ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines European cinema, in its infancy, inherited the racist and colonialist discourse whose historical contours. The advent of colonialism inspired a retroactive rewriting of African history and its relation to classical Greek civilization. Bernal distinguishes between the 'ancient model', which simply assumed classical Greek civilization's deep indebtedness to both African and Semitic civilizations, and the 'Aryan model' which developed in the wake of slavery and colonialism. The same double-edged process of combined mystification and defamation that has operated in relation to Africa has also operated in relation to the pre-Conquest Americas. The conquista of the 'New World' was ideologically buttressed by the prejudicial discourses articulated during the long reconquista of Iberia. The Columbus story is crucial to Eurocentrism, not only because Columbus was a seminal figure within the history of colonialism, but also because idealized versions of his story have served to initiate generation after generation into the colonial paradigm.
