Refracted Images: The Canary Islands through a New World Lens: Transatlantic Readings

During the “Age of Exploration and Discovery,” the Canary Islands became an important Atlantic post for European colonial experimentation before the encounter with the New World. This event, in turn, changed forever the way Europeans wrote history and conceived of other cultures, which inevitably influenced the Old World. The Canary Islands, geographically at the midway of a transatlantic passage, a “contact zone” par excellence, appear in this book as an important symbolic locus of imperial transactions at the turn of the seventeenth century. Three works--a historiographic text by Alonso de Espinosa, an epic poem by Antonio de Viana, and a play by Lope de Vega, provide the main analytic corpus of this study. By reinventing and contesting the historical and cultural identity of the Canaries, these works illustrate how the islands become an alternative space of negotiation where Spanish imperial history could be exposed or mitigated. With an interdisciplinary angle and through a New World detour, this book seeks to fill an important void by re-mapping a far more inclusive and interdependent Hispanic Atlantic.