Colonizing the Early Modern Body

Harvard FAS

How do early modern texts, images, and maps contribute to — or resist — colonization and extractivism? How are notions of ’nature’ and the ‘wild’ or ’savage’ mobilised in justifying the exploitation of land and indigenous peoples, and what symbolic and rhetorical strategies are used to unpick and unsettle these? What bodies do we find represented in the texts and images of the period, and how? Which voices do we hear in texts about indigenous peoples, and which voices are missing? This…