New York University (New York, NY 10012-1019)
Alexander Nagel (Project Director: December 2015 to October 2021)
Elizabeth Anne Horodowich (Co Project Director: January 2016 to October 2021)
RZ-249862-16
Collaborative Research
Research Programs
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[Grant products]
Totals:
$290,000 (approved)
$289,966 (awarded)
Grant period:
10/1/2016 – 9/30/2019
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Amerasia: A Renaissance Discovery
Research
and writing for a book on how Europeans, during the Age of Encounters in the 16th and 17th centuries, saw Asia in the “New World," where Mexico could be India and North America could be part of China.
Amerasia: A Renaissance Discovery reveals many ways in which Europeans during the Age of Encounters saw Asia in the newly discovered lands of the Americas. We demonstrate that the association of America and Asia dominated the geographical imagination of Europe for over a century after 1492. By considering a plethora of texts, maps, objects, and images produced between 1450 and 1700, this study immerses the reader in a coherent if malleable vision of a world where Mexico really was India and North America was an extension of China. What does it mean, we ask, that Europe was coming into self-definition during the very period that it inhabited an Amerasian worldview? The resulting book and web portal will bring into view a dynamic model of the world and of Europe's place in it that was later suppressed by Eurocentric narratives. To rediscover this history is, we believe, a necessary part of coming to terms with the emergent polyfocal global reality of our own time.
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