Combining the insights of various academic disciplines as well as those of diverse national and ethnic cultures, this volume presents a rich variety of case studies and scholarly perspectives on the interplay of diverse cultures in the Americas since the European conquest.

Jenny Mander is an intellectual historian at the University of Cambridge, specializing in eighteenth-century France, the rise of the novel, colonial thought and early globalization. She has a special interest in the abbé Raynal, and is an editor of the new critical edition of Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes.

David Midgley is Professor emeritus of German Literature and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Writing Weimar: Critical Realism in German Literature, 1918-1933 (Oxford 2000), and his research is currently focused especially on the major works of Alfred Döblin.

Christine D. Beaule is Associate Professor of Latin American and Iberian Studies, University of Hawai¿i at M¿noa. Her research combines anthropological archaeology with the study of historical texts and is focused on the comparative impact of colonialism on material culture and indigenous sociopolitical organization in South America and the Philippines.

Introduction. Speculations. 1. Putting Tierra del Fuego on the Map 2. Sir Balthazar Gerbier's Utopian Dreams of the New World, 1649-1660 3. The Impossible Dialogue between Plato and Epicurus: José Manuel Peramás's Commentarius on the Paraguayan Missions Constructions 4. Translating Franciscan Poverty in Colonial Latin America 5. Italian Scientists in South America: Argentina as Constructed by Paolo Mantegazza and Pellegrino Strobel 6. Imagined Indigeneity in Alfred Döblin's Novel Amazonas (1937-1938) 7. Challenging Colonial Discourses: the Spanish Imperial Borderland in Chile from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century. Records of Appropriation 8. Native Artists and the Defense of Territory in Sixteenth-Century New Spain 9. A Thing of the Past: Representation, Material Culture, and Indigeneity in Post-Conquest Meso- and Andean South America 10. The Nationalization of the Ecuadorian Amazon Region in the Early Twentieth Century: The Salesian Outpost Adaptations and Conflations 11. Aristotelian Politics among the Aztecs: A Nahuatl Adaptation of a Treatise by Denys the Carthusian 12. The Poetics of Emulation in a Latin American Context: Towards a New Theoretical Framework 13. The Greco-Roman as an Arena for Conflict: Classical Reception, Popular Poetry and Power in Northeast Brazil 14. The 'Indians of Europe' in Sierra Morena: Reputation, Emulation and Colonization in the Spanish Enlightenment Buried Histories 15. Form and Decorations on Qeros and Unku: The Impact of Inka and Spanish Conquest on Material Culture in Settler Colonial States 16. Black Space Production in Andean Societies: How Africans and Their Descendants Shaped Lima's San Lázaro Neighborhood 17. Fashioning the 'Other:' The Foreign as Diplomatic Currency in the Sixteenth-Century Caribbean and in Europe 18. Imagining the Hispanic Past: The De-Mexicanization of California, 1880-1930. Legacies of Coloniality. 19. The Lure of the Andes: Peruvian Mountain Guides 'Made in Switzerland' 20. The Conquest in Cultural Memory: Peruvian Migrants in Europe 21. Our Grandmother's Looms: Q'eqchi' Weavers, Museum Textiles and the Repatriation of Lost Knowledge 22. Afro-Mexico: Images of the Indeterminate