ABSTRACT
The “material turn” has brought into sharp focus the critical potential of objects and other types of physical phenomena. In this study I review its current articulations, particularly in relation to the study of colonialism and coloniality. Through the lens of material culture studies and new materialisms, this chapter examines how material objects shape representations of the Caribbean, and by extension of the New World, in Christopher Columbus’s Diario del primer viaje (1492–1493). It demonstrates how the study of material culture and materiality productively intervenes in familiar narratives of colonial possession, exchange, and domination that are present within Columbus’s text. The chapter concludes with a brief assessment of colonial object ontologies, thus suggesting how this interrelated material approach can further expand the methodological repertoire of colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies.
