William O'Reilly | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4

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William O'Reilly | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492–1637. By Gesa Mackenthun. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. xii, 370 pp. $32.95, ISBN 0-8061-2953-0.)

"If we have a sense that culture is both invention and prescription, then History made of what actually happened in the past must surely describe what metaphors were made of clichés." Thus wrote Greg Dening in his 1995 book The Death of William Gooch: A History's Anthropology, as he struggled with the ambiguity of signs in the Pacific region. Gesa Mackenthun's Metaphors of Dispossession is no less ambitious a project and is virtuous in opening the early modern "ambivalent enterprise" in the Atlantic world to intense inspection. Riding the waves of De Manian poststructuralism and positivist historiography, Mackenthun's volume steers us through American "discovery" narratives from Richard Hakluyt through Hernán Cortés to Walter Ralegh and beyond. Prescient, certainly detailed, and comfortingly cogent, Metaphors is a new-historical marriage of literary and historical scholarship, seeking "to elucidate the processes by which colonial history has been textualized and translated from one European nation (Spain) to another (England)." 1

Chapter 1 considers the "Colonial Program of Richard Hakluyt" and that author's reliance on Spanish, German, and French texts in his own writings. The polyphony of bestial and animalistic references, Mackenthun points out, becomes a metaphor of the good fight against evil. "Canibals or man eaters" prey on their peaceful Indian neighbors and are like "Dogs against doves." . . .

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