Introduction : The construction of a colonial imaginary : Columbus's signature -- 1. Word and mirror : presages of the encounter -- 2. De Bry's las Casas -- 3. (Re)discovering Aztec images -- 4. Fantastic tales and chronicles of the Indies -- 5. Reading in the margins of Columbus -- 6. To read is to misread, to write is to miswrite : las Casas as transcriber -- 7. Loving Columbus -- 8. Fray Ramón Pané, discoverer of the Taíno people -- 9. Colonial writing and indigenous discourse in Ramón Pané's Relación acerca de las antiguedades de los indios -- 10. When speaking was not good enough : illiterates, barbarians, savages, and cannibals -- 11. Colonial reform or utopia? Guaman Poma's empire of the four parts of the world -- 12. Amerindian image and Utopian project : motolinía and millenarian discourse -- 13. The place of the translator in the discourses of conquest ; Hernán Cortés's Cartas de relación and Roland Joffe's the Mission -- 14. Other-fashioning : the discourse of empire and nation in Lope de Vega's el Nuevo mundo descubierto por Cristobal Colón -- 15. Authoritarianism in Brazilian colonial discourse -- 16. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; or, the snares of (con)(tra)di(c)tion -- 17. The indian as image and as symbolic structure : Bartolomé Arzáns's Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potosí -- 18. Images of America in eighteenth-century Spanish comedy -- 19. Humboldt and the reinvention of America -- 20. Atahuallpa Inca : axial figure in the encounter of two worlds -- 21. Art and resistance in the Andean world -- 22. Saer's fictional representation of the Amerindian in the context of modern historiography -- 23. An image of Hispanic America from the Spain of 1992