections and asymmetrical circulations of power, knowledge, and representation. Mexican author Octavio Paz (1950) has famously elaborated on the imaginary function but also the related colonial power of the concept of America. Paz defines ‘America’ as a discourse rather than a geographic entity: “[L]o que llamamos América . . . [n]o es una region geográfica, no es tampoco un pasado y, acaso, ni siquiera un presente. Es una idea, una invención del espíritu europeo.” [What we call America is not a geographic region, nor is it a past and, maybe, not even a present. It’s an idea, an invention of the European spirit.] (Paz 183, my translation).
