ABSTRACT
Early modern Europe was obsessed with borders. It found, imagined and manufactured new borders for its travellers to cross. It celebrated and feared borders as places or states were meanings were created and transformed. In early modern Europe, crossing a border could take many forms. Travelling inevitably involves crossing borders. When Christopher Columbus crossed the border between Europe and America he tore it up so that it could never be restored. Travel can, however, also reinforce existing borders and lead to the production of new ones. The exotic but also potentially dangerous proteanness, material and linguistic, of the New World is brought up short by the figure of the cannibal as the one sign in the colonial ‘contact zone’ that could not be consumed by the European traveller. Cannibalism created a space and at the same time provided the boundary for debates over the status of the indigenous population of the Americas.
