Constructing and Transgressing Borders. Images of Self and Other in the History of the Americas

Abstract

This article will focus on cognitive and mental borders that find expression in perceptions of the foreign other. Perceptions and mental images demonstrate the exchange function of borders. Borders – whether political or cultural – are constructed on the basis of concepts of alterity. For historians of Latin America, the main pole of alterity has been Europe; historians have traditionally concentrated on processes of perception in relation to the “Old World”. From a European perspective, America – at the point of its discovery – constituted a monolithic “New World”.