Liz Horodowich and Alexander Nagel
Amerasia: A Renaissance Discovery
Studies devoted to the New World discoveries routinely acknowledge that Europeans
confused the Americas with Asia well into the sixteenth century, but no study has ever
focused specifically on this confusion and its broader implications. Early modern
European cartographers, writers, editors, and artists systematically blurred Asia and the
Americas, placing Asian ports in Latin America, Marco Polo's lions and tigers in Canada,
and identifying Aztec temples as mosques. We propose that the confusion evident in the
cartographic record needs to be understood in relation to a wide array of texts and images,
all of which we will consider as maps of different sorts. These confusions pose a
fundamental methodological challenge, making it necessary to suspend the definition of
the words “America,” “Asia,” and even “Europe” during a period when these terms
underwent significant mutual redefinition. To take the confusion seriously is to resist
imposing later cartographic and cultural definitions on the earlier period, and to reimagine a proximity of thinking and discovery connecting one to the other. It is tempting
to say that in the early modern global movement of people, commodities, ideas, and
images, ideas about Asia influenced representations of the Americas, and (a less familiar
hypothesis) ideas about the New World also influenced representations of Asia. But the
challenge is precisely not to frame the problem in such a way that America on one side
and Asia on the other. When a Tupinamba king appears in a scene of the Adoration of the
Magi, the challenge is to see it not as a strange intrusion of “New World” information
into traditional iconography, but rather as an instance of expanding eastern imaginary
incorporating evidence from the most recent discoveries—a malleable situation also
evident in contemporary cartographic representations.